Storming Heaven (14 page)

“Explain,” Brent ordered, sharply.  “Are you suggesting that the Killers might
survive
a supernova?”

“It is a possibility,” Cromwell said.  “The weapon works by creating massive disruption within the star that will cause it to explode, blowing off a vast amount of superheated matter.  The explosion, depending upon the exact moment of detonation, will expel a considerable percentage of the star’s material at a tenth of the speed of light into the surrounding interstellar medium.  The wave of energy would devastate any Earth-like world, but it may not destroy a gas giant, although there would be serious consequences for the planet’s environment.”

Brent looked down at the display again.  “And that wouldn’t harm the Killers?”

“We know nothing about their habitations in the gas giants, or even if they truly live there,” Cromwell reminded him.  “We may cause complete destruction or they may live far down enough to ride out the blast.  Again, we are unable to be sure of the consequences until we actually launch the weapon.”

“I see,” Brent said.  A thought struck him.  “What would happen if we were to turn the weapon on the gas giants instead?”

“There would be no question of the effective destruction of the target planet,” Cromwell said, finally.  “The effects on the remainder of the star system would not be comparable to a supernova, mainly because other possible targets will be sheltered behind the local star.  It is unlikely that the planet-bound Killers could survive the destruction of their planet.”

“Unless they have something else up their sleeves,” Brent said, sourly.  By common consent, those who knew about the starbombs had decided to only build a handful of such weapons – and to avoid using them until they had decided how best to proceed.  “Have we completed our study of possible evolutionary paths for the Killers?”

“No, sir,” Cromwell said.  “I believe that Professor Jones and his team are still working on the data from the captured ship.  They have not yet completed their research…”

The AI broke off.  “Sir, I am picking up a priority signal from the
Observer
,” Cromwell said.  “She is under attack by the Killers!”

“Show me,” Brent ordered.

The final moments of the
Observer
seemed to fly past terrifyingly quickly.  He'd never seen so many Killer starships gathered together outside of one of their star systems, let alone actually paying attention to humanity.  All of a sudden, he wasn't so convinced that encouraging them to take an interest was a good idea; the Killer starship chased the
Observer
towards a gas giant, where it encountered another Killer starship.  The final moments of the starship, as it turned and rammed its tormentor, remained with him as the signal link broke.  There was no doubting that the
Observer
was gone and that her crew was dead.

“Poor bastards,” he said, grimly.  On one hand, he knew that many more would die before the war ended; on the other, it came as a shock after the successful capture of a Killer starship.  There could be no questioning the fact that the Killers knew that
something
had happened now; the only good news was that Star’s End hadn’t received a visit.  The Killers weren't capable of tracking their lost ship down.  “Do you have a complete copy of their telemetry?”

“Yes, sir,” Cromwell said.  “There are also copies being dispatched to the various analysis centres and the MassMind.  They will have reports for you soon.”

“Good,” Brent said, grimly.  He wanted to study them himself, but he was still too close to the disaster.  The crew of the
Observer
had deserved better.  The entire Defence Force deserved better than a hopeless fight against overwhelming odds.  “Make sure that the Defence Forums in the MassMind see the information.  They might be able to offer different insights into the incident.”

He looked down at the display once again and felt his resolve harden.  “Contact the Admirals in command of the various fleets and inform them that I want volunteers for a dangerous mission,” he added, bringing up the
Observer’s
final location.  There was a whole Killer base they hadn’t even known existed.  Had the Killers infested all of the galaxy’s gas giants?  Destroying them might become even more impossible than it had been before the
Observer
was lost.  “I think it’s time we tested the device on a live target.”

“I would remind you that the deployment of such weapons is in the jurisdiction of the War Council,” Cromwell said.  The AI’s voice was dispassionate, but firm.  “Do you intend to seek permission?”

“Of course,” Brent said.  He replayed again the final moments of the
Observer
.  “I think the entire human race wants to just strike back and to hell with the consequences.”

“That would appear to be typical of the human race,” the AI said.  “The loss of a single planet will not cripple the Killers, while it will expose human settlements to their retaliation.  I do not feel that this is a wise move.”

“No?”  Brent asked.  “Tell me, then.  At which point do we stop running and fight back?”

Paula was no stranger to walking in space – like everyone born on an asteroid habitat, she’d made her first spacewalk as soon as she could operate a child-suitable spacesuit – but Star’s End was different.  Intellectually, she knew that there was no real difference between walking in space back home and at Star’s End, but her hindbrain kept screaming at her about the dangers of floating off into intergalactic space.  She kept trying to convince herself that if she lost control, one of the starships or interplanetary bugs would rescue her long before she passed out of the system, yet somehow her mind refused to believe.  The presence of the Killer starship, sitting helplessly in a vast framework of sensors and observation units, only added to her unease.  The last time she’d been so close to that craft, it had been trying to kill her.

