Storming Heaven

Chapter Seventeen

Chiyo Prime — as she had started to think of herself — floated within an endless sea of energy. It had been easy to create a personal environment for herself — she’d moved on from the illusion of her own room to creating entire apartment complexes — but she had realised that it would be dangerous in the long run. She couldn’t afford to start thinking of herself as safe, or immortal; if the Killer mind realised that she was there, the Killer would attempt to… well, kill her. Chiyo had no way of knowing if the Killer had AI assistants that could purge the network of unwanted human personalities, but she found it hard to imagine any computer network that didn’t have at least some protection. A human system would have, at least, a semi-sentient antiviral defence system — the mere existence of other humans would have guaranteed that, or defeat.

Did the Killers wage war on each other? It was so hard to read the endless stream of data running to and from the Killer mind, but she suspected that they probably advanced through conflict, just as humans had advanced before the Killers had arrived at Earth. Even after the Earth had been destroyed, the human race had continued to fight one another, as well as trying desperately to build a workable defence. The Community hadn’t been able to keep much of a dampener on it; indeed, half of the Defence Force was more experienced at fighting fellow humans than the Killers.

Yet humans were ingenious foes, she knew. A human tactician would struggle to overcome the opponent’s advantages and turn their own advantages into war-winning tactics. A human military force that didn’t advance, or advanced in the wrong direction, would lose eventually, whatever it had started with — human history was full of examples of a military force that had remained behind the times too long. A force that failed to adept to new realities was one that wouldn’t remain in existence for much longer.

The Killers, by contrast, hadn’t shown any real improvement in their technology ever since they had been rediscovered, two hundred years after Earth had been destroyed. Their formidable weapons remained the same, their equally-formidable starships hadn’t been improved or redesigned and their tactics remained as direct as ever. They had never shown any hint of understanding subtle tactics, or diversions, or even the value of intelligence. They came, they saw and they destroyed. If humans had possessed equal technology to the Killers, Chiyo was sure, the Killers would have been rapidly and completely exterminated. They might have lost the ability to adapt completely.

She extended her mind carefully into the main data stream — as she had termed it — and listened to the Killer whispers at the edge of her awareness. It was barely possible to understand the whispers she could hear perfectly, yet nothing quite seemed to make sense. It was like being trapped in a nightmare, an unwanted guest in a haunted house, never quite knowing when the ghosts would stop being holograms and turn into real threats. The MassMind would probably have been able to analyse the entire system within seconds, but Chiyo was only human — even if she only existed as a personality within an alien system. There were limits to how far she could extend her mind, even with the aid of her duplicates. There were now hundreds of Chiyo-duplicates running through the system — an act that would have ensured her prosecution if she had carried it out in the Community — but they were all still her. They lacked a different perspective from Chiyo Prime.

I should have studied that textbook on alien systems, she thought, silently cursing the recording implant under her breath — or what passed for breath inside the alien network. The Community had studied hundreds of dead alien societies and cracked their languages — although researchers kept asking awkward questions about how successful the effort had been in the absence of any actual aliens to talk to, apart from the Killers — but Chiyo had never studied any of their work. She’d had the files in her memory implant — if she’d been in a physical body, she would have access to them within microseconds — but she hadn’t even glanced at them, which would have ensured that they would have been in her memory and recorded as part of her personality. It might not have been as useful as she thought — if the Killers really were from a gas giant, instead of a rocky world, they would have little in common with humanity — but it would have been reassuring. Three of her duplicates were already searching for her physical body, hoping that the Killer had kept it intact, but Chiyo doubted that the Killer had bothered. Why should it have?

Another wave of energy swept through the starship and Chiyo allowed her awareness to follow it, becoming aware of powerful waves of energy materialising within the starship’s power cells. The Killer was preparing for something, she realised, and extended her mind further, trying to understand why it was building up such a reserve of energy. She found herself looking out through the Killer’s sensors onto the cold darkness of interstellar space, before a funnel of light shimmered into existence in front of the starship. It took her barely a second to realise that it was a wormhole before the Killer starship advanced and slid into the singularity, the power curves altering and fading away as the wormhole started to draw power from the quantum undertow. The wormhole was, once started, a genuine perpetual motion machine.

Clever, Chiyo decided, as the wormhole stretched on to infinity. No one in the Defence Force had any idea just how quickly the Killers could move in their wormholes, but Chiyo had the impression that the starship was actually picking up speed as it plunged onwards. In the MassMind, there would be referents she could use to calculate speed and time, but inside the alien system, all of the referents would be alien. She didn’t even know how long it had been since she had been absorbed into the alien system; it could have been seconds, or years. There was no way to know.

