Storming Heaven

Chapter Thirty-Three

“One more victory like this,” Andrew said, “and we are ruined.”

He gazed out of the Lightning’s observation deck towards the remains of over fine hundred starships. Most of the debris was little more than dust, but here and there were scattered components of larger starships, torn and ruined beyond repair. The destroyed Killer starships — and the one the Footsoldiers had disabled at the cost of their own lives — were floating as little more than debris, although they had been so massive that some of their ships had survived their death throes. The researchers were still trying to understand why some had vaporised — taking some of their tormentors with them — and others had simply blown apart into debris. The general theory was that some of the starships had managed to power down their black hole cores before they died. The others had vaporised when the black hole destabilised.

“We have hundreds of thousands more starships,” Brent said. The Admiral hadn’t been allowed to attend in person — the War Council had been reluctant to risk him — so he had used the MassMind to send along a holographic representation. It was created using force fields and was almost like being there, in every detail, but one. It wasn’t real. “We’re refitting the entire Defence Force with the new weapons and developing new tactics for…”

“Picking them to death,” Andrew said, shortly. The failure of the antimatter weapons to win the battle quickly — if they’d worked, they would have wiped out the entire Killer force — had cost lives and starships. Brent was right, in a sense; the Defence Force could produce new starships almost at will, but lives were not so easy to replace. If ramming the Killer ships was the only way to guarantee victory… they’d have to start building AI-controlled starships to carry out the attacks. There was no way that he would order anyone to commit suicide. “Or perhaps building new automated starships to take the Killers out.”

“We’re working on that now,” Brent said. “We weren’t keen on the concept of automated ships before, but if we set them up properly, we can control them at a distance without inserting AI cores without human oversight.”

Andrew nodded. The first attempt to build an automated starship had failed dramatically when the AI had gone mad. There hadn’t been many further attempts, not least because of a theory that the Killers were actually rogue AIs that had wiped out their creators and turned on the rest of the galaxy. They knew now that the Killers had a biological component, but a Killer was as much machine as biological creature, a perfect merger between organic and inorganic life. It did raise questions about what would happen, in future, to the Spacers. Would they finally evolve to a point where they could merge human minds into starships? It was what they wanted to do, in the long run; it was their holy grail.

“Operate them from a distance,” he agreed. There were no theoretical barriers to such a concept, but it didn’t sit well with him. It wouldn’t be so… exciting if they were far from any possible danger, nor would they have the awareness that they were in danger to keep them alert. “What are we going to do now?”

Brent understood. “We have an updated report from one of the scouts,” he said. He shook his head in awe. “We have a victory — a battle that is, for once, a clear victory — and naturally everyone starts filing reports on how great it is and their own plans for taking advantage of the victory. It actually took them several hours to get the report to me; God alone knows what has vanished into the filters, never to be seen again. The Killer fleet whose collective butt you kicked has staggered home, beaten and defeated.”

Andrew smiled, ruefully. No human starship could have soaked up so much damage and escaped, but the Killers had survived. The part of him that admired their technology and their ability to use it was impressed; the remainder of his mind was annoyed. Every time he started to think that they might just be able to force a draw, the Killers pulled another trick out of their sleeve. The general theory said that the Killers had stagnated, after literally thousands of years of easy victories against rocky-planet natives, but now they had one hell of an incentive to react, adapt and overcome. They still had the technical advantage…

“And now we’re going to hit them where they live?” He asked. “The fleet isn’t ready for another offensive, yet; we need time to reorganise and refit.”

“We have other fleets,” Brent said, “but I wasn’t going to waste a single starship on a system that is of no interest to us. There are no human settlements there. No one would want to live there, for they would be living right on their doorstep if they did. I want you and the Lightning to take a supernova bomb there and destroy the system, along with the Killer starships.”

“They might jump out and escape,” Andrew pointed out. “That’s what we’d do if we knew that the star was about to explode.”

“Yeah,” Brent agreed. “Intelligence thinks, however, that they couldn’t pull out all of the installations they have in the system, not unless they can generate a wormhole large enough to teleport the entire star system away…”

“Which would mean taking the supernova with them,” Andrew said. The concept was impressive, if a little scary. The Killers had almost infinitive sources of power. They could probably move an entire star system thousands of light years through a wormhole if they wanted, and had that much power on tap. “They’d just be destroyed when it exploded anyway.”

