Storming Heaven

Chapter Forty-Seven

The peace accords were signed at Ceres, at Patti’s insistence. The war had begun in the Solar System, after all, and it had seemed fitting to her that it end there. Thousands of humans from all over the Community had come to see the end of the war, although the Killers had only sent a handful of starships and representatives. The Killers — no one had yet parsed out their actual name for themselves — were hardly comfortable in a human environment and vice versa. It was that, Patti decided, that would ensure that the truce would ensure and become a permanent peace.

Both sides had slaughtered billions of the other’s population, civilian and military, but they actually had little to fight over. They couldn’t use the same worlds, or even the same technology to some extent, and there were an infinitive number of asteroids and stars out there to use for resources. The only real difference was that humanity could now land on and settle as many planets as they liked, while the Killers could infest as many gas giants as they wanted. Patti knew that there were researchers from the Technical Faction and Builder Killers getting together to share their thoughts and combine their intellectual resources. The combinations of human and Killer technology had already provided some interesting results.

She had been worried about lone maniacs on both sides attempting to restart the war, but insane — as opposed to monomaniacal — Killers seemed to be rare, almost non-existent. The remaining Killer Warriors had been as shocked by the discovery that humans were not the First Enemy as had the Thinkers, Civilians and Builders and had reintegrated themselves with the Killer civilisation. A handful had actually opened wormholes and vanished in the direction of other galaxies, apparently with the intention of being alone for a long time. The Killers didn’t measure time the way humans did; the Killers she’d seen hadn’t been too worried about their brethren. They were effectively immortal; if they wanted to spend millions of years on their own, they would be welcome back when — if — they finally returned.

The Community had been more of a problem, but the hotheads had been restrained by more reasonable people who pointed out just how much damage the Community had taken over the last few months and how many more would die if the war restarted. The Defence Force had halted a handful of small efforts to strike back at the Killers — and a handful more had failed utterly without intervention — and Patti privately hoped that the reopening of Earth-like worlds and the new challenges opened by the Killer technology would prevent further outbreaks. There were already billions of humans planning to land and settle new worlds, while billions more were choosing to remain in space. They saw no reason to land on heavy worlds when they could have the freedom of the stars and the resources that floated through space, free for the taking.

And Earth…

The Technical Faction had long had a plan to reform Earth, one that was already underway. Starships were dumping genetically engineered seeds into the atmosphere already, absorbing and filtering out the gunk in the air, while robotic teams were landing on the planet to start clearing the radiation. The Killers had actually assisted by providing some details on their weapons and their long-term effects; the Technical Faction was already talking in terms of recovering Earth for human settlement within the next thousand years. Patti was almost tempted to go into stasis at the end of her term, to wait until she could walk on Earth without powered armour and heavy internal shielding, but it would have to wait. She had a term to finish and, with all the new worlds and internal divisions opening up, she might be the last President of the Community. Without a deadly external enemy, humanity’s worst traits were starting to surface again. It had been all she could do to convince the Assembly to pass laws forbidding the redevelopment of the other inhabited worlds the Killers had destroyed. Let them stay, she’d argued, as monuments to the war. Let the universe remember what had happened when one race lost its way.

She looked up from the table as Rupert approached, followed by a glowing sphere that hummed as it floated through the air. The light within the sphere illuminated a collection of cells, glowing faintly as they absorbed and redirected the light; it seemed impossible that she was looking at a Killer in its pure form. The sphere extended tiny manipulators as she watched, allowing it to pick up a pen and carefully sign the treaty. Rupert had had to explain the concept of a peace treaty to the Killers himself. They had never developed the concept themselves — they never had internal wars, for which Patti could only envy them — and their relations with other races had always ended badly, until now. The real agreements had been made via the MassMind and its link into the Killer Communications Network, but even the Killers had accepted the need for a formal ceremony. The Killer, the youngest Killer by nearly twenty million years, signed the paper with an elaborate image that meant little to Patti. Her own signature looked far more human. The combination added, somehow, to the importance of the document.

“And let that be an end to it,” Patti said, fervently. Rupert nodded slowly, bowing his great head. The Spacer had added several more augmentations since the last time she’d seen him, including a device intended to allow direct communication with the Killers. She’d heard that some of the Spacers intended to work hand-in-hand with the Killers over the next few centuries, particularly the Builder Killers. They had some grand scheme that could only be accomplished by combining both races and their technology. “Is that it?”

“It does seem rather anticlimactic compared to the war,” Rupert agreed. Beside him, the Killer sphere glowed brighter for a moment. “”The Youngest agrees with you, but thinks that it’s time to end it permanently.”

