Christopher Nuttall: Storming Heaven

“Captain,” Brent said, calmly. He, at least, wasn’t too awed with her reputation. “We had better make this quick. I’m scheduled to attend another two briefings before the end of the day.”

Tabitha smiled. She approved of efficiency and the Defence Force, even though it was largely helpless against the Killers, was an efficient organisation. Brent had handled much of that when he became its Commanding Officer, rebuilding what had been a rapidly decaying communications and reconnaissance force into a formidable military machine — formidable against anything, but the Killers. He controlled firepower that would have been unimaginable back in her youth and starships that could span the galaxy in mere hours, yet the Killers didn’t care. To them, humanity was just another race of insects that needed to be exterminated.

She sent a mental command into the MassMind and the image of the Killer starship materialised in front of them. It didn’t look any less formidable than it had looked in the Council Chamber and she wondered, suddenly, if they were doing the right thing. Humanity had survived by hiding in the asteroids and out in interstellar space, but now… now they were talking about going on the offensive, against an overwhelmingly superior foe. Tabitha had been a military officer long enough to know that that was dangerous, yet there was little choice. The only other choice was to flee the galaxy entirely and escape. The MassMind couldn’t be moved so easily.

“Our target,” Brent said, seriously. “The planning sessions have all been completed. As we know nothing about the internal environment of the Killer starship, we were very limited in what we could tell the Footsoldiers about it. We believe that we are prepared for anything reasonable, but…”

He didn’t need to finish the sentence. They all knew how formidable the Killer starships were… and how little humanity knew about their interiors. The Killers didn’t take prisoners, or capture starships; they just came, saw and destroyed. The commando teams boarding the enemy starship were risking everything. It was quite possible that they wouldn’t be able to survive within the Killer ship, although every destroyed world had been quite Earth-like. There was no reason to believe that the Killers were that alien.

“It’s out of our hands now,” Tabitha said, feeling — once again — the helplessness of being part of the MassMind. By long tradition, the MassMind only had one vote on the War Council, or even as part of the Greater Community. It might be the largest single population — if one counted human personalities as being part of a population — but the living would not permit the dead to dictate to them. Besides, Patti might be the President of the Community, but the Community was such a decentralised system that the President counted for very little. “What about the other project?”

“The Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator is in final development now,” Arun confirmed. Tabitha had chosen the name herself, secure in the knowledge that no one would connect the name with any actual project. “The problem remains testing it.”

Brent changed the image — a serious breech of MassMind etiquette — to the final images from Lieutenant Chiyo Takahashi. “I have a target right here,” he said, coldly. “If we strike that star, even their technology would be unable to prevent a disaster.”

“We’d have to blow up a lot of stars to make an impression on them,” Tabitha pointed out, coldly. The Killers had thousands of star systems. She had a dark suspicion that humanity hadn’t located even a fraction of them. It was a mystery why the Killers seemed to ignore uninhabited Earth-like worlds in those systems, but it wouldn’t matter — humanity couldn’t use them so near the Killers. “How many stars do you want to kill?”

“As many as we have to,” Brent said. “We’re at war.”

“They may be able to counter the effect,” Arun said, reluctantly. “My team have been going through the images from the scout ship flight and they believe that the Killers are actually attempting to take control of the star. If they are capable of operating on such a level — which is theoretically possible — they may be able to compensate for the supernova effect.”

“They dismantle entire star systems to build their structures and now you’re telling me that they’re taking control of entire stars,” Brent said. “Why? What’s the point of taking control of a star?”

Tabitha said nothing, thinking hard. One benefit of the MassMind was that it allowed the brightest scientists and technicians of humanity to work together without being lumbered with their own care and feeding. Arun might have been the Administrator of the Technical Faction, but much of the real work was done in the MassMind, by the ghosts of scientists who had centuries of experience and the ability to assimilate data and study the implications almost instantly. They could use the MassMind fantastic processing power to run simulations and experiments that would have been impossible in the outside world and repeat them as many times as necessary. They’d been concentrating on the mystery of Killer technology for thousands of years. They’d even cracked some minor mysteries.

“The best we can suggest is that they want the power the star represents,” Arun said, finally. “If they took control of a star, they’d be able to tap into its power on a far more effective basis than anything they’d have even if they enclosed the star completely.”

“But why not use energy drawn from the universe itself?” Brent asked, shaking his head. “Or even other sources? Why go to all that trouble just to take control of a star?”

“We don’t know,” Arun admitted. “They already have more power at their disposal than we have. Anything they want or need… they can get it with the power they have already. Why would they bother to reconfigure a star?”

“We’ll just have to hope that capturing one of their starships will give us some answers,” Tabitha said, grimly. “If we can’t crack one of their starships, we may be reduced to blowing up stars just to get them to pay attention to us.”

She winced inwardly, remembering Patti’s concerns. The President knew that humanity was in a fragile state and the Killers could come after them at any moment. She believed that it would be better if the Community did nothing to anger the Killers, but humanity couldn’t live like that. The hundreds of thousands who fell into the MassMind and its illusions, or committed suicide or even fled the galaxy entirely were merely symptoms of humanity’s growing despair. The human race couldn’t go on being the hunted prey. Whatever it took, she knew, the war had to end.

Paula Handley allowed herself to feel a hint of nervousness as she was called into the Administrator’s office on the Technical Asteroid. She hadn’t seen the Administrator in person since she’d joined the Technical Faction as a young girl just out of school and qualified to become a Technical in her own right. She was proud, very much so, of what she had accomplished, yet she was young and knew that it would be a long time before she rose to the position where she could pick and choose her own research projects. She’d been funnelled into studying Killer technology — gravity science was an interest of hers — and she took some pride in knowing that she had enhanced humanity’s understanding, yet she knew how little it was compared to what the Killers did so effortlessly. It didn’t help that certain old women of both sexes were worried about the consequences of experimenting with gravity technology. Gravity waves propagated instantly across space and they believed — feared — that they would attract the Killers. They could hardly fail to respond to someone attempting to crack the secrets of their own technology.