Storming Heaven

Chapter Forty-Six

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…

“They don’t,” Chiyo99 said, bitterly. “They’ve decided that we are impossible, so we don’t exist for them. We have to be nothing more than a data glitch for them.”

Tabitha felt bitter despair. “What do we do now?” She asked. The sense of frustration almost overwhelmed her. To have come so far, only to fail at the last hurdle. How could the Killers just ignore them? “Just crash the entire network, all of it?”

“That may no longer be possible,” the MassMind said. It’s normally confident tenor shifted. Tabitha felt its doubt and growing despair. The grand plan, the nuclear option, would no longer work. “They may already have prevented us from successfully crashing their network.”

The newborn had been wrapped in conversation with Rupert — the mite, no, the human, had a name, something else alien to the Killers — when it had heard the first human call through the communications network. It had almost been lost in the howling data storm that the destruction of one of the hubs had created, yet it was unquestionably alien. The newborn abandoned its conversation and extended its mind out to the newcomer, but the other Killers simply ignored it. It could not exist, so it didn’t exist. The newborn had no such preconceptions.

It formatted a call of its own, using what it had learned from Rupert and the human minds it had absorbed, and replied. The sense of the MassMind almost overwhelmed it, yet it was prepared and ready for such an entity — it was almost like encountering a far larger and diverse Killer, like the ones who had been slaughtered on the remains of the sphere. There was a sense of presence, of many minds working together as one, yet also a sense of unity and calm contemplation. The MassMind was everything that the human race was, it realised; it was all the glory, the delight, the pride and the agony. It was far more like a Killer than the Killers themselves — or the humans — would have felt comfortable admitting, yet it was surprisingly alien… and different.

Their minds meshed together almost unwillingly, each bringing something different to the merger. The newborn saw, for the second time, many different human lifetimes and the fear of the Killers that had bound the human race together. The MassMind saw, for the first time, the memories of the war against the First Enemy, a foe that had been defeated millions of years ago, yet how the Killers had never realised that there were different races on each of the rocky worlds. They had never encountered another gas giant-dwelling race, never, yet was that such a surprise. The gas giants were hardly as habitable as Earth-like worlds.

“We need to end this,” the MassMind said, directly to the newborn. There was no room for doubt or deceit, not when two very different and yet alike minds were in such close harmony. It would have destroyed another Killer, but the newborn had the mental capability to endure the touch, even embrace it. “We need to end this before we destroy each other.”

“We have to shout louder,” the newborn replied. They were sharing thoughts and ideas faster than any human mind could understand, or handle. They were both vaguely aware of the two puny human minds, left far behind by their communication, yet there was no time to update them, or seek their consent. “You have to… here.”

A plan formed in their shared mind. The MassMind reached out, through the Killer Communications Network, to touch the very heart of their shared consensus. They used their own network to share thoughts and ideas, even though they were far from human, and they all used it. They might no longer be able to share memories directly, through the transference of cells from Killer to Killer, but they could talk. They could be one.

The MassMind formatted a new message, a gestalt of everything they were, everything they ever had been and everything they could be, in the future, and broadcast it right into the heart of the Killer consensus. It was a massive shout, a wordless cry of WE ARE HERE, and it screamed into their minds. The shock was undeniable. No amount of disbelief could hide its true nature, or humanity’s, from the Killers, either from the Warriors or the Civilians living down in the gas giants; they could no longer deny the truth. The entire fate of the universe seemed to hang in the balance.

And then the Killers replied.