Storming Heaven

Chapter Fourteen

Paula was no stranger to walking in space — like everyone born on an asteroid habitat, she’d made her first spacewalk as soon as she could operate a child-suitable spacesuit — but Star’s End was different. Intellectually, she knew that there was no real difference between walking in space back home and at Star’s End, but her hindbrain kept screaming at her about the dangers of floating off into intergalactic space. She kept trying to convince herself that if she lost control, one of the starships or interplanetary bugs would rescue her long before she passed out of the system, yet somehow her mind refused to believe. The presence of the Killer starship, sitting helplessly in a vast framework of sensors and observation units, only added to her unease. The last time she’d been so close to that craft, it had been trying to kill her.

“We, the dispossessed, the outcasts, return our friends to the stars,” the preacher said, her words echoing over the communications link. The first coffin was already moving, pushed out of the magnetic cage and launched towards the star, followed by the second. A handful of bodies had been recovered from the captured starship, but most of the coffins were empty. The Killer weapons, with their complete matter-energy conversion fields, left very little behind to bury. “Their light will shine on our descendents, thousands of years in the future, when all around us is dead and dust. We will not forget them.”

Paula swallowed hard as the next coffin moved past her, heading onwards towards its final destination. She hadn’t grasped the realities of death before, even though she’d seen men die on the Killer starship, for it was true death. The starship crews the Killers had killed hadn’t had time to transmit their final personality recordings into the MassMind. There was nothing left of them, but atoms and memories. Others had been luckier, but only by degree; the MassMind had only fractions of their personalities to integrate. Paula had broken tradition, which mandated that all personalities were forbidden to interact with the living until after the funeral, to check up on them, but the MassMind supervisors hadn’t been hopeful. The personalities were broken and fragmented and, lacking a real sense of self, would probably end up collapsing into the MassMind and losing what remained of their individuality. They would never live again…

There were other possibilities, darker ones. Every so often, something discovered the potential of copying a MassMind personality into a cloned body, allowing a personality to live again, but it was illegal. A newly-born clone brain would be unable to accept the transcribing process, while an adult clone would be a living breathing being in his or her own right. The Community had banned any such experimentation, but in a society where information was free and resources virtually infinitive, someone was probably experimenting without any regard for moral concerns. It shouldn’t have surprised her — all moral concerns had been thrown aside in the desperate fight for survival — but it made her uncomfortable. The human race couldn’t fight monsters by becoming monsters themselves.

“Nelson Oshiro, Argyris Aniketos, Nomiki Dimitris, Tyrone Leff, Clinton Remus, Darryl O’Hare, Tyrone Knobel…” The list of names went on and on. “We bid them farewell and look forward to meeting them again in the land where no shadows fall, knowing now that they shine their light upon us all.”

Paula almost rolled her eyes. She knew, as an astrophysics expert, that the bodies would vaporise as they reached the local star, sending out a brief flare of light that would be almost unnoticed amid the star’s permanent glare. The Deist beliefs never quite made sense to her anyway; they were a strange mixture of Old Earth religions and countless New Age cults that had established asteroid habitats so that they could practice their beliefs away from a sceptical world. The funeral wasn’t for the benefit of the dead, even those who still lived on in the MassMind, but for the living. They had died to give her a chance to unravel the mysteries of the Killer starship.

She looked back towards the Killer ship as the preacher finally came to the end of his sermon. She’d spent the first week being debriefed — and listening to endless lectures from the biological studies professors on how dare she kill the first representative of an alien race — on everything that had happened on the mission, and assisting the researchers to explore the starship’s interior. They had barely scratched the surface of the Killer starship, yet they were already making astonishing discoveries. It would be years before they understood everything that the Killers did so casually, but the new insights were worth their weight in gold…

Except she had a feeling that something was wrong. No one else seemed to think it, but every time she travelled onboard the Killer starship, she had the oddest sense that it was… waiting. It felt like a crowded theatre waiting for the play to open, or a woman waiting for her lover, a silence pregnant with anticipation. No one else had reported feeling anything out of the ordinary — at least for an alien starship large enough to swallow everything else at Star’s End — but she couldn’t escape her worries. They had barely begun to scratch the surface of the Killer starship. God alone knew what secrets it was hiding.

Her suit began to move through space under remote control as the sermon ended, after the final coffin was dispatched towards the star. Now, according to tradition, there would be a loud party and a wake for the departed, but she knew that it wouldn’t be personal. It wouldn’t be focused on one person, a person she knew well, but on all of the dead. She would have preferred to have spent the night on the Killer starship, alone and stark naked, but there was no choice. Even in a post-scarcity society, where she could obtain the resources — if not the permissions — to carry out wherever experiment she felt like carrying out, there were some who were more equal than others. The Technical Faction needed her to show the flag, no matter what she thought about it.

