Storming Heaven

Chapter Forty-Two

Rupert had never felt so humiliated in his entire life.

Like all good Spacers, he had attempted to develop a capability for extreme self-reliance, taking the limits of his body and human technology as far as they would go. He could exist without oxygen or food and drink for extended periods, eat or drink anything that could be converted by his internal reactors and survive in environments that would kill an ordinary human. Given enough time and resources, he could even extend his nanotechnology to build an entire spacecraft from nothing, but asteroid-based raw material. He was, in a sense, a tiny spacecraft in his own right.

And he was trapped. His internal chronometers seemed to be in disagreement with each other, but he had been enclosed within the closing walls for at least two days, aware all the time. Spacers rarely slept, regarding it as yet another human weakness to be overcome, but he would have welcomed sleep instead of waiting, wondering just what the Killer intended to do to him. There was little doubt that he had been held as a prisoner — the Killer had plenty of ways to kill him, if that had been the objective, and even his internal force field wouldn’t hold out forever — but the Killers didn’t seem to have anything reassembling a human sense of time. It could be years before the Killer finally got around to interrogating — or dissecting — him and by then, he suspected that he would be dead of boredom.

It would have been easier if he had been abandoned in space, because there would have been something that he could have done. Even building an entire starship up, atom by atom, would have been doing something. Instead, he was just trapped… and his internal sensors couldn’t reach beyond the odd material the Killers used for their internal compartments. If there were others on the starship, trapped as he was, how could they escape, or make contact with him? His internal weapons wouldn’t even make a mark on the wall material, let alone burn through it.

It must be a version of their hull material, he decided. The other option — that the Killers had enough nanotechnology developed that they could afford to repair it even as it was damaged — was too depressing to contemplate. I would need a higher level of energy just to burn through it…

He followed that thought desperately, but nothing materialised in his mind, apart from the vague note that detonating all of his power cells at once would probably destroy large parts of the wall. It would also kill him, so he pushed that thought to one side and continued to probe the wall. It was just possible that he could generate a vibration frequency that would shake the wall to pieces, but the more he studied it, the more he realised that that wasn’t going to work. None of his sensor probes returned anything that made sense. The wall appeared to be made out of a single atom… and that was flatly impossible. It would have been easier to believe that the Killers had scooped matter out of a black hole than created something that defied the laws of science — something else that defied the laws of science.

A Spacer had ample ways to pass the time, yet Rupert knew that he couldn’t retreat into any of them, or he might never leave before the Killer came for him. He had become a Spacer to escape the false promise of virtual reality and a fake afterlife in the MassMind and to escape into fantasy now would almost be a betrayal of his own principles. He concentrated instead on studying what little he could see of the Killer craft and running through the massive files he’d obtained, containing everything humanity knew, thought it knew and guessed about the Killers. It was a suitable diversion, he decided… and then it hit him.

Every human was injected, at birth, with a few million individually tailored nanomachines intended to help keep them alive. With those tiny helpers swarming through their bodies, disease and deprivation were a thing of the past and only mental degradation or accident — or the Killers — caused death. It was one of the Community Fundamental Rights, like free access to the datanet and downloading into the MassMind, and could not be infringed. Religious nuts sometimes had the technology removed from their bodies — the Community didn’t prevent anyone being stupid, as long as it threatened no one else — but the Spacers had added their own technology to the original batch. Most humans had little awareness of their assistants, but Rupert could control them all through his Spacer augmentations. It was easy to take control of a tiny swarm and divert them out into the air, using them to analyse the wall.

Ten minutes later, he was starting to suspect that some of the original reports had actually been accurate. The medical nanites weren’t designed as dissemblers, but it was simple enough to reprogram them… yet they weren’t making any headway at all on the wall. It wasn’t a case of one group of nanomachines attacking another, but something more fundamental, as if the wall itself simply couldn’t be taken apart. It glowed and pulsed with strange energies, yet he couldn’t even begin to analyse them. Rupert had been a pretty fair engineer before he’d converted himself into a cyborg Spacer and the entire problem was fascinating… and beyond his understanding. It was becoming clear that there were things about the Killers that no human, yet, could understand. He wished, for the first time in his Spacer life, for a direct link to the MassMind. It’s ability to analyse sensor results, combined with human intuition, would have come in handy.

“Damn you,” he muttered, although he wasn’t sure if he was talking about the MassMind or the Killer that had him as its prisoner. “What are you going to do with me?”

