She was watching from further away as the city — if it were a city — vaporised under the onrushing wave. It looked almost as if it had been deliberate, as if the city had been targeted purposely… and somehow, on the edge of her mind, she knew how it had been done. Focused gravity waves could have caused such an eruption, but there was no source, only the tiny knot of radiations that had escaped into the inner solar system. She followed and found herself too close to the star, blinded by the waves of radiation… and then the star started to destabilise and explode. It was too late to escape…
The conclusion was impossible to avoid. My God, she thought, as she felt her body returning to normal. We killed an entire star!
Everything suddenly seemed to make a great deal more sense. The Killers had been absolute masters of space for so long that they’d never been genuinely threatened… and now they’d been hurt. It might not have mattered in the long run — the Killers had thousands of starships and probably millions of planets — but in the short term, they’d never been stung like that before since their first contact with non-Killer life. They had only vaguely been aware of other intelligent life, seeing them all as rivals to be exterminated as quickly as possible, never really accepting that there was a serious threat. There was a serious threat now.
She recalled her duplicates and drank in their memories. Between them, they had explored almost the entire Killer network and worked out what corresponded to what. It was impossible to read the Killer thoughts directly — that might have alerted the Killer to their presence — but they could listen and try to comprehend. They would never learn specifics, but they might get a general idea of what was happening…
It was easier, somehow, after having seen space through a Killer’s eyes. The Killers were seriously worried. The Grand Plan — the capital letters somehow came through the translation — was threatened. The Enemy had destroyed a star and killed many of their… collectives? Individuals? Group-Thought? She couldn’t comprehend the terms they used, or how they worked; the Killers were alien, after all.
And then she saw what they had in mind.
The realisation sent her reeling back into the outer depths of the Killer matrix. It was impossible to believe that they would succeed in their mad aim, yet they believed that they could succeed… and they had the technology to try. If they succeeded, the Community would be exterminated without even having a hope in hell of fighting back. No wonder the Killers were holding back. They would destroy all their enemies in one fell swoop!
She concentrated and started to produce more duplicates. The risk of being discovered no longer mattered. The risk of creating duplicates she could no longer reabsorb no longer mattered. She had to find a way to warn the Community before it was too late, even if it cost her life and sanity. The human race had to survive.
It was all that made her life worthwhile.
“Give me two good reasons,” Administrator Arun Prabhu said, “why you should not be immediately sacked from your current position and assigned to some station at the end of nowhere?”
Paula held herself perfectly still. The Administrator hadn’t offered her a chair, or any comfort at all, and she had the uncomfortable feeling that at any moment, he might throw her out physically. It was almost like facing her father after he had discovered some childish misdemeanour, or her principal after a practical joke had gotten out of hand, with the promise of certain punishment in the future. Arun looked dark with anger, and disappointment. She really had blotted her copybook with him.
“You decided, on your own initiative, to attempt to convince the most powerful men and women in the galaxy to rewrite a policy which has been in existence for over five hundred years,” Arun continued, without waiting for her to answer. “You decided to call into question the… assembled understanding of the Technical Faction in front of our few peers and the MassMind itself. You may well have caused a major dispute within the inner ranks of the Community government. I spent the last four hours fielding questions — very hostile questions — from all kinds of government officials. Do you have anything, anything at all, that you wish to offer in your defence?”
Paula said nothing. She had been summoned back to Intelligence the moment the meeting ended — and given strict orders not to communicate with anyone else until after she had spoken to the Administrator. She had disobeyed that instruction just long enough to send a personal message to Chris, but she had said nothing to anyone else, although that wouldn’t be enough to assuage the Administrator’s anger at her. He was right, in a sense, she had broken all procedure, but there had been no choice. Humanity’s only hope for survival lay in understanding gravity technology… and they had reached the limits of what could be learned by computer simulations. They needed a real experiment.
“The Circle is already pushing for your expulsion,” Arun said, coldly. Paula blinked. The Technical Faction’s governing body rarely involved itself in the lives of ordinary researchers. “It may surprise you to know that many of them want to use you as a live test subject for retroactive genetic sequencing experiments, or other procedures that require a live human for the final touch. Others want to expel you in disgrace to places so primitive that they think that a time machine is just a watch. What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Only what I have said before,” Paula said, finally. It had taken the efforts of all her implants to keep her voice calm and firmly under control. “We must learn how the Killers manipulate gravity in order to master their technology and destroy them before they destroy us.”
“And all of the simulations agree that creating a black hole would be detectable right across the galaxy,” Arun said. Paula didn’t bother to dispute it. Gravity waves moved at FTL speeds and a new black hole would send them echoing for thousands of light years. “Do you deny that your… experiment would certainly be detectable by the Killers?”
“Of course not,” Paula said, silently grateful that her hands were clasped behind her back. He couldn’t see how tightly she was gripping them together. “The ban on such experimentation was intended to prevent them from tracking us down.”
“And you decided to ignore the ban,” Arun said. His eyes refused to leave her face. “Why?”
“You never actually forbade me not to discuss it with the War Cabinet,” Paula pointed out. They’d only discussed the new weapons and other insights into Killer technology. “In fact…”
“Don’t give me that legalistic crap,” Arun thundered, genuinely angry. Paula felt a brief shiver of regret and forced it down with an effort. The die had been thoroughly cast. “You should know better than to discuss such matters without clearing them with your supervisor first.”
Paula took a firmer grip on her temper. “The Killers have rediscovered us,” she said, calmly. “If they were unaware of our existence, which is unlikely in the extreme as they attacked New Singapore last year, they are now aware of us beyond doubt. There is little to be lost by attempting to create a black hole. We may even be able to link into their communications network and talk directly to them.”
Arun scowled at her. “And if it does lure an entire Killer fleet to the new black hole?” He asked. “We can’t stop one ship, let alone an entire fleet…”