Storming Heaven

Chapter Forty-One

“Twenty-seven new star systems attacked, fifty-nine billion dead, nine hundred and seventeen starships destroyed…”

Tabitha Cunningham listened, as dispassionately as she could, to the liturgy of disaster. The Killer blitzkrieg was slowly tearing the Community apart. Only the sheer size of the Community — and the relative insignificance of most of the targets — had prevented the Community from disintegrating by now, although millions more were joining the Exodus and fleeing the galaxy entirely. Tabitha, who had been there at the start and watched as humanity struggled to survive after Earth, had the uneasy feeling that she was in at the death — humanity’s death.

“We have destroyed twelve of their star systems so far,” Brent continued. The Admiral’s face was dark and mottled after his brief exposure to vacuum, but the nanotechnology running through his veins would suffice to deal with that, soon enough. Humanity vanity would prevent him from keeping his scars. “The bombardment of various gas giants by asteroids and comets may have had some effect, but we do not know for sure. They certainly must have some way of dealing with such impacts; gas giants are magnets for asteroid bombardment. We have also taken out” — such a cold bloodless term — “nineteen of the starships.”

His face darkened. “The war may be on the verge of being lost,” he admitted, and Tabitha could hear the bitterness in his voice. Even with the new weapons evening the odds, humanity was still losing the war. It was, she’d been told, a matter of relative damage. A Killer starship could soak up hundreds of implosion bolts, energy torpedoes and particle beam directed energy weapons and keep going. A single hit would destroy a human starship utterly. “Even if we continue to destroy their star systems, we may lose even before they begin their grand plan to destroy the galaxy.”

The War Council looked… defeated, Tabitha decided. The President was probably already thinking about a general evacuation. Father Sigmund was thinking about his flock and how best they could survive the next few years. Rupert was missing, of course, somewhere on a Killer starship. Jayne was silently cursing the war and the Rockrats involvement in the fighting. And Brent was watching the Defence Force, the force he had struggled to build up into a fleet that could actually challenge the Killers, being taken apart, piece by piece. They were already thinking in terms of defeat. They needed hope.

“The MassMind has completed its analysis of the data recovered from the Killer starships,” Tabitha said, projecting herself forward into the chamber. They had to listen to her. “We are now in a position to tell you how the war began… and how it can be ended.”

They latched onto her words like a drowning man would clutch at a rope. She had their full attention. Now all she had to do was keep it. “The exact details are rather hard to discuss in words,” she continued, knowing that it would concentrate a few minds, “so we have prepared a perceptual reality to educate you. With your permission…?”

“Run it,” Patti ordered, curtly.

“Of course,” Tabitha agreed. “Welcome to the universe as the Killers see it.”

The massive crystal-clear image of the galaxy, rotating grandly at the heart of the simulated chamber, vanished, to be replaced by a murky green-yellow atmosphere that seemed to form at the edge of their fingertips. It wasn’t a completely perfect simulation, Tabitha knew; the pressures at their level would kill an unprotected him, yet it was the simplest way of getting the message across. They had to understand what they were actually dealing with, even at the price of some discomfort…

And they would definitely feel discomfort. None of them would have seen mists before as they existed on planets, but they’d all read legends of what could be lurking in mists and shivered as they blew closer. Strange shapes could barely be made out in the distance, each one a hint of something else, something larger. It was largely imagination, Tabitha knew, yet even she was affected Anything could be lurking in those mists, anything at all.

“The heart of an unknown gas giant,” she said, dramatically. It was actually a layer a few kilometres below the surface, but she had always liked a touch of drama. “The pressures here would kill any of us who ventured there, and yet there is life. Can you see it?”

The MassMind obligingly pointed it out for those who couldn’t. A chemical soup floated on the layer of gas, spreading out slowly to cover the entire gas giant. It had probably formed from the same material that had given birth to life on Earth, something that had surprised Tabitha when she had first heard of it. It galled her to think that there might be any biological link, no matter how vague, between humanity and its deadly enemies. The other races, the ones the Killers had destroyed, had been surprisingly humanoid, but the Killers certainly didn’t share that with them. As they watched, millions of years slowly passed and cells began to form.

“We’re watching a sped-up version,” Tabitha said, as the cells continued to grow and multiply in their soup. “It will be many millions of years before intelligence begins to form.”

