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

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      “Affirmative.” And the tumble seemed to cease from her vantage point, though the Night Owl continued to fall end over end. She was facing the Stargate, now fifteen kilometers ahead and slowly growing larger. The Xul huntership was a flattened oval in the distance, slowly passing her on her left. There’d been no reaction whatsoever that she could detect.

      “A message from Chesty₃,” Chesty₂ told her. “The Xul—”

      She never heard the message, because suddenly the alien machine was there, twenty meters away, a flattened ovoid sprouting unevenly planted tentacles like black whips. Three of those tentacles snapped out and grasped the Night Owl, and with the inertial damping fields down, she felt the gut-wrenching jolt as the ship’s tumble was arrested, and as the alien machine decelerated.

      On several occasions, Marines had fought Xul combat machines—in the bowels of hunterships at Sirius and at Sol, and within the depths of a Xul space station at Night’s Edge—and always they seemed to be variations on this same theme, egg-shaped, with bumps and swellings and convolutions, with sensory lenses and implanted tentacles in patterns that appeared to differ from one individual to another. This model possessed a single, very large sensor, a glittering crystal as big across as a dinner plate, and the thing appeared to be narrowly watching her with a cold and unblinking gaze.

      Lee stifled a raw instinct to scream, to thrash, to struggle, to fight; from her perspective, the monster was holding her in the implacable grasp of its manipulators. The thing could easily drag her back to the Xul ship for a more lingering inspection … or it could blast her into randomly drifting atoms right here. She could see the snouts of several plasma weapons protruding from that black, slick shell.

      The Xul inspection lasted only a second or two … and then it released her. Stunned, she watched it recede once more, rapidly dwindling toward the huntership in the distance.

      “Looks like we passed inspection,” she managed to say after a few shaky moments.

      “There is a problem, however,” Chesty₂ told her. “That machine has reduced your velocity. Unless you accelerate, you will not reach the Stargate for another two hours, forty-seven minutes.”

      “Great.”

      “I do not understand your use of that word. The ambient radiation levels are already harming you physiologically.”

      She sighed. “It’s called sarcasm. Can you get this thing back through to the listening post?”

      “Of course.”

      “Then do it. Deliver everything from Chesty₃ you can extract.” She could feel something already, that faint, scratchy tingle that presaged a sunburn at the beach. This was going to be bad. …

       Marine Listening Post

       Puller 659 Stargate

       1904 hrs GMT

      The alarm went off and Gerard Fitzpatrick nearly fell out of his commlink couch. He’d been discussing the situation with Chesty, preparing to send out a follow-up probe, when an FR-100 transponder had lit up half a kilometer this side of the Gate. He started to check the ID, but Chesty confirmed it before he could link through.

      “It’s Lieutenant Lee’s Night Owl,” Chesty told him in maddeningly even tones. “I am linking with my uploaded counterpart now …”

      “Well? What does he say, damn it?”

      “Lieutenant Lee’s mission was successful. They electronically penetrated a Xul huntership and have confirmed that news of Argo’s capture had extended to the Xul base at Starwall, at the very least. They have also made contact with the AI from the Argo, which should prove to be informative. Lieutenant Lee is a casualty.”

      “Oh, Christ. How bad?”

      “Not good. The radiation flux within the Starwall system is—”

      “I know, damn it! How is she?”

      “Alive. Barely. My counterpart informs me she may be near death. …”

      “Well, scramble a work pod, damn it! Drag her in here!”

      “Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, I must advise against that. The Night Owl is itself highly radioactive. We could contaminate the entire—”

      “Chesty, I’ve got the watch, okay? That puts me in command of this listening post. Patch a Class-One emergency NL call through to Major Tomanaga. Upload the data Tera brought back, and tell him I’ve gone out to retrieve the lieutenant’s ship.”

      “But—”

      “That’s a goddamn fucking order!”

      “Aye, aye, sir,” the AI replied, with rigidly correct service protocol.

      Fitzpatrick knew he could buck the decision up to the Old Man—Major George Tomanaga at the LP’s main station two light-hours away. Either Tomanaga would immediately order him to send out robotic tugs to bring the lieutenant in—in which case, why the hell wait? Or he would delay while he conferred with his superiors at paraside HQ, which could mean hours of delay, hours that Lieutenant Lee did not have. Or he would say no, order Fitzpatrick to sit tight until properly equipped tugs could arrive from the main base, and that would take God-knew how long. Work tugs with rad screening were not exactly interplanetary greyhounds.

      And Fitzpatrick was going out after her now, no matter what. This way, if the Old Man flashed back an order to him to sit tight, he wouldn’t have to disobey it.

      A small but very guilt-feeling part of him was telling him that he should have gone on the sneak-and-peek, not her. Damn it, if she died. …

      In a way, things had been easier in the old days, before the widespread introduction of nonlocal communications. A few centuries ago, he would have flashed off his intent to go pick up Tera, gone, and been back at the LP long before his message had even reached HQ. Having faster-than-light communications was a royal pain in the ass, since it invited micromanagement by the jerk-off remfies in their comfortable habitats far from the point of action.

      Well, the hell with orders, and the hell with the remfs. Marines did not leave their own behind. …

       USMC Skybase

       Paraspace

       2355 hrs GMT

      “General Alexander. Please wake up.”

      Cara’s voice brought Alexander upright in bed. “This had better be goddamned important,” he mumbled aloud.

      Tabatha rolled over at his side. “Mmph. Martin? What is it?”

      “Call from the office, Tabbie,” he said, caressing her thigh. “Don’t worry about it. Go back to sleep.”

      “I’ll СКАЧАТЬ