Soon enough, they learned to alter their own cells. They were no longer helpless and forced to accept each and every change evolution forced on them, but capable of altering themselves to fit. Their mindsets altered and changed as they developed new tools, with all of the workable changes rapidly added to the entire race, which now numbered in the billions…and also just one. Their mindset was both a hive mind – it had uncomfortable similarities with the MassMind – and billions of discrete entities, but no one could have safely said just where the barriers were. They weren't human. Becoming part of a greater whole – and being separated from it – was natural to them.
And that led to learning to alter their environment. The interior of a gas giant held few terrors for them. Like humanity, they developed the technology – in their case, biological modification of their own bodies – to explode in all directions. Some fell further down towards the core of the gas giant, mining the heavier materials waiting for them there, others rose up to the very edge of the atmosphere. The information – by then, they had developed the concept of trading information, expressed in memory cell units – that they discovered was shared among the entire race and new discoveries and theories emerged. They deduced the true nature of their world and its position in the universe; they identified their primary star, the moons orbiting their homeworld and the independent rocky worlds surrounding the star. They wondered what there could be out there and devoted all of their considerable mental effort to developing a form of space travel. It took them thousands of years – they were labouring under far worse constraints than humanity – but eventually they broke out into orbit, and then to the free-floating asteroids.
Their technology exploded outwards as they suddenly had access to more raw materials than they could possibly use. Hundreds of entities took on new forms and rose up to join the expanding spacefaring subdivision of their race. Others were gestated in orbit, adapted perfectly to life in space and already beginning the process of bonding with their technology. They had no doubts or fears about creating cyborgs and other fusions between biology and technology; unlike humanity, such unions were already a part of their nature before they reached space. Their understanding of the universe rapidly expanded as they created orbiting telescopes and early, primitive spacecraft, exploring the various outer moons. They couldn’t land on the moons – the gravity field was too heavy for them at first – and they tended to dismiss them and the other rocky worlds. They hadn’t considered the possibility that rocky worlds might give birth to life. Their efforts to contact other forms of life had been focused on the other gas giants in the star system…and the strange source of radiation orbiting at the edge of the system. It took them hundreds more years to realise what the black hole was and what it was doing – they never worked out where it had come from – and, unlike humanity, they weren't terrified. It wasn't long before they were working on plans to tap the power of the black hole for their own use.
They had no way of knowing that one of the inner rocky worlds had also given birth to life. The life had developed much later, but aided by a much calmer environment, a humanoid race had arisen and reached into space. It sent out probes and scientific missions to the various nearby planets, intending to learn what resources could be adapted for their use. They didn’t expect to find the gas giant entities – they weren't broadcasting any radio signals that the newcomers could detect – and were astonished to discover that someone was already developing the gas giant’s moons. Unaware of the nature of the new aliens, they deduced that they had come from outside their star system and resolved to open communication. A massive spacecraft was built and dispatched to the gas giant.
The entities observed its passage with stark disbelief, but unlike humanity, they couldn’t take refuge in self-deception. They had missed the possibility that life existed on any of the rocky worlds and, when they had picked up radio transmissions from the star system, had decided that they had a natural cause. They had never inspected the inner planets closely, believing them to be useless, and had no way of communicating with their residents. Indeed, they could barely comprehend that they even existed. How, they asked themselves, could any form of life exist under such high gravity fields? The question was fascinating and the entities prepared themselves to welcome the newcomers. It all went horrifically wrong.
There was no way for either race to talk to the other. The entities attempted to form new signalling entities, which the newcomers couldn’t even recognise. The newcomers attempted to transmit radio messages, which affected the entities and their own internal RF transmitters. Misunderstanding piled upon misunderstanding and the two sides eventually went to war. The fighting spread rapidly out of control. By the time the entities destroyed the newcomer ship, they had learned harsh lessons. War had been alien to them. It wasn't any longer.
The war that started continued to expand rapidly. The newcomers, still unaware of the entities’ true homeworld, sent new spacecraft out to wreck havoc. The entities, having devoted all of their considerable intellect to destructive weapons, fought back with a mixture of calculation and fury. They had never been hurt before. They had racial memories of pain from the time before intelligence, but there had never been anything personal in that, no sense that they had been picked on for fun. They didn’t understand their opponents and their motivations; they just…sought their complete obliteration. The war lasted fifty years and ended with the entities, having gained control of the black hole, using it to generate gravity beams that swept the newcomer spacecraft out of existence and shatter their homeworld. They had been forever changed by the experience.
Time passed. They built new spacecraft and used the black hole to power them. By then, they had evolved a sophisticated theory of gravity control and were generating their own black holes and wormholes. They sent starships to other star systems, only to discover the presence of new alien races on rocky worlds. The entities commanding those starships had race memories, always sharp and clear, of the devastation wrecked by the war. They also couldn’t tell the difference between one humanoid race and another. They didn’t hesitate to gather a handful of asteroids and bombard the new race into obliteration. The existence of so many humanoid races was a shock to them, but by then they knew that they were all Enemy. They all had to be destroyed.
They had undergone another mutation, almost without realising it. They had taken to encysting individual entities within their starships, but as their technology advanced, those entities became locked into their permanent mental states. They were used to trading information and personalities between individual entities, but the warriors were cut off from the rest of the race. They shared information through the black hole network, of course, but they didn’t – they couldn’t – share themselves. What had started as an exercise in self-defence rapidly became a crusade, a mission to wipe out every rocky-world dwelling race before it got them. The warriors, locked in their massive starships, continued to hunt down and obliterate worlds with a single-mindedness that a human would have found hard to comprehend. Few of them considered the possibility of peace, or co-existence; by the time they encountered humanity for the first time, the warriors were no longer capable of thinking of anything, beyond exterminating every other race. Their starships came, saw and destroyed. There was nothing that could stop them, or force them to adapt again. No other race matched their technology.
“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 t
he 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.
“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 ne
w 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…
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