Christopher Nuttall: Storming Heaven

For Once-Captain Tabitha Cunningham, the dream was always the same.

She was on the observation deck of her spacecraft, the massive bridge ship Endeavour, as it started to rock violently. They were midway between Earth and the Ceres Asteroid Colony, millions of kilometres from anything that could have threatened her ship, safe in the vastness of interstellar space. The political situation down on Earth might have been heating up again, as the Russian Confederacy and the Chinese Hegemony confronted the Atlantic Alliance, but no one would have taken a shot at a Bridge Ship. Only wreckers — terrorists — would have dreamed of harming the ultimate symbol of man’s achievements in space… and no terrorist could have penetrated the security blanket protecting the ships. They should have been safe.

The ship rocked again as she stumbled onto the bridge. “Report,” she gasped, unable to understand what was happening. Endeavour was rocking like a boat out at sea, caught up in a tidal wave, yet there were no tidal waves in space. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” her first officer said. Colin Hastings was young for his position, but out in interplanetary space, there should have been nothing that could have threatened them, or forced them to act quickly. “There’s no damage; the ship…”

A final wave struck the spacecraft as new alarms sounded, reporting the build-up of weird energy patterns in space, far too close for comfort. Tabitha’s eyes snapped towards sensors she never expected to have to use — military-grade sensors intended to watch for possible tracking radars and incoming missiles — to see a massive source of energy shimmer into existence. It struck her, suddenly, that the… event was producing gravity waves as well, and it had been the gravity waves that had rocked her ship. The event wasn’t natural — it couldn’t be natural — but if that was the case, then who was behind it?

She ignored the increasingly frantic calls coming in from all departments of her ship and pulled up the images from the ship’s telescopes. The wave of energy was visible even at their distance, a boiling mass of space that, even as she watched, was drawing into a funnel. It was already large enough to swallow Endeavour and her sister ships and it was still growing. She saw, with a sudden frisson of pure excitement, stars at the rear of the funnel that bore no resemblance to stars seen from Earth, but before she could articulate what that meant she saw the starship appear.

It was massive, fifty kilometres long if it were a kilometre, large enough to utterly dwarf everything that humanity had put into space. It looked like nothing less than a massive iceberg, pointed right at Earth, glittering with strange lights and weird power fluctuations. It was impossible, yet it was in front of her; it was beyond her comprehension. It was almost impossible to grasp the sheer size of the starship.

It was terrifying.

It was as alien as hell.

“First contact,” Tabitha breathed, feeling excitement, yet disappointment — and terror. What value did Endeavour have compared to the behemoth that was closing its wormhole behind it and was advancing steadily towards Earth? What was the human race to the people who had built that massive ship? Were they friends, or would they see humanity as nothing more than ants crawling around their feet? She wished, with all her heart, that she was in Earth orbit to meet the aliens, yet she also wished that she had died before she saw their arrival. The galaxy, the galaxy that humanity had barely touched, was already taken. Nothing would ever been the same again.

The alien starship ignored all attempts to communicate with it as it closed in on Earth. It ignored pleading messages from one political faction or another. It ignored the UN’s attempt to greet it in the name of Earth. It ignored offers of friendship and military alliance, pleas and supplications, promises and threats, choosing instead to maintain its ponderous approach. Despite its size, it was moving far faster than Tabitha’s ship, seemingly unconcerned with the laws of physics, as humanity knew them. It slid past the moon’s orbit, past the L4 and L5 colonies, and seemed to pause, only a few thousand kilometres from Earth itself. There was a sudden jump in power…

…And a white streak of light flashed from the alien starship towards Earth. Tabitha watched in horror as the pulse came down somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, sending great gallows of vaporised water into the atmosphere and causing tidal waves all across the planet. The second came down in Europe, detonating with the force of a thousand atomic bombs; the third came down in China. Pulse followed pulse — the Middle East, North America, Russia, Antarctica and countless more — until the entire planetary ecosystem had been thoroughly destroyed. The orbiting defences, designed to stop missiles rather than alien attack, could do nothing. The alien ship was sitting well outside their range.

Her view changed as the firestorms raged across the planet. She was no longer on her ship, but standing on the surface, watching her friends and family, her country and her planet, burning away under the alien bombardment. She was untouched by waves of fire that eradicated cities and continents, wiping the human race out of existence. She could hear the sound of nine billion people crying out in agony as they died, smell their burning flesh as they burned, feel their hands desperately grabbing at her for a safety she couldn’t offer them. Again, she watched her planet die…

And she was floating in space, watching the alien craft completing its task and slowly moving away from the planet, ignoring the orbital habitats and the remains of the human race. It seemed to pause, just long enough to look on its work and find it good, before it opened up the wormhole again and vanished, leaving a dead world behind. On the surface, the planet was still burning.

And then she woke up, screaming.

“We have entered the system,” the AI said. “Awaken.”

Lieutenant Chiyo Takahashi came awake as her bio-implants pushed stimulants and refreshers into her bloodstream. For a long moment, she stared around in confusion, before remembering where she was — and why she’d been in hibernation. The tiny scout ship, so small and insignificant that no one had bothered to give it or its AI a name, was approaching a Killer star system. In theory, even the Killers would be unable to detect her presence. The tiny ship had been stealthed completely, using the most advanced human technology, but no one knew just how the Killers did what they did. Her probe into their space might end with her death at their hands.

“I’m awake,” she slurred, as she pulled herself upright in the command chair. Her mouth tasted bad despite the best efforts of her implants and her enhanced genetics, so she washed it out with a glass of recycled water. She called up a reflector field and winced at her face. Her oriental features looked tired and drawn. “Report.”

“Passive sensors are detecting traces of Killer activity,” the AI reported, its voice as dispassionate as ever. No one programmed a scout ship AI to show emotion. “Optical observation confirms the presence of a major Killer base. We are flying right through the heart of their territory.”

“And it all seemed so easy back when the Admiral was briefing us,” Chiyo muttered, peering down at the holographic display as it sprang to life in the darkened cockpit. Back on the carrier, her task had seemed simple, but now she was flying through a Killer star system at a reasonable percentage of the speed of light, it was much more daunting. If the Killers caught a sniff of her presence, she wouldn’t last long enough to do more than scream for help that wouldn’t come. “Show me what you’ve detected so far.”