“Of course,” the MassMind reassured her. “We will trigger it the second a suitable wormhole forms and destroy any new starship.”
The black hole spun below her, showing no sign of the titanic struggle being waged for control. Even with the MassMind to help, the entire process was still delicate. She was almost tempted to leave the MassMind to work on it and move to another part of the project, but that would have been too much like giving up. An hour passed slowly as they worked on controlling the system… and finally, they felt a response. It was nothing more than a simple acknowledgement — or so the MassMind believed — but it was there.
And the entire Killer network opened up before her.
Chapter Forty-One
“Twenty-seven new star systems attacked, fifty-nine billion dead, nine hundred and seventeen starships destroyed…”
Tabitha Cunningham listened, as dispassionately as she could, to the liturgy of disaster. The Killer blitzkrieg was slowly tearing the Community apart. Only the sheer size of the Community — and the relative insignificance of most of the targets — had prevented the Community from disintegrating by now, although millions more were joining the Exodus and fleeing the galaxy entirely. Tabitha, who had been there at the start and watched as humanity struggled to survive after Earth, had the uneasy feeling that she was in at the death — humanity’s death.
“We have destroyed twelve of their star systems so far,” Brent continued. The Admiral’s face was dark and mottled after his brief exposure to vacuum, but the nanotechnology running through his veins would suffice to deal with that, soon enough. Humanity vanity would prevent him from keeping his scars. “The bombardment of various gas giants by asteroids and comets may have had some effect, but we do not know for sure. They certainly must have some way of dealing with such impacts; gas giants are magnets for asteroid bombardment. We have also taken out” — such a cold bloodless term — “nineteen of the starships.”
His face darkened. “The war may be on the verge of being lost,” he admitted, and Tabitha could hear the bitterness in his voice. Even with the new weapons evening the odds, humanity was still losing the war. It was, she’d been told, a matter of relative damage. A Killer starship could soak up hundreds of implosion bolts, energy torpedoes and particle beam directed energy weapons and keep going. A single hit would destroy a human starship utterly. “Even if we continue to destroy their star systems, we may lose even before they begin their grand plan to destroy the galaxy.”
The War Council looked… defeated, Tabitha decided. The President was probably already thinking about a general evacuation. Father Sigmund was thinking about his flock and how best they could survive the next few years. Rupert was missing, of course, somewhere on a Killer starship. Jayne was silently cursing the war and the Rockrats involvement in the fighting. And Brent was watching the Defence Force, the force he had struggled to build up into a fleet that could actually challenge the Killers, being taken apart, piece by piece. They were already thinking in terms of defeat. They needed hope.
“The MassMind has completed its analysis of the data recovered from the Killer starships,” Tabitha said, projecting herself forward into the chamber. They had to listen to her. “We are now in a position to tell you how the war began… and how it can be ended.”
They latched onto her words like a drowning man would clutch at a rope. She had their full attention. Now all she had to do was keep it. “The exact details are rather hard to discuss in words,” she continued, knowing that it would concentrate a few minds, “so we have prepared a perceptual reality to educate you. With your permission…?”
“Run it,” Patti ordered, curtly.
“Of course,” Tabitha agreed. “Welcome to the universe as the Killers see it.”
The massive crystal-clear image of the galaxy, rotating grandly at the heart of the simulated chamber, vanished, to be replaced by a murky green-yellow atmosphere that seemed to form at the edge of their fingertips. It wasn’t a completely perfect simulation, Tabitha knew; the pressures at their level would kill an unprotected him, yet it was the simplest way of getting the message across. They had to understand what they were actually dealing with, even at the price of some discomfort…
And they would definitely feel discomfort. None of them would have seen mists before as they existed on planets, but they’d all read legends of what could be lurking in mists and shivered as they blew closer. Strange shapes could barely be made out in the distance, each one a hint of something else, something larger. It was largely imagination, Tabitha knew, yet even she was affected Anything could be lurking in those mists, anything at all.
“The heart of an unknown gas giant,” she said, dramatically. It was actually a layer a few kilometres below the surface, but she had always liked a touch of drama. “The pressures here would kill any of us who ventured there, and yet there is life. Can you see it?”
The MassMind obligingly pointed it out for those who couldn’t. A chemical soup floated on the layer of gas, spreading out slowly to cover the entire gas giant. It had probably formed from the same material that had given birth to life on Earth, something that had surprised Tabitha when she had first heard of it. It galled her to think that there might be any biological link, no matter how vague, between humanity and its deadly enemies. The other races, the ones the Killers had destroyed, had been surprisingly humanoid, but the Killers certainly didn’t share that with them. As they watched, millions of years slowly passed and cells began to form.
“We’re watching a sped-up version,” Tabitha said, as the cells continued to grow and multiply in their soup. “It will be many millions of years before intelligence begins to form.”
The development of life expanded rapidly once the first threshold had been passed. Newer and more complex cells began to form, bonding together into strange creatures, swimming through the chemical soup even as they used it as a source of food and energy. Powerful discharges of lightning seemed to flicker through the atmosphere, assisting mutation and the rapid development of viable mutations. The creatures floating within the gas giant weren’t like humans in one very important respect; they were composed of cells that divided and reformed at will, reproducing by fission rather than sexual congress. The very concept of sex was alien to them, as was the concept of strict barriers between different species. They were all composed of the same life. The more successful creatures became hybrids between the different varieties of creatures. Unlike Earth, life was permanently in flux. A race that seemed viable one year might not continue to survive the next, except they did. Death was rare among the creatures. They enjoyed a permanence of existence that had always been denied humans. They shared information by encoding it in their cells and passing it on to their successors, making them part of the previous life form. Their evolution was slow, slower than humanity’s, but they never regressed. What one knew, eventually the others knew as well.
Who knew when intelligence finally formed, creating a new form of life? They might not have known themselves when they crossed the threshold from animal to sentient life. They had no struggles for resources, or particular hatreds as humanity had developed; they worked together in perfect harmony with their world. Tabitha, watching, found that ironic. The Elders of New Hope had intended to create an Eden where humans could live in harmony with the land — a much-overrated concept — and the Killers, the creatures they had demonised, had achieved a far more effective harmony with their own worlds. Their mindset was very different to humanity’s mindset. With an infinity of food and resources, cooperation rather than conflict became the primary force for their evolution.