Did the Killers wage war on each other? It was so hard to read the endless stream of data running to and from the Killer mind, but she suspected that they probably advanced through conflict, just as humans had advanced before the Killers had arrived at Earth. Even after the Earth had been destroyed, the human race had continued to fight one another, as well as trying desperately to build a workable defence. The Community hadn’t been able to keep much of a dampener on it; indeed, half of the Defence Force was more experienced at fighting fellow humans than the Killers.
Yet humans were ingenious foes, she knew. A human tactician would struggle to overcome the opponent’s advantages and turn their own advantages into war-winning tactics. A human military force that didn’t advance, or advanced in the wrong direction, would lose eventually, whatever it had started with — human history was full of examples of a military force that had remained behind the times too long. A force that failed to adept to new realities was one that wouldn’t remain in existence for much longer.
The Killers, by contrast, hadn’t shown any real improvement in their technology ever since they had been rediscovered, two hundred years after Earth had been destroyed. Their formidable weapons remained the same, their equally-formidable starships hadn’t been improved or redesigned and their tactics remained as direct as ever. They had never shown any hint of understanding subtle tactics, or diversions, or even the value of intelligence. They came, they saw and they destroyed. If humans had possessed equal technology to the Killers, Chiyo was sure, the Killers would have been rapidly and completely exterminated. They might have lost the ability to adapt completely.
She extended her mind carefully into the main data stream — as she had termed it — and listened to the Killer whispers at the edge of her awareness. It was barely possible to understand the whispers she could hear perfectly, yet nothing quite seemed to make sense. It was like being trapped in a nightmare, an unwanted guest in a haunted house, never quite knowing when the ghosts would stop being holograms and turn into real threats. The MassMind would probably have been able to analyse the entire system within seconds, but Chiyo was only human — even if she only existed as a personality within an alien system. There were limits to how far she could extend her mind, even with the aid of her duplicates. There were now hundreds of Chiyo-duplicates running through the system — an act that would have ensured her prosecution if she had carried it out in the Community — but they were all still her. They lacked a different perspective from Chiyo Prime.
I should have studied that textbook on alien systems, she thought, silently cursing the recording implant under her breath — or what passed for breath inside the alien network. The Community had studied hundreds of dead alien societies and cracked their languages — although researchers kept asking awkward questions about how successful the effort had been in the absence of any actual aliens to talk to, apart from the Killers — but Chiyo had never studied any of their work. She’d had the files in her memory implant — if she’d been in a physical body, she would have access to them within microseconds — but she hadn’t even glanced at them, which would have ensured that they would have been in her memory and recorded as part of her personality. It might not have been as useful as she thought — if the Killers really were from a gas giant, instead of a rocky world, they would have little in common with humanity — but it would have been reassuring. Three of her duplicates were already searching for her physical body, hoping that the Killer had kept it intact, but Chiyo doubted that the Killer had bothered. Why should it have?
Another wave of energy swept through the starship and Chiyo allowed her awareness to follow it, becoming aware of powerful waves of energy materialising within the starship’s power cells. The Killer was preparing for something, she realised, and extended her mind further, trying to understand why it was building up such a reserve of energy. She found herself looking out through the Killer’s sensors onto the cold darkness of interstellar space, before a funnel of light shimmered into existence in front of the starship. It took her barely a second to realise that it was a wormhole before the Killer starship advanced and slid into the singularity, the power curves altering and fading away as the wormhole started to draw power from the quantum undertow. The wormhole was, once started, a genuine perpetual motion machine.
Clever, Chiyo decided, as the wormhole stretched on to infinity. No one in the Defence Force had any idea just how quickly the Killers could move in their wormholes, but Chiyo had the impression that the starship was actually picking up speed as it plunged onwards. In the MassMind, there would be referents she could use to calculate speed and time, but inside the alien system, all of the referents would be alien. She didn’t even know how long it had been since she had been absorbed into the alien system; it could have been seconds, or years. There was no way to know.
The wormhole terminated in another wave of brilliant light, leaving the starship floating onwards, gliding towards a star. She was suddenly shockingly aware of the presence of new sources of gravity energy — the star, nine planets and thousands of asteroids — and realised that the Killer was carefully taking stock of its new location. Humanity used gravimetric sensors itself, but the Killer sensors were far superior; it was quite possible that the Killers would be able to detect starships that were completely powered down. If that were the case, it was her duty to warn the defence force before all hell broke loose… but how? She was trapped within the alien system.
A wash of motion passed over the Killer ship as she peeked through the sensor blisters, just in time to see the starship’s destination, right ahead of her. She had hoped that the Killers were visiting one of the star systems they were redeveloping — and the Defence Force had declared off-limits to human investigators, apart from spy probes — but there was no mistaking their target. Up ahead, there were over a hundred settled asteroids, Community asteroids…
And the Killers had come to call.
“Get everyone to the escape craft, now,” Mother Jan snapped, as the shape of the Killer starship grew larger on the display. “Women and children first; men last. Get the automated defence pods up and ready to deploy, but don’t bother with the manned defence ships. Just get them out of here!”
“But Mother,” Harold protested. He was not only her youngest son — which earned him nothing on an asteroid settlement — but also the leader of the local defence unit. “Mother, we could make a stand…”
“And get blasted to atoms without accomplishing anything,” Jan snarled. Harold, in her view, lacked the virtues of his late lamented father; he was brave, loyal and determined, but was far from rational. There was no point in making a stand against the Killers, not unless someone invented a new weapon that would stop even them. She wouldn’t have hesitated to send Harold and his men against human opponents, even spend them ruthlessly if there were no other choice, but the Killers were something different. The only thing the Rockrat community could do was evacuate the entire settlement and try not to leave anyone behind. “Men! Get down to the evacuation centre and coordinate the evac, now!”