“We have been interrogating the personality of Lieutenant Chiyo Takahashi,” the MassMind representative informed the War Council. They had all been briefed on the odd communication, although none of them had understood quite why the Killers had chosen to broadcast a human mind pattern at the Defence Force fleet. They knew now that it was nothing to do with the Killers. “She has revealed considerable information about the Killers and their ultimate plan for the galaxy. We may be required to act quickly.”
An image of the galaxy appeared in front of them, with thousands of stars marked with red icons. “The Killers have infested over five hundred thousand star systems, of which seven thousand coincide with our own settlements,” the MassMind continued. “Most of them, however, are their version of civilian settlements, which may account for the fact that we never located them. CAS-3473746-6, which became the Cinder, was one such system. We only located it by accident.
“A comparative handful, around two hundred or so systems, are parts of their war machine,” it said. The icons flashed a darker red. “Some of them, however, have a darker role. The Killers intend nothing less than reshaping the entire galaxy to their design. They intend to shatter every rocky planet into asteroids and exterminate all other forms of life, but their own. They were developing this as a minor program, but following the Battle of Shiva… they may intend to bring it forward and use it to exterminate us.”
There was a long silence. “That’s madness,” Patti said, finally. “How long would it take them to destroy every planet in the galaxy?”
“Maybe not as long as you think,” the MassMind said. “In layman’s terms, they intend to turn the Core Hole — the black hole at the centre of the galaxy — into a weapon and use it to focus powerful waves of gravity at any target that takes their fancy. With an unlimited source of power — which they would have — they could just keep firing gravity pulses until they ran out of targets… and, with their capabilities, they would have no problems locating new targets. The results would be disastrous.”
It paused, carefully. “Our worst case estimate may be completely wrong — we have little to go on, apart from the theory — but if we’re right, they could dismantle every planet in the galaxy in less than a month.”
“But we don’t live on planets,” Father Sigmund pointed out. “We occupy asteroids…”
“There are all the morons who believe that living on planets without technology keeps them safe from the Killers,” Brent put in. “We’d have to evacuate them, at the least, and they’d refuse to go…”
“We would not have the resources,” the MassMind said. “The disruption caused by the gravity cannon — as we have termed it — would be disastrous to vast sections of the Community. The destruction of a planet, in such a fashion, would unleash gravity waves that would wreck havoc. They may shatter our habitats without ever knowing what they did — or maybe they intend to do it. The results would be disastrous in either case. Starships might survive, as would settlements in every star system that wasn’t targeted, but we’d lose trillions of lives. They have to be stopped.”
“This is madness,” Father Sigmund protested. “Why…?”
“When humans wanted to commit genocide, they built gas chambers to speed the whole process up,” Patti said, bitterly. “Why should the Killers not do the same?”
“It’s not the same,” Father Sigmund protested.
“Yes, it is,” Patti said. “The Killers at least have the excuse that they’re not slaughtering their own people. We attempted to do it to ourselves. Why is it such a surprise that other races do the same, to themselves and to others?”
“This argument is completely immaterial,” Matriarch Jayne snapped. “There is only one issue of importance now. What do we do to stop the Killers from slaughtering us all?”
“The only thing we can do,” the MassMind said. “We take out the devices — at whatever cost — that will take control of the black hole. We take them out and we win the time we need to make sure that if only one race can survive, that race is humanity. We always knew that we were fighting an enemy who wanted to kill us all. Now we have to kill them, or be killed. We have no other choice.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
“Why did I come here?”
Rupert, Leader of the Spacer Faction — insofar as the Spacer Faction had individual leaders — looked up at the looming shape of the captured Killer starship, before resuming his dictation. Even from such a distance — his personal starship was keeping several hundred kilometres from the Killer ship — it looked very intimidating. It was illuminated by spotlights from the human platforms assembled around the ship, like Gulliver being restrained by the Lilliputians, yet it seemed to almost soak up the light, existing as nothing more than an oddly-shaped black hole in space. It wasn’t an ill-suited analogy, Rupert knew; the rear of the starship held a tiny black hole.
“Why did I come here?” He repeated. It was a Spacer custom that all Spacers kept detailed logs and records. They never uploaded themselves into the MassMind and made themselves available to their future descendents and so it was the only form of indirect immortality they had. “I came here because I had to see it for myself. I had to know for myself. Logically, a verbal report would have sufficed, but I had to see it with my own eyes. I had to know.”
He paused, considering. “We believed at the start that the Killers were nothing more than rogue machines that obliterated their creators and went on a slaughtering spree, killing every last form of intelligent life they encountered,” he continued. “We thought that that explained everything; their insensitivity to mass slaughter, their willingness to permanently kill entire life-bearing planets and, indeed, the absence of any structures or settlements on still-living worlds. We preferred to believe that they were rogue AIs and built strong limits into our own AIs. We could have created AIs that controlled entire starships, without the need for human crews, but we refrained from that final step. We were too scared of the consequences.
“And we, the Spacers, believed that the key to humanity’s future lay in pushing the boundaries of human-machine interfacing as far as possible. We implanted and augmented our bodies with the latest technology, giving up some elements of our humanity to gain eternal life and a new perspective on existence. We believed that, in the end, we would gain the ability to link permanently into our starships, making the human race immortal. We would be able to give every human a destroyer-sized starship to use as a permanent body. It would be merely an exercise in mass production.
“And we failed, at first, to develop a brain-powered starship. The test subjects went mad. It didn’t discourage us, because others had gone through our procedures and then gone mad. The powers of a minor god are given to us by augmentation and not all could take it. Others learned to regret the loss of sex and gender, or taste and smell, and killed themselves, or took foolish risks in the belief that they were already dead. We thought that the starship project was merely experiencing teething problems. Why not? It had happened before. Every failure was eventually overcome. The remainder of the Community might tut-tut at us and question the death toll, but they used our technology as well. Their long lives and direct mental links to the MassMind came from our research.