“Aye, sir,” David said. The starship started to fall inwards towards the gas giant. At such a distance, the gravity pull was almost nothing, but their trajectory would look reasonable. A human defence unit would have fired in any asteroid that came that close to an inhabited world, but what would the Killers do? “We’re on our way.”
Hours passed slowly as Andrew waited on the bridge, watching the sensor records and examining the data on supernovas. There would be a massive pulse of radiation that would be dangerous to any starship or settlement without proper shielding, enough to damage all of the planets within a hundred light years, perhaps more. The mass destruction of stars would leave thousands of dead or damaged worlds surrounding the dead stars, but there would still be millions more for humanity to settle, if the Killers were defeated. Andrew himself hadn’t dared to think about what he would do without the Killers, yet if he could chose, it wouldn’t be living on a planet. The asteroids were much safer for humanity.
“Contact,” Gary said, suddenly. “I have one Killer starship, Iceberg-class, rising out of the planet and heading away from us.”
“Show me,” Andrew ordered. “Put it on the main screen.”
He felt a shiver running down his spine as the Killer starship slowly rose out of the atmosphere, showing no visible trace of struggle, or any difficulties at all. Andrew could have taken the Lightning down into the planet’s atmosphere, but the Lightning was tiny, compared to the Killer starship. He wondered, absently, where the Killer starship was going, and then he found himself hoping that it would remain in the system long enough to get caught by the blast. Would their hulls stand up to a supernova?
“We are now entering weapons range,” Gary said. “We can fire on your command.”
Andrew took a breath. They were about to kill an entire planet. The irony wasn’t lost on him.
“Fire.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lightning shook as the missile was fired, racing down towards the planet below.
“Bring up the Anderson Drive,” Andrew ordered, tightly. “Prepare to jump us out on my command… no, belay that. I want us to be out of here if there is a major eruption. Configure the AI to jump us out of here automatically.”
He watched as the tiny icon raced down towards the gas giant. No one had been able to say just when the weapon would reach critical mass and detonate, or even if it would survive long enough to detonate. The Killers might realise that there was a threat and launch countermeasures, or it might be destroyed by an unexpected natural threat. No one knew that much about conditions inside a Killer gas giant, or even if they differed from other gas giants. There was no way to know for sure.
“I’m picking up low-level RF transmissions, but nothing else,” Gary said, flatly. “I’m not even sure if they’re artificial or natural transmissions. There’s no way to tell if the Killers are on the alert, or if they’re just… natural.”
“Record them anyway,” Andrew ordered. A gas giant was a failed star, to all intents and purposes, and a natural radio source. No one had realised that the Killers inhabited the gas giants because they had always assumed that the radio sources were natural. It suggested that it would be difficult to tell the difference between a, inhabited gas giant and an uninhabited one, unless there was some other way to detect their presence. The Killers could have build cities to rival the greatest cities on Old Earth under the clouds and no one would be any the wiser. “Where’s our weapon?”
“Entering the atmosphere now,” Gary reported. “I’m picking up increased distortions within the atmosphere, but again, it might be natural.”
“I doubt it,” Andrew said. A flare of light, larger than the surface area of Old Earth, flared down amid the gaseous atmosphere. A moment later, another followed it, and another, sending the passive sensors quivering in alarm. Down below, the gas giant was being ripped apart. “Keep watching…”
“Sir, the Killer starship has halted its course,” Gary said, suddenly. “I think it’s noticed that something is badly wrong.”
Another flare of light lit up the entire gas giant. “I think it’s too late,” Andrew said. The radiation flare from the gas giant was constantly increasing. He wouldn’t have wanted to risk taking even a heavily shielded starship any closer, not now that the gas giant was tearing itself apart. “Stand by to get us out of here.”
“New contacts,” Gary snapped, sharply. “I have at least seven Killer starships trying to rise out of the atmosphere, three of unknown design… my God.”
Andrew followed his gaze. Four of the Killer starships were the same traditional design, exactly like the starship that had bombarded Earth into a radioactive nightmare. The remaining three were even larger, massive irregular structures that seemed too large to exist, let alone fly under their own power. The gravimetric sensors were going crazy; the massive ships seemed somehow to bending gravity around them, pushing them away from the planet. The flares of light seemed to reach up towards one of the ships, there was a massive explosion, and the ship vanished.
Andrew didn’t cheer. There was something sobering about watching the Killer cities — he was sure that that was what they were — fighting for life. They weren’t warships, or even vital systems, but civilian habitations, lacking the powerful defences of the Killer starships. The growing waves of destruction would wipe them out before they could escape, even with the help of their escorts — if twenty-kilometre long warships could be termed escorts. He watched in silence as more and more cities broke atmosphere, only to be destroyed by teeming surges of energy. The Killers, for once, were on the run.
“Power surge,” Gary snapped. “I recommend…”
The drive cut in. An instant later, they were halfway across the star system.
Deep within the gas giant, the weapon finally released the energy it had gained from splitting billions upon billions of atoms, rendering the atmosphere of the gas giant into fuel for its own destruction. It had sucked in the atoms, split them and released half of the energy, which had started a fission effect racing through the entire gas giant at the speed of light. The early surges in energy hadn’t even touched the inner core of the massive planet; now, the fission effect was becoming supercharged. Seconds after the weapon finally lost cohesion and vaporised, the gas giant burned like a new-born star.
A tidal wave of radiation and energy burned through the upper atmosphere and vaporised the remaining Killer installations and free-floating entities. The ships and cities struggling to escape before the planet exploded didn’t stand a chance. The fires reached out for them, enveloped them, and consumed them. The handful of ships that had reached safe ground were still roasted and damaged, leaving some of them to fall back down towards the burning planet. Others, further away, opened wormholes and slipped out of the system completely, fleeing to safer ground, while a handful waited to see if they could salvage anything from the disaster. It was too late to save any of their remaining comrades. The entire planet had been killed.
“Report,” Andrew snapped. “What happened?”
“The planet blew,” Gary reported. “The sensors read the massive gravity flux and jumped us out before the first waves could reach us. I doubt that we could have survived even at our distance from the planet.”
“Show me,” Andrew ordered. An image appeared in front of them; a new star burning within the system. The planet’s orbiting moons, suddenly washed in a tidal wave of heat, would be melting, perhaps even being pushed out of orbit by the gravity waves echoing out from the dying planet. The rings were already breaking down into vapour as the planet died. They wouldn’t be able to tolerate the heat. “And the Killers?”