“But it is nothing compared to what the Killers have at their disposal,” the MassMind warned, as they extended their mind towards the Killer Communications Network. The universe of black holes, massive power storage facilities – built, literally, out of space-time itself, and data formed around them. “We must not engage in a power struggle with them or we will lose.”
“I’m not arguing,” Tabitha pointed out, curtly. The goal was to interface with the Killer Communications Network, not get destroyed by it. The Killers would certainly seek to expel them as soon as they knew that they were there. “Shall we proceed?”
She extended her mind towards the Killer Network and felt it vibrating like a drunken man, shocked by the sudden loss of one of its hubs. The Shiva hole was already linked into the network, but she extended it now until it was in place to actually do more than just tapping the data, but absorbing it as well. The MassMind followed her rapidly, studying the data and working rapidly to translate it. Chiyo99 could use her experience to point the MassMind in the right direction and its processing power could unlock vast secrets. The entire network opened up in front of them.
It was familiar and strange, understandable and alien. There were vast sections that were almost understandable – the Killers, despite their nature, shared the same universe as mankind – and other sections that were beyond understanding. Tabitha wondered, in a moment of flickering humour, if the Killer network was three-quarters pornography as well; the vast majority of fantasy worlds in the MassMind involved sex, to one degree or another. The Killers were asexual, reproducing by fission and splitting their cells, but did they have anything like sex? Would they ever get distracted by thoughts of other Killers?
The thought made her smile as they hacked deeper into the Killer network. The young Tabitha had spent much of her time chasing men – or getting men to chase her while she carefully didn’t run very fast – and the older Tabitha had wondered how much she would have accomplished if she hadn’t allowed her hormones to distract her. Perhaps she would have been Director of NASA when the Killers arrived, slain along with the remainder of the planet; perhaps, without her leadership, the Community would never have formed and the human race would have died out, faded away like the Ghosts. She shook her head as more Killer data rose up in front of her, showing her the deeper structure underlying the communications network; there was no point in wondering about what might have been if…
“There,” Chiyo99 said, sensing the web of data that formed the remaining eleven hubs. Shiva was already vibrating with them; now, the black hole linked completely into the Killer network, dragging the other black holes into alignment with it and the human system. The Killers didn’t have time to react before their communications network suddenly had twelve hubs again, one of them human. “We’re in.”
“Reach out to them,” Tabitha urged. There was so little time, even at computer speeds, infinitively faster than anything the human mind could grasp. “Reach out to them before they reconfigure the network and throw us out again!”
Presented with a valid threat, the Killers were already responding; she could feel their controlling minds struggling to alter the network and remove Shiva from their links, preventing the human race from exploring further. Their network stood exposed, yet there was no way to tell which messages were ordering a change, or even a controlled collapse of the network, before they altered their frequencies to prevent another hacking event. The MassMind configured a general greeting and broadcast it into the network, but there was no response. The Killers ignored it, as they had ignored every other human attempt to communicate with them; they just continued to focus on reconfiguring their network. It was almost as if their controlling minds didn’t know that the humans were there, yet…
“They don’t,” Chiyo99 said, bitterly. “They’ve decided that we are impossible, so we don’t exist for them. We have to be nothing more than a data glitch for them.”
Tabitha felt bitter despair. “What do we do now?” She asked. The sense of frustration almost overwhelmed her. To have come so far, only to fail at the last hurdle. How could the Killers just ignore them? “Just crash the entire network, all of it?”
“That may no longer be possible,” the MassMind said. It’s normally confident tenor shifted. Tabitha felt its doubt and growing despair. The grand plan, the nuclear option, would no longer work. “They may already have prevented us from successfully crashing their network.”
***
The newborn had been wrapped in conversation with Rupert – the mite, no, the human, had a name, something else alien to the Killers – when it had heard the first human call through the communications network. It had almost been lost in the howling data storm that the destruction of one of the hubs had created, yet it was unquestionably alien. The newborn abandoned its conversation and extended its mind out to the newcomer, but the other Killers simply ignored it. It could not exist, so it didn’t exist. The newborn had no such preconceptions.
It formatted a call of its own, using what it had learned from Rupert and the human minds it had absorbed, and replied. The sense of the MassMind almost overwhelmed it, yet it was prepared and ready for such an entity – it was almost like encountering a far larger and diverse Killer, like the ones who had been slaughtered on the remains of the sphere. There was a sense of presence, of many minds working together as one, yet also a sense of unity and calm contemplation. The MassMind was everything that the human race was, it realised; it was all the glory, the delight, the pride and the agony. It was far more like a Killer than the Killers themselves – or the humans – would have felt comfortable admitting, yet it was surprisingly alien…and different.
