Storming Heaven

Chapter Thirty-Six

“What the hell?”

Captain Mikkel Ellertson had been bored, oddly enough. At first, the task of commanding the Defence Force units at Star’s End had been exciting, with the danger of a Killer starship dropping out of a wormhole to dispute possession of its captured cousin with the human race. Later, as more and more data was shunted out to the rest of the Community — and the Killers had launched their own blitzkrieg against the Community settlements — Star’s End had diminished in importance. It wasn’t exactly a backwater, not with the Killer starship sitting nearby and being slowly dissembled by the Technical Faction, but it wasn’t the front line either. The fact that it could rapidly become the front line didn’t impress him.

“We’ve got multiple power surges coming from the Killer starship,” Lieutenant Luke Falk reported, from his console. Red alarms were flashing up all over the board. “I’m picking up distress signals from hundreds of platforms and small craft.”

“Send an emergency signal to Sparta at once and alert the destroyers,” Ellertson snapped. It was right out of the tactical handbook. First, inform higher authority. He forced himself not to think about the reason that regulation was engraved in stone; the vast majority of Defence Force starships and installations that encountered the Killers didn’t live to report it afterwards. “Inform them to stand by to take action.”

It was a vague order; he didn’t know what action they should take. “And get me Doctor Singh,” he added. “I want to know what is going on.”

“I can’t raise anyone on the platforms,” Falk reported, shortly. “The power surges are blanking out everything from them, even the quantum entanglement communications system. I can’t reach anyone within two hundred kilometres of the Killer starship!”

“That’s impossible,” Ellertson protested, angrily. A nasty thought occurred to him. The one known way to block a quantum entanglement communications system was to destroy the transmitter. If the Killers had destroyed, or drained, the platforms, there would be no signals coming out. It was preferable to believing that the Killers could somehow — again — do the impossible. “Get a recon probe over there.”

“Aye, sir,” Falk said. There was a long pause. “Sir, the Killer starship is definitely powering up.”

“It was dead,” Ellertson said, in disbelief. “It shouldn’t be able to move at all without our assistance.”

“It is definitely moving, sir,” Falk said. There was another pause. “I have the Admiral on a direct line for you.”

Admiral Brent Roeder’s image materialised in the command centre. “Report,” he snapped. “What’s happening?”

Ellertson found his voice. “Sir, the Killer starship appears to be powering up,” he said. He couldn’t hide from the facts any longer. “I am totally unable to account for it, but I suspect that the ship intends to power up completely and jump out. I request permission to engage it to prevent it from escaping.”

“Granted,” Brent said, shortly. “I want an aftermath report explaining exactly how the starship started to power up and just what they did to it.”

“Aye, sir,” Ellertson said.

“Good hunting,” Brent said, and vanished. His final words seemed to hang in the air.

“Get the destroyers to close in and engage with implosion bolts,” Ellertson ordered, grimly. “I want them wrecking as much internal havoc as possible.”

Falk frowned. “Sir, there may still be people onboard the ship,” he said, “including the Spacer Representative.”

Ellertson hesitated. If they killed a Representative, even by accident, it would torpedo his career. He’d be lucky to be assigned to a fuelling station in the middle of nowhere, yet if he lost the captured ship, he’d certainly face a court-martial and probably be disgraced. The Spacers would demand his head for killing their leader… but what choice was there? If the ship powered up completely, it could lay waste the entire settlement before it escaped.

“I know,” he said, finally feeling like a real commanding officer. He hadn’t understood the price until now. “I’ll take full responsibility.”

He glanced down at his console and hit a key he had never expected to use. “Now hear this,” he said, knowing that his voice would be heard everywhere across the system. “This is a direct order. All non-Defence Force personnel are to immediately head to their evacuation stations and leave the system. I repeat, all non-Defence Force personnel are to immediately head to their evacuation stations and leave the system. I am declaring a full state of emergency.”

The channel closed. Ellertson hesitated, and then called Major Percival. He didn’t like the Footsoldier very much and suspected that the feeling was mutual. “Major, I need you and your men to supervise the evacuation,” he ordered, shortly. The Major would already know what was going on. “I want everyone off this asteroid before that thing breaks loose.”

He looked back at the shape of the Killer starship and the invisible power surges surrounding it. “I don’t think that that will be very long at all.”

“Damn it, Cindy,” Professor Lawton barked. “Can’t you get us a lick of power?”

Cindy winced, inwardly, fighting the urge to cry. The only reason she’d been assigned to the University of Chin’s contribution to the research program was that Professor Lawton, who was one of the foremost experts on matter-conversion theory outside the Technical Faction, couldn’t be relied upon to look after himself, let alone three other scientists and a horde of admiring graduate students. Cindy, who had hopes of going into advanced drive theory herself, had been selected on the entirely reasonable grounds — to a university administrator — that she knew how to fly the University’s small research craft and wouldn’t be too enthusiastic about flying too close to a possible threat. Docked, as they were, on the side of the Killer starship, she suspected that that final qualification was more of a sick joke than anything else.

