Storming Heaven

Chapter Forty-Four

Lightning shuddered as it dropped out of Anderson Drive.

“We have arrived, sir,” David announced, unnecessarily. “One Big Dumb Object dead ahead.”

“Show me,” Andrew snapped. They had bare seconds before the Killers reacted to their presence. “Put it on the main display.”

The sight shocked him silent. The sphere was immense, huge beyond imagination; so large it seemed to effortlessly dwarf everything else in the system. His imagination suggested towers and cities on the surface, but the towers would be the size of Earth and the cities would be larger than Jupiter. The tiny icons representing Killer starships seemed microscopic compared to the sphere; the merest shape on the surface of the sphere dwarfed them. It seemed to hold the entire fleet spellbound, daring them to try their worst.

Try me, it seemed to shout to the heavens. You insignificant bugs. Do you think that you can destroy my immensity? Do you think that your puny weapons can inflict even a tiny amount of harm on me?

“Scan the sphere for power emissions that might suggest the location of any defence weapons,” Andrew said. His voice felt hushed in his own ears. The sphere seemed to overwhelm any plans they might have developed, as if the plans no longer mattered, compared to the sheer glory of the sphere. The Killers might have built it, yet even a human could admire the sheer… scope of their achievement, the sheer immensity of what they’d produced. They’d wrapped a shell around a sun, a shell far further from the parent star than Earth had been from Sol, and made it look like nothing. Any defensive weapons on the surface would be so tiny as to be almost unnoticeable. “I want you to coordinate with the other starships in the fleet; try and build up a picture of the exterior of the sphere.”

The scale was all wrong, he realised, as the human fleet massed. They’d jumped in from various points, aiming to surround the sphere, yet it was futile. If they hadn’t had quantum entanglement communications, it would have taken hours to send signals between the different attack wings, using primitive radiation. The sphere didn’t seem to be emitting much of anything, apart from the low-level RF transmissions that seemed to be a stable of anything involving the Killers. It just sat in the darkness, against the blazing light of the Galactic Core, mocking the humans with its sheer intensity. It was just… too large for a human mind to grasp.

“The Killer starships are powering up their weapons, sir,” Gary said. Andrew, who had been staring at what looked like an access point that would have been the size of several Jupiter-sized planets put together, was almost grateful for the interruption. The Dyson Sphere cast a spell right across the proceedings. “I think they’re preparing to engage us.”

“No shit,” David muttered. “I’m getting wormhole emissions from several different coordinates. They’re also bringing in reinforcements.”

Andrew muttered a curse under his breath as seventeen new wormholes materialised, disgorging Killer starship after Killer starship. They’d misjudged the Killers again, he realised, as the wormholes remained open; the Killers kept most of their starships inside the Dyson Spheres and used wormholes to allow them to jump in and out of the interior as necessary. They didn’t need an access port or an airlock, merely a wormhole generator and the power to run it. They had both of them inside the sphere.

“Contact the attack wing,” Andrew ordered, curtly. It was simple enough to designate targets for a swarm attack… and this time, no one had to commit suicide to take out a Killer starship. “Tell them to lock their weapons on target and prepare to follow us in.”

He looked back up at the sphere. It seemed absurd that anything as puny as their weapons would make an impact on the vast construction, but the Killer starships had seemed to have the same problem… and they’d learned how to destroy them. The sphere only needed to be cracked so that they could break in and send the star supernova — he would have liked to see the Killers survive that, if they could. Brent had been right at the briefing. It didn’t really matter what happened when the star went supernova. The Killers would lose, at the very least, their source of power.

“The attack wing is responding,” Gary replied, calmly. “They’re standing by. The Admiral has told us all good luck and good hunting.”

“Understood,” Andrew said. He gripped the handles of his command chair, as if it would provide some safety if something went badly wrong, and smiled. “Helm, take us in towards the target ship.”

The Killer starship seemed to zoom closer at terrifying speeds as the starships closed in on it. Andrew linked his mind into the AI and used it to designate targets; not just for the Lightning, but for the other starships in the attack wing. The Admiral had designated five more attack wings to stand by and follow his wing into action; the Killer starship would be overwhelmed and rendered harmless before it could tear his wing apart, let alone the fleet. He found himself smiling as the Killer starship seemed to flinch. Now, whatever the outcome of the war, the Killers would lose their complacency now and forever.

“Entering firing range now,” Gary reported. “The Killer starship is opening fire.”

Bright streaks of white light shot past them, striking and destroying two of the attack wing. “Return fire,” Andrew snapped, as new explosions marked the death of his comrades. Ironically, not knowing them provided him a shield against his guilt; he’d been the one leading them into battle, making him the one who’d gotten them killed. “And continue firing until we are out of range.”

