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

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СКАЧАТЬ to war with the PanEuropeans, getting past Altair would be their first big strategic requirement.

      Cara ignored his sally—AIs had trouble understanding certain concepts, like “beauty”—and continued. “You are aware of the astronomical phenomenon of novae,” the AI said.

      “Of course. Stars that explode—become much, much brighter in a short period of time. They’re not as violent as supernovae, of course, but they’re violent enough to cook any planets they might have. A handful are reported every year. Most aren’t naked-eye visible, but there have been a few bright ones.”

      “Correct. Most novae appear to occur in close-double star systems, where material from one star is falling into the other. At least, that is the conventional theory, which seems to hold for a majority of the novae studied so far. And, as you say, novae are observed and recorded every year. My AI colleagues went through all such lists, among many others, in pursuance of your authorization for a data search on 1811, six days ago.”

      “What did you find?”

      “An intriguing fact. During a single thirty-seven-year period in the early twentieth century, a total of twenty bright novae—exploding stars—were observed from Earth.”

      “Go on.”

      “Five of those twenty novae occurred within the arbitrary boundaries of the constellation Aquila.”

      It took a few seconds for the import to sink in. “My God—”

      “Twenty-five percent of all observed and recorded novae, in other words, occurred within point two-five percent of the entire sky. This, we feel, is statistically important.

      “One of these novae,” Cara went on, as a bright, new star appeared on the skymap just to the west of Altair, “was Nova Aquila. It appeared in the year 1918, and was the brightest nova ever recorded until Nova Carina, almost six centuries later. Two of the other novae appeared in the same year—1936—here, and here.” Two more bright stars appeared as Cara spoke, followed a moment later by two more. “And the last two, here in 1899, and here in 1937.”

      “Five novae, though,” Alexander said slowly. He didn’t want to jump to unreasonable conclusions. “That’s still too small a number to be statistically significant.”

      “It could be a random statistical clustering, true,” Cara told him. “Statistical anomalies do occur. But the extremely small area of sky involved—one quarter of one percent—seems to argue strongly against coincidence as a factor. And there is this, as well, a datum not available to twentieth-century cosmologists.”

      The group of stars showing in Alexander’s mind rotated. The geometric figures of parallelogram and triangle shifted and distorted, some lines becoming much longer, others growing shorter.

      A constellation was purely a convenience for Earth-based observers, a means of grouping and identifying stars in the night sky that had nothing to do with their actual locations in space. With a very few exceptions, stars that appeared to be close by one another in Earth’s sky—all members of the same constellation, in other words—appeared to be neighbors only because they happened to lie along the same line of sight. That was the fatal flaw in the ancient pseudoscience of astrology; one might as well say that a building on a distant hill, or the sun rising behind it, were physically connected to a house three meters away—or to one’s own hand—simply because they all appeared from a certain viewpoint to overlap.

      Rotating the volume of space that included Aquila demonstrated this fact clearly. On a 2D map, the stars of Aquila appeared close together—the three brightest, Altair, Alshain, and Tarazed, for example, lay almost directly side by side in a short, straight line. Viewed from the side, however, Altair—Alpha Aquilae—was only 16.6 light-years from Earth, while Alshain, Beta Aquilae, was 46.6 light-years distant. Both, in fact, were quite close to Sol as galactic distances went. Gamma Aquilae, however, the third brightest star in the constellation and better known as Tarazed, was 330 light-years from Earth. Epsilon was 220 light-years distant; a few others were extremely distant; Eta Aquilae, for instance, was 1,600 light-years away, while dim Nu Aquilae, so distant it vanished off the window to the left when the display rotated, was actually a type F2 Ib supergiant 2,300 light-years distant.

      The novae could be expected to show a similar range of distances, but this, Alexander saw, was not the case. They were clustered; Nova Aquila was about 1,200 light-years from Earth. The other four were all positioned at roughly the same distance, though they were spread across the constellation like a sheet, defining a flat region of space roughly fifty light-years deep and perhaps 200 to 300 light-years wide, some 800 light-years beyond the borders of human-colonized space.

      Alexander felt a stirring of awe as he examined the 3D rotation. “Just when did these novae actually light off?” he asked.

      “That represents a second anomaly,” Cara told him. “The light from all five novae arrived at Earth within that single thirty-eight-year period between 1899 and 1937. Again, that might have been coincidence, but, as you see, they actually are located in relatively close proximity to one another. All of them, we estimate, exploded within a few years of one another, right around the year 700 c.e.”

      In the year 700, Alexander knew, Byzantines and Franks had been battling it out with the Arabs for control of the Mediterranean world on Earth, and the most startling advance in military technology was the stirrup. Twelve hundred light-years away, meanwhile, someone had been blowing up suns.

      Random statistical anomalies happened, yes … but as Alexander studied the 3D constellation map, rotating it back and forth for a better feel of the thing’s volume and the relationship of the stars within it, he was dead certain that something more than chance was at work here.

      “If this is … artificial,” he told Cara, “if this is deliberate …”

      “We estimate a probability in excess of sixty percent that this clustering of novae is the direct result of intelligent action.”

      “Intelligent action.” Alexander snorted. “Funny term for something on this scale.”

      “We know of several sapient species with technologies sufficiently high to effect engineering on such a scale,” Cara told him. “The Builders, the Xul … and possibly the N’mah of several thousand years ago, though they would not be capable of such activities now. The artificial detonation of a star is certainly feasible, given what we know of the three species.”

      “I wasn’t questioning that,” Alexander said. “It’s just, well, I see three possibilities here, assuming that those novae were artificially generated. One, of course, is that the star-destroyers were the Xul.”

      “Possibly. We have no evidence that they have blown up stars in the past.”

      “No. I agree, it’s just not their style.” The Xul’s usual modus operandi was to pound a target planet with high-velocity asteroids, quite literally bombing the inhabitants back into the Stone Age … or into extinction. “But the Xul have been around for at least half a million years, now, and if anyone has the technology to blow up a star, they should.”

      “Agreed. What are your other two possibilities?”

      “One, and the most intriguing one, I think, is the possibility that another technic species was detonating stars out there in Aquila over two thousand years ago.”

      “That СКАЧАТЬ