“That would appear to be typical of the human race,” the AI said. “The loss of a single planet will not cripple the Killers, while it will expose human settlements to their retaliation. I do not feel that this is a wise move.”
“No?” Brent asked. “Tell me, then. At which point do we stop running and fight back?”
Chapter Fourteen
Paula was no stranger to walking in space — like everyone born on an asteroid habitat, she’d made her first spacewalk as soon as she could operate a child-suitable spacesuit — but Star’s End was different. Intellectually, she knew that there was no real difference between walking in space back home and at Star’s End, but her hindbrain kept screaming at her about the dangers of floating off into intergalactic space. She kept trying to convince herself that if she lost control, one of the starships or interplanetary bugs would rescue her long before she passed out of the system, yet somehow her mind refused to believe. The presence of the Killer starship, sitting helplessly in a vast framework of sensors and observation units, only added to her unease. The last time she’d been so close to that craft, it had been trying to kill her.
“We, the dispossessed, the outcasts, return our friends to the stars,” the preacher said, her words echoing over the communications link. The first coffin was already moving, pushed out of the magnetic cage and launched towards the star, followed by the second. A handful of bodies had been recovered from the captured starship, but most of the coffins were empty. The Killer weapons, with their complete matter-energy conversion fields, left very little behind to bury. “Their light will shine on our descendents, thousands of years in the future, when all around us is dead and dust. We will not forget them.”
Paula swallowed hard as the next coffin moved past her, heading onwards towards its final destination. She hadn’t grasped the realities of death before, even though she’d seen men die on the Killer starship, for it was true death. The starship crews the Killers had killed hadn’t had time to transmit their final personality recordings into the MassMind. There was nothing left of them, but atoms and memories. Others had been luckier, but only by degree; the MassMind had only fractions of their personalities to integrate. Paula had broken tradition, which mandated that all personalities were forbidden to interact with the living until after the funeral, to check up on them, but the MassMind supervisors hadn’t been hopeful. The personalities were broken and fragmented and, lacking a real sense of self, would probably end up collapsing into the MassMind and losing what remained of their individuality. They would never live again…
There were other possibilities, darker ones. Every so often, something discovered the potential of copying a MassMind personality into a cloned body, allowing a personality to live again, but it was illegal. A newly-born clone brain would be unable to accept the transcribing process, while an adult clone would be a living breathing being in his or her own right. The Community had banned any such experimentation, but in a society where information was free and resources virtually infinitive, someone was probably experimenting without any regard for moral concerns. It shouldn’t have surprised her — all moral concerns had been thrown aside in the desperate fight for survival — but it made her uncomfortable. The human race couldn’t fight monsters by becoming monsters themselves.
“Nelson Oshiro, Argyris Aniketos, Nomiki Dimitris, Tyrone Leff, Clinton Remus, Darryl O’Hare, Tyrone Knobel…” The list of names went on and on. “We bid them farewell and look forward to meeting them again in the land where no shadows fall, knowing now that they shine their light upon us all.”
Paula almost rolled her eyes. She knew, as an astrophysics expert, that the bodies would vaporise as they reached the local star, sending out a brief flare of light that would be almost unnoticed amid the star’s permanent glare. The Deist beliefs never quite made sense to her anyway; they were a strange mixture of Old Earth religions and countless New Age cults that had established asteroid habitats so that they could practice their beliefs away from a sceptical world. The funeral wasn’t for the benefit of the dead, even those who still lived on in the MassMind, but for the living. They had died to give her a chance to unravel the mysteries of the Killer starship.
She looked back towards the Killer ship as the preacher finally came to the end of his sermon. She’d spent the first week being debriefed — and listening to endless lectures from the biological studies professors on how dare she kill the first representative of an alien race — on everything that had happened on the mission, and assisting the researchers to explore the starship’s interior. They had barely scratched the surface of the Killer starship, yet they were already making astonishing discoveries. It would be years before they understood everything that the Killers did so casually, but the new insights were worth their weight in gold…
Except she had a feeling that something was wrong. No one else seemed to think it, but every time she travelled onboard the Killer starship, she had the oddest sense that it was… waiting. It felt like a crowded theatre waiting for the play to open, or a woman waiting for her lover, a silence pregnant with anticipation. No one else had reported feeling anything out of the ordinary — at least for an alien starship large enough to swallow everything else at Star’s End — but she couldn’t escape her worries. They had barely begun to scratch the surface of the Killer starship. God alone knew what secrets it was hiding.
Her suit began to move through space under remote control as the sermon ended, after the final coffin was dispatched towards the star. Now, according to tradition, there would be a loud party and a wake for the departed, but she knew that it wouldn’t be personal. It wouldn’t be focused on one person, a person she knew well, but on all of the dead. She would have preferred to have spent the night on the Killer starship, alone and stark naked, but there was no choice. Even in a post-scarcity society, where she could obtain the resources — if not the permissions — to carry out wherever experiment she felt like carrying out, there were some who were more equal than others. The Technical Faction needed her to show the flag, no matter what she thought about it.
Bastards, she thought, as the burial party was flown towards the massive asteroid settlement. Star’s End wasn’t particularly large, as asteroid settlements went, but it was still far beyond a human scale. Thousands of humans, mainly dedicated researchers, occupied the handful of asteroid colonies, trying to unlock the secrets of Killer technology. A few weeks ago, she would have sold her soul to join them. Now she couldn’t wait to leave.
She took a long breath as the suit rocketed her towards the entrance and through the forcefield that prevented the atmosphere from leaking out of the asteroid. It would all be over soon, she decided. She would shake a few hands, engage in a little polite conversation, and leave as soon as she decently could. It couldn’t be as bad as she thought, could it?
Damned dress uniform, Captain Chris Kelsey thought angrily, as he tugged at the collar. The Footsoldiers normally had the best equipment on hand for anything they needed — and if they didn’t have it, they could practically obtain it on demand. The dress uniforms, however, had been designed by sadists and nothing he could do to his dress uniform could make it comfortable. He wore enough gold braid over the dress blues to outshine the local star — real gold braid, not a substitute — and a hat that was supposed to have been modelled on a real military hat from the pre-space years on Earth. He suspected that it had come from one of the more unstable armies in one of the more unstable nation-states; the soldiers had probably mutinied and launched coups to avoid having to wear the stupid headgear. The sword and laser pistol just completed his utter humiliation.