The development of life expanded rapidly once the first threshold had been passed. Newer and more complex cells began to form, bonding together into strange creatures, swimming through the chemical soup even as they used it as a source of food and energy. Powerful discharges of lightning seemed to flicker through the atmosphere, assisting mutation and the rapid development of viable mutations. The creatures floating within the gas giant weren’t like humans in one very important respect; they were composed of cells that divided and reformed at will, reproducing by fission rather than sexual congress. The very concept of sex was alien to them, as was the concept of strict barriers between different species. They were all composed of the same life. The more successful creatures became hybrids between the different varieties of creatures. Unlike Earth, life was permanently in flux. A race that seemed viable one year might not continue to survive the next, except they did. Death was rare among the creatures. They enjoyed a permanence of existence that had always been denied humans. They shared information by encoding it in their cells and passing it on to their successors, making them part of the previous life form. Their evolution was slow, slower than humanity’s, but they never regressed. What one knew, eventually the others knew as well.

Who knew when intelligence finally formed, creating a new form of life? They might not have known themselves when they crossed the threshold from animal to sentient life. They had no struggles for resources, or particular hatreds as humanity had developed; they worked together in perfect harmony with their world. Tabitha, watching, found that ironic. The Elders of New Hope had intended to create an Eden where humans could live in harmony with the land — a much-overrated concept — and the Killers, the creatures they had demonised, had achieved a far more effective harmony with their own worlds. Their mindset was very different to humanity’s mindset. With an infinity of food and resources, cooperation rather than conflict became the primary force for their evolution.

Soon enough, they learned to alter their own cells. They were no longer helpless and forced to accept each and every change evolution forced on them, but capable of altering themselves to fit. Their mindsets altered and changed as they developed new tools, with all of the workable changes rapidly added to the entire race, which now numbered in the billions… and also just one. Their mindset was both a hive mind — it had uncomfortable similarities with the MassMind — and billions of discrete entities, but no one could have safely said just where the barriers were. They weren’t human. Becoming part of a greater whole — and being separated from it — was natural to them.

And that led to learning to alter their environment. The interior of a gas giant held few terrors for them. Like humanity, they developed the technology — in their case, biological modification of their own bodies — to explode in all directions. Some fell further down towards the core of the gas giant, mining the heavier materials waiting for them there, others rose up to the very edge of the atmosphere. The information — by then, they had developed the concept of trading information, expressed in memory cell units — that they discovered was shared among the entire race and new discoveries and theories emerged. They deduced the true nature of their world and its position in the universe; they identified their primary star, the moons orbiting their homeworld and the independent rocky worlds surrounding the star. They wondered what there could be out there and devoted all of their considerable mental effort to developing a form of space travel. It took them thousands of years — they were labouring under far worse constraints than humanity — but eventually they broke out into orbit, and then to the free-floating asteroids.

Their technology exploded outwards as they suddenly had access to more raw materials than they could possibly use. Hundreds of entities took on new forms and rose up to join the expanding spacefaring subdivision of their race. Others were gestated in orbit, adapted perfectly to life in space and already beginning the process of bonding with their technology. They had no doubts or fears about creating cyborgs and other fusions between biology and technology; unlike humanity, such unions were already a part of their nature before they reached space. Their understanding of the universe rapidly expanded as they created orbiting telescopes and early, primitive spacecraft, exploring the various outer moons. They couldn’t land on the moons — the gravity field was too heavy for them at first — and they tended to dismiss them and the other rocky worlds. They hadn’t considered the possibility that rocky worlds might give birth to life. Their efforts to contact other forms of life had been focused on the other gas giants in the star system… and the strange source of radiation orbiting at the edge of the system. It took them hundreds more years to realise what the black hole was and what it was doing — they never worked out where it had come from — and, unlike humanity, they weren’t terrified. It wasn’t long before they were working on plans to tap the power of the black hole for their own use.

They had no way of knowing that one of the inner rocky worlds had also given birth to life. The life had developed much later, but aided by a much calmer environment, a humanoid race had arisen and reached into space. It sent out probes and scientific missions to the various nearby planets, intending to learn what resources could be adapted for their use. They didn’t expect to find the gas giant entities — they weren’t broadcasting any radio signals that the newcomers could detect — and were astonished to discover that someone was already developing the gas giant’s moons. Unaware of the nature of the new aliens, they deduced that they had come from outside their star system and resolved to open communication. A massive spacecraft was built and dispatched to the gas giant.

The entities observed its passage with stark disbelief, but unlike humanity, they couldn’t take refuge in self-deception. They had missed the possibility that life existed on any of the rocky worlds and, when they had picked up radio transmissions from the star system, had decided that they had a natural cause. They had never inspected the inner planets closely, believing them to be useless, and had no way of communicating with their residents. Indeed, they could barely comprehend that they even existed. How, they asked themselves, could any form of life exist under such high gravity fields? The question was fascinating and the entities prepared themselves to welcome the newcomers. It all went horrifically wrong.

