Storming Heaven (24 page)

She found herself pulling up the diagrams of the captured starship again as they advanced down into the rear, preceded by the drones.  This compartment was far more standard, although there were still odd differences.  Very few of them seemed to make sense, at least to her, yet she had the feeling that if she had enough time to study them, she would understand what the Killers had been thinking.  They stopped, weapons snapping into position, as they encountered one of the Killer automatons, but the device ignored them.  It was trying to repair part of the ship, Paula realised, yet it was completely alone.  The task would take it centuries.

Chris pointed a plasma cannon at its heart.  “Should I?”

“Take it out,” Paula agreed.  The automaton could become dangerous very quickly, or so she explained.  “It’s only going to become a danger to us.”

Chris pulled the trigger and a searing burst of white light blew the automaton apart.  “Got it,” he said.  She heard the smile in his voice and rolled her eyes.  There was no real skill involved in hitting an unmoving target at point-blank range.  “I love having the plasma cannons back.”

“Don’t get used to them,” someone said, over the open channel.  His voice was vague and slightly amused, as if he were joking to avoid the tension.  “I heard a rumour that we might be sent to board more starships, with the same weird atmosphere and no plasma weapons.”

“Nonsense,” another Footsoldier put in.  He sounded very definite.  “I heard that they’re going to work on finding a way to ignite their atmosphere and blow the ship up.  Hey, Paula, would that actually work?”

“We don’t know,” Paula said, finally.  Truthfully, she had no idea if the idea had even been considered, but she suspected that the Killer starships were more robust than that.  The detonation of their atmosphere might hurt, but probably not kill, unless some of the more interesting theories were accurate and the mists were actually part of a Killer mind.  “We’d have to try it and find out.”

“Knock it off,” Chris snapped.  His voice had become tense again.  The other Footsoldiers sobered quickly.  “We’re coming up to the power core now.”

Paula nodded, checking her internal sensors for possible dangers.  The Killers had armoured their power cores with enough armour to contain a nuclear explosion, or perhaps even an antimatter strike.  It suggested that they were worried about the dangers of losing power, for the armour alone would add to their mass and cost them additional power to drive the starship to its destination, but Paula – for once – could understand their logic.  Losing control of the power core would almost certainly destroy the ship.  She was happy to see the disabled ship, but…it should have been destroyed.

“I’m picking up low-level power readings,” one of the Footsoldiers said.  Paula quietly confirmed his results, checking to ensure that the power surges posed no actual danger.  It didn’t seem likely.  There was barely enough power to light a match.  The remaining power had been expended.  “They seem to be on standby, or powering down.  I’m not sure what they are and…I’m getting some very odd readings concerning the interior of the core.”

Chris looked over at her, his face hidden behind the black armour.  “Well?”

“Give me a minute,” Paula said, examining the shielding surrounding the core.  It was cracked and broken, bearing mute testament to the forces that had been unleashed in the starship’s hellish final moments.  The power levels required to crack that shielding were nothing short of astonishing.  “Here…no, stay back.”

She stepped forward, carefully, and peered beyond the shielding.  Unyielding blackness looked back at her, yet when she activated her suit’s illumination and shone lights into the darkness, it revealed a vast spherical chamber, empty apart from strange distortions in the air.  She ran a quick measurement with her suits sensors and concluded that the distortions were fading away along with the power readings.  The Killer’s automated servants had saved the wrecked ship from complete destruction by pushing the power core out of reality, leaving it for the human race to salvage.  They probably wouldn’t appreciate the humour of it. 

“All right,” Chris said, angrily.  He'd reached the end of his willingness to accept her silence…and she could understand his point.  “No more games.  What the hell is that thing?”

Paula suppressed an insane urge to giggle.

“Well,” she said, finally.  “Not very long ago, Chris, it was a black hole.”

“Are we there yet?”

Private Ron Friedman sighed inwardly.  It wasn't part of a Footsoldier’s job to deal with small children and Mary, the young girl sitting on his armoured lap, was smaller than most.  He rather suspected that she thought he was actually a robot, rather than a man wearing an Armoured Combat Suit; after all, he hadn’t dared crack the suit open for the entire week he’d spent onboard the
Family Farm
.  The suit’s automated scrubbers were doing a grand job of keeping him reasonably clean and active, but he was grimly aware that when he
did
open the suit, he was going to stink the starship out.