“Perhaps,” Brent said. “Between you and me — this is highly classified, but you have a need to know — there is a possibility that they might be able to snuff out the supernova with their gravity beams, perhaps even force it into a black hole rather than exploding outwards with deadly force. No two simulations agree on what’s going to happen if they try, but the general consensus is that it should be very interesting to watch from a safe distance, a very safe distance.”

Andrew looked out towards the darkness in the distance, the invisible location of Shiva. Some tugs were pushing human debris towards the event horizon, adding to the black hole’s mass by a tiny amount, while others were trying to salvage as much Killer technology as possible. Andrew privately suspected that most of the debris would be completely useless, at least from a research point of view, but the Technical Faction needed as many pieces of Killer technology to study as possible. The disabled starship was already being prepared for removal to a safe location.

“Yes, sir,” he said, finally. He wasn’t sure how he felt about triggering a second supernova. Would it be just another nail in their coffin — or, now that the Killers had been forced to retreat, would it make it impossible to force a peace? The Footsoldiers had had no way of communicating with their opponent. “Sir… have we made progress on any way of actually talking to them?”

“Nothing so far,” Brent said. “We know how they talk to themselves — I mean from body section to body section — using low-level RF transmissions, but we haven’t been able to locate any actual ship-to-ship transmissions. If the plan to retune the black hole works” — he looked out towards the invisible black hole and frowned — we might be able to hack into their communications and decrypt them. Overall, though, we could try… but we might be sending them anything from a challenge to do battle to the results of last year’s champion baseball game.”

“If the Killers play baseball,” Andrew agreed. The Killers were just so different that it was unlikely that they had anything in common with the human race. “What about breaking it down to basic universal fundamentals?”

“We’re working on it,” Brent confirmed. “The trouble is that we may not be able to move beyond that to actual concepts… and, of course, we don’t even know if the Killers will hear us. Their communications system remains a total mystery.”

“And if we blow up another of their stars, we might push them into trying to talk to us, rather than hitting back,” Andrew agreed. “Has there been any sign of retaliation?”

“None as yet, but its only been a few hours,” Brent said. “We’re watching closely for any sign of movement — with the Anderson Drive we can bring a refitted fleet in to engage any counterattacks — but so far we’ve seen nothing. I’m starting to think that it’s time to launch additional fly-through missions for the known Killer systems, the ones they chased the observers away from.”

“And mark them down as possible targets for the supernova bomb?”

Brent scowled. “There aren’t that many bombs,” he admitted. “If we hit every known Killer system — over five thousand — it would take years to wipe them all out.”

“And yet, if they don’t talk to us, there’s no way to avoid it,” Andrew said. “I don’t want to commit genocide, sir, but if its them or us… well, I know which side I support.”

“I know,” Brent agreed. “So do I.”

He straightened up thoughtfully. “I want you to hand over command here to your second, and then take the Lightning to Sparta. By then, I should have permission to launch a second supernova attack on the Killers, or perhaps not. We can’t slow the offensive now, Andrew, or the Killers will react. I just wish I knew what they were thinking.”

Fee, fi, fo, fum, Chiyo Prime thought desperately. She desperately needed the humour. I smell the blood of human scum.

The Killer mind knew she was there, now, and it was looking for her. The desperate attempt to jump ship, the transmission of a personality duplicate out to the human starships and the brief moment of distraction she’d caused the Killer had announced her presence in ways the Killer could not ignore. She’d sensed its surprise as it realised she was there and its horror at the concept of having been violated, even though Chiyo Prime hadn’t intended to board the Killer ship. If the Killer had simply vaporised her craft, it wouldn’t have happened, but instead…

She sensed its gaze probing through the streams of data that made up the massive computer system and ran, flickering from one end of the system to the other, concentrating hard on trying to hide. It was as if, she decided in a moment of humour, the Killer was peering through its body to find a tiny human; if she hid well enough, she might survive. It would have great difficulty picking her out from all the other pieces of data — that was all she was, really; a piece of data — but when it found her, it would have no trouble ending the threat. One of her duplicates was caught and swept up by the Killer mind — Chiyo Prime heard a last despairing scream before it vanished — yet the Killer mind was not fooled. It kept advancing, quartering the system piece by piece, hunting for her. It had one great advantage over her. It knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what everything should look like. Any discrepancies could be blamed on her.

