“Gravity spike,” Lieutenant Windsor snapped, suddenly. “They’re opening a wormhole!”
“Keep the fleet back,” Brent ordered. His mind was racing; could they — should they — try to reply? If there was a chance to open communications, it had to be taken, whatever the risk. “Communications, attempt to…”
The wormhole flared into existence. A moment later, the Killer starship was gone, leaving no trace of its passing.
Brent ran his hands through his sweaty hair. “Stand down from battle stations,” he ordered, finally. The tension in the compartment refused to face. They had known that they were about to die, that all they could do was kick and scratch on the way to the gallows, and somehow they had been granted a reprieve. “Now… what the hell was all that about?”
No one had an answer.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“And then they just vanished?”
Tabitha Cunningham would have refused to believe it, had it not been confirmed by multiple sources. The War Cabinet had gathered to watch — they expected — Sparta’s last stand against the Killers. Instead, the Killer starship had stared at the human settlements and then opened a wormhole, leaving the humans behind. It was utterly out of character for the Killers; they came, they saw and they destroyed. They never ran, they never fled from human defences… until now.
“Yes,” Brent said, shortly. The Admiral looked relieved. “They just left us alone.”
His voice tightened suddenly. “It’s been seventy-two hours since they departed Sparta and, in that time, there had been no new attacks. Their blitzkrieg against the Community seems to have been terminated.”
The President leaned forward. “Terminated how?” She demanded. “Were they scared of us, or were they merely terminating their offensive anyway, even before we blew up one of their stars?”
“And were they actually trying to communicate?” Father Sigmund put in. “If we actually managed to bring them to the negotiation table, shouldn’t we be trying to follow up on the contact?”
“We’re uncertain,” Brent admitted. His own voice hardened. “If they were attempting to communicate, their communications systems were completely different to ours; if there were an intelligent signal in their emissions, we were unable to detect or understand it. Their communications systems may be completely incompatible with our own. We would have been able to talk to the Ghosts, if any were still alive, but the Killers are another story. The bottom line is that we simply do not know.
“We also don’t know what they’re doing now,” he continued. “Before their offensive began, we had starships tracking over five hundred of their vessels, keeping us updated on their movements. Most of those ships either turned on their shadows and destroyed them, or opened wormholes and left their companions eating their dust. We are currently only tracking a handful of their craft and we don’t know where the remainder have gone. The only thing we can say with any certainty is that they’re not in any system we have under constant observation.”
“And so we have a pause in the storm,” Patti said. The President looked grimly relieved; Tabitha rather felt for her. She had been President herself during the early years following the destruction of Earth, but Patti had presided over the worst series of disasters in Community history. The only bright side was that they had proof that the Killers were not invincible after all. “I assume that you have issued orders to avoid further confrontation, if possible?”
“Perhaps,” Brent said. “It may not be our choice. The Killers generally decide if they want to open hostilities, or not. The only real weapon we have is the supernova bomb and… well, stockpiles are limited.”
Tabitha nodded, keeping her expression blank. The onrushing Killer offensive had neglected the argument in favour of keeping the weapon a secret while building up a massive stockpile and hitting every Killer star system at once, but the end results didn’t sit well with her. They had slaughtered an entire star system and God alone knew how many Killers, but they had no way of knowing just how badly they’d hurt the Killers. Had they taken out ten percent of their capability, one percent, point one percent… or what? If the Killers had infested every gas giant in the Milky Way, they wouldn’t even notice the loss.
“We may have new weapons,” Administrator Arun Prabhu said. The Technical Faction representative leaned forward, his dark features twisted with an unholy glee. “The studies of the Killer starship — and the damaged starship recovered at the Cinder — have finally allowed us new insights into Killer technology and how to counter it. We even know more about them, I believe, than any other race ever learned. “We may even be able to equalise the odds a little.”
Tabitha sat up, seeing the same expressions on the other War Council members, those who chose to show their expressions. “You have developed new weapons?”
“We have developed several new weapons,” Arun agreed. “With your permission, I will summon two of my faction to brief you.”
A flicker of light announced the arrival of one of the Technical Faction. Tabitha accessed the underlying stream of information from Intelligence and discovered that he was called Doctor Tony Jones, an expert in alien biology and one of the unsung heroes of the Eden Project, which had attempted to recreate plants and animals from Earth. Tabitha wasn’t too sure of how she felt about the project — it struck her as an exercise in futility — but she had to admit that it had had unusual results. If humanity ever moved back to a planet-bound existence, they might be accompanied by neo-dogs, cats, horses and every other kind of lost animal. Tabitha herself wouldn’t have gone back to a planet — although, as a personality in the MassMind, it wasn’t possible to reincorporate herself — but she knew that millions of humans felt differently.
Tony Jones himself affected a baseline human appearance, marred only by the third eye set within his forehead. Tabitha had never approved of the fashion for body modification — she hoped that it was merely the product of cosmetic surgery, rather than being sequenced into his genes — but the Community granted its people considerable freedom to warp themselves at will. He wore a simple white lab tunic and long blonde hair, streaming all the way down to his ass. That, too, was the dictates of current fashion. They changed so rapidly in the material world.
“I have been directly involved with analysing the Killer remains found in the captured ship,” he began. A hologram appeared in front of him as he spoke. “The Killer entity — I am fairly sure that it was a single entity — was killed and badly disrupted in the boarding action, but enough remained for us to conduct a analysis. The Killers are very definitely a very different race to us, or any other known intelligence species. I believe that Doctor Handley’s theory that the Killers originated on a gas giant world is accurate…”
“That was proven by the attack on Cinder,” Brent put in, dryly. “We saw them fleeing the gas giant world.”
“Yes, Admiral,” Jones agreed. He cleared his throat and continued. “The Killer entity is perhaps the most complex form of life we have studied, yet at the same time it is remarkably simple, almost as simple as a human being. The Killer appeared to exist as a collection of discreet cells that were bonded together and merged with the technology onboard the vessel. Our current theory is that they would be capable of floating within the atmosphere of a gas giant — in their natural form, they would be balanced on the planet’s atmosphere, to use laymen’s terms — and somehow they managed to obtain access to space. We have various different computer models that suggest various different paths to high technology for them, but we have no idea — of course — which one they actually followed. What is fairly clear is that they would have far higher tolerances for radiation and gravity than humanity.