A thousand implosion bolts lanced out of the attacking starships and plastered the Killer’s hull, which seemed to shatter as the starships swarmed around their target, firing blast after blast into the Killer ship. The white streaks of light faded and died as chunk after chunk of armour was blasted off, leaving the Killer inside completely exposed — and helpless. Andrew laughed aloud as Gary switched to energy torpedoes and particle beams, digging deep gorges into the heart of the Killer ship. Strange energies flickered over the enemy ship’s remaining hull as it struggled to survive, diverting power to its internal force field in a desperate attempt to retain its structural integrity.

“I’m picking up gravity twists,” Gary barked, suddenly. “They’re trying to crush us!”

“Evasive action,” Andrew snapped, sharply. “Don’t let them get a lock on us!”

The starship seemed to shudder under the strain, and then they were free, rocketing away from their victim at several times the speed of light. Andrew looked back at the Killer starship and almost felt sorry for it — almost. It was a lion being torn apart by hyenas, he realised; great bursts of plasma were flaring off the hull, sending streaks of light dancing through space. The Killer starship was dead, yet it didn’t seem to know it. There was little point in prolonging the agony.

“Bring in one of the ramming ships,” he ordered. The Killer starship couldn’t destroy the rammer, even if it had time to react… even if it saw the new threat in time. Had their bombardment blinded it? In their place, Andrew would have opened a wormhole and tried to escape, yet it was remaining stubbornly in the real universe. Had they knocked out the wormhole generator? “I want it destroyed before it can escape.”

A flicker of light marked the arrival of the first ramming ship, dropping out of Anderson Drive and racing down towards its target. Its controllers, hundreds of light years away, steered it towards the rear of the craft, attempting to destabilise the black hole in the first few seconds of disaster. The other starships saw the threat, turned and rocketed away, leaving the Killer starship alone for a few microseconds. It had no time to even notice. The rammer slammed home and the starship vanished in a blaze of white light.

“One Killer starship gone, sir,” Gary reported, his voice law and controlled. “I have five more possible targets, all insufficiently engaged.”

“Order the attack wing to follow us in,” Andrew ordered, shaking his head. The Killers didn’t have the numbers or firepower advantage any longer and they were being mobbed every time they showed themselves. What did it matter if they swatted one or a hundred of the gnats surrounded them, if there were thousands more gnats ready and awaiting their chance to tear the enemy ship apart? The humans had had advantages in numbers before, but they had never been decisive, until now. The new weapons weren’t dangerous in small doses, but with thousands of blows…

The Killers didn’t stand a chance.

“Wormhole opening, right on top of us,” Gary snapped. “They’re coming through!”

“Evasive action,” Andrew barked. There was barely any time to react. They skimmed the hull of the Killer starship and barely avoided the burst of white light fired at them in passing. Other starships weren’t so lucky. They slammed into the Killer starship hull and died, smashed to nothing against the impregnable hulls. Andrew snapped orders, bringing the attack wing around to engage the new target as it opened fire, sweeping dozens of human starships out of existence. “Take us in, now!”

“Gravity surges,” Gary said. The humans had barely touched the newcomer. “They’re leaping out again!”

The Killer starship vanished again, leaving behind nothing, but a backwash of gravity distortion. The disruptions in local space-time were dangerous, damaging a dozen destroyers that were too close to the wormhole, but survivable. The human starships could and did compensate for them, but it was a nasty new trick, if a dangerous one. Other Killer starships were using the same tactic, ramming their undamaged hulls into human ships and relying on their hulls to save them from serious damage. The starships that couldn’t adapt to the changing face of war — if the briefing had been accurate, that would be most of the Killers — would probably have been wiped out already.

They broke through into a moment of clear space and he looked down at the overall battle. The Killers had lost no less than fifty-seven craft in less than ten minutes, although it had felt longer. The fighting was raging all over the sphere’s exterior, yet the Killers were — for the first time — forced to fight on the defensive, and they were losing. The handful of remaining Killer starships that weren’t jumping around in their wormholes were being hammered to death even as he watched. The Killers didn’t seem to be sending in new starships. Perhaps they had finally run out of ships, or perhaps they had decided that they were losing too many ships for nothing. Who knew…?

“Gravity surges,” Gary snapped, sharply. A mighty hand seemed to pick up and shake the Lightning. “They’re firing general blasts at us!”

“Who is?” Andrew snapped. No new Killer wormholes had opened near them, yet they were under attack. Space itself was twisting around their position, trying to rip them to shreds. “What are they doing to us?”

“They’re using the sphere itself,” Gary said, slowly. The updates were streaming in from the MassMind, which was watching through their sensors. The sphere was bending time and space around them, deploying its formidable power as a defensive force. Andrew had to admire the sheer power the Killers were deploying, even as he loathed the way they used it; the sphere might succeed in destroying some of the ships, even though they were wrapped in warp bubbles. “I think they’re channelling energy through the… ah, buildings and pushing it out at us.”

“And if they can tap an entire star, they can probably produce enough energy to swat us, eventually,” Andrew agreed. The Admiral was coordinating the remaining part of the battle, but he had no doubt what he would order. “David, take us down towards the sphere. Prepare for a strafing run!”

