Storming Heaven

by Nuttall, Christopher

  “Once you board the craft, you’ll have to proceed independently towards the main power source and put it out of commission,” the Admiral continued. One of the few things that were known about the Killer starships was the location of their main power plants. No one knew how they worked or what they looked like – which added yet another degree of risk to the mission – but they knew where they were, roughly. “We cannot advise you on passing through the internal defences, or what kind of environment you might encounter, but we believe that there is no other way to secure control of the ship. Do not lose contact with the escorting starships; we need whatever data you can retrieve from the interior.”

  Even if we don’t survive, Chris finished, ruefully. He understood why the Admiral hadn’t said that out loud – he wouldn’t want to demoralise them with the knowledge that the Defence Force starships had been ordered to abandon them rather than attempt a rescue – but no one in the audience was fooled. They all knew full well that it might be a one-way trip. It was what they had signed up to do.

  “I want operational plans in my processor by 1900,” the Admiral finished. “Good luck,”

  Chris opened up his secure processor and linked into the other Footsoldiers. One advantage of their communications implants was that they could share tactics and information – and hash out assault plans – without needing to talk aloud. They had also been known to use the channels for whispering during boring lectures, but the senior Footsoldiers tended to stamp on that hard. What little they knew about the Killer starships was waiting for them and rapidly assessed, before the discussion turned to the more mundane issue of breaking into the starship. Nothing the Defence Force had used had scratched the surface of the ships, yet openings had been observed on their massive hulls. It was just possible that they could be used as access points.

  “I don’t like this,” one of the Footsoldiers said. “There’s far too much that can go wrong.”

  “If you’re backing out, I know hundreds who will take your place,” someone sent back. “They’d all volunteer too.”

  “I wasn't saying that,” the first Footsoldier said quickly. “I was just saying that she’s going to be a bitch to crack.”

  The planning session was well underway when Chris was interrupted by a message, summoning him to report to the Admiral personally. He disengaged from the network and left the room, walking quickly through the corridors to the Admirals office, passing some of the clerical staff as he walked. Normally, he would have stopped to flirt with the girls, but time was pressing. It reminded him that he would have to ensure that his men spent some time in a brothel, or attending to their other needs, before they set out on the mission.

  He’d expected to see the Admiral when he entered, but he was surprised to see another person sitting in the office, waiting for him. She was young – at least on the surface – blonde and surprisingly attractive. She wore the simple white uniform of the Technical Faction and carried an insignia he didn’t recognise.

  “This is Captain Kelsey,” the Admiral said. “Captain, this is Paula Handley, a technical from Intelligence.”

  Chris nodded, slowly. Intelligence was the heart of the Technical Faction, a distributed university that stretched across hundreds of asteroid settlements and research bases, including several that had gone rogue or created rogue AIs. He’d visited once when he’d been looking for his future career, but he hadn’t found patient study to be a suitable career path. Research work bored him when he could be blowing things up.

  “She will be accompanying you on your mission,” the Admiral continued. “She…”

  “Absolutely not,” Chris said, firmly. By long tradition, the CO of a given mission had absolute authority – and responsibility. “I cannot take a civilian into a combat zone.”

  “The entire galaxy is a combat zone,” the Admiral snapped, coldly. “Paula has volunteered to accompany you…”

  “She’s not trained, or checked out on the suits, or anything else,” Chris said, equally coldly. “She will be nothing more than a liability…”

  “She has a name, you know,” Paula snapped, irritated. “I do know the risks and I do accept them.”

  “We have to consider the possibility of failure as well,” the Admiral said, before Chris could say something cutting about civilians who didn’t know what they were getting into. “If your teams are wiped out, we still need to learn what we can, even if it’s only what killed you all. Paula will carry observation equipment and she’s the closest thing we have to an expert on their gravity technology. Your men are good, but they don’t have the understanding she has, so she’s going. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Chris said, annoyed. He scowled at Paula. “You will do exactly as I tell you at all times. I don’t have the time or the patience to deal with disobedience. If you turn into a liability, we will simply abandon you, understand?”

  “Yes,” Paula said. He was pleased to see that she didn’t back down easily. “I understand.”

  “Good,” Chris said. “Now, come with me. We’ll go get you checked out on a suit.” He smiled, suddenly. “Feel free to change your mind at any time.”

  Chapter Five

  At first there was nothing, and then there was pain, a strange distant pain that almost felt as if it were happening to someone else who just happened to share her body. She wavered on the edge of awareness for a long time – hours or days or months or years; she couldn’t tell and they all seemed believable – before slowly struggling up towards the light. Her eyes flicked open, yet she could see nothing, but darkness. It was a moment before a strange green glow – the emergency illumination system, her mind whispered to her – penetrated her eyelids and illuminated the cockpit. She was lying in the wreckage of her scout ship.

