“Not specified,” the AI said. “The probes are picking up weapons signatures comparable with particle weapons and energy torpedoes. There are also several unknown signatures and odd gravity fluxes surrounding the Killer starships. They may no longer be capable of opening a wormhole without repair and refitting.”
Justin smiled. “Are you sure of that?”
“No,” the AI replied. “There is no way to be sure. I merely postulate it from the low-level power curves, seventy percent below standard Killer power curves, on the starship. They are definitely running on short reserves, but they may be capable of rerouting power to the wormhole generator if pushed. We are unable to determine the level of internal damage, nor do we have the information to tell us what impact having such damage will have on the ship.”
“And if they can’t,” Justin breathed. The opportunity could not be missed, whatever the risks. They might never have another such opportunity again. “Get me a link to Sparta. I want to make a case for blowing up this star.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
“One more victory like this,” Andrew said, “and we are ruined.”
He gazed out of the Lightning’s observation deck towards the remains of over fine hundred starships. Most of the debris was little more than dust, but here and there were scattered components of larger starships, torn and ruined beyond repair. The destroyed Killer starships — and the one the Footsoldiers had disabled at the cost of their own lives — were floating as little more than debris, although they had been so massive that some of their ships had survived their death throes. The researchers were still trying to understand why some had vaporised — taking some of their tormentors with them — and others had simply blown apart into debris. The general theory was that some of the starships had managed to power down their black hole cores before they died. The others had vaporised when the black hole destabilised.
“We have hundreds of thousands more starships,” Brent said. The Admiral hadn’t been allowed to attend in person — the War Council had been reluctant to risk him — so he had used the MassMind to send along a holographic representation. It was created using force fields and was almost like being there, in every detail, but one. It wasn’t real. “We’re refitting the entire Defence Force with the new weapons and developing new tactics for…”
“Picking them to death,” Andrew said, shortly. The failure of the antimatter weapons to win the battle quickly — if they’d worked, they would have wiped out the entire Killer force — had cost lives and starships. Brent was right, in a sense; the Defence Force could produce new starships almost at will, but lives were not so easy to replace. If ramming the Killer ships was the only way to guarantee victory… they’d have to start building AI-controlled starships to carry out the attacks. There was no way that he would order anyone to commit suicide. “Or perhaps building new automated starships to take the Killers out.”
“We’re working on that now,” Brent said. “We weren’t keen on the concept of automated ships before, but if we set them up properly, we can control them at a distance without inserting AI cores without human oversight.”
Andrew nodded. The first attempt to build an automated starship had failed dramatically when the AI had gone mad. There hadn’t been many further attempts, not least because of a theory that the Killers were actually rogue AIs that had wiped out their creators and turned on the rest of the galaxy. They knew now that the Killers had a biological component, but a Killer was as much machine as biological creature, a perfect merger between organic and inorganic life. It did raise questions about what would happen, in future, to the Spacers. Would they finally evolve to a point where they could merge human minds into starships? It was what they wanted to do, in the long run; it was their holy grail.
“Operate them from a distance,” he agreed. There were no theoretical barriers to such a concept, but it didn’t sit well with him. It wouldn’t be so… exciting if they were far from any possible danger, nor would they have the awareness that they were in danger to keep them alert. “What are we going to do now?”
Brent understood. “We have an updated report from one of the scouts,” he said. He shook his head in awe. “We have a victory — a battle that is, for once, a clear victory — and naturally everyone starts filing reports on how great it is and their own plans for taking advantage of the victory. It actually took them several hours to get the report to me; God alone knows what has vanished into the filters, never to be seen again. The Killer fleet whose collective butt you kicked has staggered home, beaten and defeated.”
Andrew smiled, ruefully. No human starship could have soaked up so much damage and escaped, but the Killers had survived. The part of him that admired their technology and their ability to use it was impressed; the remainder of his mind was annoyed. Every time he started to think that they might just be able to force a draw, the Killers pulled another trick out of their sleeve. The general theory said that the Killers had stagnated, after literally thousands of years of easy victories against rocky-planet natives, but now they had one hell of an incentive to react, adapt and overcome. They still had the technical advantage…
“And now we’re going to hit them where they live?” He asked. “The fleet isn’t ready for another offensive, yet; we need time to reorganise and refit.”
“We have other fleets,” Brent said, “but I wasn’t going to waste a single starship on a system that is of no interest to us. There are no human settlements there. No one would want to live there, for they would be living right on their doorstep if they did. I want you and the Lightning to take a supernova bomb there and destroy the system, along with the Killer starships.”
“They might jump out and escape,” Andrew pointed out. “That’s what we’d do if we knew that the star was about to explode.”
“Yeah,” Brent agreed. “Intelligence thinks, however, that they couldn’t pull out all of the installations they have in the system, not unless they can generate a wormhole large enough to teleport the entire star system away…”
“Which would mean taking the supernova with them,” Andrew said. The concept was impressive, if a little scary. The Killers had almost infinitive sources of power. They could probably move an entire star system thousands of light years through a wormhole if they wanted, and had that much power on tap. “They’d just be destroyed when it exploded anyway.”
“Perhaps,” Brent said. “Between you and me — this is highly classified, but you have a need to know — there is a possibility that they might be able to snuff out the supernova with their gravity beams, perhaps even force it into a black hole rather than exploding outwards with deadly force. No two simulations agree on what’s going to happen if they try, but the general consensus is that it should be very interesting to watch from a safe distance, a very safe distance.”
Andrew looked out towards the darkness in the distance, the invisible location of Shiva. Some tugs were pushing human debris towards the event horizon, adding to the black hole’s mass by a tiny amount, while others were trying to salvage as much Killer technology as possible. Andrew privately suspected that most of the debris would be completely useless, at least from a research point of view, but the Technical Faction needed as many pieces of Killer technology to study as possible. The disabled starship was already being prepared for removal to a safe location.
“Yes, sir,” he said, finally. He wasn’t sure how he felt about triggering a second supernova. Would it be just another nail in their coffin — or, now that the Killers had been forced to retreat, would it make it impossible to force a peace? The Footsoldiers had had no way of communicating with their opponent. “Sir… have we made progress on any way of actually talking to them?”