“They don’t have any defences anyway,” Andrew said, grimly. It hadn’t taken a moment to review the information on New Hope… and what he’d found appalled him. New Hope had been founded by colonists who had believed that the Killers were God’s punishment on a sinful humanity and that, if they avoided technology and prayed heavily, the Killers would leave them alone to build their paradise. It was obvious now that they’d been disastrously wrong. The Killer starship closing in on the planet was ample proof of that. “They’re completely pre-technical. They don’t even have matchlocks or cannons.”
He felt his teeth clench. The Community had watched New Hope and concluded that the colonists had managed to create a hell for themselves, rather than a paradise, but there had been no grounds to interfere. The Community didn’t have the legal right to intervene even when human rights were being shredded by other humans and an attempt to do so would have started a civil war. Very few humans would have tolerated New Hope willingly, but the precedent would have worried at least two-thirds of the Community. Who cared about New Hope when the entire Community was at stake?
The reports had concluded that the Elders of New Hope had, accidentally or deliberately, removed most of the genetically engineered modifications that their children would have otherwise inherited. New Hope wasn’t that habitable, but Andrew could have survived there indefinitely, relying on his modified body to handle the poisonous plants and animals. A baseline human from Old Earth would have suffered from all kinds of deficiencies… assuming, of course, that they didn’t eat anything lethal and die before they realised the error. The Elders had also deliberately lost most modern medical techniques, even techniques and medicines that had been developed a long time before humans had stopped believing that the Sun went round the Earth. It was disgusting, to Andrew’s mind, but they were still human. They didn’t deserve to die…
“The Killers are opening fire,” Lieutenant Gary Young reported. The tactical officer put up the main display without even being asked. Andrew watched in far too much detail as streaks of white light lanced out of the Killer starship and struck the planet, devastating the entire biosphere. Anyone lucky enough to survive the first blast — which had come down on top of the largest city on the planet — would soon wish that they had died with the others. It wouldn’t be long before their wish was granted. “They’re just… hammering the planet at random.”
“They don’t have to be subtle, Lieutenant,” Andrew reminded him. “Helm, keep us at a safe distance and prepare to trigger the Anderson Drive if they come at us.”
“Aye, sir,” Lieutenant David Dunagin said. “I have a course laid in and ready.”
John Wagner was young, too young. “Sir,” he protested, “shouldn’t we be doing something?”
The desperation in his voice convinced Andrew not to snap at him. “There’s nothing we can do, Ensign,” Andrew said, seriously. If the report of a single Killer starship being destroyed was accurate — and the MassMind hadn’t passed on more than vague details — it might be possible to intervene, but how? If the Lightning attacked, the Killers would either ignore them or open fire… and keep firing until they picked off the gnat that had dared to confront them. “All we can do is watch, and bear witness to the fall of New Hope.”
The Killer weapons couldn’t — thankfully — convert the entire mass of the planet into energy. If they had, the result would have been a small supernova, but the devastation they caused was quite enough to exterminate any life on the surface. A single hit would probably have wiped out all of the human settlers, yet they kept firing until the planet was rendered lifeless. The massive clouds of radiation, the dust in the atmosphere, the shockwaves that would have knocked down any human construction… all ensured that the planet was thoroughly dead. The Killer starship halted its firing pattern and waited, for what? Andrew frowned. Normally, the Killers arrived, destroyed, and vanished again. Were they waiting for someone to meet with them?
“Hold us here,” he ordered, watching the Killer starship carefully. If it had sensors equal to human technology, it shouldn’t be able to detect the Lightning, but Andrew had assumed from the start that the Killer knew exactly where they were. “John, dispatch an updated warning to Sparta and inform them that we are… observing the target.”
He heard John’s sniff and considered calling him on it, but there was little point. He wanted, desperately, to engage and destroy the Killer starship, but how? The most they could do was distract it, if that, and only then if the Killer took the bait. There was no point any longer anyway; even if they had had a Killer-killing weapon — the thought made him smile grimly to himself — New Hope would have been destroyed anyway. The Killers had wiped out the entire planet’s population. The explosions were detectable even at several AUs distant and no one, not even someone using the latest Community technology, would have survived.
“Captain,” the AI murmured in his ear, “I have the latest update from the MassMind. Do you wish to review it?”
“Snap me out if anything changes,” Andrew ordered. “Show me.”
The update unfolded rapidly in his brain, a direct information download. The Killers had retaliated for the capture mission, on a scale that defied belief. A hundred settlements, including several dozen that everyone had believed were beyond detection, had been destroyed, with billions of fatalities. A hundred Defence Force starships had been destroyed, directly or indirectly, while over fifty civilian ships had been picked off while they tried to evacuate people from the settlements. It didn’t look as if the Killers had intended to massacre fleeing civilians — they could have killed millions more if they had been so inclined — but it hardly mattered. The devastation had been shattering. Merely accommodating the refugees would stretch the remaining settlements to the limits.
On one scale, the attacks had been tiny, a drop in the literally millions of hidden settlements and human outposts scattered across the entire galaxy. The Community numbered in the trillions, after all, even if they didn’t count the ships that had headed right outside the galaxy, either to the Clouds or further beyond. On the other, it was just another reminder of the sheer power the Killers possessed… and those other settlements might not remain safe indefinitely. If the Killers maintained their attacks, the other settlements might be destroyed as well, leaving the human race scattered across the galaxy, doomed to die out, like the Ghosts and countless others. Andrew stared into the face of the future, a truth that the Elders of New Hope had sought to escape, and shivered. There was no escaping reality.
And yet… a single Killer starship had been destroyed.
Andrew reviewed the download, such as it was, and cursed. Cochrane Twists were rare, even when the enemy was cooperating; the sheer speed of the warp drive ensured that starships rarely interpenetrated and destroyed each other. The tactic had actually been designed for warp missiles — which were generally fired at other targets moving at FTL speeds — yet even warp missiles, which were expendable by definition, couldn’t guarantee an interpenetration event. It was easy to tune a low-level warp field to prevent interpenetration and that, the Defence Force had assumed, had been what the Killers had done. God alone knew that they had all kinds of technology that humans could barely imagine, let alone duplicate. Why shouldn’t they have warp drive as well?
Apart from the fact that they don’t have warp fields when they move at FTL, or even a warp signature, he reminded himself. No warp field; no warp drive.