  “I’m alive?” She said, or tried to say. Her throat hurt in a manner she hadn’t felt since she’d swallowed something far too large on a bet, back at the training centre. Her mouth was dry and tasted foul; her body seemed paralysed, unable to move. A wave of panic swept through her mind and she found herself twisted and turning in the chair before remembering the straps that bound her safely, protecting her from sudden acceleration. “What happened?”

  Lieutenant Chiyo Takahashi lay back and concentrated on summoning up information from her implants. Nothing happened, not even a ping to reassure her that they still had minimum levels of power. That was impossible, her mind insisted while she reeled in shock; no one ever lost their implants. Only prisoners and criminals were stripped of the internal network devices that were the birthright of every human and she wasn't a criminal, was she? Her head felt so musty – normally, her implants would have cleaned her mind and helped her return to sanity – that it was impossible to be sure of anything, even her own name. She didn’t even know what she was doing in the cockpit of a scout ship…

  Memory returned and she tried to sit upright, only to be held down by the straps. The Killers, the Killer star system, the dismantling of an entire star system…and her final death at the hands of a Killer ship…except that she wasn't dead. Her mind wondered briefly if she were in heaven or hell, but it felt too real to be either; her body hurt badly, too badly. It was an effort to move her fingers, but finally she was able to undo the straps and release herself from the chair. She struggled to pull herself out of the chair, straining against an unusually heavy gravity field, and finally managed to stagger onto her feet. The gravity pulled at her and she almost collapsed onto the deck, before steadying herself on the console. It was as dark and silent as the grave.

  “Report,” she ordered, hearing her own voice for the first time. “Report.”

  The AI didn’t answer her. Chiyo repeated her command, but there was no response from a system that should have remained online permanently, short of the complete destruction of the scout ship. Her hands danced across the control console, but there was no response, not even from the emergency systems. It, combined with the loss of her implants, suggested that the entire craft had been comple
tely drained of power.

  But that can’t be right, she thought, dazed. Her implants drew their power from her own body. They shouldn’t have gone offline until she died and some, including the MassMind recording implant, should have remained online permanently. It would have completed its recording of her life and personality, everything that made her what she was, and waited patiently for a chance to upload her into the MassMind. A flicker of panic ran through her mind; she had known, intellectually, that she risked losing immortality if the Killers caught her and killed her, but now it was terrifyingly real. She touched the side of her head, half-hoping that she could still feel the implants under her fingers, but there was nothing apart from smooth skin. She had never been able to feel the implants, yet she had always known they were there.

  It took her another ten minutes to confirm that almost all of the scout ship’s systems were online. The emergency illumination system used a natural bio-luminance rather than anything powered, or it would have been killed as well by the Killers. She remembered the last moments of her flight and wondered just where she was. Was she a prisoner, or was her craft now melded into the strange structures the Killers had been building around the star? The thought was chilling. No one would have a hope of being able to rescue her and she would die, inevitably, if she ran out of oxygen. The emergency illumination system also acted as an emergency air freshener, but it wouldn’t last forever. It wasn't designed to serve as more than an emergency measure.

  “Shit,” she said, just to hear her own voice. The entire craft was hauntingly quiet. She opened up one of the emergency supply boxes and pulled out a bar of semi-chocolate, eating it quickly to gain what energy she could, while taking stock of her supplies. They might last, if she were careful, little more than a week, yet the absence of fresh water would kill her far quicker. The recycling system was completely down, along with the implants that would scrub her system and keep her healthy. She chuckled, bitterly. She’d been saved from certain death to be transported to a more lingering and unpleasant death at the hands of her own body and its demands. Oddly, it felt liberating. If death was certain, she might as well risk everything.

  She turned back to the cockpit and tried to open the hatches covering the viewport. They refused to open, even when she attempted to use the manual system. That suggested that the system was either jammed, or there was something outside preventing them from opening. If the latter…it did suggest that they were encased in something, but what? Her mind returned to the image of the tiny craft melded into the structure the Killers were building and she shivered. If that were the case, she was dead, yet the Killer should have dismantled her craft – and her – completely, right down to the bare atoms. There was no reason why they would have kept her craft intact, unless they wanted a prisoner, but they had never shown any interest in taking humans prisoner before. What – if anything – had changed?

