Storming Heaven (46 page)

He found himself looking at the horizon, the massive curving interior surface of the sphere.  He’d expected, despite himself, something a human would understand, a surface like Earth.  The Killers could have created trees and valleys and gardens and mountains, things that Andrew had never seen in person, outside of short visits to untouched worlds.  Humanity had lost so much when the Killers arrived and destroyed their planet.  It seemed unfair that the Killers hadn’t even bothered to save something of the worlds they had destroyed.

Instead, there was a strange murky gaseous surface, flickering with the occasional flash of lightning as energy discharged.  Some of the starships had launched probes into the mixture, which had reported – in the moments before being knocked out by the lightning – that it was a strange chemical soup, identical in many ways to the observed composition of Killer-infested gas giants.  The Killers had probably intended to create a vast living space for their own kind as well as creating a power source; the absence of a sun probably wouldn’t bother them, not like it would have bothered humanity.  They already lived so deeply within gas giants that they hadn’t even been aware of the star their world orbited until they drifted up towards the surface.

“We’re approaching the planet now, sir,” Gary said.  “I have prepared an antimatter spread, but I would recommend deploying the Cracker.”

Andrew nodded.  The ‘planet’ was no planet, but a colossal machine floating in space, nearly twice the size of Earth.  The power floating around it made the
Lightning’s
vast power reserves look like nothing at all.  They were insignificant next to its immensity…and, he recalled, he had thought the same about the Killer starships.  They thought and built on a scale far beyond humanity.

“That’s no planet, sir,” David said, suddenly.  “That’s a space station!”

Andrew laughed – that was a dream of the future when humanity had no idea how harsh the universe actually was – and linked his mind into the computer network.  The Cracker was an experimental weapon, developed by the Technical Faction, and no one was entirely sure if it would work.  It had been based upon the matter-conversion weapon the Killers had created, but when the Killers had accidentally hit their own ships, the results had been non-existent, as far as their sensors could tell.  It took him nearly a minute to clear all of the safety systems and confirm that he did, indeed, have the right to launch the Cracker.

“Take us into firing range,” he ordered.  “Once the Cracker is launched, take us out of here, best possible speed.”

“Aye, sir,” David said.  There was no amusement in his voice.  They all knew that if the Cracker worked as advertised, the results would be…disastrous.  “The course is laid in, Captain.”

Andrew nodded as they entered firing range.  The absence of any counter-fire bothered him.  Had the Killers been so sure of their own safety that they hadn’t installed any defences inside their Dyson Sphere? 

“Cracker ready,” he said.  Gary should have fired the weapon, but the ultimate responsibility for the ship lay with Andrew.  “I am firing…now!”

He keyed the final command sequence into the system and launched the Cracker towards its target.  “Get us out of here, now!”

“Aye, sir,” David said.  The
Lightning
rotated in space and zoomed back towards the massive breach in the sphere.  The Killer atmosphere, clinging like a wisp to the interior of the sphere, was pouring out of the breach, but it wouldn’t slow them down for a second.  The other starships were launching their own Crackers and retreating at speed.  The interior of the Sphere was about to become extremely hazardous.  “Time to open space; seven minutes.”

“Not good enough,” Andrew hissed.  They had to move faster.  No one knew just how fast the Cracker’s effects would propagate.  The timer rapidly reached zero.  “The first Cracker is detonating…now!”

A brilliant flare of white light enveloped the planet-sized machine.

It happened very quickly, yet very slowly.

Brent saw it all from his position.  The Killers had developed weapons that forced a limited matter-energy conversion over the affected area.  The results were almost always disastrous for their target because the energy released was colossal, even through the affected area was often tiny.  A planet struck by a thousand atomic bombs would be in a better state than a planet struck by a single Killer weapon.  A starship hit by the weapon would be vaporised.  It was a very formidable weapons system.

And the Technical Faction had studied it carefully and come up with the Cracker.  The Cracker wasn't as simple a weapon as the Killers had developed, but it actually had a far more interesting internal system.  It was partly based on the fission weapon deployed against the Cinder; the effect caused a total matter-energy conversion, but it raced ahead of the explosion, breaking down the quantum bonds that held matter together as it moved.  No one was quite sure what would have happened if it had been deployed against the surface of the sphere – although that had been the emergency plan – yet the Killers might have been able to compensate for it.  Now the human race knew what was really inside the sphere, they knew that the Killers couldn’t compensate for the mass destruction of all six of their coordination devices.  Their unquestioned control over the black hole was about to be challenged.

