Paula gave him an odd look. “Are you a woman?”
“No,” Chris said, with a half-leer. “I’m all man, with a bit of animal thrown in. Roar!”
“Twit,” Paula said. Chris laughed out loud. “I never even thought about becoming a man.”
“I never even thought about becoming a woman, or a Spacer,” Chris agreed. The Community allowed perfect sex changes at will and it wasn’t unknown for civilians to change sex several times in their lives, but Defence Force personnel tended to be more stable and secure in their identities. Spacers, by contrast, cut themselves off from gender, literally. They were effectively tiny spacecraft in their own right. “I always thought I was perfect.”
Paula laughed. “I always wanted to become a researcher and everything else could go hang,” she said, dryly. “And now… I seem to have to spend time shaking hands and telling everyone what fine work we’re doing, instead of exploring the alien ship.”
She paused. “You’ve been exploring the ship and laying beacons and probes as well,” she added. “Do you have any… sense that the ship is still alive?”
Chris felt his eyes narrow. “Now you come to mention it,” he said, “there’s something about the inside of that ship that makes my skin crawl. It’s not a human ship, but I’ve been through Ghost wreckage and I didn’t have the same reaction to their ships.”
“Me too,” Paula said, “but there’s nothing the Ghosts built that we couldn’t duplicate. They were actually more primitive than we were when the Killers arrived, while the Killer ship is beyond our current understanding. I just keep having the feeling that the ship is biding its time and preparing to make its next move.”
Chris opened his mouth to say something, but he was interrupted by a FLASH RED alert signal from the Defence Force, coming directly in through his implants. One look at Paula’s horrified face told him that she was hearing the same message. A major Community system was under attack.
The Killer retaliation had begun.
Chapter Fifteen
The massive sensor array was large enough to envelop an Earth-sized planet comfortably, yet so thin and gossamer that a single tiny asteroid could wreck hideous damage on its system. It had grown up over the years from a tiny cell of nanites placed on an asteroid by a human starship, supervised by an AI called IQ-HI, configured to scan for signs of alien activity over thousands of light years. It was a task demanding inhuman patience, watching vast areas of space for tiny spikes of energy that might mark the existence of a hidden civilisations yet IQ-HI didn’t mind. The AI had no sense of time passing, or any capability for boredom. It had more than enough to keep even its vast mental facilities occupied.
Its watch for distant flickers of energy was suddenly disrupted by a massive energy spike bare thousands of kilometres from the array. The wave of energy was so intense that it blinded hundreds of different sensor nodes on the array, forcing IQ-HI to rapidly reprioritise its systems to handle the sudden overload. The wave of energy kept building rapidly, finally stabilising into a massive gravity singularity. IQ-HI compared it rapidly to every known natural event in its memory banks and concluded that it wasn’t a natural phenomenon. Microseconds passed as it checked and rechecked, before reluctantly deciding that the only known source of such power were the Killers. It sent an emergency signal back to System Command and retuned its sensors again. Priority One orders were to record and analyse anything to do with the Killers, even at the expense of more theoretical studies. It had no capability to feel annoyed at the interruption, but if it had had such a capability, it would have done so. It hadn’t been built to respond to every little piece of interference from so-called intelligent beings.
The wave of energy focused into a funeral and then into a wormhole. IQ-HI recorded the sudden shift in power rapidly, noting the arrival of a massive object from somewhere across the galaxy. A lucky shift in the wormhole’s position revealed a glimpse of a star on the other side, wherever it was, allowing IQ-HI to compare it to the massive database of stars in the galaxy. It only took additional microseconds to confirm that the other end of the wormhole was alarmingly close to the galactic core. In the time it took the AI to determine the terminus, four more Killer starships had arrived, accelerating away from the wormhole at sublight speeds. They could have moved quicker, but apparently they were in no hurry — or perhaps the Killers only thought as fast as fleshy humans. The AIs wondered, sometimes, if the Killers were rogue machines, rather than living creatures. It might have explained quite a bit.
It watched dispassionately as the wormhole folded down and faded away, leaving only gravity shockwaves as proof that it had ever existed. Absently, subroutines began to analyse the sheer level of power the Killers had displayed, calculating just how much power they would require to create such a wormhole. No known power source would suffice, unless they actually risked generating the wormhole and keying it to drain power from the quantum foam. The human race had attempted such experiments in the past, but they had always ended badly, destroying the research stations. If the Killers had mastered such technology, it would merely make them a more formidable threat. Their five starships possessed enough firepower to lay waste to the entire system.
And they were accelerating towards the array. An AI, unlike a human, had no room for wishful thinking. At the very least, IQ-HI concluded, they were going to smash straight through the array and destroy it. It would almost certainly terminate IQ-HI’s existence. The AI worked rapidly and uploaded its findings into the MassMind, knowing that more powerful minds would use its readings to generate their own theories, perhaps gain new insight into how the Killer technology worked, before concluding with a compressed copy of itself. Unlike a human, an active AI mind-pattern could be downloaded into another AI core, or even allowed to run freely in the MassMind. It would live again.
It noted the power spike building on one of the Killer craft and added its sensor readings to the upload. The power seemed to build achingly slow — a human would have barely been aware of any delay at all — but eventually the pulse of white light leapt towards the array. There was a brief moment of pain as the array disintegrated — it regarded sensor damage as pain — and then darkness.
Every alarm in the Asimov System Command Centre was going off at once.
“Shut that racket down,” Captain Thomas Mandell barked. The five massive red icons that were proceeding in towards the heart of the system needed no explanation. The day he’d dreaded ever since assuming the position was finally here, yet nothing, not even the most advanced simulations, had prepared him for this moment. “What is their ETA?”
“They will enter firing range of the main cluster in twenty-one minutes,” his tactical officer reported. Every sensor in the system was focused on the incoming Killer starships. It crossed his mind that any number of pirates and smugglers were probably making their escape while the Defence Force was distracted, but that was hardly a serious concern. They might be the only survivors of the system. “They will be in firing range of mining craft and a handful of tourist ships within ten minutes, unless they change course.”
“Order the tourist ships to jump out now,” Mandell ordered, grimly. A day ago, everything had looked so peaceful. Now he was going to watch as the Killers tore his home system apart. “Contact the mining craft and tell them to pull as many men and women off the platforms before they have to run.”