He shook his head and came out of the download, feeling his skull ache slightly as he opened his eyes. Direct memory downloads always gave him a bit of a headache, but there was no choice. The Technical Faction claimed that, one day, humans would be so perfectly integrated with their mechanical servants that direct memory downloads — and much else — would become as easy as taking a walk, or swallowing a pill. It would be yet another modification of the baseline human form, one that the Elders of New Hope would have hated, but was it necessary? Every generation, Andrew had discovered, questioned just how much more modification was actually required. It was sometimes disturbing to realise how far they’d come from the basic human form.
“No change, sir,” Gary said. The tactical officer sounded concerned, with good reason. “They’re just holding position and waiting for something.”
Andrew tapped into the AI and studied the Killer starship directly. It was a standard Iceberg — if there were internal differences, they were beyond the ability of his sensors to detect — and should have had enough firepower to deal with the remainder of the system with ease. There was actually little in the system to attract its attention; there were no asteroid settlements, as far as Andrew knew, or anything else, apart from New Hope. The Elders had chosen New Hope precisely because it was completely isolated, with no technology to attract the Killers. Their precautions had failed spectacularly.
“Give me a low-level scan of the surrounding system,” Andrew ordered, finally. “I want to know if there’s someone out there waiting for them.”
There was a pause. An active scan, even a low-level one, would almost certainly betray their presence — assuming, of course, that they weren’t already under Killer observation. Andrew smiled suddenly, remembering something his father had told him when he’d visited the asteroid settlement’s fish farms; they’re as afraid of you, son, as you are of them. The thought was ridiculous — the Killers had little reason to be scared of the Lightning — yet it refused to fade. In all their history, had the Killers only lost two starships? Were they actually scared of him?
“I’m picking up nothing apart from a handful of fading ion trails,” Gary reported, finally. “If there’s anything else, it’s too well-hidden for low-power scans to detect.”
Andrew nodded. Ion trails meant warp-capable starships, which probably meant smugglers. Had that been what had attracted the Killers? The Defence Force could track warp signatures at over a hundred light years distant — could the Killers do the same?
An alarm sounded suddenly. “Power surge,” Gary snapped, as Andrew came to full attention, using his implants to snap himself into full awareness. Tiredness was never a problem on a Defence Force starship, but like all things, it had to be paid for eventually. “The Killers are opening a wormhole…”
Before he had finished, the wormhole had already expanded, swallowed the Killer starship, and faded away into nothingness.
“Stand down from battlestations,” Andrew ordered, finally. The Killers might not have had the Anderson Drive, but wormholes allowed them the same degree of strategic mobility as a Defence Force starship. “Helm, set course for Sparta.”
He looked down at the display as the starship’s main drive powered up, preparing to hurl them tens of thousands of light years to Sparta, and — hopefully — new orders.
“Now tell me,” he said, softly. “What the hell was all that about?”
Behind them, a planet burned.
Chapter Nineteen
Sanctuary was the heart of the Community — insofar as the Community had a heart — and the President’s official residence. Like most of the Community settlements, it was based around a cluster of asteroids that housed over a million human beings — as well as countless MassMind personalities — but there the difference ended. Unlike most settlements, which tended to be self-supporting communities in their own right, Sanctuary mainly housed the political civil servants who made the Community work. It wasn’t intended to be a long-term settlement, even though it had existed for over seven hundred years; the Community preferred to keep its political class under control. There were few luxuries or rewards for governing the human race.
President Patti Lydon watched, in person, as the massive freighter settled down onto the hanger deck and opened its hatchways. A tidal wave of humanity swarmed out at once, mainly women and children, helpless and completely dispossessed. A tiny number of medics and security guards — the guards wearing light armour — met them and attempted to divert the swarm into holding chambers, while they performed background checks and handed out medical care. Patti felt her heart break as she watched young children, most of them suddenly orphans, looking around desperately for their parents, parents who would never be seen again. It only took a moment to check the freighter’s name against the constantly updating reports from the Defence Force; the freighter had barely escaped the Hawthorn System, which had since been shattered by the Killers. Anyone left behind, including a handful of Defence Force starships, was almost certainly dead.
In the olden days, Patti reflected, it would be possible to believe, just for a while, that someone had survived. It would be against all logic and reason, but it might just be possible that no news was good news, that the enemy had taken them prisoner rather than simply slaughtering them out of hand. The Killers didn’t take prisoners and drew no distinction between civilian and military humans. The parents, unless they’d escaped on one of the other freighters, were dead. Her virtual vision zoomed in on a child who couldn’t be more than five years old, wearing a light cotton dress and long black pigtails. She looked stunned, as if she couldn’t quite comprehend what had happened or even where she was, but somehow Patti was sure that she suspected the truth. Her life had just been turned upside down.
She pulled up an image of the captured Killer starship and stared at it. Had it been worthwhile, after all? She didn’t know. The human race needed the captured ship to gain insight into Killer technology, but so far there had been few discoveries, although the MassMind was still hopeful of greater success. Patti hadn’t said it aloud, to anyone, but what if there were no discoveries? What if over twenty billion humans had been sacrificed… for nothing? Patti had known that there was little choice — the human race had to defeat the Killers, or be exterminated — but now she found herself wondering if it had been the right thing to do. If they hadn’t captured the Killer ship, would those twenty billion humans still be alive?
And would it end? The first wave of attacks seemed to have come to an end, but there was no reason why the Killers would stop, unless the loss of a second ship had deterred them. Patti had hoped that it would rock them back on their heels, but if they had even noticed, they hadn’t shown any sign of slowing down. Two more Defence Force starships had been lost attempting to repeat the interpenetration explosion, without any success. No one knew — yet — if it had been sheer bad luck, or if the Killers already had a countermeasure deployed. It would be simple, her analysts had suggested, to counter the tactic, once it had been used.
She shook her head, dismissing the virtual armada of icons that floated permanently in front of her eyes, and stepped down to the hanger deck. The smell hit her at once, nearly forcing her to gag before her implanted systems took care of it, the smell of hundreds of humans in close quarters, unwashed and often unwell. The medics were taking care of the children as quickly as possible, but it was a scene out of nightmares, a scene from the days before the human race could feed everyone on one small planet. Patti hadn’t believed some of the old reports from Old Earth, where there had been great abundance and great scarcity within bare miles of one another, but now it was believable. The Community hadn’t been prepared for disaster on such a scale. It was beyond imagination…