“We, the dispossessed, the outcasts, return our friends to the stars,” the preacher said, her words echoing over the communications link.  The first coffin was already moving, pushed out of the magnetic cage and launched towards the star, followed by the second.  A handful of bodies had been recovered from the captured starship, but most of the coffins were empty.  The Killer weapons, with their complete matter-energy conversion fields, left very little behind to bury.  “Their light will shine on our descendents, thousands of years in the future, when all around us is dead and dust.  We will not forget them.”

Paula swallowed hard as the next coffin moved past her, heading onwards towards its final destination.  She hadn’t grasped the realities of death before, even though she’d seen men die on the Killer starship, for it was true death.  The starship crews the Killers had killed hadn’t had time to transmit their final personality recordings into the MassMind.  There was nothing left of them, but atoms and memories.  Others had been luckier, but only by degree; the MassMind had only fractions of their personalities to integrate.  Paula had broken tradition, which mandated that all personalities were forbidden to interact with the living until after the funeral, to check up on them, but the MassMind supervisors hadn’t been hopeful.  The personalities were broken and fragmented and, lacking a real sense of self, would probably end up collapsing into the MassMind and losing what remained of their individuality.  They would never live again…

There were other possibilities, darker ones.  Every so often, something discovered the potential of copying a MassMind personality into a cloned body, allowing a personality to live again, but it was illegal.  A newly-born clone brain would be unable to accept the transcribing process, while an adult clone would be a living breathing being in his or her own right.  The Community had banned any such experimentation, but in a society where information was free and resources virtually infinitive, someone was probably experimenting without any regard for moral concerns.  It shouldn’t have surprised her – all moral concerns had been thrown aside in the desperate fight for survival – but it made her uncomfortable.  The human race couldn’t fight monsters by becoming monsters themselves.

“Nelson Oshiro, Argyris Aniketos, Nomiki Dimitris, Tyrone Leff, Clinton Remus, Darryl O’Hare, Tyrone Knobel…”  The list of names went on and on.  “We bid them farewell and look forward to meeting them again in the land where no shadows fall, knowing now that they shine their light upon us all.”

Paula almost rolled her eyes.  She knew, as an astrophysics expert, that the bodies would vaporise as they reached the local star, sending out a brief flare of light that would be almost unnoticed amid the star’s permanent glare.  The Deist beliefs never quite made sense to her anyway; they were a strange mixture of Old Earth religions and countless New Age cults that had established asteroid habitats so that they could practice their beliefs away from a sceptical world.  The funeral wasn't for the benefit of the dead, even those who still lived on in the MassMind, but for the living.  They had died to give her a chance to unravel the mysteries of the Killer starship.

She looked back towards the Killer ship as the preacher finally came to the end of his sermon.  She’d spent the first week being debriefed – and listening to endless lectures from the biological studies professors on how
dare
she kill the first representative of an alien race – on everything that had happened on the mission, and assisting the researchers to explore the starship’s interior.  They had barely scratched the surface of the Killer starship, yet they were already making astonishing discoveries.  It would be years before they understood everything that the Killers did so casually, but the new insights were worth their weight in gold…

Except she had a feeling that something was wrong.  No one else seemed to think it, but every time she travelled onboard the Killer starship, she had the oddest sense that it was…
waiting
.  It felt like a crowded theatre waiting for the play to open, or a woman waiting for her lover, a silence pregnant with anticipation.  No one else had reported feeling anything out of the ordinary – at least for an alien starship large enough to swallow everything else at Star’s End – but she couldn’t escape her worries.  They had barely begun to scratch the surface of the Killer starship.  God alone knew what secrets it was hiding.

Her suit began to move through space under remote control as the sermon ended, after the final coffin was dispatched towards the star.  Now, according to tradition, there would be a loud party and a wake for the departed, but she knew that it wouldn’t be personal.  It wouldn’t be focused on one person, a person she knew well, but on all of the dead.  She would have preferred to have spent the night on the Killer starship, alone and stark naked, but there was no choice.  Even in a post-scarcity society, where she could obtain the resources – if not the permissions – to carry out wherever experiment she felt like carrying out, there were some who were more equal than others.  The Technical Faction needed her to show the flag, no matter what
she
thought about it.

Bastards
, she thought, as the burial party was flown towards the massive asteroid settlement.  Star’s End wasn’t particularly large, as asteroid settlements went, but it was still far beyond a human scale.  Thousands of humans, mainly dedicated researchers, occupied the handful of asteroid colonies, trying to unlock the secrets of Killer technology.  A few weeks ago, she would have sold her soul to join them.  Now she couldn’t wait to leave.

She took a long breath as the suit rocketed her towards the entrance and through the forcefield that prevented the atmosphere from leaking out of the asteroid.  It would all be over soon, she decided.  She would shake a few hands, engage in a little polite conversation, and leave as soon as she decently could.  It couldn’t be as bad as she thought, could it?