That said, the
Family Farm
didn’t smell very good at all, at least according to Virginia Basil.  The hatchet-faced woman – Ron would have said she had a face like a bum seen sideways, apart from the fact he had been brought up never to speak ill of a lady – had been complaining about each and every thing since they had fled the Asimov System, just ahead of the advancing Killer blitzkrieg.  The small freighter was rated for carrying ten passengers at most, but their desperation had led the evacuation coordinator to pack over fifty children and teenagers – along with two armoured soldiers – into the starship.  The over-design of the ship’s life support system could tolerate it, barely, but the ship wasn't designed to carry so many comfortably.  It was impossible to find any real privacy on the vessel; indeed, Ron was privately concerned about accidentally hurting or killing one of the kids with his armoured suit.  The Footsoldiers had more than their fair share of training accidents and a person without a comparable suit would crack like an eggshell if he walked into them.  It had contributed to the tension of the journey…

Which hadn’t been helped by the fact that there was no destination in mind.  The evacuation coordinator had been more focused on getting them out of the system than finding a place for them to go, so they had ended up at the O’Neal System, which had promptly ordered them to proceed onwards to a different system.  Ron had found it hard to blame them – there were only a dozen asteroid settlements in the system and they were already overwhelmed with refugees – but Captain Basil and his wife had bitched their asses off.  The next system had said the same, despite their angry protests, although they
had
provided additional food and water supplies.  The
Family Farm’s
internal food processors had never been intended to feed so many.

“Not yet,” Ron said, tiredly.  The Footsoldiers had been trained to spend months, if necessary, inside their suits, yet no one enjoyed the experience.  He was tempted to crack the suit open for a while, smell or no smell, but he didn’t trust Captain Basil in the slightest.  The only advantage the two Footsoldiers had was the armour.  If they climbed out of it, he wouldn’t have put it past Basil to kill the pair of them, before ejecting them and the kids into space.  Captain Basil had bitched almost as much as his bitch of a wife.  “I don’t know when we’ll be there.”

Some of the kids, at least, still thought that it was a great adventure, but the older ones knew better.  The links to the Galactic Communications network had been weakened badly by the destruction, yet they had been able to establish that many of the children were suddenly orphans.  Most of them were
complete
orphans; their parents hadn’t even been able to upload themselves into the MassMind before the Killers destroyed their homes.  Ron didn’t know what they were going to do with the kids.  It wasn't as if they could take the
Family Farm
to another galaxy and set up a new homeworld there.

“We just got fobbed off from another asteroid,” Captain Basil snapped, coming over to glare down at Ron’s armoured visor.  Ron, who had been fighting off the temptation to simply take the Captain’s head in his armoured hand and squeeze hard, scowled at him.  He knew that the blank visor would show nothing of his expression to the increasingly frustrated Captain.  “How much longer are they going to make us wait?”

“As long as it takes,” Ron said, as calmly as he could.  The augmentation that made a Footsoldier helped him to keep his voice calm, even though the frustration was getting to him as well.  He wanted to get out there and get stuck into the Killers, who had slaughtered his friends and comrades, even though he knew that it would be almost-certain death.  It would be better than babysitting an untrustworthy Captain and fifty kids, even if some of the teenage girls were real stunners.  “We have enough resources to cruise for years if we have no other choice.”

“I will not stand for that,” Captain Basil said.  “I didn’t sign up to keep my ship at the Community’s disposal for years.”

Ron felt his temper flare.  Legally, the Captain was right; the Community lacked the ability to force compliance from its member settlements.  Apart from the Defence Force, which was the only arm of enforcement the Community possessed, there was little binding the various settlements together.  The settlements guarded their independence jealously and often competed against each other almost as much as they competed against the Killers.  Some even turned rogue and opposed their fellow humans, others isolated themselves from the remainder of the Community and refused all contact.  There was no way to force them to open themselves to the Community…

But Ron had a card the Captain couldn’t beat.  “You signed up to the general protocols when you worked within the Community,” he said.  “You had the legal obligation to help with the rescue effort, which you did.  You will help us to find them a safe place to stay and then you can fly to the other side of the universe if you want.”

He allowed his voice to harden.  “And if you keep pushing us, we will lock you and your wife in your cabin and take control of the ship directly,” he added.  “I have obligations to the kids as well.”

“Don’t fight,” Mary said, before Basil could answer.  “You’re both adults.  You shouldn’t fight.”

“One week,” Basil hissed.  “You’d better find them somewhere within one week.”

He stalked off before Ron could say anything in return, so he returned to his direct link to the Footsoldier network.  It was almost like being AWOL, in a sense; other Footsoldiers were fighting and dying, while he was on a starship that was safe, if very isolated.  The direct link to the network was online, barely, but there seemed to be nowhere to go.

A new message blinked up in the inbox and he allowed himself a sigh of relief.  “Captain,” he said, carefully lowering Mary to the ground and standing up, armour and all, “we have a message from the Defence Force and new coordinates for delivery.”

“And then I’ll be rid of you?”  Basil asked.  “You’re going to be off my ship?”

