Storming Heaven

Chapter Forty-Five

Paula Handley felt as if she were drowning within a virtual universe of data, surrounded by entire galaxies of icons and symbols representing different aspects of the Shiva Control System. She could reach out with her mind into the stream of data pouring through her head and alter anything, affecting the outside universe in ways that would have been impossible, only a few weeks ago. The black hole’s power existed on levels even she hadn’t grasped until they had worked out the full scope of the Killer Communications System. She felt almost as if she could do anything.

She was barely aware of Chris’s hand holding hers, squeezing it from time to time, reminding her of the universe outside. The virtual universe was a world away from the more normal virtual universes that absorbed the attention of so many humans, allowing them to shut out the universe; there was an edge to her private universe that tore at her, sapping her strength even as she fought to control it. She might be powerful indeed, but she was not God, even within the world she’d created. If it started to swing out of control, she might become overwhelmed… and die. The system she’d created was far more volatile than anything the MassMind might supervise. She could feel its presence within the network, guiding her and helping her to hold it all together, but even the MassMind was tiny compared to the universe opening up in front of her.

“We’re lucky we didn’t know about any of this when we started plotting to take a Killer starship,” she said. Her voice sounded weak and tinny in her own ears. She wasn’t even sure if she were talking aloud, or merely thinking. It crossed her mind that she could link into the speakers now and think her thoughts aloud, but she pulled herself away from that distraction. “We would never have dared even thinking about challenging them.”

The Killer Communications Network was more than just a communications network, she saw as it opened up in front of her. It was a vast universe of data and power, roaring away under the skein of the real universe, linked together by thousands of black holes and gravity beams. In hindsight — and hindsight was always so much clearer — she couldn’t understand how she hadn’t guessed that they’d stuck a black hole inside their Dyson Sphere. They seemed to have black holes everywhere else, or perhaps they had started with a star and eventually compressed it down to a black hole. There was no way to know, apart from asking them… and that seemed as impossible as ever. The MassMind, despite its colossal intellect, had made little progress in decrypting the messages spinning through the Killer network. The Killers were transmitting thousands of messages through their network, but it was difficult to trace the source, let alone understand them. They were even gathering their power for something else, channelling it from thousands of black holes, through the network of power links and gravity beams… for what?

“I don’t even know if they’re aware of me, or if they care,” she said, wishing for a moment that she could slip out of the new universe and talk to Chris directly, or someone else. A pair of strong arms wrapped around her would feel very good, but she didn’t dare leave her post. The Killer system had to be monitored; she even had to look at the Dyson Sphere and find a way to destroy it, whatever it took. The more she looked at it, the more she wondered how they even dared think about destroying it. The sphere was so large that it could soak up thousands of antimatter warheads and keep going. “But how do they do it?”

The Killer starship Captain Ramage had crashed into the sphere had broken through the surface, exposing the black hole inside… deep inside. Despite its mass — it was over a hundred times heavier than Shiva, suggesting that the Killers had been fattening it up for centuries — it was still tiny on a stellar scale, allowing the Killers all the room on the interior of the sphere they needed. It would let off bursts of radiation that would make the surface uninhabitable for humans, but the Killers had the technology to shield themselves. The interior was more than just a living space, she saw as the human starships flew inside, searching for targets; it was their industrial complex and nerve centre rolled into one. There had to be a way to knock out the communications network, somehow.

She focused in on the gravity fields surrounding the Dyson Sphere and frowned. She could reach out with all the gravity potential of Shiva and attempt to disrupt the Killer network, but the network would compensate instantly, using the power of thousands of black holes to either push her out, or simply route around her. The odd nature of the communications network meant that she was accessing all of their messages, but they wouldn’t care… and isolating Shiva would be relatively simply. The Dyson Sphere itself seemed to be wrapped in invisible gravity beams, firmly embedded in the universe, its sheer mass daunting to her eyes. How had they even thought of challenging such a behemoth?

The plans humans had developed for Dyson Spheres appeared in her head and she scanned them rapidly, looking for weaknesses. The human plans had been intended to surround entire stars, not black holes, but the principle was the same. They had worried about the danger of literally heating up the entire sphere until the population died from heat stroke, eventually cooking the entire interior. A star pumped out heat all the time and, in an enclosed area, would eventually end up creating an oven large enough to roast planets. The Killers had to have some way to drain off that heat and radiation — no, just radiation. The black hole wouldn’t put out any heat.

She frowned to herself as the images of the interior of the sphere grew in her mind. It was all so frustratingly slow. She had grown up in a universe where data on almost anything was available for the asking — the MassMind and the Technical Faction saw to that — but now she had to wait until the starships actually collected the data. The interior of the black hole was vast beyond imagination. The sensors were draining in data at impossible speeds and yet it was far too slow. If Anderson Drive had worked inside the sphere…

The data flowed into her head and she frowned. There was little in the sphere apart from the black hole and a set of six planet-sized objects. They rotated around the black hole at two AUs from its event horizon, wrapping it in an invisible network of gravity beams that focused and absorbed its power, pushing it away from the sphere and into the Killer network. It was enough power to reach all the way to Andromeda and wipe out the entire galaxy, simply by focusing the beams on each of the stars, sending them supernova one by one. A human mind, even a Hitler or a Stalin, would have recoiled in horror. Somehow, she thought that the Killers would merely view it as an excellent method for strip-mining entire galaxies. The Exodus might have been far less of a bright idea than its leaders had thought.