***

Damned dress uniform
, Captain Chris Kelsey thought angrily, as he tugged at the collar.  The Footsoldiers normally had the best equipment on hand for anything they needed – and if they didn’t have it, they could practically obtain it on demand.  The dress uniforms, however, had been designed by sadists and nothing he could do to his dress uniform could make it comfortable.  He wore enough gold braid over the dress blues to outshine the local star –
real
gold braid, not a substitute – and a hat that was supposed to have been modelled on a
real
military hat from the pre-space years on Earth.  He suspected that it had come from one of the more unstable armies in one of the more unstable nation-states; the soldiers had probably mutinied and launched coups to avoid having to wear the stupid headgear.  The sword and laser pistol just completed his utter humiliation.

The party was being held in the middle of the asteroid’s garden, with enough grassy areas and foliage to provide both open spaces and concealed areas for couples to snatch a little privacy.  The majority of the asteroid’s settlers probably welcomed the party more than anyone else, although the inhabitants had probably realised that the presence of the Killer starship meant that they’d suddenly woken up to find themselves on the front lines.  There was no reason why the Killers couldn’t reach Star’s End and the handful of Defence Force starships couldn’t hope to hold the line if they attacked.  Chris privately suspected that the real reason the Footsoldiers had been kept at Star’s End was so that they could repeat their boarding feat with an antimatter bomb, although he doubted that that trick would work twice.  The Killers had definitely been aware of the boarding party before the end.

He cast his gaze over one area of the garden and rolled his eyes.  Seven girls – it might have been eight; it was hard to sort out the number of limbs – were rolling around on the grass together, completely naked.  It was hardly an uncommon sight in an environment where Old Earth’s social taboos had largely faded away, but it struck him as disrespectful, somehow.  All Footsoldiers knew that there was a chance that they could face permanent death out among the stars, yet few really believed that it could happen to them.  They didn’t want to believe it.  Chris had read all the military material that had survived the destruction of Earth, including tales so tall that he suspected that they had been exaggerated, and he couldn’t understand how the soldiers had managed to take such risks without even a chance at immortality.  It beggared belief just how careless some of the Old Earth Generals had been with their men, but then, manpower had never been a problem for them.  They hadn’t known how lucky they’d been.

There was a long table, completely groaning with food and drink, and he took a small plate, pausing to exchange polite compliments with some of the hosts.  Star’s End, at least, didn’t belong to any of the Peace Factions or the Killer-Worshipping religions, neither of which would be happy to see a Footsoldier in uniform.  The Peaceniks believed that if humanity didn’t provoke the Killers, they wouldn’t come and complete their task of exterminating the human race, while the religious nuts worshipped the Killers, seeing them as a modern-day Flood, or horde of locusts.  Chris had no time for either set of beliefs.  There was no evidence that the Killers were either inclined to leave the remainder of humanity alone, or ‘assist’ the human race further.  They only seemed to exist to kill.

“You did well out there,” one of the researchers said, sipping something so strong that Chris could smell it even without his augmented senses.  His own nanites were flushing out and countering the alcohol before it could really get into his system.  It would be nice to get extremely drunk, but it would probably have resulted in a catastrophe.  “Did you happen to notice…?”

Chris listened to the researcher go on, answering what questions he could – although most of them covered topics that had been explored in the debriefing sessions – and broke away from him as soon as he decently could.  The researchers were fascinated by the Killer starship – and he supposed that at an intellectual level it
was
fascinating – but it was nothing, but an enemy to him.  The entire starship had pulsed with a malign intelligence that had killed entire worlds and thought nothing of killing his men, even though their armour.  He wanted a weapon that would blow right through the alien ships and freedom to use it, not kind words.  The scientists complained about the damage the Footsoldiers had caused as they fled towards the Killer’s chamber and their final stand.

“You’re looking lost,” a voice said, from behind him.  He turned, wondering if the drink had dulled his senses anyway, despite the nanites, to see Paula.  She wore a simple blue cocktail dress and a look that, he wryly acknowledged, probably matched his expression.  It was easy to see, now, that she was baseline human.  There were no unsightly modifications to her body.  “Want to come sit with me instead?”

Chris smiled and allowed her to lead him out of the crowd and up towards a more private area somewhere within the jungle.  The asteroid’s AI had just left the jungle to grow almost at random, then created paths through the tangle to allow humans to explore a shadow of a real world.  It was easy to forget – thanks to sound-dampening fields – that there were entire crowds only bare metres away.  It was as private as one could get in the garden.

“Thanks,” he said, relieved.  She probably wasn't offering sex, part of his mind reluctantly decided, but he was more than grateful for the save.  “I was going mad in there.”

“Me too,” Paula said.  They found a patch of dry grass and sat down, disturbing a pair of bees and forcing them to buzz away.  The AI maintained the ecology and included as many savaged forms of life from Earth as it could.  It was a shame that it was impossible to recreate so many dead animals from Earth.  Chris would have given anything to see a real tiger.  “I don’t…surely that isn’t how you plan to say farewell to your fellow Footsoldiers.”

“Hardly,” Chris said, shaking his head.  They’d already held a private ceremony, but it wasn't something he could share with a civilian, even one who had been with them on the mission.  It was a private Footsoldier tradition that helped to bind the teams together.  “We’ll bid them farewell in our own way and try to forget that this…ceremony ever happened.  Did they have you on the outside?”