Chiyo had read, once, a theory that life moved from star to star as spores drifting in space, rather than being carried on starships. If that were true — and no one had proven it in a thousand years of space exploration — it might explain why the Killers used massive overkill on their targets, but why would they believe that? It made much more sense, to her, that the Killers were not only wiping out present threats — however laughable — but also all possibility of future threats from their target worlds. It was possible they didn’t understand humanoids at all… hell, they might even believe that humans, and the Ghosts, and the countless other races that had encountered the Killers and hadn’t survived the experience were the same!
She pushed that thought aside as the wormhole opened up again and the Killer starship vanished from the universe. Whatever happened to her personality, she had to let the Community know what she’d discovered, before it was too late. The Killers were hunting humanity down like rats.
And if they kept hitting asteroid settlements, they’d break the Community into a million isolated settlements that could be wiped out, one by one, and the human race along with them. It would be the final end.
Chapter Eighteen
Charlie Reynolds scowled as she knelt down under the Good Bush and started to pick the berries. There would be a good crop of berries this year if the sun kept shining down on New Hope, but the fifteen-year-old girl wasn’t enthusiastic at all. Picking the berries was hard work and then they had to be mashed, boiled and then stored for several weeks before they were even remotely good to eat. There were men and women on New Hope who had expired ahead of their time from eating Good Fruit berries, but what else could they eat? There were so few things on New Hope that humans could eat safely at all.
The Elders swore that God would provide, as He had provided before, but the younger men and women suspected otherwise. The Elders had come down from the stars to create New Hope — a colony where the sinfulness of the human race would be redeemed, sparing them the destruction that had swept billions of humans away in a massive flood — and insisted, firmly, that hard work and prayer would turn New Hope into a paradise. Charlie agreed with the others of her generation; the more they worked New Hope’s soil, the smaller the amount of yield. Charlie didn’t know much arithmetic — maths was no proper skill for a girl, said the Elders, or a young man — but it seemed obvious to her that the end result would be starvation and death. No amount of grovelling in front of an altar the Elders had placed in the centre of the village would change that. Charlie was the fifth child of her parents, the first to survive to maturity, and the great hope of her parents. There were times when she wondered, keeping the thought privately to herself, if New Hope was not God’s Chosen, but God’s Enemies. Nothing else seemed to explain why they could barely grow food in seemingly-fertile soil.
But another kind of fertility occupied her thoughts, distracting her so that she pricked herself on one of the thorns. Inquisitor Johan had asked her parents for her hand in marriage — and you didn’t say no to the Inquisitors, or share your secret thoughts with them, not if you valued your life. The Inquisitors had burned her old teacher only seven months ago for daring to suggest to the children that there were truths beyond that which the Elders knew — and he had been an Elder himself! The Elders might live longer than the younger generation, but Charlie had thought that that was far too harsh — although she hadn’t dared say that aloud. The Inquisitors wouldn’t have hesitated to burn her as well, along with her family. No, there was no doubt; her parents would tell her officially, soon enough, that she was to be Johan’s bride, and that would be the end of it. She would marry him, he would take her to his bed, and…
She wasn’t quite sure of what would happen next, but she doubted that it would be pleasant. The girls of the village whispered to one another of what some of the men were like, and Johan was one of the worst. His position made him unquestionable and, as the food supplies fell further, he had turned into a threatening bully. No one dared question him and few dared remain alone with him, male or female. He was the most feared person in the village. Her parents wouldn’t even dare ask for a heavy dowry for her, even though Johan could have paid with ease.
If I’d been born a man… she thought, but it was wishful thinking. The younger generation of men had slightly more freedom than the women, but they would die too when the food supplies ran out, or perhaps in fights when they couldn’t get married. The young women were all being married off to the Elders, or their servants, those who had the influence or power to demand whatever they wanted. Charlie knew that she might even be one of the lucky ones; Johan, at least, was young and wealthy. She knew girls who had barely passed their first blood before being married off to Elders who were ancient. Her parents had made no secret of the fact they had wanted a son… but their two sons had all died in infancy. It just wasn’t fair.
She stamped her foot impatiently and stood up, looking back towards her parent’s cottage. Being late, even now, would have drawn harsh punishment from her father, but being outside, even in the garden, was the only time when she felt free. It was just an illusion — she cast a wistful look towards the muddy track leading out of the village, towards other villages she’d never seen and never would — but it was all she had. She turned, picking up the basket, and then she saw the flash of light in the sky,
The Elders swore that there was nothing beyond the blue-black sky of New Hope, and that the points of light in the darkness were nothing more than God’s decorations, but she could see that there was something coming closer and closer to the village. It looked like a falling star, drifting off to the left as she watched, as if it was going to come down somewhere beyond the mountains. They dominated the horizon and added to the sense of being hemmed in, although some of the young men had once set off to climb them — and never returned. The spark of light came down… and the entire horizon lit up with a blinding flash of light. A moment later, the shockwave picked her up and threw her right over the village. She had a bare moment to realise that she’d escaped Johan, her parents and life itself, before the wave of energy wiped her out of existence.
“They haven’t replied to our messages, sir,” Ensign John Wagner said, from the communications station on the bridge. “They’re completely defenceless.”
Captain Andrew Ramage nodded bitterly. The Lightning had been on a training mission since the attack wing had been decimated by the Killers, a fancy way of saying that the surviving starships would probably be assigned to new attack wings, once more starships rolled out of the fabricators. If nothing else, the successful capture of the Killer starship had encouraged tens of thousands more to sign up with the Defence Force, which was now having problems absorbing all the excess manpower. They’d been on a routine pass ten light years from New Hope when they’d detected the Killer wormhole and Andrew had ordered an intercept course. They’d reached the New Hope system in time to see the Killer starship on final approach to the planet… and charging weapons.