Their minds meshed together almost unwillingly, each bringing something different to the merger. The newborn saw, for the second time, many different human lifetimes and the fear of the Killers that had bound the human race together. The MassMind saw, for the first time, the memories of the war against the First Enemy, a foe that had been defeated millions of years ago, yet how the Killers had never realised that there were different races on each of the rocky worlds. They had never encountered another gas giant-dwelling race, never, yet was that such a surprise. The gas giants were hardly as habitable as Earth-like worlds.
“We need to end this,” the MassMind said, directly to the newborn. There was no room for doubt or deceit, not when two very different and yet alike minds were in such close harmony. It would have destroyed another Killer, but the newborn had the mental capability to endure the touch, even embrace it. “We need to end this before we destroy each other.”
“We have to shout louder,” the newborn replied. They were sharing thoughts and ideas faster than any human mind could understand, or handle. They were both vaguely aware of the two puny human minds, left far behind by their communication, yet there was no time to update them, or seek their consent. “You have to…here.”
A plan formed in their shared mind. The MassMind reached out, through the Killer Communications Network, to touch the very heart of their shared consensus. They used their own network to share thoughts and ideas, even though they were far from human, and they all used it. They might no longer be able to share memories directly, through the transference of cells from Killer to Killer, but they could talk. They could be one.
The MassMind formatted a new message, a gestalt of everything they were, everything they ever had been and everything they could be, in the future, and broadcast it right into the heart of the Killer consensus. It was a massive shout, a wordless cry of WE ARE HERE, and it screamed into their minds. The shock was undeniable. No amount of disbelief could hide its true nature, or humanity’s, from the Killers, either from the Warriors or the Civilians living down in the gas giants; they could no longer deny the truth. The entire fate of the universe seemed to hang in the balance.
And then the Killers replied.
Chapter Forty-Seven
The peace accords were signed at Ceres, at Patti’s insistence. The war had
begun in the Solar System, after all, and it had seemed fitting to her that it end there. Thousands of humans from all over the Community had come to see the end of the war, although the Killers had only sent a handful of starships and representatives. The Killers – no one had yet parsed out their actual name for themselves – were hardly comfortable in a human environment and vice versa. It was that, Patti decided, that would ensure that the truce would ensure and become a permanent peace.
Both sides had slaughtered billions of the other’s population, civilian and military, but they actually had little to fight over. They couldn’t use the same worlds, or even the same technology to some extent, and there were an infinitive number of asteroids and stars out there to use for resources. The only real difference was that humanity could now land on and settle as many planets as they liked, while the Killers could infest as many gas giants as they wanted. Patti knew that there were researchers from the Technical Faction and Builder Killers getting together to share their thoughts and combine their intellectual resources. The combinations of human and Killer technology had already provided some interesting results.
She had been worried about lone maniacs on both sides attempting to restart the war, but insane – as opposed to monomaniacal – Killers seemed to be rare, almost non-existent. The remaining Killer Warriors had been as shocked by the discovery that humans were not the First Enemy as had the Thinkers, Civilians and Builders and had reintegrated themselves with the Killer civilisation. A handful had actually opened wormholes and vanished in the direction of other galaxies, apparently with the intention of being alone for a long time. The Killers didn’t measure time the way humans did; the Killers she’d seen hadn’t been too worried about their brethren. They were effectively immortal; if they wanted to spend millions of years on their own, they would be welcome back when – if – they finally returned.
The Community had been more of a problem, but the hotheads had been restrained by more reasonable people who pointed out just how much damage the Community had taken over the last few months and how many more would die if the war restarted. The Defence Force had halted a handful of small efforts to strike back at the Killers – and a handful more had failed utterly without intervention – and Patti privately hoped that the reopening of Earth-like worlds and the new challenges opened by the Killer technology would prevent further outbreaks. There were already billions of humans planning to land and settle new worlds, while billions more were choosing to remain in space. They saw no reason to land on heavy worlds when they could have the freedom of the stars and the resources that floated through space, free for the taking.
And Earth…
The Technical Faction had long had a plan to reform Earth, one that was already underway. Starships were dumping genetically engineered seeds into the atmosphere already, absorbing and filtering out the gunk in the air, while robotic teams were landing on the planet to start clearing the radiation. The Killers had actually assisted by providing some details on their weapons and their long-term effects; the Technical Faction was already talking in terms of recovering Earth for human settlement within the next thousand years. Patti was almost tempted to go into stasis at the end of her term, to wait until she could walk on Earth without powered armour and heavy internal shielding, but it would have to wait. She had a term to finish and, with all the new worlds and internal divisions opening up, she might be the last President of the Community. Without a deadly external enemy, humanity’s worst traits were starting to surface again. It had been all she could do to convince the Assembly to pass laws forbidding the redevelopment of the other inhabited worlds the Killers had destroyed. Let them stay, she’d argued, as monuments to the war. Let the universe remember what had happened when one race lost its way.
