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

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СКАЧАТЬ had been servicing Skybase, used gravitic engineering both for their drives and to maintain artificial gravity on board. Such units warped and wrinkled the fabric of space, rendering useless the Skybase’s mathematical understanding of the local metric. From a distance of 10 kilometers, though, with drives switched off, the minor warping from the argrav generators was trivial enough to ignore.

      General Alexander was in his office on board Skybase, awaiting the translation to Puller 659, but he was linked in to the scene transmitted from the transport Aldebaran, the image electronically unfolded in his mind. From this vantage point, some 10 kilometers off, Skybase looked like a huge pair of dark gray dishes fastened face to face, rim to rim, with one side flattened, the other deeper and capped by a truncated dome. The structure’s surface looked smooth from this distance, but Alexander knew that up close its skin was a maze of towers, weapons mounts, sponsons, surface buildings, and trenches laid out in geometric patterns that gave it a rough and heavily textured look.

      The perimeter of the double saucer was broken in one place as though a squared-off bite had been taken from its rim, at the broad opening leading into Skybase’s hangar deck, a deep and gantry-lined entryway nearly 100 meters wide jokingly referred to as the garage door. Harsh light spilled from that opening, illuminating the gantry cranes and the massive shapes of the starships nestled inside.

      “Ten minutes,” an AI’s voice announced in his head. It wasn’t Cara, this time, but one of the battalion of artificial intelligences resident within the MIEF net, tasked with coordinating the entire operation.

      Was there anything else that needed to be done, anything forgotten? God help them all if there was. Alexander expected no serious trouble with the PanEuropeans at Puller, but after that, when they jumped through to Nova Aquila. …

      Three days earlier, a fleet of gravitic tugs had gentled the behemoth clear of Dock 27 and into open space well beyond the outer ramparts of the outermost Earthring. Hours later, Skybase had translated to the fleet rendezvous area to begin the final loading. The gravimetric picture was complicated close to Earth and to the artificial gravity-twisting engineering of the Rings themselves, but the translation was a tiny one, only about a quarter of a million miles, from geosynch out to the Moon’s orbit. There’d been the faintest of shudders, and Skybase had quietly vanished from Earth synchorbit, to reappear a heartbeat later at L-3.

      L-3, the third of the five Earth-system LaGrange points, was located at the Moon’s orbit, but on the far side of Earth from the Moon’s current position, so that Luna was perpetually masked from view by the larger disk of Terra. The point was gravitationally metastable; the gravitational metric was relatively flat, here, with Earth and Moon always positioned in a straight and unchanging line, but ships or structures parked at L-3 still tended to drift away after a few-score days due to perturbations by the Sun and by other planets, especially Jupiter.

      However, that metastability would not affect Skybase, which wouldn’t be there long enough to be perturbed by much. The important thing was that local space was flat enough in terms of gravitational balances, providing a good starting point for the coordinate calculations that would allow Skybase to transit through a much, much longer jump, not through but past the Void.

      A jump of some 283 light-years, all the way out to Puller 659.

      For that transition, local space had to be as flat as could be managed, with a metric far less complex than the scramble of interpenetrating gravity fields found in geosynch. There could be no drift of Moon relative to the Earth, no hum of nearby artificial agrav fields, no space-bending pulse of a passing ship under Alcubierre Drive. L-3 was ideal as a jump-off point, as ideal as could be found, at any rate, this deep inside the Solar System.

      “There is something I do not understand,” Cara said as he watched the view of Skybase from the transport.

      “What’s that?”

      “The QST appears to be a highly efficient means of crossing interstellar distances,” the AI said. “I’m curious why more mobile habitats like Skybase have not been built.”

      Alexander let the comment about being curious pass. From his first introduction to the EA years ago, Cara had continued to surprise him with what seemed to be a genuinely human range of behaviors. AIs weren’t supposed to exhibit curiosity, but the more powerful ones did, indisputably.

      “Well, there are plans on the drawing boards,” Alexander said, “for true starships using Quantum Space Translation … but I don’t think any of them are funded for development yet. At least, not beyond the wouldn’t-it-be-nice stage.”

      “I have seen some of those plans on the Net,” Cara told him. “But you’re right. None has been funded past the initial research stage.”

      “The Arean Advanced Physics Institute has been using Skybase as a testbed to study paraspace,” Alexander said, “both to improve energy tap technology and to investigate the possibility of very long-range transport. But ships built around translation technology … they’d be damned expensive. They’d also have to be huge, to accommodate the necessary power taps and the translation drive itself. A lot of military decision-makers don’t think it’s feasible.”

      “Skybase is still considerably smaller than a typical Xul huntership,” the AI pointed out. “And it would be simple enough to mount gravitic drives to provide the necessary maneuverability for combat and in-system travel. A fleet of such vessels equipped as warships would be most formidable.”

      “And you want to know why we’re not developing such ships more … aggressively?”

      “Exactly. It is as though human governments, the people who make such decisions, do not realize the gravity of the Xul threat.”

      Alexander sighed. It was almost embarrassing admitting to the non-human artificial intelligence in his head what most senior military officers had lived with for their entire careers, worse, what humankind had lived with for centuries.

      “That’s a complicated question, Cara. I guess the short answer is … they know the Xul are a threat, sure, but after five centuries, they don’t seem to be an urgent threat. There are always more important things to attend to closer at hand.”

      “Even after the Xul incursion of 2314, when humankind was nearly annihilated?”

      Alexander shrugged. “But we weren’t, were we? Humans have a lot of trouble connecting with something that happened centuries ago … or that might not happen until centuries in the future. Download the history. Remember global warming? The fossil fuel crisis? The e-trans crisis? The genetic prosthesis crisis? The chaos of the nanotechnic revolution? If it doesn’t threaten us, immediately and personally, it’s someone else’s problem—especially if it’s government that has to take action to fix it. Hell, politicians have trouble keeping their focus on problems just from one election to the next. The Roman Senate probably had the same problem with the barbarian crisis three thousand years ago.”

      “But it is the politicians—specifically the Senate Military Appropriations Committee—that would be responsible for funding a fleet capable of fighting the Xul, is it not?”

      Cara sounded genuinely confused, and Alexander wondered how much of that was personality software miming human patterns, how much was genuine perplexity. There was no way to tell.

      “That’s right,” he said. “And they’re not eager to increase taxes just so the military can have some expensive new toys.” He hesitated. While Cara was his electronic assistant alone, she did share data with many other people, СКАЧАТЬ