Storming Heaven

by Nuttall, Christopher

  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 willi
ng. 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.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The Defence Force – oddly, for such a high-tech organisation – had always preferred to have meetings conducted on a face-to-face basis, believing that it was easier for all parties to gage what was really being said. In a universe where the right software could allow a fake image – either of the wrong person or merely hiding their emotions – face-to-face meetings made sense, even if they could be inconvenient. Andrew had served in the Defence Force long enough to understand, although he privately believed that there were times when meetings in the MassMind were the only way to proceed. A mass briefing, involving nearly all of the remaining Defence Force units, was one such time.

  To his eyes, they were standing in a massive hall, with enough seating to hold over a hundred thousand Captains. The illusion only began to fade when he looked around, seeing how the room appeared to be greater on the inside than on the outside, somehow compressing far too many people into a confined space. The audience would be seeing things from the same point of view, even though they knew that they were hardly alone; it felt oddly cumbersome for the MassMind. It wasn't a personal fantasy, created for one person or a handful of people, but a shared reality for thousands of minds. It felt a little absurd.

  “Welcome, all of you,” Brent said, from his place at the centre of the room. Andrew could hear him perfectly; he could even see him perfectly, something that would have been difficult if the room existed outside a perceptual reality. A mental command allowed him to zoom in on the Admiral’s face, noting the telltale signs of a man using an image modifier to keep his emotions hidden. It struck him as odd, somehow; the Admiral wasn’t known for hiding anything from his subordinates. “We have taken the risk of calling you all together to discuss the coming offensive – an offensive that might prove decisive.”

  Andrew sensed the murmur racing around the massive room. He’d been pulled off defence duty himself and knew that almost all of his fellow Captains felt the same way. Defences all across the Community had been cut back to the bare minimum – if that – so that the fleet could be massed in the right locations, leaving countless settlements undefended. Logically, the Killers couldn’t wipe out more than a handful of them in the time they had left, but logic was cold comfort when the dead might include family and friends. The Defence Force wasn’t a real Faction, even though it sometimes acted as one; every man and woman in the room would have friends, family and acquaintances outside the fleet. Abandoning the Community didn’t sit well with them.

  “This is Prime #4,” Brent continued. If he was aware of the growing discontent, he showed no sign of it. “We didn’t succeed in locating it, despite its odd nature, until we recovered data from the Killers by an…unusual delivery method. It is one of twelve stations the Killers have constructed up near the Galactic Core, bare hundreds of light years from the Core Hole, and serves two separate purposes. The first one is to generate gravity fields that can reach out and touch anywhere in the galaxy. The second one is to serve as a hub for the Killer Communications Network.”

  Andrew felt the tension rising in the room. They all knew what the Killers could do with gravity fields and the concept of them being about to affect anywhere in the entire galaxy was a chilling one. Andrew had seen the classified briefings that had been brought back from the Killer Network and knew that the Killers could, when they were ready, render the galaxy uninhabitable for any other form of life. The entire human race was at stake…

  The remainder of humanity might just join the Exodus and flee outside the galaxy, but how long would they be safe there? The Killers could certainly follow them, or even stretch their gravity beams over to Andromeda or M33 or one of the other galaxies. The human race might encounter allies in another galaxy, or merely discover other Killer outposts…he shook his head, grimly. There was no evidence that the Killers had anything, even an outpost, outside the Milky Way galaxy.

  But there’s no evidence against it either, he reminded himself, and turned back to the massive hologram mounted in the centre of the room. It showed a monstrous structure orbiting a star, a complete enclosure that hid the star from view and allowed the Killers to drain every last erg of power. It seemed an oddly poor choice of power source for a race that could tap into black holes and presumably build quantum taps as well, but perhaps the Killers had built their station before all of the early supermassive stars had been destroyed, using their gravity fields to reconfigure the star to keep it alive. No one knew just how old the Killers really were, but in a universe that was billions of years old, they seemed to be the only constant. Nothing else had emerged to threaten their superiority until humanity had barely escaped destruction.

  “This is a Dyson Sphere,” Brent explained, dryly. Everyone in the room would know what they were looking at. “It encloses a star and drains its power off into these, we believe” – the hologram zoomed in on massive structures built on the surface of the sphere, each one larger than Earth itself – “and the power is tuned into massive gravity fields, working through a network of small black holes. They then use those gravity fields to focus in on the other stations, synchronise with the smaller black holes that serve as part of the Killer network and perhaps even generate more power without tapping into the Core Hole. We have run a handful of very stealthy recon missions through the system and we can confirm that there is one hell of a lot of power being generated there. If they succeed in mastering the Core Hole, they will be able to accomplish their objective. I don’t have to remind you, gentlemen and ladies, that if they do that, it is the end.”

  There was a long pause, broken finally by someone at the back. “How did they build that big-ass Motherfucker anyway?”

  Brent smiled, rather wanly. “We’re uncertain,” he admitted. “The Dyson Sphere is actually much larger than any concept humanity came up with; its surface is apparently at least ten AUs from the star, suggesting that the interior land surface is considerably greater than you might expect. There simply could not have been enough material in the system to build it, but the analysts believe that the Killers simply opened a few hundred wormholes and scooped up planets from the surrounding systems. The onrush of radiation from the Galactic Core will have left those worlds completely dead, so there would be no particular risk in using them as material. Alternatively, they might have simply pulled them from their home systems and brought them to their new home, although that would have taken years. They had the time.”

  He looked up at the display as it zoomed out again. “There are at least seventy known Killer starships in the system and perhaps more inside the sphere,” he added. “The purpose of this mi
ssion is simple; take out those ships, break inside the sphere and launch a supernova bomb into the star inside. If we can get it to explode, the shockwave should melt the sphere’s exterior and take out the system; if it fails to melt the system, it should still be drained of power. We have amassed the greatest and most powerful human fleet in the history of mankind to meet this threat.”

  Andrew looked around the room, feeling a lump in his throat. The Community Defence Force had assembled over a hundred thousand starships to fight their final battle. Even coordinating so many different attack wings, each of which might never have trained with its neighbour, would be a challenge. They had certainly never practiced working and fighting as a single force, yet they would be an overpowering force when they engaged the Killers. They might still have to henpeck the Killer starships to death, but they could do that. The other problem lay in the sphere itself. Who knew what kind of defences it possessed?

  “We have added a new weapon to our arsenal,” Brent said. “We have produced and deployed a fleet of ramming ships, which will be deployed against the Killer starships and the sphere itself. We have not located any particular weak points on the sphere, but we believe that we can break through its material using implosion bolts – or by destabilising their black holes – and punch our way inside. Once inside, the priority remains to destroy their star and then escape. The rest of the mission will be handled elsewhere.”