The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human. Ian Douglas

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       8

       2410.1102

       Lieutenant Tera Lee

       Starwall System

       1609 hrs GMT

      Lieutenant Lee watched the stream of returning data from Chesty₃, her alarm growing with each fresh revelation. She could only hear what Chesty was able to translate, but he’d picked several “voices” out of the background chorus and singled them out for special attention.

      And now Lee and Chesty₂ listened to the ebb and flow of harmonies from the huntership now drifting a few kilometers away, an eerie symphony of voices crying out, echoing one another, merging, branching, merging once more. The Xul knew of Humankind’s modest pocket of habitation in the Orion Arm, knew that it had destroyed several of their hunterships in the past, knew it represented a threat, at least in principle, to Xul long-term survival.

      This last made absolutely no sense to Lee. How could beings as powerful and as technologically advanced as the Xul feel threatened by the insignificant likes of Homo sapiens? Still, the fact that they believed it was significant.

      It was vital that she get this data back to the listening post.

      But actually pulling that off was going to be a bit more difficult than thinking it. The Night Owl was falling directly away from the Stargate at a relative velocity of 217 meters per second—a bit over 700 kph. To return to the other side of the local Gate, she needed to kill that speed, then accelerate back the way she’d come. But as soon as Chesty₂ powered up the Owl’s drive, they risked immediate detection.

      Normally, this wouldn’t have been a problem. The main Xul base in the Starwall system was some twelve light-seconds distant, ten times the distance between Earth and Earth’s moon. Lee could have reversed course and slipped back through the gate before the Xul ever realized she’d been there.

      That was not a good option, though, with a Xul huntership ten kilometers off her beam. For long seconds, she watched that other ship as it slowly drifted farther and farther astern, willing it to switch on its own drive and vanish into the blaze of starlight ahead. Damn it, what were they playing at over there? They’d come through the Gate from the gods alone knew where; why didn’t they now move in-system, to dock with the Xul base here?

      The longer she waited, though, the more she wondered if the Xul huntership had been deliberately parked there, squarely above the center of the Gate’s opening, as a sentinel, as a guard on perimeter watch. It made sense; if the Xul were now suddenly concerned about Species 2824, they might be taking extra security precautions at all of their gateway bases. Or, worse, they might already know that humans possessed a listening post accessible through this gate—659—and be guarding against exactly such reconnaissance missions as Lee was now carrying out.

      “Chesty₃ reports that he cannot access more deeply without risking discovery,” Chesty₂ told her, a whisper in her mind. “He suggests that he remain in place as a rear guard while we attempt the vector change. He will wait to dissociate until after we pass through the Gate.”

      Lee thought about this, but didn’t like it. Like most Marines, she thought of the Chesty iterations as sentient and autonomous life forms—artificial, perhaps, but as much alive and aware in terms of their thought processes as any organic life form. There were cybernetic СКАЧАТЬ