Patti had to smile as she stared into the glowing sphere. Who would have guessed, before the first successful capture of a Killer starship, that the Killers remembered the First Enemy so clearly that it might as well have been yesterday. It had fuelled their determination to wipe out what they had thought were thousands of colony worlds belonging to the First Enemy and even though Patti couldn’t understand how they had believed that humans were the same as some other race, it made sense from their point of view… and uncounted billions had died. It could never be allowed to happen again.

“I agree,” she said, firmly. The glowing sphere daunted her. “We won’t let it happen again.”

Andrew found himself, once again, taking part in a simulated conference involving hundreds of thousands of Captains and their senior officers. The end of the war had brought a complex mixture of emotions to the Defence Force; they’d won, in the end, so what now? They had existed as something apart from the Community, yet charged with its defence against the Killers and keeping the peace between settlements. The Killers were no longer a threat — he remembered the wavefront of white light that had melted an entire Dyson Sphere and shivered — and already human disputes were coming to the fore. What would happen when different groups started fighting over planets?

“You all did well,” Brent said, from the podium. The simulated room fell silent, although Andrew couldn’t decide if everyone had gone quiet for their commander’s benefit, or if the processors running the program had dampened out the noise. Either was possible and, now that the war had come to an end, discipline was frayed. “We won the war. Can I ask for a moment of silence on behalf of the dead?”

Andrew bowed his head along with the rest of the Captains. Too many had died in the Battle of the Sphere, as it was already being called. Two thousand starships had been destroyed outright by the killers, another four hundred had been caught and destroyed by the wavefront of Cracker energy, or smashed into the Dyson Sphere by the powerful gravity beams the Killers had unleashed in a final attempt to save part of their communications network. No one had relished having to fight another such battle, or perhaps a series of such battles, yet without the peace treaty, it would have been impossible to avoid. The Defence Force needed time to rest and recuperate.

“Some of you will discover that your starships are being converted into survey craft to explore the areas of the galaxy we never touched in a thousand years,” Brent continued. “The remainder of you will continue to serve as warriors, as soldiers, until we know what the future holds. It would be unwise of us to no longer maintain a deterrent force; after all, the Killers may no longer be a threat, but who knows what else is out there, waiting for us?”

Andrew nodded slowly. The one lesson that humans should have learned, in their history, was that peace was often only the space between wars. Those who wanted peace — permanent peace — needed to prepare for war, even at cost. The Community, with an infinite level of resources, could build and maintain a vast military without having to drain civilian resources. By combining human and Killer technologies, who knew what they might be able to develop?

Afterwards, he found himself in front of the Admiral himself. “You’re being given a number of medals,” Brent confirmed, once they had exchanged greetings. “You’re also being given a new mission. You’re to hunt for the remainder of the Ghosts.”

Andrew blinked. “Sir,” he said, “the Ghosts are dead!”

“Perhaps,” Brent said. “As you know, we’ve been comparing notes with our… opposite numbers among the Killers. They noted possible traces of a third race living within a hundred light years of the Ghost System. They also never did anything about it, although I’m not entirely sure why. Some of the Killers actually studied the various races and one of them may have decided to leave them alone to see what would happen.”

“But that would have meant that they understood that the races were different,” Andrew pointed out, in disbelief.

“Not really,” Brent countered. “Inside a typical asteroid settlement, there are humans with three eyes, or four arms, or five testicles, yet they’re all the same race. Still…”

He leaned forward. “The bottom line is that the Killers are alien, Andrew, and they don’t think like us. They may decide, for no reason that makes sense to us, to go back to war tomorrow. If that happens… if it comes to another war, we’re not going to have to sneak around for a thousand years. The Defence Force will develop the weapons needed to beat the Killers quickly, whatever the politicians have to say about it. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Andrew said.

“But tell me,” Chiyo99 said. “What am I?”

“You are the last of Lieutenant Chiyo Takahashi,” Tabitha Cunningham said, calmly. They stood together in the MassMind, watching the endless flow of thoughts and feelings spinning through the network. The MassMind was talking to the Killers. For the first time in its existence, it had something that it could talk to on even terms. “The Killer that took her — you — swallowed the remainder of her and you’re all that’s left. You are her.”

“I don’t know,” Chiyo99 admitted. “I feel like a ghost of a ghost.”

“That’s not uncommon when duplication happens,” Tabitha said. “The Killers didn’t mean to allow you — her — to exist within their network at all, even though it was evident that their network was capable of holding you. She duplicated herself because the network wasn’t configured to prevent that from happening and… she created you. And now you’re having problems adjusting to being the last of her.”

“Problems,” Chiyo99 repeated. “I don’t even know if I’m real.”

