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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ hell should I want to talk to you?”

      “I am Monique Sainte-Jean. You may think of me as your … your therapist. You have been unconscious for a very long time, and we want to be sure you awake with your mind, memories, and personality intact, non?”

      Alarm bells were figuratively ringing in Lee’s mind, now. As a rule, she’d paid scant attention to interstellar politics, but she had been thoroughly briefed before her deployment to the Puller star system. The Puller system, she knew, was uninhabited and of zero importance to anyone, with the single exception of the Puller Gate.

      The Gate’s connections had been explored in the half-dozen years following its discovery, some three decades earlier. A total of twelve established gatepaths had been uncovered there, one of them the route to the large Xul base at Starwall.

      The problem with the stargates was that the multiple paths to other stars they provided never seemed to go to anyplace known or useful. All appeared to open at gates circling other stars scattered across the Galaxy, from the outer halo to the Galactic Core itself, but until more was known about those possible destinations—and whether or not entering them would alert the Xul to Humankind’s presence—it had been decided to avoid using them entirely.

      Ever since the discovery of the very first gate at Sirius, astronomers, cosmologists, and physicists from every human starfaring government had been clamoring for the chance to use the Gates as research tools—opportunities to explore close-up such cosmic wonders and enigmas as black holes, neutron stars, the large-scale structure of the entire Galaxy, and the weird zoo of mysterious phenomena ticking away at the Galaxy’s heart. Since a significant number of those paths—two-hundred or so—led to Xul-occupied systems, and since the Xul appeared to use the far-flung network of Gate connections for their own long-range movement through the Galaxy, the various interstellar governments had agreed at the Treaty of Chiron in 2490 not to permit any human movement through the gates for any reason, without the fully informed consent of all starfaring governments.

      And that was why the Puller Listening Post, and all of the others like it, were illegal, at least within the often murky arena of international treaty law. Under the auspices of the DCI², the Department of Commonwealth Interstellar Intelligence, the Marines had been tapped to build and operate the system of listening posts … and as part of that operation, they routinely sent robotic probes and even—upon occasion and when necessary—manned surveillance spacecraft to keep an eye on the various identified Xul bases.

      “My therapist, huh?” Lee replied. “Since when is the Direction Général interested in the emotional health of junior Marine officers?”

      The DGSE—Direction Général de la Sécurité Extraterrestrial—was the Franco-PanEuropean counterpart to the DCI². It was a guess on Lee’s part, but Ste.-Jean had to be either military or Federal-Republic civilian intelligence, and the DGSE was the largest and best funded of all of the Republic’s intelligence organizations.

      The long silence that followed her jab suggested that she’d been on-target, or close to it. She might be consulting with her superiors on a different channel, or with a military intelligence AI.

      “Very well,” Ste.-Jean said after a moment. “Perhaps we should play this in a more, ah, straightforward fashion. As it happens, I am DST, not DGSE, but it was a good guess on your part.”

      The DST was the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, a kind of civil police intelligence unit tasked with keeping tabs on people, organizations, and traffic within French territory that could pose a threat to the government. Other Terran nationalities within the PanEuropean Republic had their own intelligence organizations, the Germans and British especially, but the French held the lion’s share of planetary colonies within the Republic, and they claimed the Puller system as their own, even if the place wasn’t populated.

      “Yeah, well,” Lee said in her mind. “I don’t think I have anything to say to you.”

      “Not even in exchange for our medical assistance?” Ste.-Jean said. “Look. I will be honest with you. We know all about your observation post at the Puller gas giant. And we know that you went through the stargate in that system to investigate a Xul base. Your government, it seems, has much to answer for … beginning with the arrogant breaking of solemn interstellar treaty, and with placing the security, even the very survival of all human worlds at grave risk. You needn’t worry, Lieutenant. We have brought no charges against you … at least, not yet. We recognize that you were simply doing what your superiors told you to do … and were caught in the middle, yes?”

      “If you say so.”

      “However, we do require your cooperation. We want to know exactly what you saw and experienced on the other side of the gate. And we want your cooperation in identifying Marine installations that we suspect are imbedded within other Stargate systems in sovereign PanRépublique space.”

      “Go fuck yourself.”

      That response elicited another long silence.

      Lee managed to open her eyes, and this time she could keep them open. She was lying in what obviously was a hospital bed, her body completely enclosed in a plastic sheath that left only her face exposed. Unable to move, she couldn’t see much of the room, but it appeared to be sterile, white, and lacking in any amenities whatsoever. She couldn’t even see a door.

      Presumably, they had her body hooked up with tubes for feeding, for medication, and for waste removal, though she couldn’t feel much of anything from her neck down save for that general, far-off-in-the-background sense of pain. Presumably, too, her bloodstream was now crawling with nano-agents—microscopic devices programmed to busily swarm through her circulatory system and repair the damage caused by her exposure to the Galactic Core’s radiation fields, but they might be programmed for other things as well.

      The big question of the moment was how they’d managed to tap into her private internal communications channel. If they could manage that, then theoretically they should be able to download her entire on-board memory. They wouldn’t need to ask her questions or elicit her cooperation; all they’d need to do was pull a full memory dump.

      Okay, girl, she thought. Think it through. But keep it low-channel, in case they’re listening in …

      If they hadn’t pulled a memory dump, then they didn’t have access to her cerebral link hardware. Tentatively, she tried to connect with Terry, her personal software EA, but the AI resident in her hardware remained silent. She tried again, searching for Chesty or any of his iterations. Again, nothing.

      Okay, that suggested they’d deliberately disabled Terry … or that he’d been fried by the Core radiation. Chesty was too large a program to reside within her personal hardware, so he might be off-line because of range. Had her cereblink been damaged on the other side of the Gate?

      She ran a fast diagnostic, ignoring the fact that her captors—she thought of them in those terms, now—would be able to monitor what she was doing. There was damage, but her hardware appeared to be more or less complete. The software was running at about forty percent efficiency.

      Her personal software might have been taken off-line in order to facilitate her treatment. More likely, her captors had tried to access the software directly while she was unconscious, and either botched it, or caused some physical damage in the retrieval process. If the former, questioning her would be the only alternative they had in order to get the information they wanted. If the latter, they might have a partial memory dump already in-hand, and simply СКАЧАТЬ