The explosions defied belief.  The entire mass of each of the planetoids was converted into energy, which raced out at the speed of light.  The handful of starships caught within the sphere were vaporised by the blast, which instantly sterilised the surface of the sphere and weakened it in a thousand different places.  The sphere’s exterior melted and ran like liquid.  It was a tribute to the Killers and their awesome industrial capability that the sphere didn’t simply crack like an eggshell.  The probes left within the sphere, before they died, showed white light blazing out over the interior and washing away everything the Killers had created.  The complex strings of gravity the Killers had formed to control the black hole faded away.  They had never been meant to absorb so much energy at once and, as the waves of energy roared into the black hole, lost their cohesion completely.  The black hole was still there, still dangerous, but it was no longer part of the Killer Communications Network.  At a cost of over ten thousand starships and nearly a hundred thousand lives – as well as however many Killers there had been on the surface of the sphere – the mission had been completed.

“Take us out of here,” Brent ordered.  The remainder of the mission was out of his hands.  “We’ll regroup at the first waypoint.

“Aye, sir,” the coordinator said.  “Jump coordinates being transmitted now.”

One by one, the human starships jumped away from the blazing sphere.

***

The newborn hadn’t joined the battle, not when it was convinced that the entire war was a disastrous mistake, even though it was an understandable one.  It had bent its formidable intellect, unhampered by what every other Killer
knew
to be true, to the task of successfully communicating with the mite.  It had taken encouragement from the fact that the mite was just as keen to talk to the newborn as the newborn was to talk to it and they made rapid progress.  They had passed well beyond the simple work when the sphere had been damaged and the black hole communications network had been destroyed.

It knew that it was probably futile, but it had to try.  “The mites are intelligent,” it sent, right into the remainder of the communications system.  The entire civilisation was reeling.  They had never lost so many of their number in a moment, not since the mites had started blowing up stars to destroy their worlds.  The spheres had been the linchpin of their power and they had always believed them to be completely indestructible.  They knew exactly what the mites had done…and felt true terror.  What if they lost the other spheres as well?  “We have to learn to talk to them!”

There was no response.  The other Killers were too old to take the newborn seriously, even though it dumped the full history of its work with the mite into their communications systems.  They couldn’t understand or even conceive of the possibility that the mites might be intelligent; to them, the war with the First Enemy was yesterday.  They remembered a time when the Killers were on the verge of being destroyed and refused to allow it to happen again, even though it
was
happening again.  New orders were being dispatched to the remaining starships, sending them out to wreck even more mite settlements and star systems, for what?  If the mites were spread out like the Killers themselves, they could lose a few hundred insignificant systems – taking down a few dozen Killer starships in the process – while they concentrated on destroying the remaining spheres.  Without the spheres, the communications network would not exist.  Without the communications network, the Killer civilisation would not exist.  It couldn’t avoid that thought.  The mites were on the verge of scoring a victory and it could no longer believe that they had succeeded by accident.  There was true intelligence in their actions.

It split its mind and started to analyse the dead mites on its ship, studying them and trying to access their implants.  It had deduced that the mites used them to store data, just as the Killers themselves did, but it was astonished by the sheer wealth of data; it lived the life of a hundred different mites in the space of a second.  It had almost
been
a mite, looking at the world through their eyes…and the mites died.  The Killers had evolved to a point where there was nothing natural that could harm them – apart from a supernova or a black hole – but the mites were so fragile, so vulnerable.  They fought each other, they struggled against the natural universe…and they tried desperately to understand the Killers.

The newborn had no concept of looking at the world though its enemy’s eyes, until now.  It saw in a heartbeat how the Killers had destroyed an innocent world – hundreds of thousands of innocent worlds – along with its inhabitants, a race that had had nothing to do with the First Enemy.  It had – no, its
parent
had – slaughtered hundreds of billions of individuals,
true
individuals.  Nothing was left of those races, apart from ruins and perhaps a few survivors, hiding in the corners of the universe.  They didn’t have a kind of immortality through forming new collectives, or sharing parts of themselves with others; they just…lived and died.  The concept was horrifying.  The Killers had rarely fought each other, not when they could share parts of themselves and see the other’s point of view, but the mites…when the mites died, they
died
.  It was the end. 

It studied the human memories again, carefully, and used them as a guide to understanding the human language.  Human, it reflected.  The mites called themselves humans.  The living human, the human who was almost a Killer, was trying to talk to it, yet the method was so limited.  It formed a single question in the human tongue – it was so
strange
to talk by vocalising messages, rather than sharing thoughts and feelings – and spoke directly to the human.

“I think we should talk, don’t you?”

***

“What the hell happened to her?”