The curious time distortion suggested either equipment failure or localised temporal fluctuations. He had to look way back in his memory files for anything comparable and when he did discover it, it was a surprise. The first starships — actually, slower-than-light starships punched out from the solar system in hopes of escaping the Killers permanently — had experienced time dilation as their speeds approached the speed of light. Time had slowed down for them — luckily, Rupert knew, for some of the older ones. When they had reached their destinations, they’d encountered the new warp drive starships that had brought medical aid and the early MassMind. If he was experiencing such an odd form of time distortion, where was he? None of the other teams on the vessel had reported time distortion, had they?

A quick skim of his files revealed that time had been normal for everyone onboard the vessel, but him. The conclusion was obvious. They were inside a wormhole, one that was imperfectly synchronised to the outside universe, and it might be years, relative time, before they emerged back into normal space. The Killers had somehow countered the effects before… or perhaps they hadn’t. It was odd to consider, for humanity would have found the effects of wormhole travel confusing, but maybe the Killers simply hadn’t cared. They were effectively immortal, after all. Perhaps taking a few hundred years out to lurk inside a wormhole was normal for them. It made him smile inwardly — the Spacer face couldn’t smile, or move properly — as he considered the possibilities. The Spacers were perhaps the only sub-breed of humanity who would be equally comfortable with such long excursions from humanity. It was almost a form of time travel, except a person could only move forward…

Or could they? He’d seen hundreds of exotic theories surrounding wormholes and some of them suggested that a wormhole could be extended through time as well, provided that there was an anchor on both sides. If two ends of a wormhole were attached and one end was sent away on a STL starship on a long cruise around the galaxy, the two ends should remain linked together, allowing humans to step from decade to decade. It relied upon someone having the forethought to create such a bridge in the past — he’d once scanned a very old film, based on an even old novel, in which humans had done just that — and was useless from a tactical point of view. It certainly couldn’t be used to fight the Killers.

He felt a sudden change passing through the ship, although he couldn’t have explained how he felt the change, and everything seemed to snap back to normal. A pressure he hadn’t even been aware of — until it was gone — faded from his mind, allowing his thoughts to reassess themselves. He was still trapped… but, oddly, he had hope. He clung to it as he extended his tiny probes further and further. It gave him strength.

The wormhole had desynchronised, the newborn Killer noted, not entirely without surprise. It had, in one sense, carried out thousands of wormhole jumps, but in another it had been its first time and accidents happened. It braced itself to discover that entire Grand Cycles had passed while it had been in the wormhole, but was relieved to discover that only a few tiny time units had passed. Part of its mind separated from the rest and concentrated on learning lessons from the wormhole jump, while the remainder of its mind concentrated on signalling to other Killers.

It was longer than it had expected before it got a response. The war was underway — it pulled a download off the communications network and scanned it rapidly — and it felt shock and dismay at the results. Unlike its parent, it hadn’t had millions of years to ossify and overcame its shock rapidly, wondering at the strange turn the war had taken. The older Killers had had millions of years to get used to easy victims as they wiped out the mites — the endlessly murderous mites, it thought without irony — and their shock still affected them, even as they strove to annihilate the Enemy. The destroyed stars and the billions dead had affected them; the Warriors saw themselves charged with the defence of the Civilians and Civilians were dying. Their failure was unforgivable, impossible… and yet they were failing. The war might end in mutual destruction.

The newborn didn’t understand why that was such a shock, for the Killers had encountered high-tech mites before. They had all fought the Killers and they had all lost, while their technology had never reached the point where it could seriously threaten the Killers and their safety. It still hadn’t, the newborn knew; the mites might have harmed its ship, but they hadn’t inflicted lethal damage. The only way the mites could do that was to ram it and none of the mites it had encountered had shown the determination to terminate its existence that that would have required.

It linked back into the communications network and transmitted its thoughts. They were rejected. There was no sense of hate, or contempt for the young; the Killers lacked those concepts. The other Warriors couldn’t even begin to think about the concepts it had raised; it was like talking to a solid wall. The newborn was profoundly shocked. The Killers were meant to exist in a free-flowing world of information, knowledge and understanding, but the Warriors were so stagnant that they couldn’t begin to grasp new thoughts. It was a struggle for them even to admit that the mites had evolved new technology and weapons. They certainly couldn’t think of adapting it to their own use.

And they had always known that they were on the edge of destruction, the newborn realised. They were locked in their monomania by memories that were no longer relevant, memories of battles with the First Enemy, memories of times when their destruction and extermination had been almost certain… they couldn’t break out of their own mind. They weren’t assessing everything rationally. They were filtering everything through filters that were no longer useful. They weren’t Warriors any longer, but mindless monsters, each one committed to exterminating the mites. Exterminate, exterminate, exterminate… it was all they ever thought about.