The sphere was already dominating the horizon, even from light-minutes away. Flying down towards its surface was like flying right at the surface of a planet, with the exact same result if they crashed into the ground. No one was entirely sure what the Killers had used to construct their Dyson Sphere, but the smart money was on something not unlike their hull material, held together by power supplied by the star. Bombarding it with conventional weapons might just be useless, yet even if it wasn’t, it would be… tricky to inflict enough damage to matter. The sphere could lose a surface area a hundred times the size of Jupiter without even noticing…

What do they have inside the sphere? Andrew asked himself, as they zoomed closer. It was impossible to believe that they were not already within weapons range, yet they were still light-seconds away from the target. What do they have inside that will be exposed when we open fire?

The thought nagged at him, even as he checked on the deployment of his attack wing and that of the other attack wings that were closing in on the surface. A human-built Dyson Sphere would have an interior terraformed to look like Earth’s surface; indeed, some of the more outrageous plans put before the Community had consisted of a massive Dyson Sphere that would have housed much of the Community’s population, yet would have been completely undetectable by the Killers. The fact that the news that a Dyson Sphere was under construction would have spread across the galaxy at the speed of light — simple optical observation would have caught signs of the construction program, assuming the Killers had such a system — and in any case, if the Killers discovered the Sphere, the result would have been a quick massacre and the end of the human race.

And yet… what would the Killers have inside a Dyson Sphere? Their own atmosphere — there was no reason why they couldn’t duplicate a gas giant atmosphere inside the sphere — or something else, something more dangerous? It all came back to a different question, the real reason why Dyson Spheres were likely to be impractical, even in a galaxy without Killers. There was a near-limitless supply of Earth-like worlds in the galaxy, so why bother going to the expense of gathering the material and building the Dyson Sphere in the first place? It would be a serious dent even to a post-scarcity society. Just out of curiously, he’d looked it up; it would take the entire Community at least two hundred years to build a Dyson Sphere. The Killers didn’t need to build a fully-fledged sphere just to tap a star, did they? Their technology would have let them take everything they required without the sphere.

“We are entering firing range,” Gary said. His voice was hushed. Perhaps he, too, was thinking of ancient Old Earth fighter jets strafing a city. They would have had comparably limited results until the deployment of atomic bombs. “Weapons are online and ready to fire.”

Andrew slid his mind back into the neural net. “Open fire,” he ordered. “Tactical pattern delta.”

Lightning shivered as she unleashed a spread of implosion bolts on the surface of the sphere, only to see them splash harmlessly against the surface. Other starships, bombarding planet-sized towers and buildings, had slightly more luck, but they were nowhere near punching a hole through the sphere. The explosions didn’t even scratch the surface.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Gary said. It was hardly the most professional of reports, but Andrew couldn’t blame him. “Sir, the implosion bolts are not breaking through! They’re not even having any effect at all.”

“Hellfire,” Andrew hissed. “Contact the MassMind; we need an explanation and we need it now!”

“They’re wondering if the sphere isn’t made out of something they hold together with force fields,” Gary said, after a moment. “If that were the case, the implosion bolts would be useless.”

Andrew clenched his teeth. “Open fire with energy torpedoes, maximum spread,” he snapped. “Order the other starships to concentrate their fire on the same location.”

The starship shook again as it unleashed another spread of weapons. “We’re having some effect,” Gary reported, slowly. “We caused some carbon scoring on the surface. At this rate, we should be through in another few hundred years.”

“Add antimatter weapons to the spread,” Andrew snapped. White blasts flared up from the surface as the antimatter weapons detonated. “Damnation!”

“Wormhole opening,” Gary snapped. “They’re bringing up additional starship!”

Andrew opened his mouth to order a swarm attack, and then something else occurred to him. The new Killer starship was hanging right above the surface of the sphere, held aloft by powerful gravity beams. If it could be destabilised…

“Keep the fleet back,” he ordered, slowly. It was the work of a moment to link into the command network and transmit new orders to the ramming ships. “Go!”

The first ramming ship came out of Anderson Drive and kicked in its drive field, disengaging the safety interlocks as it moved. Without a warp bubble, it wouldn’t move as quickly as the other ships, but it hardly mattered. The faster it was moving in normal space, the more mass it would carry. The Killer starship ignored them; perhaps believing that if they wanted to crash against an undamaged hull there was no reason to prevent them. The ramming fleet crashed home, slamming the Killer ship down towards the surface of the sphere… and it crashed before it could arrest its fall. A massive explosion blew right through the sphere, releasing a deadly blast of hard radiation…

“I think we’ve made a terrible mistake,” Gary announced, grimly. Andrew could only agree. Stars didn’t put out such radiation. Hindsight was mocking him, claiming that it should have been obvious right from the start. “That’s not a star, sir; that’s a black hole. How the hell do we destroy that?”