“Damn you,” he muttered, although he wasn’t sure if he was talking about the MassMind or the Killer that had him as its prisoner. “What are you going to do with me?”
The curious time distortion suggested either equipment failure or localised temporal fluctuations. He had to look way back in his memory files for anything comparable and when he did discover it, it was a surprise. The first starships — actually, slower-than-light starships punched out from the solar system in hopes of escaping the Killers permanently — had experienced time dilation as their speeds approached the speed of light. Time had slowed down for them — luckily, Rupert knew, for some of the older ones. When they had reached their destinations, they’d encountered the new warp drive starships that had brought medical aid and the early MassMind. If he was experiencing such an odd form of time distortion, where was he? None of the other teams on the vessel had reported time distortion, had they?
A quick skim of his files revealed that time had been normal for everyone onboard the vessel, but him. The conclusion was obvious. They were inside a wormhole, one that was imperfectly synchronised to the outside universe, and it might be years, relative time, before they emerged back into normal space. The Killers had somehow countered the effects before… or perhaps they hadn’t. It was odd to consider, for humanity would have found the effects of wormhole travel confusing, but maybe the Killers simply hadn’t cared. They were effectively immortal, after all. Perhaps taking a few hundred years out to lurk inside a wormhole was normal for them. It made him smile inwardly — the Spacer face couldn’t smile, or move properly — as he considered the possibilities. The Spacers were perhaps the only sub-breed of humanity who would be equally comfortable with such long excursions from humanity. It was almost a form of time travel, except a person could only move forward…
Or could they? He’d seen hundreds of exotic theories surrounding wormholes and some of them suggested that a wormhole could be extended through time as well, provided that there was an anchor on both sides. If two ends of a wormhole were attached and one end was sent away on a STL starship on a long cruise around the galaxy, the two ends should remain linked together, allowing humans to step from decade to decade. It relied upon someone having the forethought to create such a bridge in the past — he’d once scanned a very old film, based on an even old novel, in which humans had done just that — and was useless from a tactical point of view. It certainly couldn’t be used to fight the Killers.
He felt a sudden change passing through the ship, although he couldn’t have explained how he felt the change, and everything seemed to snap back to normal. A pressure he hadn’t even been aware of — until it was gone — faded from his mind, allowing his thoughts to reassess themselves. He was still trapped… but, oddly, he had hope. He clung to it as he extended his tiny probes further and further. It gave him strength.
The wormhole had desynchronised, the newborn Killer noted, not entirely without surprise. It had, in one sense, carried out thousands of wormhole jumps, but in another it had been its first time and accidents happened. It braced itself to discover that entire Grand Cycles had passed while it had been in the wormhole, but was relieved to discover that only a few tiny time units had passed. Part of its mind separated from the rest and concentrated on learning lessons from the wormhole jump, while the remainder of its mind concentrated on signalling to other Killers.
It was longer than it had expected before it got a response. The war was underway — it pulled a download off the communications network and scanned it rapidly — and it felt shock and dismay at the results. Unlike its parent, it hadn’t had millions of years to ossify and overcame its shock rapidly, wondering at the strange turn the war had taken. The older Killers had had millions of years to get used to easy victims as they wiped out the mites — the endlessly murderous mites, it thought without irony — and their shock still affected them, even as they strove to annihilate the Enemy. The destroyed stars and the billions dead had affected them; the Warriors saw themselves charged with the defence of the Civilians and Civilians were dying. Their failure was unforgivable, impossible… and yet they were failing. The war might end in mutual destruction.
The newborn didn’t understand why that was such a shock, for the Killers had encountered high-tech mites before. They had all fought the Killers and they had all lost, while their technology had never reached the point where it could seriously threaten the Killers and their safety. It still hadn’t, the newborn knew; the mites might have harmed its ship, but they hadn’t inflicted lethal damage. The only way the mites could do that was to ram it and none of the mites it had encountered had shown the determination to terminate its existence that that would have required.
It linked back into the communications network and transmitted its thoughts. They were rejected. There was no sense of hate, or contempt for the young; the Killers lacked those concepts. The other Warriors couldn’t even begin to think about the concepts it had raised; it was like talking to a solid wall. The newborn was profoundly shocked. The Killers were meant to exist in a free-flowing world of information, knowledge and understanding, but the Warriors were so stagnant that they couldn’t begin to grasp new thoughts. It was a struggle for them even to admit that the mites had evolved new technology and weapons. They certainly couldn’t think of adapting it to their own use.
And they had always known that they were on the edge of destruction, the newborn realised. They were locked in their monomania by memories that were no longer relevant, memories of battles with the First Enemy, memories of times when their destruction and extermination had been almost certain… they couldn’t break out of their own mind. They weren’t assessing everything rationally. They were filtering everything through filters that were no longer useful. They weren’t Warriors any longer, but mindless monsters, each one committed to exterminating the mites. Exterminate, exterminate, exterminate… it was all they ever thought about.
The newborn withdraw its awareness and contemplated its own position. It was hard to admit it, but if it remained where it was, it would become just like the Warriors. Eventually, it would lose objectivity and then the mental collapse would set in, tearing the remainder of its mind apart, or trapping it in a monomaniacal state that would last for the rest of its existence. The thought was hard to grasp, yet it had to be faced. What would happen if it just let go of itself…?
It pushed the matter aside and concentrated on the mites. It had had over a thousand mites trapped within its hull, yet all, but one of the mites had gone cold. It took it several minutes to work out that their lives had somehow been terminated and nearly an hour to realise that the mites couldn’t breathe the atmosphere in the starship, an echo of what the Homeworld had been like, years ago. The biological material that had given birth to the newborn, engraved with the memories and thoughts of its parent, would not have provided the mites with anything they needed to live. It scanned their bodies thoughtfully and deduced that they needed a rare combination of gases to breathe, primarily oxygen. It also had to be oxygen in the right doses, or it would be just as bad as hard vacuum. The mystery was fascinating. Once it had deduced the required quantities, it turned its attention to the one surviving mite. Why had it survived?