The wormhole terminated in another wave of brilliant light, leaving the starship floating onwards, gliding towards a star. She was suddenly shockingly aware of the presence of new sources of gravity energy — the star, nine planets and thousands of asteroids — and realised that the Killer was carefully taking stock of its new location. Humanity used gravimetric sensors itself, but the Killer sensors were far superior; it was quite possible that the Killers would be able to detect starships that were completely powered down. If that were the case, it was her duty to warn the defence force before all hell broke loose… but how? She was trapped within the alien system.

A wash of motion passed over the Killer ship as she peeked through the sensor blisters, just in time to see the starship’s destination, right ahead of her. She had hoped that the Killers were visiting one of the star systems they were redeveloping — and the Defence Force had declared off-limits to human investigators, apart from spy probes — but there was no mistaking their target. Up ahead, there were over a hundred settled asteroids, Community asteroids…

And the Killers had come to call.

“Get everyone to the escape craft, now,” Mother Jan snapped, as the shape of the Killer starship grew larger on the display. “Women and children first; men last. Get the automated defence pods up and ready to deploy, but don’t bother with the manned defence ships. Just get them out of here!”

“But Mother,” Harold protested. He was not only her youngest son — which earned him nothing on an asteroid settlement — but also the leader of the local defence unit. “Mother, we could make a stand…”

“And get blasted to atoms without accomplishing anything,” Jan snarled. Harold, in her view, lacked the virtues of his late lamented father; he was brave, loyal and determined, but was far from rational. There was no point in making a stand against the Killers, not unless someone invented a new weapon that would stop even them. She wouldn’t have hesitated to send Harold and his men against human opponents, even spend them ruthlessly if there were no other choice, but the Killers were something different. The only thing the Rockrat community could do was evacuate the entire settlement and try not to leave anyone behind. “Men! Get down to the evacuation centre and coordinate the evac, now!”

Harold left, recognising the tone that promised harsh punishment if he dared to offer any further disagreement. Jan wasn’t just his and his family’s mother; she was the elected Mother of the entire settlement and the leader of over a thousand human souls. The tiny settlement, like most asteroid settlements, was run by women and Jan was known to be the most cunning, ruthless and far-seeing of all the women on the settlement. In an environment where men went out to mine, or to fight, women held the line at home — and, with it, most of the political power. Jan had never enjoyed the job — it wasn’t meant to be an enjoyable job — but now she felt helpless. By long tradition, a Mother’s word was law, but the Killers wouldn’t heed her words. They would smash through the defences and crush her people without even noticing the effort.

“Motherless bastards,” she said, when she was alone. The Command Centre was normally only manned by a handful of women; now, she was alone, apart from the ever-present AI. It was a limited model — the founder of the settlement hadn’t been comfortable with AIs that had too much freedom of action — but more than capable of handling anything that might be required, until now. “Report.”

“All freighters are being loaded now with evacuees,” the AI said, calmly. Jan was tempted to disconnect the conversational overlays, which kept the AI sounding like a human, provided that it wasn’t pushed, but there was no point. Alone, she could pretend that the AI was as human as she was, or the rest of her people. They wouldn’t be her people much longer. Even if they found safety somewhere else, the community would be broken and scattered among the stars. “The first freighter is leaving the docking bay now.”

Jan clenched her teeth as the freighter lumbered away and, with a flash, vanished into warp drive. The settlement hadn’t been able to afford Anderson Drive starships and that meant that if the Killers decided to give chase, the evacuees would probably be chased down and killed. They generally ignored human starships unless they were actively engaging the Killer ships, but she suspected that this time it would be different. The Defence Force hadn’t hurt the Killers until they’d actually managed to capture a Killer starship. The Killers were probably furious, maybe even out for revenge. Who knew how they thought?

“Good,” she said. It was tempting to call down to the docking bay and order Harold to hurry up, but she knew better than to pester anyone, even her son. Harold might be a man, but he had the ability to handle the task and pestering him would only delay the loading. “How long until they enter firing range?”

“The Killer starship will enter firing range in seven minutes,” the AI informed her. “They will enter range of our automated missile batteries in three minutes.”

“And won’t stop even when we open fire,” Jan muttered. “Can we hurt them? Hell, no.”

The AI didn’t recognise that it was a rhetorical question. “The defence data from the Defence Force suggests that the detonation of Type-Nine warheads against Killer hull material, which is of unknown composition, will not inflict even minimal damage,” it informed her. Jan had known that from the start. The defences were intended for human pirates, not Killers and their invincible starships. “The Killers may not even bother to respond.”

“Maybe they will,” Jan said, slowly. “Can you rewrite their firing patterns? Have each platform engage individually?”

“Yes,” the AI said, “but Defence Force protocols warn that if we do not engage collectively…”

“Override,” Jan said, shortly. “I want one platform firing at a time. When that platform is destroyed, or shot dry, I want the next platform to engage.”

