He felt his feet leaving the deck and realised that something else had failed. The gravity generator had been knocked out as well. He considered it for a moment and decided that it probably worked in their favour. It would be easier to rescue anyone trapped under falling stone. He triggered his augmented vision as well and peered around the command centre, marvelling at the strange view in front of him. The seventeen men and women in the command centre were clinging on for dear life, hanging on to their useless consoles or chairs. A handful of men were drifting in the air, unmoving; they’d been killed when their consoles exploded. The survivors were lucky that the compartment hadn’t caught fire.
“Bring up your augmented vision and focus on me,” Brent ordered. A faint draft was pulling him towards a hatch leading out towards the docks at one end of the asteroid, suggesting the location of the leak. He followed it reluctantly, activating his communications implant and ordering a permanent scan for other communicator signatures. If someone was trapped and helpless, they would be using their implants to call for help. “We cannot stay here.”
He skimmed through his memory of the asteroid’s layout and found the location of the emergency supplies, the ones that no one had ever considered that they might actually needed. He altered the map manually – it took longer than having the computers do it for him – and transmitted the altered map to the remaining people in the compartment. They responded, opening up their own communications systems, adding their signals to his broadband call for help. There was an outside chance that they would attract the Killers, Brent knew, but he had chosen to dismiss that possibility. If the Defence Force starships on the outside didn’t rescue them, they would die when their force fields ran out of power.
“Follow me,” he ordered, after a quick check of the survivors. There were a handful of tiny injuries, but no one had been so badly injured that they couldn’t move. The unlucky ones were dead. He pulled himself over to the cracked hatch and hunted for the manual release. Captain Waianae joined him a moment later and added her strength to his, allowing them to slowly crank the hatch open completely. They looked out onto a scene from hell. The air was visible now as it cooled, sucked down the corridor into the distance…the Killer ship, he realised, had to have impacted just a few kilometres away from their position. Who in their right mind would have thought of using a starship to smash an asteroid wide open?
We would have, he thought ruefully, as the cold started to seep into his bones. He shared a long glance with Captain Waianae and then activated his internal force field. The Killer tactic had proven spectacularly successful and now they had either departed or were engaging the Defence Force. He couldn’t do anything about it from his position, he knew, so he pushed it out of his mind and concentrated on the map. If they didn’t reach the emergency supplies, they were dead.
The remaining command staff followed him, struggling against the pull caused by the outpouring of air. The asteroid had enough air to keep generating the current for a few more minutes yet, Brent decided, but they couldn’t wait for it to run out and leave them standing in a vacuum. The emergency force fields that should have prevented more than a tiny outpouring of air had obviously failed as well, not entirely to his surprise. Humans had used kinetic weapons before – indeed, on Earth, early firearms had all been kinetic weapons – but it had been a long time since anyone had used kinetic weapons on such a scale. He pulled himself from handhold to handhold, wishing for a jetpack or some other way to manoeuvre without risking being sucked out by the airflow, and somehow made it all the way through the corridor. It was a moment later when he saw the dead bodies.
They had clearly been caught by surprise; three women, one man, all wearing Defence Force uniforms. They had had no time to raise their own force fields, or brace for impact; the shock had smashed them against the corridor and killed them. The outpouring of air was pulling them gradually towards the breach in the hull; Brent wanted to catch them, to tether them to something so that their bodies could be recovered later, but they had no time. He found himself hoping that the bodies patched the rent in the hull, although he knew that that wasn't likely. Their problems were far worse than a single tiny hull breach.
“Keep going,” he hissed, as two of the command staff looked as if they were about to give up and wait for death. The outpouring of air was slowing down now, suggesting that the air supply was running out. There were more objects floating in the air now, everything from vital equipment to clothes and supplies; he found himself battering them out of his way as they crawled into the emergency compartment. The young Brent had wondered why the Community bothered insisting that emergency compartments were part and parcel of every asteroid settlement; the older and wiser Admiral was grateful that they were there. He keyed the door and it hissed open, revealing a sealed compartment and enough supplies to outfit all of the command staff.
“Get everyone into suits and equipped,” he ordered Captain Waianae, who moved to obey. Pulling on suits without gravity wasn't easy, but they would manage it, somehow. The entire Defence Force took classes in how to move without gravity, although Brent knew that most cadets passed the exams and then never went outside a gravity field again. He made a mental note to insist that – if they got out alive – everyone in the Defence Force was exposed to zero-gravity at least once per year. The lesson should have been learned long ago.
“Aye, sir,” she said. Her voice, even though the communications implants, was calm and practical. “Will you be putting on a suit yourself, sir?”
“Of course,” Brent said. It was like having a Mother Hen pecking at him, but she was right. “I’ll activate the emergency systems first, then get dressed.”
