“I need you to take out those planets,” she said, almost wonderingly. How long would it take humanity to duplicate the Killer system? It would take centuries to build such a device without the Killers interfering… and they would interfere. They’d attempted to destroy Shiva, after all, and a single black hole was far less dangerous. “I need them shattered, now!”
An alarm rang in her mind, dragging her attention back to Shiva itself. The black hole was osculating wildly, its event horizon shifting without apparent cause. She stared at it through her sensors, through the view she’d developed of the Killer Communications Network, and realised exactly what the Killers had in mind. Aware of her presence, unable to dislodge her, the Killers were attempting to force open an entry and turn Shiva into a wormhole. The sheer power they could bring to bear was daunting; they were already altering the black hole’s vibrating patterns, synchronising it with another black hole somewhere in the galaxy. It was already too late to counter their move. It would be bare seconds before the Killers opened the wormhole and sent something through…
And it could be anything. She’d assumed that they would use it as a bridgehead and launch a thousand ships though it, but it could be something far more dangerous, like a discharge of energy and radiation, enough to melt her station and terminate her control of Shiva. She acted quickly, activating emergency programs she’d created for just this eventuality, and watched grimly as the black hole hiccupped. It made her smile — evidently it had eaten something that disagreed with it — as the black hole vomited, crushing the newcomer — whatever it had been — down to energy and absorbing it into its own power store. Starship or energy burst, whatever it had been, it was harmless now. It probably hadn’t even known what had hit it.
“Keep looking for other possible threats,” she ordered, grimly. It could have been an entire planet, rammed down the wormhole to smash her station into fragments, or an entire fleet of Killer warships. The Killers operated on a scale that she could barely grasp. The full potential of their network was beyond her imagination. “If they try to launch something else thought the wormhole, we need to be ready for it.”
The Killers tried again and again, opening the wormhole, ramming something down it, only for Shiva to catch and devour their weapons. Paula allowed herself to hope that it was only the Killers showing their lack of imagination, but she knew that that was probably foolish. The Killers had created the network in the first place. They probably knew exactly what she was doing to their weapons. They opened new wormholes from different locations, often cross-combining them to confuse her, but the MassMind took over and prevented them from forcing anything through into normal space. They were only adding to her power stores…
Although it probably wouldn’t matter, she knew. They could keep supplying her with entire planets for years and she wouldn’t even have even a tiny percentage of the power they had at their disposal. If the starships succeeded, she could force her way into the network completely or shatter it, but if they failed… it dawned on her, suddenly, that they had a time limit. If the Killers restructured entire sections of their network, they might be able to keep it intact, no matter what she did to it. They would proceed with their plan and that would be the end.
“Incoming,” the MassMind warned. A new wormhole appeared in space, only a handful of light-hours from Shiva. They were sending through individual starships now. Paula reached out with her mind, feeling Shiva’s vast potential vibrating beneath her, and snapped the wormhole out of existence. The Killer starship vanished, either diverted elsewhere or destroyed by the hand of God. A handful of other wormholes appeared and she closed them all, draining their power into the black hole. She wondered if the Killers felt frustration, or helpless rage, as they watched their starships vanish. Could they even feel such emotions?
Her sudden burst of amusement was nearly the end of her. A wormhole snapped into existence and she closed it, but a second materialised only a microsecond later, well outside the remains of the system. It was too far away for her to close before the Killer starship came through the wormhole, heading right towards her. She could feel the waves affecting the fabric of local space-time as it drove towards her position, and the handful of starships on defence duty. They might be able to slow it down, but they wouldn’t be able to stop it.
She thought rapidly as the Defence Force ships opened fire, only to see their implosion bolts deflected harmlessly from the hull. No, she realised; that was wrong. They’d never even touched the hull, but had been bent away from it, like a beam of light near a high-gravity source. She peered at the Killer starship through her gravity telescope, as she had started to think of it, and saw the complex webbing of gravity power surrounding it. It had managed to render itself completely invulnerable. One of the Defence Force starships rammed it and only slammed into its undamaged hull.
“Damn it,” Paula snapped. She opened her mouth to apologise to Chris, who was about to die with her… and then it struck her. It was the work of a moment to reconfigure the gravity fields with the MassMind helping her, refocusing them around the Killer starship’s own gravity field, and then she compressed them rapidly. The Killer starship was crushed like a bug. “Hah!”
She distantly heard Chris’s voice, like someone right at the edge of her mind. “What happened to it?” He asked, desperately. Her head was spinning helplessly. “What did you do?”
Paula opened her mouth to reply, but everything caught up with her at once and she fell into blackness.
The interior of the sphere was surreal, Andrew decided, as the Lightning raced through the interior wrapped only in a protective warp bubble. Without it, they would have been destroyed by the massive tidal waves of gravity spinning through the sphere, but the sheer size of the Killer construction made their heads spin. They were travelling at twenty times the speed of light and it was still taking real time to reach their target. The hundreds of other starships that had broken into the sphere were racing out on missions of their own, trying to parse out just how the sphere worked, or what the Killers actually used it for, apart from power generation.
He found himself looking at the horizon, the massive curving interior surface of the sphere. He’d expected, despite himself, something a human would understand, a surface like Earth. The Killers could have created trees and valleys and gardens and mountains, things that Andrew had never seen in person, outside of short visits to untouched worlds. Humanity had lost so much when the Killers arrived and destroyed their planet. It seemed unfair that the Killers hadn’t even bothered to save something of the worlds they had destroyed.
Instead, there was a strange murky gaseous surface, flickering with the occasional flash of lightning as energy discharged. Some of the starships had launched probes into the mixture, which had reported — in the moments before being knocked out by the lightning — that it was a strange chemical soup, identical in many ways to the observed composition of Killer-infested gas giants. The Killers had probably intended to create a vast living space for their own kind as well as creating a power source; the absence of a sun probably wouldn’t bother them, not like it would have bothered humanity. They already lived so deeply within gas giants that they hadn’t even been aware of the star their world orbited until they drifted up towards the surface.
“We’re approaching the planet now, sir,” Gary said. “I have prepared an antimatter spread, but I would recommend deploying the Cracker.”