“I need you to take out those planets,” she said, almost wonderingly. How long would it take humanity to duplicate the Killer system? It would take centuries to build such a device without the Killers interfering… and they would interfere. They’d attempted to destroy Shiva, after all, and a single black hole was far less dangerous. “I need them shattered, now!”

An alarm rang in her mind, dragging her attention back to Shiva itself. The black hole was osculating wildly, its event horizon shifting without apparent cause. She stared at it through her sensors, through the view she’d developed of the Killer Communications Network, and realised exactly what the Killers had in mind. Aware of her presence, unable to dislodge her, the Killers were attempting to force open an entry and turn Shiva into a wormhole. The sheer power they could bring to bear was daunting; they were already altering the black hole’s vibrating patterns, synchronising it with another black hole somewhere in the galaxy. It was already too late to counter their move. It would be bare seconds before the Killers opened the wormhole and sent something through…

And it could be anything. She’d assumed that they would use it as a bridgehead and launch a thousand ships though it, but it could be something far more dangerous, like a discharge of energy and radiation, enough to melt her station and terminate her control of Shiva. She acted quickly, activating emergency programs she’d created for just this eventuality, and watched grimly as the black hole hiccupped. It made her smile — evidently it had eaten something that disagreed with it — as the black hole vomited, crushing the newcomer — whatever it had been — down to energy and absorbing it into its own power store. Starship or energy burst, whatever it had been, it was harmless now. It probably hadn’t even known what had hit it.

“Keep looking for other possible threats,” she ordered, grimly. It could have been an entire planet, rammed down the wormhole to smash her station into fragments, or an entire fleet of Killer warships. The Killers operated on a scale that she could barely grasp. The full potential of their network was beyond her imagination. “If they try to launch something else thought the wormhole, we need to be ready for it.”

The Killers tried again and again, opening the wormhole, ramming something down it, only for Shiva to catch and devour their weapons. Paula allowed herself to hope that it was only the Killers showing their lack of imagination, but she knew that that was probably foolish. The Killers had created the network in the first place. They probably knew exactly what she was doing to their weapons. They opened new wormholes from different locations, often cross-combining them to confuse her, but the MassMind took over and prevented them from forcing anything through into normal space. They were only adding to her power stores…

Although it probably wouldn’t matter, she knew. They could keep supplying her with entire planets for years and she wouldn’t even have even a tiny percentage of the power they had at their disposal. If the starships succeeded, she could force her way into the network completely or shatter it, but if they failed… it dawned on her, suddenly, that they had a time limit. If the Killers restructured entire sections of their network, they might be able to keep it intact, no matter what she did to it. They would proceed with their plan and that would be the end.

“Incoming,” the MassMind warned. A new wormhole appeared in space, only a handful of light-hours from Shiva. They were sending through individual starships now. Paula reached out with her mind, feeling Shiva’s vast potential vibrating beneath her, and snapped the wormhole out of existence. The Killer starship vanished, either diverted elsewhere or destroyed by the hand of God. A handful of other wormholes appeared and she closed them all, draining their power into the black hole. She wondered if the Killers felt frustration, or helpless rage, as they watched their starships vanish. Could they even feel such emotions?

Her sudden burst of amusement was nearly the end of her. A wormhole snapped into existence and she closed it, but a second materialised only a microsecond later, well outside the remains of the system. It was too far away for her to close before the Killer starship came through the wormhole, heading right towards her. She could feel the waves affecting the fabric of local space-time as it drove towards her position, and the handful of starships on defence duty. They might be able to slow it down, but they wouldn’t be able to stop it.

She thought rapidly as the Defence Force ships opened fire, only to see their implosion bolts deflected harmlessly from the hull. No, she realised; that was wrong. They’d never even touched the hull, but had been bent away from it, like a beam of light near a high-gravity source. She peered at the Killer starship through her gravity telescope, as she had started to think of it, and saw the complex webbing of gravity power surrounding it. It had managed to render itself completely invulnerable. One of the Defence Force starships rammed it and only slammed into its undamaged hull.

“Damn it,” Paula snapped. She opened her mouth to apologise to Chris, who was about to die with her… and then it struck her. It was the work of a moment to reconfigure the gravity fields with the MassMind helping her, refocusing them around the Killer starship’s own gravity field, and then she compressed them rapidly. The Killer starship was crushed like a bug. “Hah!”

She distantly heard Chris’s voice, like someone right at the edge of her mind. “What happened to it?” He asked, desperately. Her head was spinning helplessly. “What did you do?”

Paula opened her mouth to reply, but everything caught up with her at once and she fell into blackness.

The interior of the sphere was surreal, Andrew decided, as the Lightning raced through the interior wrapped only in a protective warp bubble. Without it, they would have been destroyed by the massive tidal waves of gravity spinning through the sphere, but the sheer size of the Killer construction made their heads spin. They were travelling at twenty times the speed of light and it was still taking real time to reach their target. The hundreds of other starships that had broken into the sphere were racing out on missions of their own, trying to parse out just how the sphere worked, or what the Killers actually used it for, apart from power generation.

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.