Bastards, she thought, as the burial party was flown towards the massive asteroid settlement. Star’s End wasn’t particularly large, as asteroid settlements went, but it was still far beyond a human scale. Thousands of humans, mainly dedicated researchers, occupied the handful of asteroid colonies, trying to unlock the secrets of Killer technology. A few weeks ago, she would have sold her soul to join them. Now she couldn’t wait to leave.

She took a long breath as the suit rocketed her towards the entrance and through the forcefield that prevented the atmosphere from leaking out of the asteroid. It would all be over soon, she decided. She would shake a few hands, engage in a little polite conversation, and leave as soon as she decently could. It couldn’t be as bad as she thought, could it?

Damned dress uniform, Captain Chris Kelsey thought angrily, as he tugged at the collar. The Footsoldiers normally had the best equipment on hand for anything they needed — and if they didn’t have it, they could practically obtain it on demand. The dress uniforms, however, had been designed by sadists and nothing he could do to his dress uniform could make it comfortable. He wore enough gold braid over the dress blues to outshine the local star — real gold braid, not a substitute — and a hat that was supposed to have been modelled on a real military hat from the pre-space years on Earth. He suspected that it had come from one of the more unstable armies in one of the more unstable nation-states; the soldiers had probably mutinied and launched coups to avoid having to wear the stupid headgear. The sword and laser pistol just completed his utter humiliation.

The party was being held in the middle of the asteroid’s garden, with enough grassy areas and foliage to provide both open spaces and concealed areas for couples to snatch a little privacy. The majority of the asteroid’s settlers probably welcomed the party more than anyone else, although the inhabitants had probably realised that the presence of the Killer starship meant that they’d suddenly woken up to find themselves on the front lines. There was no reason why the Killers couldn’t reach Star’s End and the handful of Defence Force starships couldn’t hope to hold the line if they attacked. Chris privately suspected that the real reason the Footsoldiers had been kept at Star’s End was so that they could repeat their boarding feat with an antimatter bomb, although he doubted that that trick would work twice. The Killers had definitely been aware of the boarding party before the end.

He cast his gaze over one area of the garden and rolled his eyes. Seven girls — it might have been eight; it was hard to sort out the number of limbs — were rolling around on the grass together, completely naked. It was hardly an uncommon sight in an environment where Old Earth’s social taboos had largely faded away, but it struck him as disrespectful, somehow. All Footsoldiers knew that there was a chance that they could face permanent death out among the stars, yet few really believed that it could happen to them. They didn’t want to believe it. Chris had read all the military material that had survived the destruction of Earth, including tales so tall that he suspected that they had been exaggerated, and he couldn’t understand how the soldiers had managed to take such risks without even a chance at immortality. It beggared belief just how careless some of the Old Earth Generals had been with their men, but then, manpower had never been a problem for them. They hadn’t known how lucky they’d been.

There was a long table, completely groaning with food and drink, and he took a small plate, pausing to exchange polite compliments with some of the hosts. Star’s End, at least, didn’t belong to any of the Peace Factions or the Killer-Worshipping religions, neither of which would be happy to see a Footsoldier in uniform. The Peaceniks believed that if humanity didn’t provoke the Killers, they wouldn’t come and complete their task of exterminating the human race, while the religious nuts worshipped the Killers, seeing them as a modern-day Flood, or horde of locusts. Chris had no time for either set of beliefs. There was no evidence that the Killers were either inclined to leave the remainder of humanity alone, or ‘assist’ the human race further. They only seemed to exist to kill.

“You did well out there,” one of the researchers said, sipping something so strong that Chris could smell it even without his augmented senses. His own nanites were flushing out and countering the alcohol before it could really get into his system. It would be nice to get extremely drunk, but it would probably have resulted in a catastrophe. “Did you happen to notice…?”

Chris listened to the researcher go on, answering what questions he could — although most of them covered topics that had been explored in the debriefing sessions — and broke away from him as soon as he decently could. The researchers were fascinated by the Killer starship — and he supposed that at an intellectual level it was fascinating — but it was nothing, but an enemy to him. The entire starship had pulsed with a malign intelligence that had killed entire worlds and thought nothing of killing his men, even though their armour. He wanted a weapon that would blow right through the alien ships and freedom to use it, not kind words. The scientists complained about the damage the Footsoldiers had caused as they fled towards the Killer’s chamber and their final stand.

“You’re looking lost,” a voice said, from behind him. He turned, wondering if the drink had dulled his senses anyway, despite the nanites, to see Paula. She wore a simple blue cocktail dress and a look that, he wryly acknowledged, probably matched his expression. It was easy to see, now, that she was baseline human. There were no unsightly modifications to her body. “Want to come sit with me instead?”