There was no way for either race to talk to the other. The entities attempted to form new signalling entities, which the newcomers couldn’t even recognise. The newcomers attempted to transmit radio messages, which affected the entities and their own internal RF transmitters. Misunderstanding piled upon misunderstanding and the two sides eventually went to war. The fighting spread rapidly out of control. By the time the entities destroyed the newcomer ship, they had learned harsh lessons. War had been alien to them. It wasn’t any longer.

The war that started continued to expand rapidly. The newcomers, still unaware of the entities’ true homeworld, sent new spacecraft out to wreck havoc. The entities, having devoted all of their considerable intellect to destructive weapons, fought back with a mixture of calculation and fury. They had never been hurt before. They had racial memories of pain from the time before intelligence, but there had never been anything personal in that, no sense that they had been picked on for fun. They didn’t understand their opponents and their motivations; they just… sought their complete obliteration. The war lasted fifty years and ended with the entities, having gained control of the black hole, using it to generate gravity beams that swept the newcomer spacecraft out of existence and shatter their homeworld. They had been forever changed by the experience.

Time passed. They built new spacecraft and used the black hole to power them. By then, they had evolved a sophisticated theory of gravity control and were generating their own black holes and wormholes. They sent starships to other star systems, only to discover the presence of new alien races on rocky worlds. The entities commanding those starships had race memories, always sharp and clear, of the devastation wrecked by the war. They also couldn’t tell the difference between one humanoid race and another. They didn’t hesitate to gather a handful of asteroids and bombard the new race into obliteration. The existence of so many humanoid races was a shock to them, but by then they knew that they were all Enemy. They all had to be destroyed.

They had undergone another mutation, almost without realising it. They had taken to encysting individual entities within their starships, but as their technology advanced, those entities became locked into their permanent mental states. They were used to trading information and personalities between individual entities, but the warriors were cut off from the rest of the race. They shared information through the black hole network, of course, but they didn’t — they couldn’t — share themselves. What had started as an exercise in self-defence rapidly became a crusade, a mission to wipe out every rocky-world dwelling race before it got them. The warriors, locked in their massive starships, continued to hunt down and obliterate worlds with a single-mindedness that a human would have found hard to comprehend. Few of them considered the possibility of peace, or co-existence; by the time they encountered humanity for the first time, the warriors were no longer capable of thinking of anything, beyond exterminating every other race. Their starships came, saw and destroyed. There was nothing that could stop them, or force them to adapt again. No other race matched their technology.

“Their monomania may be all that kept the human race alive,” Tabitha said, as the images faded away. “They never seemed to really think about asteroid settlements, not really. It’s as if they thought of them vaguely, but never bothered to actually lock themselves into hunting down asteroid and lunar settlements. They might have changed that policy now, but not until we hurt them.”

“Poor bastards,” Father Sigmund said. The entirety of human religious history was at his fingertips. He could appreciate how the Killers had fallen into the trap. “Can we stop them without destroying them?”

Tabitha nodded. “This is the Killer Communications Network,” she said, as an image formed in front of her. “It’s also their wormhole generation network and the hub for their plan to tap the energy of the galactic core and destroy every rocky planet in the galaxy. It consists of twelve massive stations at the following coordinates.”

They blinked up on her command. “By combining the different research efforts, we have devised a way to tap into their system and actually talk to them,” she continued. “The problem is that the only way to do it is to take out one of those twelve stations and use the missing segment to insert our own black hole signals. The good news is that if we take a single station out, we will have prevented them from disintegrating the galaxy until they can replace it. The bad news is that the station is likely to be heavily defended. Given their nature, destroying them is going to be difficult.”

She paused. “There is a back-up plan,” she added. “If we fail to talk to them, the MassMind believes that we can generate enough interference in the system to collapse it. The vast majority of tiny black holes will evaporate. The bigger ones may destabilise. They will certainly lose their links to the network. If we succeed, the Killer Communications Network will disintegrate and their civilisation will collapse into thousands of individual planets and starships. Their ability to coordinate their offensive will come to an end. We will have to hunt down and destroy every one of their planets, every one of their ships, but victory would be certain.”

“And if we do that,” Father Sigmund said, “we will have committed genocide.”

“They have committed genocide millions of times over,” Jayne said. “Do we have the right not to destroy them, if we have a chance? Not just for humanity, not just for our children, but for the rest of the races now struggling up from the primordial ooze.”

“We will make the attempt to communicate with them,” Patti said, firmly. “If we can avoid committing genocide, we will avoid it. We have to give them a chance to see reason. If not… then we will not hesitate to destroy their network, and then the Killers themselves.

“And that will be the end of the threat.”