“Gravity surges,” Gary said. The humans had barely touched the newcomer. “They’re leaping out again!”
The Killer starship vanished again, leaving behind nothing, but a backwash of gravity distortion. The disruptions in local space-time were dangerous, damaging a dozen destroyers that were too close to the wormhole, but survivable. The human starships could and did compensate for them, but it was a nasty new trick, if a dangerous one. Other Killer starships were using the same tactic, ramming their undamaged hulls into human ships and relying on their hulls to save them from serious damage. The starships that couldn’t adapt to the changing face of war — if the briefing had been accurate, that would be most of the Killers — would probably have been wiped out already.
They broke through into a moment of clear space and he looked down at the overall battle. The Killers had lost no less than fifty-seven craft in less than ten minutes, although it had felt longer. The fighting was raging all over the sphere’s exterior, yet the Killers were — for the first time — forced to fight on the defensive, and they were losing. The handful of remaining Killer starships that weren’t jumping around in their wormholes were being hammered to death even as he watched. The Killers didn’t seem to be sending in new starships. Perhaps they had finally run out of ships, or perhaps they had decided that they were losing too many ships for nothing. Who knew…?
“Gravity surges,” Gary snapped, sharply. A mighty hand seemed to pick up and shake the Lightning. “They’re firing general blasts at us!”
“Who is?” Andrew snapped. No new Killer wormholes had opened near them, yet they were under attack. Space itself was twisting around their position, trying to rip them to shreds. “What are they doing to us?”
“They’re using the sphere itself,” Gary said, slowly. The updates were streaming in from the MassMind, which was watching through their sensors. The sphere was bending time and space around them, deploying its formidable power as a defensive force. Andrew had to admire the sheer power the Killers were deploying, even as he loathed the way they used it; the sphere might succeed in destroying some of the ships, even though they were wrapped in warp bubbles. “I think they’re channelling energy through the… ah, buildings and pushing it out at us.”
“And if they can tap an entire star, they can probably produce enough energy to swat us, eventually,” Andrew agreed. The Admiral was coordinating the remaining part of the battle, but he had no doubt what he would order. “David, take us down towards the sphere. Prepare for a strafing run!”
The sphere was already dominating the horizon, even from light-minutes away. Flying down towards its surface was like flying right at the surface of a planet, with the exact same result if they crashed into the ground. No one was entirely sure what the Killers had used to construct their Dyson Sphere, but the smart money was on something not unlike their hull material, held together by power supplied by the star. Bombarding it with conventional weapons might just be useless, yet even if it wasn’t, it would be… tricky to inflict enough damage to matter. The sphere could lose a surface area a hundred times the size of Jupiter without even noticing…
What do they have inside the sphere? Andrew asked himself, as they zoomed closer. It was impossible to believe that they were not already within weapons range, yet they were still light-seconds away from the target. What do they have inside that will be exposed when we open fire?
The thought nagged at him, even as he checked on the deployment of his attack wing and that of the other attack wings that were closing in on the surface. A human-built Dyson Sphere would have an interior terraformed to look like Earth’s surface; indeed, some of the more outrageous plans put before the Community had consisted of a massive Dyson Sphere that would have housed much of the Community’s population, yet would have been completely undetectable by the Killers. The fact that the news that a Dyson Sphere was under construction would have spread across the galaxy at the speed of light — simple optical observation would have caught signs of the construction program, assuming the Killers had such a system — and in any case, if the Killers discovered the Sphere, the result would have been a quick massacre and the end of the human race.
And yet… what would the Killers have inside a Dyson Sphere? Their own atmosphere — there was no reason why they couldn’t duplicate a gas giant atmosphere inside the sphere — or something else, something more dangerous? It all came back to a different question, the real reason why Dyson Spheres were likely to be impractical, even in a galaxy without Killers. There was a near-limitless supply of Earth-like worlds in the galaxy, so why bother going to the expense of gathering the material and building the Dyson Sphere in the first place? It would be a serious dent even to a post-scarcity society. Just out of curiously, he’d looked it up; it would take the entire Community at least two hundred years to build a Dyson Sphere. The Killers didn’t need to build a fully-fledged sphere just to tap a star, did they? Their technology would have let them take everything they required without the sphere.
“We are entering firing range,” Gary said. His voice was hushed. Perhaps he, too, was thinking of ancient Old Earth fighter jets strafing a city. They would have had comparably limited results until the deployment of atomic bombs. “Weapons are online and ready to fire.”
Andrew slid his mind back into the neural net. “Open fire,” he ordered. “Tactical pattern delta.”
Lightning shivered as she unleashed a spread of implosion bolts on the surface of the sphere, only to see them splash harmlessly against the surface. Other starships, bombarding planet-sized towers and buildings, had slightly more luck, but they were nowhere near punching a hole through the sphere. The explosions didn’t even scratch the surface.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Gary said. It was hardly the most professional of reports, but Andrew couldn’t blame him. “Sir, the implosion bolts are not breaking through! They’re not even having any effect at all.”
“Hellfire,” Andrew hissed. “Contact the MassMind; we need an explanation and we need it now!”
“They’re wondering if the sphere isn’t made out of something they hold together with force fields,” Gary said, after a moment. “If that were the case, the implosion bolts would be useless.”
Andrew clenched his teeth. “Open fire with energy torpedoes, maximum spread,” he snapped. “Order the other starships to concentrate their fire on the same location.”
The starship shook again as it unleashed another spread of weapons. “We’re having some effect,” Gary reported, slowly. “We caused some carbon scoring on the surface. At this rate, we should be through in another few hundred years.”
“Add antimatter weapons to the spread,” Andrew snapped. White blasts flared up from the surface as the antimatter weapons detonated. “Damnation!”
“Wormhole opening,” Gary snapped. “They’re bringing up additional starship!”
Andrew opened his mouth to order a swarm attack, and then something else occurred to him. The new Killer starship was hanging right above the surface of the sphere, held aloft by powerful gravity beams. If it could be destabilised…
“Keep the fleet back,” he ordered, slowly. It was the work of a moment to link into the command network and transmit new orders to the ramming ships. “Go!”