Storming Heaven (40 page)

He ran through their situation and explained the problem.  “We have to get out onto the surface, but only a handful of us have to go,” he concluded.  “Does anyone want to stay here?  It will not be counted against them.”

No one, much to his private pride, chose to stay behind.  “You two are staying behind,” he said, pointing to two of the injured girls.  “If anyone else turns up here, get them into a spacesuit as well and prepare them for possible evacuation.  Keep in touch via implant communicators and keep heart.  We’ll be back for you before you know it.”

He turned and nodded to Captain Waianae.  “Let’s move,” he said.  “Open the hatch.”

There was no rush of air this time, but only a spooky silence.  He called up the map in his implants and found the quickest way towards one of the emergency egress hatches, but decided, after a moment’s thought, to head towards the hull breach instead.  The hatch might be jammed, or otherwise inaccessible, and they
knew
that the hull breach was open to space.  He led the way down the corridor, flying the suit as well as he could, bumping off the walls as he moved.  It was small consolation to know that everyone else was having just as bad a time; spacesuit drills, too, were a thing of the past.  It was something else that he would have to change.

They passed several more dead bodies as they moved further towards the hull breach, both men who had been deemed essential.  There would have been more bodies if the Killer attack had been a complete surprise, without the evacuation plans, but Brent couldn’t account for their delay in attacking.  Why had they watched the asteroid system without attacking?  Why had they waited so long to mount an offensive?  The only explanation that made any sense to him was that the Killers had used the first ships to triangulate the location of their wormhole when they had charged through it and into battle, but why would they even need to do that when they could have just opened fire?  Had they believed that humanity had duplicated their impregnable hulls?

He pushed that, too, out of his mind as they rounded a corner and saw the hull breach at the end of the throughway.  The damage was much greater than he had expected; the Killer attack had bisected the entire asteroid.  He accessed his implants and scanned again for any other signs of life, but nothing presented itself for inspection.  They might as well have been alone in the universe.  He attached a tether to the asteroid hull – that, too, had been taught back at the Academy – and used the suit’s jets to push himself out into space.  The stars were still watching him in their silent majesty, but he could see signs of a space battle raging out amidst the system, tiny flashes of light…yet each of those flashes signified the death of a human starship.  The Killers were still out there, somewhere…

“This is Admiral Roeder,” he said, concentrating on a full-spectrum distress call.  Out in space, the starships should be able to hear them without interference.  If they could break contact and come in to pick up the survivors…that, he knew, was a different story.  “Emergency; we require an emergency pick-up now, I repeat…”

Ten minutes later, a bug drifted into view.  It was hardly the kind of ship normally used for a rescue mission, but Brent had no choice.  The pilot managed to take the wounded onboard and departed to deposit them on one of the evacuation systems, while Brent and the remaining command staff waited for the next pick-up starship.  It wasn't long in coming.

“They’re breaking contact,” Captain Ackbar reported, once Brent reached the bridge.  The small destroyer had left the combat zone to pick up the survivors; a pitifully small number, compared to the thousands who normally manned the asteroid.  “They’re running from us.”

“No,” Brent corrected.  He felt very tired and it was all he could do not to slump on the bridge.  There were reports flooding in from all over the Community of new Killer attacks.  “They did what they came here to do.”

From a safe distance – a
very
safe distance – Shiva was completely invisible to the naked eye, apart from a faint blue glow.  Paula wasn't entirely sure if the glow was her imagination or not, but it hardly mattered; the black hole was very apparent to her sensors as it curved space and time into a tight ball.  The flickers of radiation emitting from it as it consumed tiny particles – the remains of the battle debris that had once littered the system – marked its position well enough for her work.  The network of gravity-emitters she’d had built in position around the black hole were enough to give her some degree of control over the hole in space she’d created.  She had to hope that it was enough.

The Killers had achieved a high degree of control over black holes and Paula was all too aware that the human race was trying to catch up with them; there was no time for a quiet research program that could explore and consider every possible angle before the actual experimentation began.  Paula had never been too enthused about exploring all of the angles before actually testing the theories – theories tended to grow on researchers, pushing them into looking for ‘proof’ rather than observing the experiment with an open mind – but now that she was prepared to start her experiments, she almost quailed.  The Killers might pick up her experiments – no, she knew; there was no doubt that they
would
pick up her experiments – and move to silence her forever.  The thought of the Killers recognising that Paula Handley, a Technical Faction Researcher, was a personal threat to them made her smile, but they might well decide to destroy her station and take possession of the black hole.