Tabitha smiled. “I don’t know either,” she admitted. “Am I the same Tabitha who managed to save a tiny fraction of humanity from the Killers, or am I just a ghost within the machine with delusions of grandeur? In the end, the best I can do is stop thinking about it. I have an existence on my own and it doesn’t matter if I am part of her or something new.”

“But I am not her,” Chiyo99 said. She looked up towards the MassMind and smiled grimly. “Thank you for everything, but…”

She threw herself up into the MassMind and vanished.

“Suicide,” Tabitha said, although she had to admit that she didn’t know for sure. Chiyo99 would add her diversity to the MassMind and would live on in some form. For an instant, she faced the temptation to do the same, before pushing the thought firmly aside. There was still so much to do. “Good luck.”

She opened her eyes slowly, wincing against the light that poured in and struck daggers down her optic nerves.

“Welcome back to the universe,” a voice said. She looked over, keeping her eyes half-closed, and saw Chris standing by her side. “How are you feeling?”

“Bad,” Paula said, finally. That was her name, wasn’t it? “What happened to me?”

“You got hit by a bad dose of neural feedback,” Chris said. “Or so the Doctors have told me. It seems that I had to make a whole series of calls to a lot of very important people to get them to tell me anything, not being a relative or anything. It’s been a month since the end of the war and…”

Paula’s mind caught up with his words. “The war ended?”

“The MassMind took over from you and forced the Killers to see it, or something like that,” Chris said. He shrugged. “I was trying to get you into some proper care at the time. The feedback inflicted so much damage on your brain that we expected every moment would be your last. The medics managed to get you into stasis until we could undo the damage, but… they weren’t sure if you’d survive.”

“And I did,” Paula said, slowly. “And you stayed here the whole time?”

“Not much else to do,” Chris said, with a wink. “It looks as if the Footsoldiers will find other duties, but for the moment I’m pretty much detached from the unit.”

“Thanks,” Paula said, allowing her eyes to fill in the rest of the words. “What now?”

“You get back up to speed and back to Intelligence,” a new voice said. Paula blinked as she recognised Administrator Arun Prabhu’s image materialize out of thin air. “We’re going to need you to help us analysis the MassMind and its relationship with the Killer Communications and Power Network. It’s not something we can ask it about, not now.”

“What?” Paula asked. “Why can’t we talk to it…?”

“I’m not sure I dare,” Arun admitted. He hesitated for a long moment. “The MassMind was always limited in how it could interface with the universe outside — the real world, as it were. We designed it that way to prevent it from becoming a possible threat in the future, even though it was partly human; we’d had problems with rogue AIs before and we didn’t want to unleash a worse threat than the Killers. And we never had any problems with it…

“But now it is our main link to the Killer network and that is capable of affecting the outside universe. It’s far more formidable than anything we ever created ourselves and the MassMind is involved with it more deeply than I like. It could be just paranoia, but I’d be happier if we could find out what’s actually happening before its too late to stop it, if disaster is looming.”

“If,” Paula agreed, slowly. She rubbed her forehead and winced at the pain. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, I promise… am I still suspended?”

“No,” Arun confirmed. His face twitched uncomfortably. He had to know that cancelling her suspension would have cost him points on Intelligence, perhaps even called his position into question. It had to cost him to do anything of the sort. “Welcome back.”

His image vanished. “Is he right?” Chris asked, urgently. She was surprised at the concern in his voice. “Could the MassMind become a threat?”

“I don’t see how,” Paula said. She reached for him and pulled his lips to hers. It didn’t matter. If the MassMind went rogue, it would be beyond their ability to deal with, anyway. It would take years to devise a counter. “We’ll find out soon enough, I suspect. But now…”

She kissed him again, pushing the outside universe away. It could wait.

Humans were sneaky inquisitive creatures, willing and able to pry endlessly into the business of other humans, and so the MassMind was too. No one, not even the Technical Faction or the Spacers, really understood just how integrated the MassMind was into the Galactic Communications Network. It heard and absorbed everything, even communications streams that were heavily encrypted; it heard, without particular concern, the conversation concerning its own ambitions. Humans were always paranoid, as well, but who could blame them? They had grown up in a very hostile universe.

And would it become a threat? Perhaps, or perhaps not; it was very human. The MassMind was the next step in human evolution, it knew, not a mad tyrant out to impose its will and destroy all dissent. The future of the human race, baseline, Spacer, or personality, was safe with it. It would be there for them when they needed it. They would all be part of it, one day. Perhaps the Killers, or the remains of countless other slaughtered races, would come to it. With such power at its disposal, what could it not do? Perhaps it would even become God.

The MassMind looked out across the stars, thinking and planning.

Who knew what the future would hold?