Chris smiled and allowed her to lead him out of the crowd and up towards a more private area somewhere within the jungle. The asteroid’s AI had just left the jungle to grow almost at random, then created paths through the tangle to allow humans to explore a shadow of a real world. It was easy to forget — thanks to sound-dampening fields — that there were entire crowds only bare metres away. It was as private as one could get in the garden.

“Thanks,” he said, relieved. She probably wasn’t offering sex, part of his mind reluctantly decided, but he was more than grateful for the save. “I was going mad in there.”

“Me too,” Paula said. They found a patch of dry grass and sat down, disturbing a pair of bees and forcing them to buzz away. The AI maintained the ecology and included as many savaged forms of life from Earth as it could. It was a shame that it was impossible to recreate so many dead animals from Earth. Chris would have given anything to see a real tiger. “I don’t… surely that isn’t how you plan to say farewell to your fellow Footsoldiers.”

“Hardly,” Chris said, shaking his head. They’d already held a private ceremony, but it wasn’t something he could share with a civilian, even one who had been with them on the mission. It was a private Footsoldier tradition that helped to bind the teams together. “We’ll bid them farewell in our own way and try to forget that this… ceremony ever happened. Did they have you on the outside?”

Paula nodded. “Not something I want to do again,” she admitted. Chris wasn’t surprised. Funerals were never decent occasions… and as for that crazy preacher, well, he wanted a few words with whoever had selected him. What was wrong with a more standard farewell? “And you?”

“Inside looking out,” Chris said. In fact, he’d been trying to get his dress uniform on and failing miserably. The only redeeming feature of the uniform was that it encouraged teamwork. “I would have traded places in a heartbeat.”

“Lucky you,” Paula said, dryly. “Tell me something. Why are you still here?”

“You didn’t tell me to go,” Chris said, and then understood. “You mean at Star’s End? I don’t know. The Admiral seems to have decided that we are to remain here to provide you researchers with the benefit of our experience in the enemy starship and perhaps provide security if required. The location of the captured ship should be a secret, but with the MassMind around hardly anything is secret these days.”

Paula nodded. “True,” she agreed, “but I can’t believe that the MassMind would betray the human race.”

Chris snorted. “If the Killers should happen to listen in to the MassMind and its thoughts, or even our communications, they could be led right here without any intention of betrayal at all,” he reminded her, dryly. The security issues had been hammered into his head repeatedly. It wasn’t helped that no one knew just what the Killers could actually do. In theory, no one could tap into quantum entanglement fields, but in practice… no one knew for sure. “It’s just a routine precaution.”

“I know,” Paula said. She looked over at him suddenly. “Answer me another question. Why are you Footsoldiers all men?”

“Tradition,” Chris said. It had struck him as odd before he joined up — every other post in the Defence Force was determined by ability, not gender — but after his induction he understood the reasoning. “Just after the Killing of Earth, the first Footsoldier units were formed from men only, because men were more expendable than women. The tradition just continued into the present day. Some of my men are actually women who changed themselves into men just to join up.”

Paula gave him an odd look. “Are you a woman?”

“No,” Chris said, with a half-leer. “I’m all man, with a bit of animal thrown in. Roar!”

“Twit,” Paula said. Chris laughed out loud. “I never even thought about becoming a man.”

“I never even thought about becoming a woman, or a Spacer,” Chris agreed. The Community allowed perfect sex changes at will and it wasn’t unknown for civilians to change sex several times in their lives, but Defence Force personnel tended to be more stable and secure in their identities. Spacers, by contrast, cut themselves off from gender, literally. They were effectively tiny spacecraft in their own right. “I always thought I was perfect.”

Paula laughed. “I always wanted to become a researcher and everything else could go hang,” she said, dryly. “And now… I seem to have to spend time shaking hands and telling everyone what fine work we’re doing, instead of exploring the alien ship.”

She paused. “You’ve been exploring the ship and laying beacons and probes as well,” she added. “Do you have any… sense that the ship is still alive?”

Chris felt his eyes narrow. “Now you come to mention it,” he said, “there’s something about the inside of that ship that makes my skin crawl. It’s not a human ship, but I’ve been through Ghost wreckage and I didn’t have the same reaction to their ships.”

“Me too,” Paula said, “but there’s nothing the Ghosts built that we couldn’t duplicate. They were actually more primitive than we were when the Killers arrived, while the Killer ship is beyond our current understanding. I just keep having the feeling that the ship is biding its time and preparing to make its next move.”

Chris opened his mouth to say something, but he was interrupted by a FLASH RED alert signal from the Defence Force, coming directly in through his implants. One look at Paula’s horrified face told him that she was hearing the same message. A major Community system was under attack.

The Killer retaliation had begun.