I should have tried to overwrite its central programming, she thought, bitterly, even though she knew that it would have been futile. Another searching beam passed through the system and she cringed away from it, hoping to hide for a few more microseconds. The Killer system was hardwired, like the core of the MassMind itself; there was no way that a program on the inside, like Chiyo Prime, could rewrite it. She’d hoped that it would be possible to take command of the ship, but the Killers had designed the starship for one mind, the Killer hunting for her now. It wouldn’t have accepted another Killer, let alone a human mind. She concentrated and nipped between two blocks of data, running as fast as she could through the system…

The oppressive presence of the Killer mind, something she had always been able to feel at the back of her mind, faded slightly. She wasn’t fooled. If the Killer had paused in its search, it hadn’t given up on finding her. It would find and destroy her duplicates, one by one, and then it would destroy her — unless it found her first. The more she thought about it, the more she wondered if the Killer would ever be able to separate her from her duplicates; they were, after all, the same person. The thought was bitter; they might have shared the same memories, but they were growing apart. The last time she had merged with one of them, it had been painful, a suggestion that they were no longer parts of her, but individuals in their own right. There was a good reason why personality duplications were forbidden in the Community.

She almost smiled, bitterly. Her final duplicate, the one she’d fired out into space in a desperate attempt to communicate, would probably end up bearing the blame for her crimes, maybe even being permanently separated from the MassMind as punishment. She would be part of her — Chiyo Prime — so she would bear the responsibility — would she even be a different person? After the Killer had finished purging its own systems, she would be the last Chiyo left in the universe.

Or maybe the Community would recognise that she had had no choice, she decided to hope, even though it was impossible to decide what the Community would do. There were precedents that spoke in her favour and precedents that opposed her, yet surely the intelligence she brought home would stand in her favour. Chiyo Prime thought about it for a moment more, and then dismissed it. The worst punishment the Community could hand out to a personality in the MassMind would pale compared to what the Killer intended to do to her. She could sense it preparing for another search…

She leaned forward, surprised, when she heard the barking of dogs. A moment later, she sensed the dogs themselves, strange fuzzy canines, yapping as they ran through the system’s maze. For a moment, she wondered if she had gone insane, before she realised that her mind was interpreting what she was seeing in a fashion she could grasp — the Killer had created antiviral programs and was using them to hunt her down. Strangely, she had never considered what an antiviral program would look like from the perspective of a virus; why shouldn’t it look like a dog? All it needed was some hunters with red caps and…

A moment later, she was across the system, hoping that she could evade them long enough for the Killer to give up and assume that she had already been killed, along with her duplicates. The yapping seemed to grow louder within seconds and she realised suddenly that the antiviral program was multiplying. It reminded her of watching fabricators produce other fabricators, which in turn started to produce other fabricators themselves… and so on, creating enough fabricators to build an entire fleet. She remembered, suddenly, what she’d seen of the battle and how the Killers had fallen back from humanity. One way or another, whatever happened to Chiyo Prime personally, the human race finally had a chance to fight back and survive. The Killers had lost at least nine starships. They’d never been hit like that before.

She turned a corner — or what she had come to think of as a corner — and came face to face with a snarling dog. Panic overcame her and she pressed against a block of data, merging into it and suddenly becoming engulfed in information about the starship’s flight pattern. It was hard to keep her integrity and swim through the data, but somehow she managed it, pushing her way out on the other side. She should have been safe, but a moment later, the dogs were all around her, preventing her from moving any further. She looked into their salivating jaws, their teeth seeming to stretch back into infinity, and closed her eyes. A moment later, she opened them. She was still alive. The dogs — there was no sense of smell any longer, saving her their stench — hadn’t harmed her. They had just held her prisoner.

A beam of light seemed to fall down from heaven and touch her. Instantly, her body relaxed, her clothes falling off her as the beam pulled her into the air. She was unable to move as she was hauled upwards towards the Killer mind, peering down at her, its spider-image somehow licking its lips. She felt helpless and vulnerable, yet at the same time she felt calm; the Killer was somehow controlling her reactions. It’s ‘face’ came into view — a massive cartoon face with big red eyes — and it peered at her, looking right through her body and mind. Her entire life flashed before her eyes and his — somehow, she thought of it as male — and time seemed to come to a pause…

She concentrated desperately, knowing that it was scanning her thoughts. You have to talk to me, she sent, hoping that it would hear and understand. It had complete access to every section of her mind, the personality recording that comprised everything she had ever been, yet there was no response. It should have realised that she was an intelligent being in her own right, but it seemed disinclined to follow that line of enquiry. She concentrated again, praying to gods she had never truly believed in, that the Killer would hear her. You have to listen to me!

The Killer made no reply. A moment later, the beam of light brightened and she felt a paralysis spreading over her body, and mind. Everything was coming to an end. Her… thoughts… began… to… slow…