Her eyes looked at the inner-system display and she winced.  Two days ago, the Killers had launched their second blitzkrieg against the Community and the death toll was mounting rapidly.  The fleet of destroyers that had been assigned to guard the black hole after the last battle had been largely pulled out, leaving her and Shiva almost unprotected, apart from their command ship.  Paula made no claim to being a military tactician, but even she knew that a single ship wouldn’t be able to stop the Killers, unless something new came out of her weapons research.  The irony was that she
did
have a potential weapon in mind, yet she had no time to concentrate on it.  She had detailed the idea to the Technical Faction and the MassMind; they would have to follow up on it, without her. 
She
had a more important task to complete.

“Last chance, I think,” she said, looking over at Chris.  She still didn’t know why an entire Platoon of Footsoldiers had been assigned to her personal protection, but it did give her a feeling of security.  The growing intimacy between her and Chris rather helped.  If she had had the time, she would probably have sought to speed up the process and invited him to bed, but there were more important concerns.  “If you and your men want to leave, now is your chance.”

Chris gave her a reproving look.  “We didn’t leave earlier and we’re not going to leave now,” he said.  “Besides, even if we did, where would we go?”

Paula nodded, slowly.  The reports had kept filtering in from the Killer offensive.  A team of heavily-armed Footsoldiers had attempted to board and disable a Killer starship, only to be intercepted by armed and ready automatons.  The resulting firefight had devastated the interior of the Killer starship, but had failed to disable the ship – the entire team had been wiped out.  The Killers had adjusted their tactics and overcome most of the new weapons the human race had deployed.

Nine more Killer star systems had been destroyed by the human supernova bombs, wiping out God alone knew how many Killers, but that was just a drop in the bucket compared to how many Killer star systems there were out there.  There were thousands of reports and millions of rumours flying through the MassMind, talking about the need to evacuate settlements before the stars they orbited were turned supernova, or the Rockrat offensive by bombarding Killer gas giants with asteroids from a safe distance.  The Killers seemed barely to notice the latter; indeed, if some of the simulations were accurate, asteroids might have been how the proto-Killers got their hands on metals in the first place.  Paula knew – through her own contracts – that every industrial-grade fabricator in the Community had been turned over to producing supernova bombs, but it wasn't easy to produce them in the sheer volume that would be required to exterminate the Killers.

And, for that matter, she wasn’t sure what would happen to the galaxy if so many stars were simply destroyed.  The galaxy was held together by gravity – the force the Killers controlled somehow – and losing so many stars would definitely have an effect, although she wasn't sure what.  There were simulations that argued that the galaxy would eventually – billions of years in the future – collapse into the massive black hole at the core, and other simulations that suggested that the galaxy would come apart completely.  There was even a really far-out simulation that suggested that blowing up so many stars would cause a chain reaction that would send the remaining stars in the galaxy supernova, although Paula doubted that that was actually the case.  It was beyond belief.

“I understand,” she said, finally.  Chris and his men could join the Exodus, as the news media had already dubbed it, but that wasn't in their nature.  Millions of humans were fleeing the Milky Way galaxy permanently, heading out to the Clouds or much further away, but the entire Community couldn’t move.  It would have been logistically impossible.  Chris and his men would have preferred to stay and fight, but instead they were babysitting one academic and her pet black hole.  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

A black hole, viewed from one point of view, was a hole leading down into the fabric of space-time.  Another point of view merely had it that black holes were ultramassive objects that bent gravity around them.  Confusingly, to the layman, both explanations were actually true, although not particularly easy to grasp.  Paula had attempted to explain it to the Footsoldiers, all highly-intelligent men, and
they
hadn’t grasped it entirely.  To
add
to the confusion, two black holes vibrating at the same frequency could be used to form a wormhole between them, or merely a communications link.

Paula believed – and knew that many others shared her theory – that the Killers used it as a method of communication.  A tiny black hole should have evaporated in a puff of Hawking Radiation, but the Killers could certainly have used their gravity manipulation technology to keep one alive and use it as a communications system.  A larger black hole could be used as a power source – they knew now that that was how the Killers powered their starships – and a supermassive one could be used to create gravity beams that could be felt all over the galaxy.  The Killers hadn’t attempted to develop quantum entanglement communications technology because they hadn’t needed any such thing.  They already possessed instantaneous communication and transport technology.

“MassMind, come online,” she ordered.  If something went wrong, the MassMind might be required to assist her in dealing with it, or at the very least sucking out all their personalities before the disaster overwhelmed them.  Its reactions were inhumanly fast and competent.  “Link into the system and stand by.”