He placed his hand on the emergency systems panel and waited for them to respond to the implant emplaced in his right hand. It took a moment before the emergency system came online – it should have come on automatically when the asteroid was hit – and it couldn’t tell him anything useful. The asteroid’s computer network was all screwed up and half of the asteroid seemed to be gone. Brent wasn't entirely surprised. The Killer starship might have smashed the asteroid right in half.
“I’m getting nothing on the progress of the battle,” he said, after a moment. The external sensors seemed to be completely down as well, for reasons he couldn’t understand. Most of the systems should have existed independently of the main computer, although it was possible that the sensors were fine and the computer relay system was messed up. “We may not get any help from outside.”
Captain Waianae nodded, her face pale behind the suit’s visor. “That may make escape difficult,” she said, with masterful understatement. The Killer starship had separated them from the docks. The FTL starships would be gone or otherwise inaccessible. “We’ll have to get outside and see if we can signal for help from there.”
Brent nodded. The emergency procedures should have let them all remain inside the shelter until rescue arrived, but few people would want to remain there. The Sparta System had just been knocked out of the war. After the asteroid had been hit so badly, it was possible that there would only be a cursory search for survivors before the Defence Force starships pulled out to other war fronts. They might be left alive to wait until the atmosphere ran out. They couldn’t afford to assume that there would be time to mount a search for them.
And, he thought, in the privacy of his own head, anyone on the outside may not even pick up the distress beacon. Everything else has failed today.
“All right,” he said, addressing all of his people. “Listen carefully.”
He ran through their situation and explained the problem. “We have to get out onto the surface, but only a handful of us have to go,” he concluded. “Does anyone want to stay here? It will not be counted against them.”
No one, much to his private pride, chose to stay behind. “You two are staying behind,” he said, pointing to two of the injured girls. “If anyone else turns up here, get them into a spacesuit as well and prepare them for possib
le evacuation. Keep in touch via implant communicators and keep heart. We’ll be back for you before you know it.”
He turned and nodded to Captain Waianae. “Let’s move,” he said. “Open the hatch.”
There was no rush of air this time, but only a spooky silence. He called up the map in his implants and found the quickest way towards one of the emergency egress hatches, but decided, after a moment’s thought, to head towards the hull breach instead. The hatch might be jammed, or otherwise inaccessible, and they knew that the hull breach was open to space. He led the way down the corridor, flying the suit as well as he could, bumping off the walls as he moved. It was small consolation to know that everyone else was having just as bad a time; spacesuit drills, too, were a thing of the past. It was something else that he would have to change.
They passed several more dead bodies as they moved further towards the hull breach, both men who had been deemed essential. There would have been more bodies if the Killer attack had been a complete surprise, without the evacuation plans, but Brent couldn’t account for their delay in attacking. Why had they watched the asteroid system without attacking? Why had they waited so long to mount an offensive? The only explanation that made any sense to him was that the Killers had used the first ships to triangulate the location of their wormhole when they had charged through it and into battle, but why would they even need to do that when they could have just opened fire? Had they believed that humanity had duplicated their impregnable hulls?
He pushed that, too, out of his mind as they rounded a corner and saw the hull breach at the end of the throughway. The damage was much greater than he had expected; the Killer attack had bisected the entire asteroid. He accessed his implants and scanned again for any other signs of life, but nothing presented itself for inspection. They might as well have been alone in the universe. He attached a tether to the asteroid hull – that, too, had been taught back at the Academy – and used the suit’s jets to push himself out into space. The stars were still watching him in their silent majesty, but he could see signs of a space battle raging out amidst the system, tiny flashes of light…yet each of those flashes signified the death of a human starship. The Killers were still out there, somewhere…
“This is Admiral Roeder,” he said, concentrating on a full-spectrum distress call. Out in space, the starships should be able to hear them without interference. If they could break contact and come in to pick up the survivors…that, he knew, was a different story. “Emergency; we require an emergency pick-up now, I repeat…”
Ten minutes later, a bug drifted into view. It was hardly the kind of ship normally used for a rescue mission, but Brent had no choice. The pilot managed to take the wounded onboard and departed to deposit them on one of the evacuation systems, while Brent and the remaining command staff waited for the next pick-up starship. It wasn't long in coming.
“They’re breaking contact,” Captain Ackbar reported, once Brent reached the bridge. The small destroyer had left the combat zone to pick up the survivors; a pitifully small number, compared to the thousands who normally manned the asteroid. “They’re running from us.”
“No,” Brent corrected. He felt very tired and it was all he could do not to slump on the bridge. There were reports flooding in from all over the Community of new Killer attacks. “They did what they came here to do.”