  A brief search of the emergency supplies turned up a plasma pistol – dead – a lighting wand – also dead – and a very primitive design of firearm, shooting material bullets rather than energy rays. There was no way to check it – she couldn’t even remember why the weapon was included among the emergency supplies without her memory implants – but merely buckling it onto her belt gave her a feeling of confidence. She examined the survival belt quickly, but there was little that was actually useful to her, although she would have been reasonably well-equipped if she had crashed on a planet’s surface. Her gaze fell to the final item in the belt and she winced. It was a black injector marked with a skull and crossbones, a suicide capsule. If there was no way out and nothing ahead, but a slow lingering death…

  She shook her head, dismissing the thought, and walked over to the hatch leading to the outside. She considered pulling on a space suit before deciding only to wear a breath mask; if the outside was that hostile, she was dead anyway. Besides, the spacesuits were as dead as the rest of the craft. The mask wouldn’t last for long either. She stepped through the airlock and had to struggle with the manual release before it slowly cranked open. It was more of a struggle than she remembered, but then, she hadn’t had to do it since her first training session. No one had anticipated something that would kill every system on the craft, but leave her alive.

  I shall have to inform them to change their procedures, Chiyo thought, as she peered out. No wave of outpouring air threw her into empty space; no mass of implacable metal confronted her. Instead, she was staring into an empty bay, illuminated only by glowing green smoke. It was an eerie sight and she found herself rooted to the spot, before she realised where she had to be. She was onboard a Killer starship, the first human ever to set foot on one of their ships – as far as she knew. If she had been taken onboard, it was quite likely that others had been as well…and vanished. No one had returned from such an encounter. She stepped gingerly onto the deck and was relieved to find that it was solid below her feet. The mists seemed to withdraw slightly as she stepped forward, circling the remains of her scout ship, but pressed in behind her. She couldn’t see more than a few meters ahead of her.

  The scout ship looked as if it had been in the wars; it was scorched and pitted, every sensor node or weapons system burned out. It was so far beyond any theory that Chiyo abandoned any lingering thoughts she’d had of recharging the scout ship and escaping – as if escape were possible. Whatever the Killers had done to her ship had killed it stone dead. She turned away from the craft and stared into the mists. After a moment, the mists cleared in front of her, revealing a path into the heart of the starship. It occurred to her that the mists were the Killers, but it seemed impossible. It was far more likely that they were just part of their environmental system. She wished, desperately, that she had a working remote sensor. She would have loved to know what the mists actually were, or even what was in the atmosphere.

  The breath mask fell from her face before she could react and she found herself gulping in a mouthful of their air. It was cold and clammy, but breathable. The working theory about the Killers suggested that they came from a planet like Earth, which suggested that they would breathe a similar atmosphere to humanity, yet no one had ever located a Killer-inhabited world. They might destroy inhabited worlds with gay abandon, but they didn’t even seem to settle the worlds themselves, or even the uninhabited Earth-like worlds they encountered. It was another mystery surrounding them and she wondered if they were providing an atmosphere suitable for her. If that were the case, it was yet another reminder that she was completely dependent on them for everything, including life-support. She was nothing more than a prisoner.

  She took another breath and walked slowly into the mists. They closed in around her, seemingly just out of reach, and orbited her threateningly. She looked behind her, but the scout ship had already vanished into the mists and she was certain – very certain – that if she ran back, she would discover that the scout ship had vanished. There was nothing for it, but to press onward through the mists and see where the Killers wanted her to go. There was nothing else she could do. It felt as if she had been walking for hours – an effect of the higher gravity – and she almost yawned as she stopped for a rest. The mists boiled around her – she was sure that she could see shapes within the mist, although it might have been just her imagination – but she waited until she had caught her breath before continuing. There was little point in hurrying.

  The mists cleared away suddenly, revealing a small room packed with strange machinery. Some looked to be comparable to the remote orbital manufacturing machines that humanity used to construct its starships, others looked so different, so alien, that she found herself developing a headache just looking at them. She looked behind her to see a blank wall. Wherever she was now, she was trapped – but then, she’d been trapped all along. There hadn’t even been the illusion of freedom. The air seemed somehow tenser now, as if Bad Things were waiting to happen, yet she could see no sign of anything moving. The compartment seemed as dark and silent as her scout ship had been, after she
’d been taken prisoner…

  Something moved behind her. Before she could react, she found herself scooped up by a giant machine and deposited inside one of the other machines, floating inside a tank of air. It took her a second to realise that she was inside a variable gravity field inside another gravity field – humanity couldn’t do that, yet the Killers did it so casually – before feeling a tingle at the back of her head. Strange lights flickered across her eyelids and she realised that her body was being scanned. She wondered what they would use as she struggled to control her panic – it could be anything from primitive x-rays and ultrasounds to something unimaginably advanced – but there was no clue. A buzzing noise echoed through her ears and rapidly became a high-pitched sound that made her scream in pain, before being replaced by sound waves that were too low for her to hear, yet she could feel them running through her body. Her teeth hurt suddenly, for no reason she could determine, before a stab of pain went through her head. It occurred to her that they were torturing her, rather than examining her to see what made her tick, yet they weren’t even shouting any questions. It was like a child pulling the wings off flies.