Andrew sat down carefully. A direct summons from the Admiral was unusual, yet he’d had two such summonses within a fortnight. It normally meant either a dangerous mission or a chewing out for some misdemeanour, yet he couldn’t think of anything he might have committed to earn a chewing out, unless it was not challenging the Killer starship at New Hope. It would have gained nothing and cost the Defence Force his starship, but if the Admiral decided not to see it that way…
“I read your report on what happened at New Hope,” Brent said, without preamble. “I can’t disagree with your decision not to engage; the planet was lost and there was no way to evacuate the settlement, even if they would have gone. The Elders would have fought and argued until it was too late. You did the right thing.”
“Thank you, sir,” Andrew said. He hadn’t expected a charge of Cowardliness in the Face of the Enemy, but with the war going badly, it was possible that the Defence Force would start looking for scapegoats. He would sooner have died than give up the Lightning and retire. “Why did we even allow them to set up that damned colony anyway?”
“We couldn’t prevent them, legally, if they believed that they were safe,” Brent admitted. “If they had settled within a hundred light years of a Killer star system, we might have been able to deter them, but there were no known settlements within a thousand light years of New Hope. It means nothing with wormholes and the Anderson Drive, but the Elders believed that they were safe on a barely-habitable world. They were wrong.”
He shook his head, dismissing the issue. “In any case, I have a more… interesting task for you,” he continued. “Watch carefully.”
An image of a star system appeared in front of Andrew and he studied it. It was a fairly typical star system with seven planets, four of them gas giants and therefore possible Killer colonies. The remainder of the system was nothing particularly special; there were asteroids, comets and various pieces of space junk. The largest gas giant was surrounded by beautiful rings, but Andrew had seen thousands of gas giants with comparable natural features and wasn’t impressed. Now, knowing that the gas giants might house billions of Killers, the beauty became a deadly trap. Saturn was still a major tourist attraction, back in the Solar System, but were they attracting the Killers? There was no way to know.
“This is CAS-3473746,” Brent said. Andrew frowned; the CAS — Community Astrograph Survey — designation meant that no one had even bothered to give it a proper name. “The system was surveyed five hundred years ago and considered as a possible location for a settlement, but — thankfully — we never actually established anything there beyond a handful of fuel deports. The Observer fled to this system and…”
The display changed, focusing in on the large gas giant… and the Killer starship emerging from the mists, rising up to confront the human intruder. Andrew stared; humanity could accomplish wonders — and would accomplish more wonders when the Killers were finally defeated — but nothing the Community had could lift so much mass out of a gas giant’s gravity well. The Killer starship might not even have noticed the human starship racing towards it, or perhaps it was playing games with its comrade, pushing the Observer into a trap it couldn’t escape. Andrew remembered the starship’s commander, who had picketed a Killer starship until it had been captured, and scowled. There would be revenge for that day.
“This,” Brent continued, “is CAS-3473746-6; the sixth planet in the system… and a known Killer colony. I don’t think I need to spell out some of the possible implications to you.”
Andrew nodded. Humanity had always assumed that the Killers had started life as humanoids, born on an Earth-like world, and they had believed that locating the Killer homeworld was only a matter of time and patience. If the Killers lived on gas giants instead, the Community might have its own settlements right next door, in the asteroid fields. The two societies might be living side by side, neither one truly aware of the other. Back in the early days, mining the gas giants had been a vital part of survival; it made him wonder if the Killers had simply ignored them, or if they had been lucky enough never to stumble across a Killer homeworld.
But humanity would have colonised as many worlds as it could. There were literally millions of Earth-like worlds in the galaxy, or worlds that could be terraformed into becoming habitable by humanity. The human race would have expanded rapidly even without the Killers, settling on those worlds and turning them into new human settlements. The Community had only a handful of planetary settlements — including places like New Hope, which didn’t even pay lip service to the Community — but without the Killers, there would be a rapid expansion. The Killers might have settled every gas giant in the galaxy. God knew; they’d been around long enough.
Andrew recalled, not for the first time, the old Fermi Paradox. Fermi had asked where the aliens were — and concluded, because no alien race had arrived at Earth, that there were no other races in the galaxy. Fermi might have been right, had he anticipated the Killers, wiping out all humanoid forms of life and settling gas giants. Races that might have been humanity’s friends and allies, or deadly enemies, had been exterminated a long time before humanity had learned to rub two sticks together to make fire. If there was anything left of the Ghosts, or countless others, they were hiding very well.
And Fermi had concluded that even without FTL, it would only take a million years or so to settle the entire galaxy…
“The important thing about the system is that it is hundreds of light years from anything above a minor settlement,” Brent explained. “It makes it a perfect target.”
Andrew frowned. “A target, sir?” He asked. The massed power of the Defence Force would break like an egg against any Killer star system. “Do we have a way to break their hulls yet?”
“Maybe,” Brent said. “However, your mission is to destroy two things; the planet itself and the star.”
He pushed on before Andrew could say anything. “We have developed two new weapons that are ready for deployment,” he said, shortly. Andrew had the odd impression that he didn’t quite believe his own words. “The first weapon is configured to wreck vast damage on a gas giant, perhaps even ignite it like a sun and exterminate any Killer settlements floating down in the mists. The second will send a star supernova and blast the entire system. You will deploy the first weapon against CAS-3473746-6 and the second against its star.”
Andrew nodded, concealing his surprise. “And… what effect will it have on them?”
“We don’t know,” Brent said. “There was a lot of debate about the first targets for the weapons, but CAS-3473746 has one advantage; they don’t have any major structures surrounding the star, ones that might be able to prevent the supernova. We’re in uncertain territory here, Andrew; we may fail to destroy the planet, but the expanding supernova blast will cook it regardless.”
“I see,” Andrew said. “How exactly do the weapons work?”
”Classified,” Brent said. “And I mean classified. You won’t know how they work, nor will anyone else onboard your vessel, or anyone — for that matter — outside the development centre. If the Killers capture your ship intact and figure out how we do it…”
“They’ve never taken prisoners before,” Andrew pointed out. The Lightning would probably be destroyed, as ruthlessly as the Killers had wiped out entire fleets. “Could they understand what they’d captured even if they did take us prisoner?”
“We’re not taking chances,” Brent said. “There are… ah, political considerations as well. Let’s just say that we don’t want to cause an arms race or a panic inside the Community as well. There’s also the issue of how the Killers will react when they realise that we can take out entire stars. They may attempt to capture your ship just to find out how it was done. If they do…”