Storming Heaven

by Nuttall, Christopher

  He stopped outside a lighted column that seemed to rise into the endless green mists. At first, he could see nothing inside the column, but as he peered into the light, he started to see shapes within, strange crystalline shapes that danced just on the edge of perception. He pushed the suit’s sensors against the column, convinced somehow that it was important and frowned. The column was made out of a transparent metal that was stronger than anything humans knew. There was no way they could break into the light to find out what it was.

  “I’m getting only a low-powered reading from it,” Paula said, as she joined him. “Whatever it is, it isn’t part of the starship’s power supply. It reads out as almost organic.”

  “Almost organic?” Chris asked. “Some kind of bioelectric system?”

  “Could be,” Paula said. “Whatever it is, its emitting low-level transmissions as well as odder signals my systems cannot identify. We can barely pick them up. I’m recording everything and transmitting them back to the starships for the MassMind to analyse, but I fear it could take years before we unlock them, if we ever do.”

  “I thought that codes could be broken instantly in the MassMind,” Jock said, as he came up to the hauntingly beautiful column. “Can’t you just crack it that quickly?”

  “This is alien,” Paula said. “Even with the resources of the MassMind, it took years to decrypt the written languages on each of the dead worlds and they were apparently very close to humanity; they breathed the same air, ate the same foods…if the Killers hadn’t existed, we might have been competing with them for worlds and resources. The Killers are apparently more alien than anything else we know about, yet…”

  She frowned as she leaned closer. “Yet I think I’m starting to build up a picture of how this starship distributes power,” she added. “I think some things are starting to make sense.”

  Chris nodded impatiently. “Are you sure we’re heading in the right direction?”

  “The power core of this ship is easy to detect now,” Paula assured him, seriously. The confidence in her voice surprised him. “We knew that much before we launched. I think, however, that the nerve centre of the ship is much closer to us.”

  Chris frowned. “How can you be sure?”

  “Because the alien power relays are very precise,” Paula said. “I don’t know for sure, but I’m betting that the core of the alien system is here” – she transmitted a location to his HUD – “because they all seem to spring from there. The other teams have located similar columns and all of them lead down there…”

  “It’ll have to wait,” Jock snapped suddenly, as new shapes appeared at the edge of the room. The remote drones hadn’t even noticed their presence. Chris felt a chill run down his spine. Paula had speculated that the Killers might not even register as a form of life to the sensors. Had they been missed completely? “We’ve got company!”

  “Ready weapons,” Chris snapped, sharply. The Killers had finally responded to their presence. The shapes might still be obscured within the mists, but they were definitely there and almost certainly hostile. He peered at them through the suit’s sensors, yet no signs of life revealed themselves, suggesting that they were robots. The mists cleared suddenly, revealing Octopus-like machines staring at the humans. “Stand by…”

  A moment later, the machines lunged forward. “Open fire!”

  Chapter Eight

  Before Paula could react, her suit took over and sent her diving down to the deck. She hit it hard enough to shake even the suit as new red warnings flared up in her HUD, warning her of enemy fire nearby. She felt her head spin as new downloaded memories bubbled to the surface, pushing her to crawl away from the firing as fast as she could, leaving the Footsoldiers to defend themselves without having to worry about her. She still wanted to know what was going on and to see the Killer machines directly, but her suit remained in firm control, keeping her out of the firing line. They weren’t going to risk her life any further.

  Part of Paula’s mind insisted that that was silly; she was in the heart of an alien starship, one commanded by a race that had thought nothing of frying all seven billion humans on Earth when they’d stumbled across the Solar System. The remainder of her mind was grateful; it took years to learn how to handle a suit properly and the brief lessons she’d had – and the downloaded memories – weren’t enough to make her an armoured combatant. It was more likely that she’d accidentally shoot her own side from the rear.

  “Show me the feed from their suits,” she ordered, as the suit kept crawling away. “Show me what they’re seeing.”

  The image appeared in front of her and she winced. Humanity had given its androids and other repair systems a vaguely humanoid form, but the Killers hadn’t bothered – or perhaps they did look like giant Octopuses. The machines seemed to have little sense of tactics – they marched relentlessly into the teeth of the Footsoldiers and their weapons – but they just kept coming. It was hard to tell if they had any vital components to hit at all; judging from the way they kept moving, Paula wouldn’t have bet against them having to be reduced completely to junk before they would stop moving. They didn’t seem to carry any projectile weapons of their own, but she saw one of them catch a Footsoldier in his suit and start tearing the suit apart as if it were made of paper. A suit that would allow its wearer to survive a near-miss from an atomic weapon or a hour’s bombardment with a laser cannon was just torn apart.

