Christopher Nuttall: Storming Heaven

“Transmitting,” the AI said. There was a pause. “Signal sent.”

The gravity field increased suddenly and Chiyo blacked out.

“At that point, the signal terminates,” Admiral Brent Roeder said, as the final images of the doomed scout faded and died. “We do not know for sure what happened to Lieutenant Takahashi, but we believe that she was killed in the line of duty, along with her AI. We do not believe that there is any point in a fast-recon mission to attempt to locate any traces of her vessel.”

“You intend to abandon her?” Father Sigmund asked, coldly. “I believe that you could get a starship in and out of the system before the devils could respond.”

“If we jumped a starship into the system, either in a warp bubble or though the Anderson Drive, we will certainly attract their attention,” Brent said, with forced calm. “They will act at once against the starship and the crew will be lucky to escape. The telemetry from the scout suggests, quite strongly, that the craft was broken up and used for raw materials, along with the pilot. I will not waste additional resources attempting to rescue a dead woman.”

“There’s little point in arguing,” President Patti Lydon said, as calmly as she could. It had been a long day even before the War Council had been summoned by the Admiral. “I believe that the Admiral still holds the confidence of his peers and they do not appear to have condemned the decision. I assume that the Lieutenant knew the risks?”

“Yes, Madam President,” Brent confirmed. “Those of us in the Defence Force all know the risks. We live with them every day. We face them every time we scout out a potential Killer star system or shadow a Killer starship. We lose hundreds of people each year to the Killers, or simple accidents in space; we all know the risks.”

Patti nodded tiredly. There were times when she wished that the Community was a more formal structure, but the truth was that humanity could not afford any such structure, not now. The members of the War Council couldn’t share the same asteroid settlement, or even visit each other socially, merely because of the risk of a Killer attack leaving humanity leaderless. There were thousands of asteroid settlements, billions of humans in hiding across the stars, but without the Community, any hope of united action would be gone.

“And another one of God’s Children dies,” Father Sigmund intoned. “How many more must die, Admiral?”

“We have been unable to communicate with the Killers,” Brent pointed out, tightly. His words came in sharp choppy sentences. “We cannot offer to surrender. They want us all dead. We can either try to fight — or hide, hoping that we will not be discovered. As the events last year proved, even the asteroid settlements are not safe.”

“The settlers of High Singapore brought their fate on themselves,” Rupert said. The massive Spacer’s electronic eyes seemed to flicker towards the Admiral, before turning to Father Sigmund. “They were careless and were detectable when a Killer starship entered their system. Other settlements do not make the same mistake.”

Patti scowled. She remembered the images High Singapore — a settlement of several hundred asteroids, comprising over twenty million humans — had sent, in the last moments before the Killers wiped them out. The massive Iceberg -class starship had appeared in the system, tracked them down, and systematically blasted every asteroid, while the Defence Force struggled to hold them off long enough for some humans to escape. Only ten thousand humans had escaped the brutal and utterly ruthless attack… and over a hundred Defence Force starships had died in the battle. The Killers had barely slowed to swat the gnats before destroying the asteroids.

“May God keep them,” Father Sigmund said, and for once there was general agreement. “May he take them into his heaven as righteous souls.”

Humanity had once had hundreds of different religions, but the destruction of Earth had wiped out almost all of that rich tapestry. There had been a handful of religion-based asteroid settlements, but over time, almost all of them had merged into the Deists, an overarching religious community. They had borrowed elements from all human religions, but they spent so much time arguing about the actual way of God that they were barely a political power in their own right. Patti had long since decided that that was for the best. The last thing humanity needed was a religious civil war.

“The more worrying implication of all this is what might be happening to other star systems touched by the Killers,” Tabitha Cunningham said. “Are they going to be dissembling other star systems — and, if so, why?”

Patti studied Tabitha carefully as she posed her question. At one thousand and forty years old, Tabitha was probably the oldest person — personality — in existence. When she’d been human, she’d watched helplessly as the Killers destroyed Earth, before setting out on an asteroid generation ship to try to escape the solar system, only to discover that she’d been beaten to the new system by a warp drive starship. It had been a surprisingly friendly meeting and Tabitha, now on the brink of death by old age, had accepted the offer to be transcribed into the MassMind. She now represented the MassMind on the War Council. Patti had learned to value her insights, but she was from a very different age. She had never accepted that humanity had to hide indefinitely.

“They appear to be building a Dyson Sphere or a variant on the theme,” Rupert grated. The cyborg studied Tabitha thoughtfully. The Spacers grafted artificial implants onto their bodies, giving up their gender and much else to live and work in space without any form of protection. They also looked obscene; their flesh and blood mangled by implanted machines and augments. The Spacers claimed to be immortal, and it was true that they only died through accidents, but most humans considered it a high price to pay. Only those who feared that the MassMind wasn’t true immortality wanted to join the Spacers. “That would grant them access to even more stupendous sources of power.”

“Indeed,” Administrator Arun Prabhu agreed. The Technical looked around the holographic simulation of the dying star system. “The current theory is that they might even be able to take control of the star altogether and collapse it into a black hole. It would give them another source of power.”

“I believe that we are slipping away from the point of this meeting,” Tabitha said. “Computer; return to general display.”

The image of the star system vanished, to be replaced by an image of the galaxy, seem from a view point high above the galactic core. It gave the illusion of god-like power to the War Council as they gazed down on the perfect image, spoiled only by the hundreds of tactical icons as they orbited the galaxy. The red icons marked known Killer star systems, or the locations of known Killer starships on their endless hunt for intelligent life to exterminate; the blue icons marked some of humanity’s settlements. Patti had grown up with such maps and knew how to read them; humanity was steadily being driven to the brink of extinction.

Tabitha’s image was one of her in her prime, commander of a spacecraft that had been the most advanced of its time — and pitiful compared to the Killer starship that had destroyed Earth. Patti found herself respecting Tabitha, even though she feared the woman’s icy determination to wreck revenge on the Killers, a desire shared by far too many humans. If there had been hope, Patti would have joined them, but there was none. Every engagement had ended badly for humanity.

“We need to face the facts,” Tabitha said. “We are still retreating from their advance, unable to escape unless we flee the galaxy entirely. We need to find a way to strike back at them.”