“The system is completely drained,” she said, finally. She ran her hands over the touch-sensitive console, but it was only for effect. Nothing happened. “I don’t know how, but we’ve been completely drained of power.”

She ignored their protests as she continued to study the problem. The tiny starship had no quantum tap, but it did have two fusion reactors — guaranteed for at least fifty years service — and enough battery power to get them home from anywhere in the galaxy, as well as numerous tiny power sources for the emergency systems. The entire starship shouldn’t have been drained completely of power, yet it was unquestionably what had happened. The spacesuits and environmental gear had suffered the same fate. She didn’t want to think about what might have happened to anyone caught outside when disaster had struck.

“But what are we going to do?” One of the others asked. She was a fellow student and sounded as if she was on the verge of panic. “What happens when we run out of air?”

“We die,” Cindy said, just to shut them up. She peered out of the viewport towards the horizon, looking for signs of power. The other starships mated to the Killer starship hull weren’t moving, or showing signs of life. She picked up a pair of visual enhancers and peered through them, but not entirely to her surprise she couldn’t see anything, even a trace of other living human beings. Somewhere in the distance, a spacesuit was drifting towards the Killer ship…

”Hellfire,” she said, angrily. It was the obvious question and she hadn’t even thought to ask it — where, without power, was the gravity coming from? The answer was obvious; they were being held down by a gravity field generated by the Killer starship, which meant that somehow the starship had been powered up. Had it drained their power and used it to refuel itself? “Everyone; get back to your seats and strap in, now!”

She ignored their protests as she watched the hull of the Killer ship. Once, when she’d been considering archaeology as her career, she’d attended a dig on an icy world, where she’d seen bioluminescent creatures swimming under the ice. She was reminded of that now as she saw lights flaring into existence under the hull material; cold, strangely ominous lights, somehow sending chills down her spine. She looked up towards the stars, towards the great disc of the galaxy laid out in front of her, and grasped for the first time how far they were from home. If the power had failed on a system-wide basis, hundreds of thousands of humans were about to die.

The ship quivered slightly. At first, she wondered if their power had somehow been magically restored, but when she checked, she realised that everything was still dead. The Killer ship itself was shaking as the lights grew brighter, preparing to… what? Open a wormhole and escape, or devastate the entire system before departing? The lights seemed to shimmer under the hull material, irresistibly drawing her attention towards their formation, and then concentrated underneath one of the other ships. There was an explosion, chillingly silent in the darkness of space, and the starship disintegrated. The lights flared under the hull, racing towards the next starship, and a moment later that one exploded as well. Scientific platforms, monitoring stations and research ships; they all disintegrated, one by one. Cindy knew that it was just a matter of time before they died as well.

Professor Lawton couldn’t see. He didn’t understand. “What’s happening, girl?”

Cindy didn’t reply. The lights were drawing closer. Two more starships exploded in bursts of light, and then finally the lights raced towards her ship. She shook her head, remembering all the students who had wondered if there was a way to make peaceful contact with the Killers, and closed her eyes. An instant later, it was all over.

The Killer was young and unformed, yet it could draw on the race memory of its parent, the Killer Paula Handley had killed, and use it to understand what was going on. It was mildly surprised that it had even been born at all, but with the death of its parent the starship mentality had acted to bring forth another controlling mind. It slid into position, gazing out at the universe through eyes that were both young and very old, and felt its mind expand. The presence of the little mites inside its hull was a danger and it reached out to trap them, preventing them from causing any further harm. Somehow, it knew that the mites, the vermin, had killed its parent.

It had no sense of parental loyalties — the Killers had never developed that emotion, lacking the equipment to understand it — but it was coldly angry at the mites. As its mind expanded to study the universe, it became aware of other mites; some neutralised by the starship’s mentality, others hanging back, watching as the starship started to power up. They had docked their tiny ships on its hull, the Killer realised, and in a flash of anger it started to wipe them out. The hull absorbed the force of the blasts effortlessly.

They had held it prisoner, it realised, with another hot flash of anger. They had killed its parent and held it prisoner while it gestated. Only simple ignorance had saved it from being killed before it achieved the critical mass required for sentience. It wanted to carry on the fight, to obliterate every last vermin in the system, but it knew that it was unready for battle. It had not yet attained full merger with the starship mentality. The starship had been so used to its parent that it wasn’t ready to merge with a new mind, even a child of the original mind. It needed to escape, yet it would take time to generate enough power to form a wormhole. Reluctantly, it started to prepare to fight. If the mites wanted to destroy it, they would have to struggle to do so.