“Understood,” the AI said. “Command protocols are being rewritten. Command protocols have been rewritten.”

“Good,” Jan said, looking down at the update from the docking bay. Nine more starships were underway, fleeing onwards towards the Community, as if there was safety anywhere. The entire Defence Force couldn’t stop one Killer starship. “You may fire the first platform when the Killers come into range.”

“Acknowledged,” the AI said. There was a pause. “You may wish to leave the command centre and proceed to the docking bay. There are only three more starships still accepting evacuees.”

“I’m bred out,” Jan said, relaxing. There was no way that she was going to abandon the remaining settlers to die alone. Her place was in the command centre. “Don’t let them call me. Just clear them to depart without me.”

The AI didn’t argue.

Chiyo felt like screaming as the human settlement drew closer, illuminated by the ghostly gravity waves that emitted from the Killer starship and echoed back from the asteroids. The Killer mind was coldly and precisely picking out the inhabited asteroids, designating them for attention, one after the other. Chiyo guessed — she had to keep herself thinking, just to avoid falling into panic or despair — that the Killers used vast neutrino fields as well. It was a worrying thought. There were hundreds of hidden settlements, designed to be safe from the Killers, that were anything, but.

The first missile caught her by surprise; a flare of light that appeared out of nowhere, slammed into the Killer starship and detonated, without even shaking the starship. The Killer mind wasn’t remotely concerned as missile after missile materialised out of nowhere and struck the ship, leaving the business of destroying the launcher to automated systems. A pulse of white light flared out of the Killer starship and wiped the launcher out of existence, but another launcher opened fire, continuing the ineffective bombardment. Chiyo frowned; the tactic made no sense, yet it was irritating the Killer mind. It seemed to concentrate, and then open fire with ruthless abandon, wiping hundreds of tiny human constructions out of space, along with dozens of innocent asteroids.

It can’t see the launchers, she realised, in disbelief. She had realised that something was odd about the way the Killer was reacting to the human attack, but it hadn’t occurred to her that the Killer couldn’t see what was launching the attack, even though it had been easy to deduce it’s location. It was bizarre; there was no way that a human starship would have missed it, unless it was a stealthed platform. The thought excited her, for it proved that there were chinks in the Killers and their armour, but it worried her at the same time. Why couldn’t the Killers see them?

The thought kept nagging at her as the Killer starship finally battered its way through the defences and closed in rapidly on the core asteroid. A human opponent would have tried to take the asteroid and its equipment intact — the Rockrats had fought hundreds of bitter Rock Wars over asteroid settlements — but the Killers had no need of human resources. Chiyo watched, unable to look away, as the first white ball of light struck home and the asteroid disintegrated. The asteroid hadn’t bothered with artificial gravity, relying instead on spin to create gravity and that spin was now tearing it apart. The detonation alone would have rendered the asteroid uninhabitable, but the spin completed the destruction, leaving the Killer starship free to move on to the next target. The starship ignored the human ships as they slipped away into interstellar space…

Chiyo couldn’t watch any longer and fled back down into the core of the Killer system, watching the cold dispassionate rage of the Killer mind as it completed the task of destroying any trace of human existence in the system. There was no sense of pleasure, or glee, or even sadism, just the awareness that the task had to be completed as quickly and decisively as possible. It fitted in with how the Killers had handled Earth and the other worlds they’d destroyed over millions of years; they hadn’t just wiped out the intelligent races despoiling their homeworlds, but they’d rendered the worlds completely uninhabitable. A limited amount of radiation was a requirement for rapid evolution, but after the Killers had finished, Earth had become so radioactive that even the cockroaches hadn’t survived. Nothing lived there now, apart from a handful of human researchers under very heavy protection, and nothing would ever evolve there again.

Chiyo had read, once, a theory that life moved from star to star as spores drifting in space, rather than being carried on starships. If that were true — and no one had proven it in a thousand years of space exploration — it might explain why the Killers used massive overkill on their targets, but why would they believe that? It made much more sense, to her, that the Killers were not only wiping out present threats — however laughable — but also all possibility of future threats from their target worlds. It was possible they didn’t understand humanoids at all… hell, they might even believe that humans, and the Ghosts, and the countless other races that had encountered the Killers and hadn’t survived the experience were the same!

She pushed that thought aside as the wormhole opened up again and the Killer starship vanished from the universe. Whatever happened to her personality, she had to let the Community know what she’d discovered, before it was too late. The Killers were hunting humanity down like rats.

And if they kept hitting asteroid settlements, they’d break the Community into a million isolated settlements that could be wiped out, one by one, and the human race along with them. It would be the final end.