The first ramming ship came out of Anderson Drive and kicked in its drive field, disengaging the safety interlocks as it moved. Without a warp bubble, it wouldn’t move as quickly as the other ships, but it hardly mattered. The faster it was moving in normal space, the more mass it would carry. The Killer starship ignored them; perhaps believing that if they wanted to crash against an undamaged hull there was no reason to prevent them. The ramming fleet crashed home, slamming the Killer ship down towards the surface of the sphere… and it crashed before it could arrest its fall. A massive explosion blew right through the sphere, releasing a deadly blast of hard radiation…
“I think we’ve made a terrible mistake,” Gary announced, grimly. Andrew could only agree. Stars didn’t put out such radiation. Hindsight was mocking him, claiming that it should have been obvious right from the start. “That’s not a star, sir; that’s a black hole. How the hell do we destroy that?”
Chapter Forty-Five
Paula Handley felt as if she were drowning within a virtual universe of data, surrounded by entire galaxies of icons and symbols representing different aspects of the Shiva Control System. She could reach out with her mind into the stream of data pouring through her head and alter anything, affecting the outside universe in ways that would have been impossible, only a few weeks ago. The black hole’s power existed on levels even she hadn’t grasped until they had worked out the full scope of the Killer Communications System. She felt almost as if she could do anything.
She was barely aware of Chris’s hand holding hers, squeezing it from time to time, reminding her of the universe outside. The virtual universe was a world away from the more normal virtual universes that absorbed the attention of so many humans, allowing them to shut out the universe; there was an edge to her private universe that tore at her, sapping her strength even as she fought to control it. She might be powerful indeed, but she was not God, even within the world she’d created. If it started to swing out of control, she might become overwhelmed… and die. The system she’d created was far more volatile than anything the MassMind might supervise. She could feel its presence within the network, guiding her and helping her to hold it all together, but even the MassMind was tiny compared to the universe opening up in front of her.
“We’re lucky we didn’t know about any of this when we started plotting to take a Killer starship,” she said. Her voice sounded weak and tinny in her own ears. She wasn’t even sure if she were talking aloud, or merely thinking. It crossed her mind that she could link into the speakers now and think her thoughts aloud, but she pulled herself away from that distraction. “We would never have dared even thinking about challenging them.”
The Killer Communications Network was more than just a communications network, she saw as it opened up in front of her. It was a vast universe of data and power, roaring away under the skein of the real universe, linked together by thousands of black holes and gravity beams. In hindsight — and hindsight was always so much clearer — she couldn’t understand how she hadn’t guessed that they’d stuck a black hole inside their Dyson Sphere. They seemed to have black holes everywhere else, or perhaps they had started with a star and eventually compressed it down to a black hole. There was no way to know, apart from asking them… and that seemed as impossible as ever. The MassMind, despite its colossal intellect, had made little progress in decrypting the messages spinning through the Killer network. The Killers were transmitting thousands of messages through their network, but it was difficult to trace the source, let alone understand them. They were even gathering their power for something else, channelling it from thousands of black holes, through the network of power links and gravity beams… for what?
“I don’t even know if they’re aware of me, or if they care,” she said, wishing for a moment that she could slip out of the new universe and talk to Chris directly, or someone else. A pair of strong arms wrapped around her would feel very good, but she didn’t dare leave her post. The Killer system had to be monitored; she even had to look at the Dyson Sphere and find a way to destroy it, whatever it took. The more she looked at it, the more she wondered how they even dared think about destroying it. The sphere was so large that it could soak up thousands of antimatter warheads and keep going. “But how do they do it?”
The Killer starship Captain Ramage had crashed into the sphere had broken through the surface, exposing the black hole inside… deep inside. Despite its mass — it was over a hundred times heavier than Shiva, suggesting that the Killers had been fattening it up for centuries — it was still tiny on a stellar scale, allowing the Killers all the room on the interior of the sphere they needed. It would let off bursts of radiation that would make the surface uninhabitable for humans, but the Killers had the technology to shield themselves. The interior was more than just a living space, she saw as the human starships flew inside, searching for targets; it was their industrial complex and nerve centre rolled into one. There had to be a way to knock out the communications network, somehow.
She focused in on the gravity fields surrounding the Dyson Sphere and frowned. She could reach out with all the gravity potential of Shiva and attempt to disrupt the Killer network, but the network would compensate instantly, using the power of thousands of black holes to either push her out, or simply route around her. The odd nature of the communications network meant that she was accessing all of their messages, but they wouldn’t care… and isolating Shiva would be relatively simply. The Dyson Sphere itself seemed to be wrapped in invisible gravity beams, firmly embedded in the universe, its sheer mass daunting to her eyes. How had they even thought of challenging such a behemoth?
The plans humans had developed for Dyson Spheres appeared in her head and she scanned them rapidly, looking for weaknesses. The human plans had been intended to surround entire stars, not black holes, but the principle was the same. They had worried about the danger of literally heating up the entire sphere until the population died from heat stroke, eventually cooking the entire interior. A star pumped out heat all the time and, in an enclosed area, would eventually end up creating an oven large enough to roast planets. The Killers had to have some way to drain off that heat and radiation — no, just radiation. The black hole wouldn’t put out any heat.
She frowned to herself as the images of the interior of the sphere grew in her mind. It was all so frustratingly slow. She had grown up in a universe where data on almost anything was available for the asking — the MassMind and the Technical Faction saw to that — but now she had to wait until the starships actually collected the data. The interior of the black hole was vast beyond imagination. The sensors were draining in data at impossible speeds and yet it was far too slow. If Anderson Drive had worked inside the sphere…
The data flowed into her head and she frowned. There was little in the sphere apart from the black hole and a set of six planet-sized objects. They rotated around the black hole at two AUs from its event horizon, wrapping it in an invisible network of gravity beams that focused and absorbed its power, pushing it away from the sphere and into the Killer network. It was enough power to reach all the way to Andromeda and wipe out the entire galaxy, simply by focusing the beams on each of the stars, sending them supernova one by one. A human mind, even a Hitler or a Stalin, would have recoiled in horror. Somehow, she thought that the Killers would merely view it as an excellent method for strip-mining entire galaxies. The Exodus might have been far less of a bright idea than its leaders had thought.