“Standing by,” the MassMind confirmed.  It housed the personalities and memories of humans who had been involved in such research since it had been created.  Its presence should provide an extra degree of security.  “We are ready to move on your command.”

Paula nodded.  “Switch power to gravity manipulators,” she ordered, slowly.  “Target the gravity beams on the black hole and engage.”

The power rapidly built up as the gravity beams started to flow out of the orbiting platforms and down towards the black hole.  This, Paula knew, was what might convince the Killers to forget the bloody nose they’d received the last time they’d come to the Shiva System and return to destroy her.  Gravity beams had been their exclusive technology.  Now, Paula was manipulating the black hole in front of her, attempting to gain control over it and use it as a power source.  It’s gravity field, immensely strong – even though Shiva was puny, compared to some black holes the human race had observed – seemed to dance and twist as the gravity beams intersected with it, reaching down towards the singularity at the core of the black hole.

She was barely aware of time passing as the gravity beams continued their dance.  The black hole seemed to jump and twist like a living thing – control over the black hole, it seemed, was not as simple as she had assumed – but slowly she wrestled it into submission.  The Killers, she realised slowly, operated on an entirely different principle.  They drained the power from the black hole, used that power to control the black hole, and then funnelled most of the power back
into
the black hole.  The black hole, she reflected, was quite literally paying for its own enslavement.

“Its lucky for them that you’re not intelligent,” she muttered to herself as she continued to probe the black hole.  A group of rather weird Technical Faction researchers had once speculated that intelligent life might develop within a black hole, or that one of the races trying to hide from the Killers might hide
inside
a black hole.  Their theories had provided Paula with some minor amusement, but she hadn’t believed them, even before she’d confirmed her theory that the Killers used black holes for power.  An intelligent black hole would probably have fought back against such abuse.  “If I do this…”

Another hour passed before she finally felt that she had gained complete control over the gravity field.  It seemed to spin in and out from the event horizon – she had expected a simple field, but her gravity beams seemed to be reshaping it somehow – yet she had it jumping at her command.  It hadn’t been easy, but when she sat back, she knew that she had duplicated one of the Killer tricks.  She, too, had enslaved a black hole.

“You need to rest now,” Chris said, rubbing the back of her neck.  Under other circumstances, she would have relaxed into his touch and seen where events led, but now she could barely keep her eyes open.  Her implants were flickering up all kinds of different alarms.  She needed food, drink, a shower and bed, perhaps not in that order.  “Come on.”

She was barely aware of his strong arms picking her up and she had blacked out completely by the time he lowered her into her bed.  Her implants had been configured to put her deep under for at least eight hours, yet somehow she still dreamed, tormented by visions of a demonic black hole screaming under her touch.  The thought snapped her out of her rest far too early and she felt her head spinning before she pushed herself back down into the bed and fell asleep again.  Chris didn’t wake her at the end of the eight hours and it was nearly twelve before she pulled herself awake again.  The MassMind, at least, never slept.

“The black hole is still under your control,” it said, when she asked.  “We have not attempted to do anything beyond studying the exact nature of our control and how we can amplify and simplify the process.”

Paula nodded, midway through stripping off her tunic and stepping into the shower.  “And have you deduced anything new?”

“We have altered the control routines slightly,” the MassMind confirmed, as the hot water began to wash away the dirt and grime she had somehow acuminated on her figure.  “Your original models actually used too much power in the later stages and we have compensated for that.  There are – as yet – no requirements for further modification.”

“Well, thank heaven for that,” Paula said, tartly.  The water felt so good.  The sonic massage felt even better.  It slowly worked all of the kinks out of her body.  “I was starting to wonder if I was still needed.”

The MassMind, perhaps wisely, didn’t bother to answer.  Paula smiled to herself and leaned back in the shower, allowing the water to run over every inch of her body, before she stepped out.  The force curtain between the shower and the remainder of the room tingled over her breasts as it wiped away all the water, forcing an involuntary gasp from her lips, leaving her perfectly dry.  She pulled out a new tunic, provided by the tiny civilian-grade fabricator in the room, and dressed quickly.  Her night had been rough, but at least she felt human again.

”Thank you for putting me to bed,” she said, as she entered the control room and saw Chris on the other side, reading a datapad with a darkening face.  It could have been anything from a military manual to a pornographic video, but she guessed from his expression that it was news from the war fronts.  Mankind and the Killers were trying their best to exterminate each other.  “I hope you didn’t touch anything.”
 

“I’m not that dumb,” Chris said, with a wink.  Paula had to smile at his mock-offended expression.  He really
was
remarkably attractive.  “I just sat here and waited for you.”