Andrew nodded. The ‘planet’ was no planet, but a colossal machine floating in space, nearly twice the size of Earth. The power floating around it made the Lightning’s vast power reserves look like nothing at all. They were insignificant next to its immensity… and, he recalled, he had thought the same about the Killer starships. They thought and built on a scale far beyond humanity.
“That’s no planet, sir,” David said, suddenly. “That’s a space station!”
Andrew laughed — that was a dream of the future when humanity had no idea how harsh the universe actually was — and linked his mind into the computer network. The Cracker was an experimental weapon, developed by the Technical Faction, and no one was entirely sure if it would work. It had been based upon the matter-conversion weapon the Killers had created, but when the Killers had accidentally hit their own ships, the results had been non-existent, as far as their sensors could tell. It took him nearly a minute to clear all of the safety systems and confirm that he did, indeed, have the right to launch the Cracker.
“Take us into firing range,” he ordered. “Once the Cracker is launched, take us out of here, best possible speed.”
“Aye, sir,” David said. There was no amusement in his voice. They all knew that if the Cracker worked as advertised, the results would be… disastrous. “The course is laid in, Captain.”
Andrew nodded as they entered firing range. The absence of any counter-fire bothered him. Had the Killers been so sure of their own safety that they hadn’t installed any defences inside their Dyson Sphere?
“Cracker ready,” he said. Gary should have fired the weapon, but the ultimate responsibility for the ship lay with Andrew. “I am firing… now!”
He keyed the final command sequence into the system and launched the Cracker towards its target. “Get us out of here, now!”
“Aye, sir,” David said. The Lightning rotated in space and zoomed back towards the massive breach in the sphere. The Killer atmosphere, clinging like a wisp to the interior of the sphere, was pouring out of the breach, but it wouldn’t slow them down for a second. The other starships were launching their own Crackers and retreating at speed. The interior of the Sphere was about to become extremely hazardous. “Time to open space; seven minutes.”
“Not good enough,” Andrew hissed. They had to move faster. No one knew just how fast the Cracker’s effects would propagate. The timer rapidly reached zero. “The first Cracker is detonating… now!”
A brilliant flare of white light enveloped the planet-sized machine.
Chapter Forty-Six
It happened very quickly, yet very slowly.
Brent saw it all from his position. The Killers had developed weapons that forced a limited matter-energy conversion over the affected area. The results were almost always disastrous for their target because the energy released was colossal, even through the affected area was often tiny. A planet struck by a thousand atomic bombs would be in a better state than a planet struck by a single Killer weapon. A starship hit by the weapon would be vaporised. It was a very formidable weapons system.
And the Technical Faction had studied it carefully and come up with the Cracker. The Cracker wasn’t as simple a weapon as the Killers had developed, but it actually had a far more interesting internal system. It was partly based on the fission weapon deployed against the Cinder; the effect caused a total matter-energy conversion, but it raced ahead of the explosion, breaking down the quantum bonds that held matter together as it moved. No one was quite sure what would have happened if it had been deployed against the surface of the sphere — although that had been the emergency plan — yet the Killers might have been able to compensate for it. Now the human race knew what was really inside the sphere, they knew that the Killers couldn’t compensate for the mass destruction of all six of their coordination devices. Their unquestioned control over the black hole was about to be challenged.
The explosions defied belief. The entire mass of each of the planetoids was converted into energy, which raced out at the speed of light. The handful of starships caught within the sphere were vaporised by the blast, which instantly sterilised the surface of the sphere and weakened it in a thousand different places. The sphere’s exterior melted and ran like liquid. It was a tribute to the Killers and their awesome industrial capability that the sphere didn’t simply crack like an eggshell. The probes left within the sphere, before they died, showed white light blazing out over the interior and washing away everything the Killers had created. The complex strings of gravity the Killers had formed to control the black hole faded away. They had never been meant to absorb so much energy at once and, as the waves of energy roared into the black hole, lost their cohesion completely. The black hole was still there, still dangerous, but it was no longer part of the Killer Communications Network. At a cost of over ten thousand starships and nearly a hundred thousand lives — as well as however many Killers there had been on the surface of the sphere — the mission had been completed.
“Take us out of here,” Brent ordered. The remainder of the mission was out of his hands. “We’ll regroup at the first waypoint.
“Aye, sir,” the coordinator said. “Jump coordinates being transmitted now.”
One by one, the human starships jumped away from the blazing sphere.
The newborn hadn’t joined the battle, not when it was convinced that the entire war was a disastrous mistake, even though it was an understandable one. It had bent its formidable intellect, unhampered by what every other Killer knew to be true, to the task of successfully communicating with the mite. It had taken encouragement from the fact that the mite was just as keen to talk to the newborn as the newborn was to talk to it and they made rapid progress. They had passed well beyond the simple work when the sphere had been damaged and the black hole communications network had been destroyed.
It knew that it was probably futile, but it had to try. “The mites are intelligent,” it sent, right into the remainder of the communications system. The entire civilisation was reeling. They had never lost so many of their number in a moment, not since the mites had started blowing up stars to destroy their worlds. The spheres had been the linchpin of their power and they had always believed them to be completely indestructible. They knew exactly what the mites had done… and felt true terror. What if they lost the other spheres as well? “We have to learn to talk to them!”
There was no response. The other Killers were too old to take the newborn seriously, even though it dumped the full history of its work with the mite into their communications systems. They couldn’t understand or even conceive of the possibility that the mites might be intelligent; to them, the war with the First Enemy was yesterday. They remembered a time when the Killers were on the verge of being destroyed and refused to allow it to happen again, even though it was happening again. New orders were being dispatched to the remaining starships, sending them out to wreck even more mite settlements and star systems, for what? If the mites were spread out like the Killers themselves, they could lose a few hundred insignificant systems — taking down a few dozen Killer starships in the process — while they concentrated on destroying the remaining spheres. Without the spheres, the communications network would not exist. Without the communications network, the Killer civilisation would not exist. It couldn’t avoid that thought. The mites were on the verge of scoring a victory and it could no longer believe that they had succeeded by accident. There was true intelligence in their actions.