  She felt her heart racing frantically as the suit kept moving, following orders from its own AI or from the Captain. Chris Kelsey hadn’t been happy to see her at all and had loudly protested her inclusion on the mission, but Paula hadn’t understood, not until she’d realised how far removed an Armoured Combat Suit was from a General Protection Suit. She’d used the latter constantly at Intelligence and had been used to using it, but the former was something entirely different. She was hardly qualified to take part in the mission and, as shots ricocheted over her head, wished that she was back on Intelligence, watching through the MassMind. Her students and fellow researchers would be watching her cowering from the fighting.

  “We’re going to have to head onwards,” Chris said, through the suit’s communications system. “Get over to the far exit and prepare to run when I give the command.”

  Paula allowed the suit to take control, concentrating instead on pulling up what the intruding teams had discovered about the Killer starship and studying it, trying to see the pattern she knew had to be there. The Killers could do a lot of things that humanity couldn’t do, but they weren't gods, or super-beings. Their tech had to be based on the same laws as humanity’s tech, which meant that if she could unlock the puzzle, she might figure out how the starship actually worked. She studied – again – the way the power relays seemed to work. If she was reading it correctly, there was a major source of transmissions coming from an area just short of the power core – a bridge? A command nexus of some kind?

  Three Footsoldiers ran past her, their weapons raised, ready to take on anything they encountered, and then her suit came to life and hurled her after them. She felt the suit cushioning her as she ran onwards, down corridors she could barely make out after the bright light of the previous room. The other teams breaking into the ship had found similar rooms in similar locations, suggesting that the Killers were surprisingly regular in their thinking. If the pattern held true, it suggested that the columns they’d found were more important than they seemed, perhaps part of the starship’s command network.

  But we can’t break into them, she thought, as they ran into another brightly lit room. This one held nothing, but a single blocky piece of equipment that seemed to have no discernable function. She scanned it anyway, using the neutrino scanning function in her suit, and wasn't too surprised when the scan revealed that the device was almost impenetrable. It would take years of study before they broke through and worked out what the device actually was, years that she didn’t have, unless they succeeded in capturing the starship. At the moment, it s
eemed like an elusive goal.

  “Keep down,” Chris warned, as the rearguard entered the compartment and reloaded their weapons. “They’re right behind us.”

  Paula couldn’t help, but admire their professionalism. The arrow guns weren't explosive – plasma cannons would have made short work of the Killer machines, at the risk of blowing up the entire team – and they would run out of projectile weapons. The suits could normally use nanotechnology to scavenge raw materials and create new ammunition, but that might not be possible on the Killer starship. Could their nanotech dismantle the machine in the room and what would happen if they did? Would it provoke another reaction…?

  Provoke a reaction, she thought, slowly. Something was dancing right at the corner of her mind, refusing to come out into the light. Something important, something she was missing; the Killers hadn’t responded until…when? They hadn’t responded to the starships until they had been attacked; they’d even let the starships zoom close and unleash enough firepower to vaporise any other kind of starship, or devastate a whole planet. They’d been secure in their invulnerability…and they had ignored two hundred armoured Footsoldiers breaking into their starship, until they had found the column. There was something important about that column then, something so important that it had provoked a reaction…

  She pulled up the results from the scans and examined them as the firing started again. The scans hadn’t been that deep – whatever the column was made of was good at blocking basic scans and there hadn’t been time to use nanotech probes to break through the metal – but they had definitely picked up traces of organic components and unidentified liquids. The column might have been just a bioelectric system, but that made no sense…unless it was part of the starship’s control system. No, she realised suddenly; it was more than that. The column had held a Killer! They had been looking at one of humanity’s greatest enemies and they hadn’t even known it.

  The shooting was getting closer, but she ignored it, concentrating on studying the craft. If the Killer was actually meshed into the starship, like an oversized Spacer, it explained a lot. It probably hadn’t cared about the intruders until they’d actually stumbled upon the column and – perhaps – recognised it for what it was. It had sent its mechanical minions to terminate their curiosity; hell, perhaps it had decided to open a wormhole, travel somewhere else and exterminate the intruders away from their gnat-like starships. She couldn’t quite understand it. Where would such a creature even evolve?

  She looked down towards the billowing green mists and understood. The atmosphere matched that of a gas giant. The Killers might have evolved in such an atmosphere themselves and had created their starships, like humanity had created its starships, to make them feel comfortable. That explained the poisonous atmosphere – an effective defence against an unprepared enemy – and maybe even the gravity. It made a depressing kind of sense. Humanity had searched endlessly for the Killers and their homeworld, but no one had taken a serious look at the thousands of gas giants. They could have millions of inhabited worlds right under the noses of everyone who searched for them.

  “Suit, open a link to Captain Kelsey,” she ordered, grimly. Her conclusions would already have been sent out to the MassMind and the Community – the MassMind would study her theory and model out the possible dimensions of the Killers, now they knew more about them – but that wouldn’t help the team. “I need to talk to him.”

