“And now they will feel inclined to retaliate against us,” Patti said, grimly. “Has there been any sign of a response from them?”
“The Observer is still on station at the scene of the battle,” Admiral Brent Roeder said. “So far, there has been no sign of another Killer starship coming to investigate the loss of one of their ships, or anything else. It has only been a day, however, and we have no idea how quickly they can react to anything so unexpected.”
“We don’t know that it was unexpected,” Patti pointed out. “For all we know, they lose a dozen ships a year.”
“We know that they don’t,” Tabitha corrected, softly. “If they lost starships so frequently, they would be a great deal more careful about what they allowed so close to their ships. They ignored our attack wing until they opened fire and didn’t bother attempting to do more than drive them away. They completely missed the boarding parties until it was far too late. No, I think that we have good cause to believe that no one has ever hurt them like this before.”
“Except for the minor detail that it’s petty,” Jayne pointed out, sharply. “We take out an entire starship; they dismantle entire solar systems. We work on unlocking their science; they react and come after our remaining settlements and worlds. It’s not as if we’ve suddenly developed a new weapon that completely changes the balance of power. How long will it be before we actually manage to incorporate their technology in our ships?”
Arun frowned. “We have several thousand scientists and researchers crawling over the starship at the moment,” he said. “It has, however, only been a day since we brought the ship into Star’s End. We have made some interesting discoveries already, but there’s no way that I can give you a timetable for when we’ll know everything about their ships, or what makes them tick. Don’t mistake me; we are in a better position than we were in last week, but we still have a long way to go before we start looking at technological parity.”
“And they seem to have ignored us, again,” Patti said. “How long will that last?”
“Unknown,” Brent said. “Overall, however, their normal means of operation was to launch an attack on any of our colonies that they encountered. We had no guarantee that they would leave us alone even if we left them alone. Our only other choice was to admit defeat and sail off to some other galaxy, where we might have been discovered again by them, one day.”
“There is no evidence that they possess any holdings outside the galaxy,” Farther Sigmund pointed out. “The survey teams that went through the Clouds found no trace of their presence, or any other form of life.”
“Which does suggest that something scorched those worlds free of life,” Brent pointed out, angrily. “There were hundreds of worlds in the Clouds like Earth, worlds that should have developed their own form of intelligent life. They never did — why? I think the Killers went through the Clouds centuries ago and wiped out any possible source of intelligent life.”
“We never even found ruins,” Farther Sigmund said.
“We can barely operate on Earth now, a thousand years after they blasted the planet into a dead husk,” Brent countered. “The bottom line is that if there is any life in the Clouds, or anywhere else apart from the Killers and us, it’s very good at hiding. There might be entire alien civilisations hidden somewhere in the Milky Way, but as far as we know, it’s just us and the Killers. And, one day, only one of us will survive.”
“And they seem to have the advantage,” Patti pointed out, coldly. “We lost fifty starships on the capture mission; they lost one, which they might be able to recover if they track it down. Hell, is it emitting any kind of signal?”
“Not as far as we can tell,” Arun said. “It appears to be a low-level RF broadcaster, but none of those signals will reach any known Killer outpost for thousands of years; they’re not FTL signals. They may have something not unlike the MassMind, or relay posts held together by quantum entanglement communications links, but we have no way to detect them, any more than they can detect ours.”
Tabitha nodded. Quantum entanglement communications links made use of the principle of quantum uncertainty to link two very distant relay nodes together; by constantly shifting their quantum state, they bound the MassMind together into a galaxy-spanning mind. They couldn’t be linked into without knowing the precise quantum fluctuation pattern and it was impossible, even, to tell if one was being used without inside knowledge. The Killers might be advanced, but even they couldn’t detect one — she hoped. It should have been impossible, but if they could… the entire MassMind would be open to their gaze.
Patti was clearly thinking along the same lines. “And if you’re wrong?”
“If we’re wrong,” Arun said patiently, “the Killers will attack Star’s End and recover their ship. We will have everything we learned in the time between its capture and its recovery — far more than we knew before we launched the raid on their ship — and enough insight to fuel genuinely original science. We may already have enough new insights to develop our own versions of their systems.”
“You don’t know that,” Jayne pointed out. “You just finished warning us that there was no hope of a time table, just… we’d have our discoveries when we had them.”
“And in the meantime, we have reminded them that we exist,” Patti added. “You might have exposed the Community to their notice…”
Tabitha tapped the simulated table angrily. “Enough,” she said, coldly. Her age and general renown kept everyone quiet. If she wasn’t the oldest personality still active, she was definitely the person with the longest history. She was history — and she wasn’t above using it for attention if necessary. “We knew that we had no choice, but to accept the risks and launch the raid. We are no more exposed to them than we were two days ago. We lost High Singapore because we believed that they didn’t care about its existence. We had no choice.”
She looked from face to face, wondering what they were thinking. They could project whatever images they liked in the MassMind; they could certainly use filters to keep their faces under firm control, even catching anything that accidentally slipped out of their mouths. She couldn’t blame Patti and Jayne for being worried about what the Killers might do in retaliation, but the destruction of Earth had convinced her that there was no room for doubt — it was humanity, or the Killers. There was no room for coexistence.
“And there is nothing to be gained from constantly rehashing the decision and bemoaning the risks,” she continued. The Community’s politics were considerably less poisonous than the ones she remembered from Old Earth, but at the same time, it’s very decentralisation made it harder to agree on a coherent policy. “We knew what we were doing when we launched the mission and now we succeeded… we can reap the fruits of success.”
Unbidden, the term catastrophic success rose to the top of her mind. Back on Earth, with an endless war against all kinds of wreckers and terrorists, the term had referred to defeating an enemy force without having the manpower to hold the ground afterwards, allowing the enemy to come back and rebuild their influence without a serious fight. The Killers had been poked hard. They’d definitely respond in some way, but how? How much of the Community was exposed to their sensors? No one knew.