As the mites and their tiny ships angled around, the Killer rapidly rescanned the interior of its hull, checking for any mites it might have missed. The mites were so small that many of them had escaped its attention the first time, trying desperately to escape to their little ships — the little ships that no longer existed. It no longer needed to hide, so it reached out through the nanomachines its parent had used to build and maintain the ship and reformed the hull around them. The mites would be moved into smaller and smaller areas until they would be completely neutralised. The Killer was not yet practiced enough to split its awareness safely, but it wasn’t a complicated task. All it had to do was seal off all the possible escape routes and prevent the mites from penetrating into the heart of the starship. They would not be allowed to kill it as they had killed its parent.

The Killer refocused its attention, watching the tiny ships as they closed in on its position, and locked its weapons onto their projected positions. A moment later, as soon as they came into range, it opened fire.

“The Killer ship has opened fire,” Falk reported, from his console. They were the only two men left in the command centre. The remainder had been evacuated to the starships and sent out of the system. “They’re concentrating on the Defence Force starships.”

“Good,” Ellertson said, slowly. The entire system had enough starships to evacuate the entire population — unlike most of the other systems the Killers had attacked — but it was still taking time. Scientists were not inclined to put down their work and run, even with a Killer starship breathing down their necks… and most of them had seen the captured starship as harmless. Ellertson himself had seen the starship as harmless, a mistake that — he suspected — was about to cost him dear. “Tell me… does it know that the Defence Force starships can actually harm it?”

“I don’t know,” Falk said, after a moment. “When we captured it, it had soaked up the fire of an entire attack wing without taking significant damage. If it had a link to the remainder of the Killer communications system, surely it would have brought other Killer starships here…”

“Surely,” Ellertson agreed, reluctantly. He couldn’t envisage anyone, even the Killers, leaving a starship in enemy hands if it were within their power to recover it. The researchers had already developed new weapons from the captured ship and had used them to hurt the Killers badly. “Inform Captain Jackson to watch for a chance to disrupt their black hole. If we kill the black hole, we kill the ship.”

“Aye, sir,” Falk said. He hesitated. “Sir, we have visual confirmation. Every starship docked on the Killer hull has been destroyed. They’re all dead.”

Ellertson looked over at the Killer starship, slowly shaking itself free of the surrounding platforms and tethers. “Understood,” he said. The Defence Force would understand now. The starships were opening fire, implosion bolts digging into the Killer hull. “Tell Captain Jackson… no, belay that. Let him fight as he sees fit.”

The Killer barely noticed the different mite weapons as they opened fire, for the simple reason that its parent hadn’t bothered to collect information on its technology and tactics. It was aware that there were Killers who studied the mites, as if there was anything useful to be learned from the mites, but it had preferred to simply destroy them. The mites represented the greatest threat to their existence and therefore had to be destroyed. Learning about them, as a man might study a particularly venomous species of snake or spider, would only distract from that fundamental task. They had to exterminate the mites to ensure that the mites never threatened the Killers.

The weapons dug into its hull and it screamed, shocked at the agony, but it wasn’t shocked senseless. Unlike the older Killers, it hadn’t lived with millions of years of effective invulnerability, a universe where nothing short of a supernova or an uncontrolled black hole could harm it. It was shocked, yet it was not surprised, and it continued to return fire. It noted, absently, what the weapons were doing to its hull and concentrated on altering the hull’s spectrum to make the weapons less effective. It also swung its hull around to prevent the other weapons from making a more serious dent in its innards, although it did note that some of the weapons were likely to kill more of the mites than parts of itself. Their blasts were coming very close to where it had stored the prisoners.

It wouldn’t matter for long, anyway, it decided. It wouldn’t be long before it could open a wormhole and escape, taking its prisoners with it. Perhaps there was something to be said for studying the mites after all. The information would assist the Killers to locate their homes and burn them out, once and for all.

“Sir, we’re not inflicting enough damage,” Falk said, grimly. The entire attack wing was surrounding the Killer ship, pouring fire into the damaged sections of the hull, but it wasn’t enough to complete its destruction. The Killer starship was just too large to destroy easily and Ellertson refused to order anyone to ram it. Antimatter missiles were merely adding their power to the Killer ship’s power reserves. “They’re… sir, I’m picking up a massive gravity shift! They’re opening a wormhole, right on top of it!”

”Pull the fleet back,” Ellertson ordered, seeing the wormhole icon flickering into existence. The Killer starship slid forward, firing parting shots at the research platforms and starships as it escaped, and vanished into the wormhole. A second later, the wormhole collapsed to nothingness and disappeared. “Contact Sparta and tell them…”

He shook his head bitterly. “Tell them that we failed to prevent its escape,” he said. The Admiral would not be happy. “And then get started on rescue efforts. We have a lot of lives to save.”