“Their monomania may be all that kept the human race alive,” Tabitha said, as the images faded away. “They never seemed to really think about asteroid settlements, not really. It’s as if they thought of them vaguely, but never bothered to actually lock themselves into hunting down asteroid and lunar settlements. They might have changed that policy now, but not until we hurt them.”
“Poor bastards,” Father Sigmund said. The entirety of human religious history was at his fingertips. He could appreciate how the Killers had fallen into the trap. “Can we stop them without destroying them?”
Tabitha nodded. “This is the Killer Communications Network,” she said, as an image formed in front of her. “It’s also their wormhole generation network and the hub for their plan to tap the energy of the galactic core and destroy every rocky planet in the galaxy. It consists of twelve massive stations at the following coordinates.”
They blinked up on her command. “By combining the different research efforts, we have devised a way to tap into their system and actually talk to them,” she continued. “The problem is that the only way to do it is to take out one of those twelve stations and use the missing segment to insert our own black hole signals. The good news is that if we take a single station out, we will have prevented them from disintegrating the galaxy until they can replace it. The bad news is that the station is likely to be heavily defended. Given their nature, destroying them is going to be difficult.”
She paused. “There is a back-up plan,” she added. “If we fail to talk to them, the MassMind believes that we can generate enough interference in the system to collapse it. The vast majority of tiny black holes will evaporate. The bigger ones may destabilise. They will certainly lose their links to the network. If we succeed, the Killer Communications Network will disintegrate and their civilisation will collapse into thousands of individual planets and starships. Their ability to coordinate their offensive will come to an end. We will have to hunt down and destroy every one of their planets, every one of their ships, but victory would be certain.”
“And if we do that,” Father Sigmund said, “we will have committed genocide.”
“They have committed genocide millions of times over,” Jayne said. “Do we have the right not to destroy them, if we have a chance? Not just for humanity, not just for our children, but for the rest of the races now struggling up from the primordial ooze.”
“We will make the attempt to communicate with them,” Patti said, firmly. “If we can avoid committing genocide, we will avoid it. We have to give them a chance to see reason. If not… then we will not hesitate to destroy their network, and then the Killers themselves.
“And that will be the end of the threat.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Rupert had never felt so humiliated in his entire life.
Like all good Spacers, he had attempted to develop a capability for extreme self-reliance, taking the limits of his body and human technology as far as they would go. He could exist without oxygen or food and drink for extended periods, eat or drink anything that could be converted by his internal reactors and survive in environments that would kill an ordinary human. Given enough time and resources, he could even extend his nanotechnology to build an entire spacecraft from nothing, but asteroid-based raw material. He was, in a sense, a tiny spacecraft in his own right.
And he was trapped. His internal chronometers seemed to be in disagreement with each other, but he had been enclosed within the closing walls for at least two days, aware all the time. Spacers rarely slept, regarding it as yet another human weakness to be overcome, but he would have welcomed sleep instead of waiting, wondering just what the Killer intended to do to him. There was little doubt that he had been held as a prisoner — the Killer had plenty of ways to kill him, if that had been the objective, and even his internal force field wouldn’t hold out forever — but the Killers didn’t seem to have anything reassembling a human sense of time. It could be years before the Killer finally got around to interrogating — or dissecting — him and by then, he suspected that he would be dead of boredom.
It would have been easier if he had been abandoned in space, because there would have been something that he could have done. Even building an entire starship up, atom by atom, would have been doing something. Instead, he was just trapped… and his internal sensors couldn’t reach beyond the odd material the Killers used for their internal compartments. If there were others on the starship, trapped as he was, how could they escape, or make contact with him? His internal weapons wouldn’t even make a mark on the wall material, let alone burn through it.
It must be a version of their hull material, he decided. The other option — that the Killers had enough nanotechnology developed that they could afford to repair it even as it was damaged — was too depressing to contemplate. I would need a higher level of energy just to burn through it…
He followed that thought desperately, but nothing materialised in his mind, apart from the vague note that detonating all of his power cells at once would probably destroy large parts of the wall. It would also kill him, so he pushed that thought to one side and continued to probe the wall. It was just possible that he could generate a vibration frequency that would shake the wall to pieces, but the more he studied it, the more he realised that that wasn’t going to work. None of his sensor probes returned anything that made sense. The wall appeared to be made out of a single atom… and that was flatly impossible. It would have been easier to believe that the Killers had scooped matter out of a black hole than created something that defied the laws of science — something else that defied the laws of science.
A Spacer had ample ways to pass the time, yet Rupert knew that he couldn’t retreat into any of them, or he might never leave before the Killer came for him. He had become a Spacer to escape the false promise of virtual reality and a fake afterlife in the MassMind and to escape into fantasy now would almost be a betrayal of his own principles. He concentrated instead on studying what little he could see of the Killer craft and running through the massive files he’d obtained, containing everything humanity knew, thought it knew and guessed about the Killers. It was a suitable diversion, he decided… and then it hit him.
Every human was injected, at birth, with a few million individually tailored nanomachines intended to help keep them alive. With those tiny helpers swarming through their bodies, disease and deprivation were a thing of the past and only mental degradation or accident — or the Killers — caused death. It was one of the Community Fundamental Rights, like free access to the datanet and downloading into the MassMind, and could not be infringed. Religious nuts sometimes had the technology removed from their bodies — the Community didn’t prevent anyone being stupid, as long as it threatened no one else — but the Spacers had added their own technology to the original batch. Most humans had little awareness of their assistants, but Rupert could control them all through his Spacer augmentations. It was easy to take control of a tiny swarm and divert them out into the air, using them to analyse the wall.
Ten minutes later, he was starting to suspect that some of the original reports had actually been accurate. The medical nanites weren’t designed as dissemblers, but it was simple enough to reprogram them… yet they weren’t making any headway at all on the wall. It wasn’t a case of one group of nanomachines attacking another, but something more fundamental, as if the wall itself simply couldn’t be taken apart. It glowed and pulsed with strange energies, yet he couldn’t even begin to analyse them. Rupert had been a pretty fair engineer before he’d converted himself into a cyborg Spacer and the entire problem was fascinating… and beyond his understanding. It was becoming clear that there were things about the Killers that no human, yet, could understand. He wished, for the first time in his Spacer life, for a direct link to the MassMind. It’s ability to analyse sensor results, combined with human intuition, would have come in handy.