She looked up from the table as Rupert approached, followed by a glowing sphere that hummed as it floated through the air. The light within the sphere illuminated a collection of cells, glowing faintly as they absorbed and redirected the light; it seemed impossible that she was looking at a Killer in its pure form. The sphere extended tiny manipulators as she watched, allowing it to pick up a pen and carefully sign the treaty. Rupert had had to explain the concept of a peace treaty to the Killers himself. They had never developed the concept themselves – they never had internal wars, for which Patti could only envy them – and their relations with other races had always ended badly, until now. The real agreements had been made via the MassMind and its link into the Killer Communications Network, but even the Killers had accepted the need for a formal ceremony. The Killer, the youngest Killer by nearly twenty million years, signed the paper with an elaborate image that meant little to Patti. Her own signature looked far more human. The combination added, somehow, to the importance of the document.
“And let that be an end to it,” Patti said, fervently. Rupert nodded slowly, bowing his great head. The Spacer had added several more augmentations since the last time she’d seen him, including a device intended to allow direct communication with the Killers. She’d heard that some of the Spacers intended to work hand-in-hand with the Killers over the next few centuries, particularly the Builder Killers. They had some grand scheme that could only be accomplished by combining both races and their technology. “Is that it?”
“It does seem rather anticlimactic compared to the war,” Rupert agreed. Beside him, the Killer sphere glowed brighter for a moment. “”The Youngest agrees with you, but thinks that it’s time to end it permanently.”
Patti had to smile as she stared into the glowing sphere. Who would have guessed, before the first successful capture of a Killer starship, that the Killers remembered the First Enemy so clearly that it might as well have been yesterday. It had fuelled their determination to wipe out what they had thought were thousands of colony worlds belonging to the First Enemy and even though Patti couldn’t understand how they had believed that humans were the same as some other race, it made sense from their point of view…and uncounted billions had died. It could never be allowed to happen again.
“I agree,” she said, firmly. The glowing sphere daunted her. “We won’t let it happen again.”
***
Andrew found himself, once again, taking part in a simulated conference involving hundreds of thousands of Captains and their senior officers. The end of the war had brought a complex mixture of emotions to the Defence Force; they’d won, in the end, so what now? They had existed as something apart from the Community, yet charged with its defence against the Killers and keeping the peace between settlements. The Killers were no longer a threat – he remembered the wavefront of white light that had melted an entire Dyson Sphere and shivered – and already human disputes were coming to the fore. What would happen when different groups started fighting over planets?
“You all did well,” Brent said, from the podium. The simulated room fell silent, although Andrew couldn’t decide if everyone had gone quiet for their commander’s benefit, or if the processors running the program had dampened out the noise. Either was possible and, now that the war had come to an end, discipline was frayed. “We won the war. Can I ask for a moment of silence on behalf of the dead?”
Andrew bowed his head along with the rest of the Captains. Too many had died in the Battle of the Sphere, as it was already being called. Two thousand starships had been destroyed outright by the killers, another four hundred had been caught and destroyed by the wavefront of Cracker energy, or smashed into the Dyson Sphere by the powerful gravity beams the Killers had unleashed in a final attempt to save part of their communications network. No one had relished having to fight another such battle, or perhaps a series of such battles, yet without the peace treaty, it would have been impossible to avoid. The Defence Force needed time to rest and recuperate.
“Some of you will discover that your starships are being converted into survey craft to explore the areas of the galaxy we never touched in a thousand years,” Brent continued. “The remainder of you will continue to serve as warriors, as sold
iers, until we know what the future holds. It would be unwise of us to no longer maintain a deterrent force; after all, the Killers may no longer be a threat, but who knows what else is out there, waiting for us?”
Andrew nodded slowly. The one lesson that humans should have learned, in their history, was that peace was often only the space between wars. Those who wanted peace – permanent peace – needed to prepare for war, even at cost. The Community, with an infinite level of resources, could build and maintain a vast military without having to drain civilian resources. By combining human and Killer technologies, who knew what they might be able to develop?
Afterwards, he found himself in front of the Admiral himself. “You’re being given a number of medals,” Brent confirmed, once they had exchanged greetings. “You’re also being given a new mission. You’re to hunt for the remainder of the Ghosts.”
Andrew blinked. “Sir,” he said, “the Ghosts are dead!”
“Perhaps,” Brent said. “As you know, we’ve been comparing notes with our…opposite numbers among the Killers. They noted possible traces of a third race living within a hundred light years of the Ghost System. They also never did anything about it, although I’m not entirely sure why. Some of the Killers actually studied the various races and one of them may have decided to leave them alone to see what would happen.”
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