Chapter Forty
From a safe distance – a very safe distance – Shiva was completely invisible to the naked eye, apart from a faint blue glow. Paula wasn't entirely sure if the glow was her imagination or not, but it hardly mattered; the black hole was very apparent to her sensors as it curved space and time into a tight ball. The flickers of radiation emitting from it as it consumed tiny particles – the remains of the battle debris that had once littered the system – marked its position well enough for her work. The network of gravity-emitters she’d had built in position around the black hole were enough to give her some degree of control over the hole in space she’d created. She had to hope that it was enough.
The Killers had achieved a high degree of control over black holes and Paula was all too aware that the human race was trying to catch up with them; there was no time for a quiet research program that could explore and consider every possible angle before the actual experimentation began. Paula had never been too enthused about exploring all of the angles before actually testing the theories – theories tended to grow on researchers, pushing them into looking for ‘proof’ rather than observing the experiment with an open mind – but now that she was prepared to start her experiments, she almost quailed. The Killers might pick up her experiments – no, she knew; there was no doubt that they would pick up her experiments – and move to silence her forever. The thought of the Killers recognising that Paula Handley, a Technical Faction Researcher, was a personal threat to them made her smile, but they might well decide to destroy her station and take possession of the black hole.
Her eyes looked at the inner-system display and she winced. Two days ago, the Killers had launched their second blitzkrieg against the Community and the death toll was mounting rapidly. The fleet of destroyers that had been assigned to guard the black hole after the last battle had been largely pulled out, leaving her and Shiva almost unprotected, apart from their command ship. Paula made no claim to being a military tactician, but even she knew that a single ship wouldn’t be able to stop the Killers, unless something new came out of her weapons research. The irony was that she did have a potential weapon in mind, yet she had no time to concentrate on it. She had detailed the idea to the Technical Faction and the MassMind; they would have to follow up on it, without her. She had a more important task to complete.
“Last chance, I think,” she said, looking over at Chris. She still didn’t know why an entire Platoon of Footsoldiers had been assigned to her personal protection, but it did give her a feeling of security. The growing intimacy between her and Chris rather helped. If she had had the time, she would probably have sought to speed up the process and invited him to bed, but there were more important concerns. “If you and your men want to leave, now is your chance.”
Chris gave her a reproving look. “We didn’t leave earlier and we’re not going to leave now,” he said. “Besides, even if we did, where would we go?”
Paula nodded, slowly. The reports had kept filtering in from the Killer offensive. A team of heavily-armed Footsoldiers had attempted to board and disable a Killer starship, only to be intercepted by armed and ready automatons. The resulting firefight had devastated the interior of the Killer starship, but had failed to disable the ship – the entire team had been wiped out. The Killers had adjusted their tactics and overcome most of the new weapons the human race had deployed.
Nine more Killer star systems had been destroyed by the human supernova bombs, wiping out God alone knew how many Killers, but that was just a drop in the bucket compared to how many Killer star systems there were out there. There were thousands of reports and millions of rumours flying through the MassMind, talking about the need to evacuate settlements before the stars they orbited were turned supernova, or the Rockrat offensive by bombarding Killer gas giants with asteroids from a safe distance. The Killers seemed barely to notice the latter; indeed, if some of the simulations were accurate, asteroids might have been how the proto-Killers got their hands on metals in the first place. Paula knew – through her own contracts – that every industrial-grade fabricator in the Community had been turned over to producing supernova bombs, but it wasn't easy to produce them in the sheer volume that would be required to exterminate the Killers.
And, for that matter, she wasn’t sure what would happen to the galaxy if so many stars were simply destroyed. The galaxy was held together by gravity – the force the Killers controlled somehow – and losing so many stars would definitely have an effect, although she wasn't sure what. There were simulations that argued that the galaxy would eventually – billions of years in the future – collapse into the massive black ho
le at the core, and other simulations that suggested that the galaxy would come apart completely. There was even a really far-out simulation that suggested that blowing up so many stars would cause a chain reaction that would send the remaining stars in the galaxy supernova, although Paula doubted that that was actually the case. It was beyond belief.
“I understand,” she said, finally. Chris and his men could join the Exodus, as the news media had already dubbed it, but that wasn't in their nature. Millions of humans were fleeing the Milky Way galaxy permanently, heading out to the Clouds or much further away, but the entire Community couldn’t move. It would have been logistically impossible. Chris and his men would have preferred to stay and fight, but instead they were babysitting one academic and her pet black hole. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
A black hole, viewed from one point of view, was a hole leading down into the fabric of space-time. Another point of view merely had it that black holes were ultramassive objects that bent gravity around them. Confusingly, to the layman, both explanations were actually true, although not particularly easy to grasp. Paula had attempted to explain it to the Footsoldiers, all highly-intelligent men, and they hadn’t grasped it entirely. To add to the confusion, two black holes vibrating at the same frequency could be used to form a wormhole between them, or merely a communications link.
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