Her eyes looked at the inner-system display and she winced. Two days ago, the Killers had launched their second blitzkrieg against the Community and the death toll was mounting rapidly. The fleet of destroyers that had been assigned to guard the black hole after the last battle had been largely pulled out, leaving her and Shiva almost unprotected, apart from their command ship. Paula made no claim to being a military tactician, but even she knew that a single ship wouldn’t be able to stop the Killers, unless something new came out of her weapons research. The irony was that she did have a potential weapon in mind, yet she had no time to concentrate on it. She had detailed the idea to the Technical Faction and the MassMind; they would have to follow up on it, without her. She had a more important task to complete.
“Last chance, I think,” she said, looking over at Chris. She still didn’t know why an entire Platoon of Footsoldiers had been assigned to her personal protection, but it did give her a feeling of security. The growing intimacy between her and Chris rather helped. If she had had the time, she would probably have sought to speed up the process and invited him to bed, but there were more important concerns. “If you and your men want to leave, now is your chance.”
Chris gave her a reproving look. “We didn’t leave earlier and we’re not going to leave now,” he said. “Besides, even if we did, where would we go?”
Paula nodded, slowly. The reports had kept filtering in from the Killer offensive. A team of heavily-armed Footsoldiers had attempted to board and disable a Killer starship, only to be intercepted by armed and ready automatons. The resulting firefight had devastated the interior of the Killer starship, but had failed to disable the ship — the entire team had been wiped out. The Killers had adjusted their tactics and overcome most of the new weapons the human race had deployed.
Nine more Killer star systems had been destroyed by the human supernova bombs, wiping out God alone knew how many Killers, but that was just a drop in the bucket compared to how many Killer star systems there were out there. There were thousands of reports and millions of rumours flying through the MassMind, talking about the need to evacuate settlements before the stars they orbited were turned supernova, or the Rockrat offensive by bombarding Killer gas giants with asteroids from a safe distance. The Killers seemed barely to notice the latter; indeed, if some of the simulations were accurate, asteroids might have been how the proto-Killers got their hands on metals in the first place. Paula knew — through her own contracts — that every industrial-grade fabricator in the Community had been turned over to producing supernova bombs, but it wasn’t easy to produce them in the sheer volume that would be required to exterminate the Killers.
And, for that matter, she wasn’t sure what would happen to the galaxy if so many stars were simply destroyed. The galaxy was held together by gravity — the force the Killers controlled somehow — and losing so many stars would definitely have an effect, although she wasn’t sure what. There were simulations that argued that the galaxy would eventually — billions of years in the future — collapse into the massive black hole at the core, and other simulations that suggested that the galaxy would come apart completely. There was even a really far-out simulation that suggested that blowing up so many stars would cause a chain reaction that would send the remaining stars in the galaxy supernova, although Paula doubted that that was actually the case. It was beyond belief.
“I understand,” she said, finally. Chris and his men could join the Exodus, as the news media had already dubbed it, but that wasn’t in their nature. Millions of humans were fleeing the Milky Way galaxy permanently, heading out to the Clouds or much further away, but the entire Community couldn’t move. It would have been logistically impossible. Chris and his men would have preferred to stay and fight, but instead they were babysitting one academic and her pet black hole. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
A black hole, viewed from one point of view, was a hole leading down into the fabric of space-time. Another point of view merely had it that black holes were ultramassive objects that bent gravity around them. Confusingly, to the layman, both explanations were actually true, although not particularly easy to grasp. Paula had attempted to explain it to the Footsoldiers, all highly-intelligent men, and they hadn’t grasped it entirely. To add to the confusion, two black holes vibrating at the same frequency could be used to form a wormhole between them, or merely a communications link.
Paula believed — and knew that many others shared her theory — that the Killers used it as a method of communication. A tiny black hole should have evaporated in a puff of Hawking Radiation, but the Killers could certainly have used their gravity manipulation technology to keep one alive and use it as a communications system. A larger black hole could be used as a power source — they knew now that that was how the Killers powered their starships — and a supermassive one could be used to create gravity beams that could be felt all over the galaxy. The Killers hadn’t attempted to develop quantum entanglement communications technology because they hadn’t needed any such thing. They already possessed instantaneous communication and transport technology.
“MassMind, come online,” she ordered. If something went wrong, the MassMind might be required to assist her in dealing with it, or at the very least sucking out all their personalities before the disaster overwhelmed them. Its reactions were inhumanly fast and competent. “Link into the system and stand by.”
“Standing by,” the MassMind confirmed. It housed the personalities and memories of humans who had been involved in such research since it had been created. Its presence should provide an extra degree of security. “We are ready to move on your command.”
Paula nodded. “Switch power to gravity manipulators,” she ordered, slowly. “Target the gravity beams on the black hole and engage.”
The power rapidly built up as the gravity beams started to flow out of the orbiting platforms and down towards the black hole. This, Paula knew, was what might convince the Killers to forget the bloody nose they’d received the last time they’d come to the Shiva System and return to destroy her. Gravity beams had been their exclusive technology. Now, Paula was manipulating the black hole in front of her, attempting to gain control over it and use it as a power source. It’s gravity field, immensely strong — even though Shiva was puny, compared to some black holes the human race had observed — seemed to dance and twist as the gravity beams intersected with it, reaching down towards the singularity at the core of the black hole.
She was barely aware of time passing as the gravity beams continued their dance. The black hole seemed to jump and twist like a living thing — control over the black hole, it seemed, was not as simple as she had assumed — but slowly she wrestled it into submission. The Killers, she realised slowly, operated on an entirely different principle. They drained the power from the black hole, used that power to control the black hole, and then funnelled most of the power back into the black hole. The black hole, she reflected, was quite literally paying for its own enslavement.