“Oh, probably,” Ron said, mentally crossing his fingers behind his back.  The report he intended to file would probably cost the Captain most of his future earnings.  The Community might scrabble from time to time, often over the pettiest of things, but no one would feel inclined to tolerate a person refusing to help out people in trouble.  An asteroid settlement was no place for selfishness.  The population would understand not risking ones life, but Basil hadn’t been in any danger.  Hell, statistically, the children would have been safer on his ship than on any asteroid settlement.  “Might I suggest that you set course at once?”

The
Family Farm
had a fairly primitive form of the Anderson Drive.  It was still astonishingly fast by the standards of Warp Drive, or whatever the Killers used for their FTL travel, but it took it nearly an hour to jump into a system orbiting a dull red star.  When they finally arrived, Ron was astonished by how much firepower was orbiting the star and its handful of settlements, enough Defence Force starships to lay waste entire star systems.  It would still be almost useless against the Killers, he reflected.  They might as well have thrown rotten eggs at the enemy starships.

“There are hundreds of warships here,” Captain Basil muttered, angrily.  “Where were they when my home system was under attack?”

Ron didn’t bother to reply.  Defence Force starships had stood and fought at Asimov and died winning time for the evacuation.  There would have been no change in the end result if the other starships were thrown into hopeless battle; it was better to hold them in reserve and use them, if necessary, as a scouting and evacuation force.  It was a grim conclusion, in a way; humanity had advanced so far, yet they were still little more than ants swarming around the Killers feet.

“Take us in,” he said, finally.  Docking information was beginning to scroll up on the main display, pointing them towards a massive asteroid some distance from the others.  He was starting to wonder why the Defence Force had steered them here, of all places, before he saw the other refugee ships.  There were few other places that could take so many people in a hurry.  In time, the refugees would be distributed out throughout the community.  “I would strongly advise you not to deviate.  This isn’t a safe place at the best of times and trigger fingers are getting itchy.”

Basil muttered under his breath, but started to key in instructions to the starship’s computer core.  It had amused Ron when he’d seen him for the first time; Basil was a starship Captain, with all that that implied, yet he couldn’t or wouldn’t control his starship directly.  The starship AI was probably considerably smarter than its commanding officer.  It could certainly handle the job of docking with the asteroid and assisting the Footsoldiers to move the children into safer hands.  In fact…

His train of thought changed rapidly as the alarm sounded.  Space was warping only a few thousand kilometres from their position.  He knew what that meant even before the wormhole started to materialise in open space, revealing a very familiar starship design.

“They tracked us here,” Captain Basil said, sheer terror blanching his face.  The Killer starship slid smoothly out of the wormhole, its mere presence sending gravity waves racing across the system.  “God damn you; you
led
them here.”

“
Quiet
,” Ron said, although he was almost equally alarmed.  There would be no fight against an equal opponent, only a slaughter.  The Killers would probably swat the
Family Farm
without even noticing them.  An AI – if they had AIs – would take the shot and blow the starship into atoms.  “Power down the main sensors.  I want us to be a rock in space.”

“No,” Captain Basil snapped.  “Computer; power up the main drive and jump us out here on a random vector, now!”

“Unable to comply,” the AI said, its smoothly modulated voice somehow clashing with the growing panic of its commander.  The AI’s personality overlays had been scaled back to the bare minimum.  “The gravity distortion is preventing the formation of a stable Anderson Field.”

“Get us out of here,” Captain Basil repeated.  “I want to be away from that thing!”

“Unable to comply,” the AI said.  It showed no hint of awareness that they were about to die.  “The alien starship is in a position to intercept us regardless of our exit trajectory.”

Ron reached out with one armoured hand and clutched Basil’s neck, lifting him up into the air with ease.  “Power down the drive and float like a rock,” he ordered, hoping that the AI would pick up on his commands.  The suit could probably hack into the AI, but that would take time, time they probably didn’t have.  The Killer starship could hit them at any moment, even though it wasn't firing or being fired upon.  It was just…looming.  Its daunting presence was dominating the entire system, mocking the human race by its very existence.  “Do it,
now
!”

“Complying,” the AI said.  The lights faded slightly as main power was taken offline.  “Drive field disengaged; helm and other systems powered down.  We are now on a ballistic course towards Patton Asteroid.”

Ron turned and stared out into space.  The Killer starship was so large that he could see it even with the naked eye.  It still wasn't firing.

“Put me down,” Captain Basil protested.  He was both pleading and cringing, desperate for reassurance and protection.  Ron could offer neither.  “What do we do now?”

“We wait,” Ron said.  “There’s nothing else we can do.”

***

“All hands to battlestations,” the AI’s voice thundered.  “All hands to battlestations!  Condition Red; I repeat, Condition Red.  This is not a drill.  All hands to battlestations!”

“Belay that,” Admiral Brent Roeder snarled.  Any human force could have been fought on even terms.  The only way to take out the Killer starship would have been to blow up the star and accept mutual destruction.  “Get the evacuation underway; I want everyone, but critical staff on the emergency starships and out of here before the shit hits the fan.”