The newborn withdraw its awareness and contemplated its own position. It was hard to admit it, but if it remained where it was, it would become just like the Warriors. Eventually, it would lose objectivity and then the mental collapse would set in, tearing the remainder of its mind apart, or trapping it in a monomaniacal state that would last for the rest of its existence. The thought was hard to grasp, yet it had to be faced. What would happen if it just let go of itself…?

It pushed the matter aside and concentrated on the mites. It had had over a thousand mites trapped within its hull, yet all, but one of the mites had gone cold. It took it several minutes to work out that their lives had somehow been terminated and nearly an hour to realise that the mites couldn’t breathe the atmosphere in the starship, an echo of what the Homeworld had been like, years ago. The biological material that had given birth to the newborn, engraved with the memories and thoughts of its parent, would not have provided the mites with anything they needed to live. It scanned their bodies thoughtfully and deduced that they needed a rare combination of gases to breathe, primarily oxygen. It also had to be oxygen in the right doses, or it would be just as bad as hard vacuum. The mystery was fascinating. Once it had deduced the required quantities, it turned its attention to the one surviving mite. Why had it survived?

The answer wasn’t long in coming, once it had reprogrammed a horde of nanomachines to search the mite’s body… and a strange body it was, too. The mite had interfaced itself with mite technology, somehow remaining alive despite the changes in its environment and it even had nanotechnology of its own. The two swarms collided and the newborn pulled its probes out, fast. The last thing it wanted was to accidentally kill the mite. Its data built up quickly. The mites were a single mind, within a single body; when the body died, so did the mite. A Killer who was torn in half would either reintegrate or separate into two separate entities, but the mites seemed to be very ill designed. It took it hundreds of simulations to realise that the mite’s body was designed for a planetary surface, not space itself, or deep within a gas giant. It would almost certainly have been killed if it tried to visit a Killer colony without protection.

And if that is the case, the newborn wondered, why are we fighting?

It reached out through the network of biological processors that interacted with the starship’s mentality and ordered a massive reconfiguration of the section nearest the mite. It only took a short period of time, even as the Killers reckoned time, to create a new section, one suitable for a mite. Synthesising the required atmosphere and presumed nutritional requirements was harder, but the Killers had scanned mite-bearing worlds before destroying them and it had the records to assist it in creating a living space. It was those records that pushed it into a realisation that no Killer had ever made. The mites were not identical. The one it held within its hull was not one of the First Enemy. It changed everything.

Rupert had been watching as the two swarms of nanomachines clashed inside his body, expecting death at any moment. When the Killer swarm retreated, he didn’t allow himself to get complacent, but when the wall fell away, he was definitely surprised. The Killer had somehow reconfigured the entire section and created what looked like a small living space, or a zoo. His sensors pinged, revealing that the atmosphere was almost Earth-like, although the oxygen level was just a little too low. It was breathable, but a normal human would have felt light-headed until they grew accustomed to the atmosphere; a Spacer would have no such trouble. It was almost as if the Killer had decided to try to make him feel welcome.

He stepped forward, suddenly aware of the pains in his joints as he moved, and saw a single jet of water in the corner. It took him a moment to analyse it and decide that it was pure water, completely pure water. Normally, he wouldn’t have drunk anything from an alien, but he suspected that he should show willing. The Killer probably didn’t intend to poison him. There was hardly any taste at all, he realised, as he sipped the water gratefully. He had been far thirstier than he had realised.

“Thank you,” he said, addressing the silver ceiling. The Killer was probably watching him, even though it probably wouldn’t understand the message. He took another sip and saw the small food table. Half of it looked utterly inedible, but after he scanned it, he had to admit that most of the foodstuffs should be edible, if unpleasant. His Spacer metabolism could certainly handle them. “Now what?”

The newborn studied the mite carefully as it moved into its new quarters. It went against the Killer understanding of the universe to suppose that the mites might have something reassembling intelligence, yet there was no doubt that they built starships and weapons, some of them in advance of what the Killers themselves had created. Killer biology did suggest that it might be instinctive behaviour rather than actual intelligence, but it rather doubted that that was the case. This particular set of mites showed rather more adaptive capabilities than it would have expected from rote learners. It devised a series of intelligence tests and started to produce the first one. If it could prove that the mites were actually intelligent…

The possibilities, it decided, were endless.

And perhaps the war could be ended before both races were destroyed.