“Nothing so far,” Brent said. “We know how they talk to themselves — I mean from body section to body section — using low-level RF transmissions, but we haven’t been able to locate any actual ship-to-ship transmissions. If the plan to retune the black hole works” — he looked out towards the invisible black hole and frowned — we might be able to hack into their communications and decrypt them. Overall, though, we could try… but we might be sending them anything from a challenge to do battle to the results of last year’s champion baseball game.”
“If the Killers play baseball,” Andrew agreed. The Killers were just so different that it was unlikely that they had anything in common with the human race. “What about breaking it down to basic universal fundamentals?”
“We’re working on it,” Brent confirmed. “The trouble is that we may not be able to move beyond that to actual concepts… and, of course, we don’t even know if the Killers will hear us. Their communications system remains a total mystery.”
“And if we blow up another of their stars, we might push them into trying to talk to us, rather than hitting back,” Andrew agreed. “Has there been any sign of retaliation?”
“None as yet, but its only been a few hours,” Brent said. “We’re watching closely for any sign of movement — with the Anderson Drive we can bring a refitted fleet in to engage any counterattacks — but so far we’ve seen nothing. I’m starting to think that it’s time to launch additional fly-through missions for the known Killer systems, the ones they chased the observers away from.”
“And mark them down as possible targets for the supernova bomb?”
Brent scowled. “There aren’t that many bombs,” he admitted. “If we hit every known Killer system — over five thousand — it would take years to wipe them all out.”
“And yet, if they don’t talk to us, there’s no way to avoid it,” Andrew said. “I don’t want to commit genocide, sir, but if its them or us… well, I know which side I support.”
“I know,” Brent agreed. “So do I.”
He straightened up thoughtfully. “I want you to hand over command here to your second, and then take the Lightning to Sparta. By then, I should have permission to launch a second supernova attack on the Killers, or perhaps not. We can’t slow the offensive now, Andrew, or the Killers will react. I just wish I knew what they were thinking.”
Fee, fi, fo, fum, Chiyo Prime thought desperately. She desperately needed the humour. I smell the blood of human scum.
The Killer mind knew she was there, now, and it was looking for her. The desperate attempt to jump ship, the transmission of a personality duplicate out to the human starships and the brief moment of distraction she’d caused the Killer had announced her presence in ways the Killer could not ignore. She’d sensed its surprise as it realised she was there and its horror at the concept of having been violated, even though Chiyo Prime hadn’t intended to board the Killer ship. If the Killer had simply vaporised her craft, it wouldn’t have happened, but instead…
She sensed its gaze probing through the streams of data that made up the massive computer system and ran, flickering from one end of the system to the other, concentrating hard on trying to hide. It was as if, she decided in a moment of humour, the Killer was peering through its body to find a tiny human; if she hid well enough, she might survive. It would have great difficulty picking her out from all the other pieces of data — that was all she was, really; a piece of data — but when it found her, it would have no trouble ending the threat. One of her duplicates was caught and swept up by the Killer mind — Chiyo Prime heard a last despairing scream before it vanished — yet the Killer mind was not fooled. It kept advancing, quartering the system piece by piece, hunting for her. It had one great advantage over her. It knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what everything should look like. Any discrepancies could be blamed on her.
I should have tried to overwrite its central programming, she thought, bitterly, even though she knew that it would have been futile. Another searching beam passed through the system and she cringed away from it, hoping to hide for a few more microseconds. The Killer system was hardwired, like the core of the MassMind itself; there was no way that a program on the inside, like Chiyo Prime, could rewrite it. She’d hoped that it would be possible to take command of the ship, but the Killers had designed the starship for one mind, the Killer hunting for her now. It wouldn’t have accepted another Killer, let alone a human mind. She concentrated and nipped between two blocks of data, running as fast as she could through the system…
The oppressive presence of the Killer mind, something she had always been able to feel at the back of her mind, faded slightly. She wasn’t fooled. If the Killer had paused in its search, it hadn’t given up on finding her. It would find and destroy her duplicates, one by one, and then it would destroy her — unless it found her first. The more she thought about it, the more she wondered if the Killer would ever be able to separate her from her duplicates; they were, after all, the same person. The thought was bitter; they might have shared the same memories, but they were growing apart. The last time she had merged with one of them, it had been painful, a suggestion that they were no longer parts of her, but individuals in their own right. There was a good reason why personality duplications were forbidden in the Community.
She almost smiled, bitterly. Her final duplicate, the one she’d fired out into space in a desperate attempt to communicate, would probably end up bearing the blame for her crimes, maybe even being permanently separated from the MassMind as punishment. She would be part of her — Chiyo Prime — so she would bear the responsibility — would she even be a different person? After the Killer had finished purging its own systems, she would be the last Chiyo left in the universe.
Or maybe the Community would recognise that she had had no choice, she decided to hope, even though it was impossible to decide what the Community would do. There were precedents that spoke in her favour and precedents that opposed her, yet surely the intelligence she brought home would stand in her favour. Chiyo Prime thought about it for a moment more, and then dismissed it. The worst punishment the Community could hand out to a personality in the MassMind would pale compared to what the Killer intended to do to her. She could sense it preparing for another search…
She leaned forward, surprised, when she heard the barking of dogs. A moment later, she sensed the dogs themselves, strange fuzzy canines, yapping as they ran through the system’s maze. For a moment, she wondered if she had gone insane, before she realised that her mind was interpreting what she was seeing in a fashion she could grasp — the Killer had created antiviral programs and was using them to hunt her down. Strangely, she had never considered what an antiviral program would look like from the perspective of a virus; why shouldn’t it look like a dog? All it needed was some hunters with red caps and…
A moment later, she was across the system, hoping that she could evade them long enough for the Killer to give up and assume that she had already been killed, along with her duplicates. The yapping seemed to grow louder within seconds and she realised suddenly that the antiviral program was multiplying. It reminded her of watching fabricators produce other fabricators, which in turn started to produce other fabricators themselves… and so on, creating enough fabricators to build an entire fleet. She remembered, suddenly, what she’d seen of the battle and how the Killers had fallen back from humanity. One way or another, whatever happened to Chiyo Prime personally, the human race finally had a chance to fight back and survive. The Killers had lost at least nine starships. They’d never been hit like that before.