Chris Kelsey was almost frantic.  One moment, Paula had been linked into the communications network, controlling the black hole and, just incidentally, saving their lives several times over.  The next, she had failed, blood dripping from her nose and ears.  The medical team had arrived at once, but they were just as confused as he was, even though they suspected a brain overload.  It shouldn’t have caused her to bleed.

“The system overwhelmed her,” a voice said.  Chris turned to see a MassMind representative forming out of thin air.  “Do not worry.  She should recover in time.”

Chris bit down several angry statements that came to mind.  “What the hell do we do now?”

The MassMind representative smiled.  “Do not worry,” he said.  “Everything is well in hand.”

Chris wanted to say something else, but the MassMind was right; whatever happened, it was out of his hands.  He sighed and helped the medics to move her to the sickbay, before going forward and programming new orders into the AI.  If the Killers showed up in firing range, they wouldn’t even hesitate before they triggered the Anderson Drive and jumped halfway across the galaxy to escape.  The resolution of the war was going to be settled elsewhere.

***

Tabitha Cunningham felt herself slipping into the universe formerly occupied by Paula Handley and smiled as she sensed power, real power, building around her.  Unlike Paula, she wasn't human any longer and wasn’t limited by human limitations – and she had an idea of what the interior of the Killer system actually looked like.  The perceptual reality shifted as Chiyo99 materialised beside her, looking wan and pale, but ready to play her part.  Behind her, she heard the ever-present muttering of the MassMind, ready to act or intervene, as required.  Its power was formidable elsewhere, yet here it actually affected the outside world.  The sheer power at her disposal – at
their
disposal – was astonishing.

“But it is nothing compared to what the Killers have at their disposal,” the MassMind warned, as they extended their mind towards the Killer Communications Network.  The universe of black holes, massive power storage facilities – built, literally, out of space-time itself, and data formed around them.  “We must not engage in a power struggle with them or we will lose.”

“I’m not arguing,” Tabitha pointed out, curtly.  The goal was to interface with the Killer Communications Network, not get destroyed by it.  The Killers would certainly seek to expel them as soon as they knew that they were there.  “Shall we proceed?”

She extended her mind towards the Killer Network and felt it vibrating like a drunken man, shocked by the sudden loss of one of its hubs.  The Shiva hole was already linked into the network, but she extended it now until it was in place to actually do more than just tapping the data, but absorbing it as well.  The MassMind followed her rapidly, studying the data and working rapidly to translate it.  Chiyo99 could use her experience to point the MassMind in the right direction and its processing power could unlock vast secrets. The entire network opened up in front of them.

It was familiar and strange, understandable and alien.  There were vast sections that were almost understandable – the Killers, despite their nature, shared the same universe as mankind – and other sections that were beyond understanding.  Tabitha wondered, in a moment of flickering humour, if the Killer network was three-quarters pornography as well; the vast majority of fantasy worlds in the MassMind involved sex, to one degree or another.  The Killers were asexual, reproducing by fission and splitting their cells, but did they have anything like sex?  Would they ever get distracted by thoughts of other Killers?

The thought made her smile as they hacked deeper into the Killer network.  The young Tabitha had spent much of her time chasing men – or getting men to chase her while she carefully didn’t run very fast – and the older Tabitha had wondered how much she would have accomplished if she hadn’t allowed her hormones to distract her.  Perhaps she would have been Director of NASA when the Killers arrived, slain along with the remainder of the planet; perhaps, without her leadership, the Community would never have formed and the human race would have died out, faded away like the Ghosts.  She shook her head as more Killer data rose up in front of her, showing her the deeper structure underlying the communications network; there was no point in wondering about what might have been if…

“There,” Chiyo99 said, sensing the web of data that formed the remaining eleven hubs.  Shiva was already vibrating with them; now, the black hole linked completely into the Killer network, dragging the other black holes into alignment with it and the human system.  The Killers didn’t have time to react before their communications network suddenly had twelve hubs again, one of them human.  “We’re in.”

“Reach out to them,” Tabitha urged.  There was so little time, even at computer speeds, infinitively faster than anything the human mind could grasp.  “Reach out to them before they reconfigure the network and throw us out again!”

Presented with a valid threat, the Killers were already responding; she could feel their controlling minds struggling to alter the network and remove Shiva from their links, preventing the human race from exploring further.  Their network stood exposed, yet there was no way to tell which messages were ordering a change, or even a controlled collapse of the network, before they altered their frequencies to prevent another hacking event.  The MassMind configured a general greeting and broadcast it into the network, but there was no response.  The Killers ignored it, as they had ignored every other human attempt to communicate with them; they just continued to focus on reconfiguring their network.  It was almost as if their controlling minds didn’t
know
that the humans were there, yet…