  ***

  Chris was feeling pushed back as he unleashed another burst of arrows into the heart of a Killer machine. Several mechanical arms and legs disintegrated under his fire, but the remainder of the machine kept coming. The suit sensors warned that some of the cutting tools the machines carried had monofilament blades and even clouds of remote nanotech, explaining how four of his men had been killed so effortlessly, despite their suits. It was oddly reassuring, in a way; the Killers evidently hadn’t been able to solve the problem of controlling vast clouds of nanotech either. If they had the entire team would have been wiped out within seconds.

  “I see,” he said finally, as Paula finished outlining her theory. “Are you sure about this?”

  “I think so,” Paula said. “I’ve been looking at everything we know about the Killers – and everything we’ve found out on this mission – and it all fits together.”

  “And we don’t have a way to get out of here now,” Chris confirmed, dryly. The Killer machines ignored the remote drones, which were still watching the enemy advance, and they were confirming that the way out to the hull and escape was firmly blocked. If they could use their plasma cannons, it would be a different story, but that would just have killed them all. It might be worth the risk as a final resort, but nothing else. “All right; send the additional drones forward and then prepare to follow them.”

  He selected an EMP grenade from the list of possible weapons, locked it on one of the Killer machines, and fired it towards them, before turning and running for the far exit. The other Footsoldiers were already ahead of him as the EMP grenade detonated, sending an electromagnetic pulse against the Killer systems, but not entirely to his surprise they showed no signs of being affected. It wouldn’t have bothered the armoured combat suits either.

  “Here,” Tom Pearson said. He picked up the strange Killer machine and pulled it after him, dumping it in a position to slow down pursuit. Chris smiled and nodded before pointing him down the corridor and running after him, avoiding a flashing blade by a millimetre. The starship seemed to be shuddering now, as if it were channelling power to something else, or perhaps fluctuating the gravity field to confuse them. “Sir, it…”

  He stumbled against a silver wall and fell right into it. Chris stopped and stared in horror as the wall literally swallowed Tom up, despite his struggles. He reached out and caught his comrade’s hand, pulling him with all the strength of the suit’s mechanical muscles, but he couldn’t budge him from the wall. A moment later, Tom shoved him back, just before he fell into the wall and vanished. His icon vanished from the display.

  “Don’t touch the walls,” Chris shouted, as they kept running towards the heart of the Killer ship, the bridge Paula had identified. Other traps kept appearing and grabbing for them as they moved, from a pair of tiny mechanical crab-like creatures to a sudden crippling change in the gravity field. Without the armour, they would have been helplessly trapped against the deck until their pursuers caught up with them. Even with the armour, crawling until they reached the edge of the gravity field was a near-impossible struggle.

  “I don’t understand how they can muster an independent gravity field inside the ship,” Paula gasped as she struggled forward. She sounded on the edge of breaking, despite the suit taking care of her, and Chris couldn’t blame her. “Having two different gravity fields in a starship risks destabilising the starship’s structural integrity, unless the starship is large enough to absorb the effects without harm…”

  Chris tuned her out as the gravity field suddenly reversed itself and left them floating in zero-gee. The suits countered the effect with their own motive power, pushing them onwards towards their destination, flying much faster through the air. The Killer evidently realised that that trick had backfired, because a moment later they crashed back down to the deck. Chris heard a scream and saw Thomas Ellisevans, one of the newer Footsoldiers, bleeding on the deck. A moment later, his suit sealed itself up to preserve what remained of its integrity.

  “What happened?” He snapped. “What did you do?”

  “I don’t know,” Thomas sent back. He sounded as if he were going into shock. “My suit’s arm just cracked!”

  “Keep moving,” Chris said, grimly. They were almost at their target. There was another vast room, large enough to house an entire Defence Force destroyer, and then finally they broke into the command nexus. “Paula…”

  She was staring at the massive room, barely hearing him. It looked more like a rocky asteroid cave than a bridge, dominated by the presence of a dozen columns like the one
they’d seen in the previous room. The columns all seemed to blur together in the base of the room; Paula examined it and proclaimed that there was a massive tank underneath, set into the rock. She waved a disintegrator over it and the rock collapsed into dust, leaving the tank revealed…and the monstrous mass inside it.

  Chris was reminded, irresistibly, of a brain, except it looked to be nothing more than a mass of chemicals. His suit was charting out the power links leading from the mass to the remainder of the ship and, finally, identified the mass before him as the source of the RF transmissions they’d picked up earlier. The Killer was sending signals out to the remainder of the ship and, a moment later, they were being repeated back to it, like a rote lesson. No, he realised, not quite a rote lesson. It was something much more complex.

  “That’s a Killer?” Someone asked. “It doesn’t look very dangerous. Why rock?”

  “It might be traditional,” Paula said, absently. “They might have decreed that its part of their culture, or it might be just like a hermit crab, inhabiting a shell created by another creature.”

  “So,” Andrew Summerlin said, looking back towards the advancing machines. “How do you intend to slap the cuffs on it and take it prisoner?”