The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human. Ian Douglas
Читать онлайн книгу.
2420–001.”
Thanks to the painstaking analyses of data brought back by other AI probes of Xul hunterships, Intelligence now understood that System 2420–544 referred to none other than Earth’s solar system, evidently the 544th star system within a galactic sector designated 2420. Gateway 2420–001 was a particular Stargate—the gate at Sirius through which Xul hunterships had first entered human space, and through which humans had attacked Xul bases at Night’s Edge and, earlier, in Cluster Space.
Species 2824, it was now known, was none other than Humanity.
If Humankind had survived this long, it was because the Xul had lost track of those identifiers within the incalculable, unfathomable immensities of a Galaxy of four hundred billion stars. Xul memories appeared to have noted Earth and Humankind a long time ago indeed, in records that quite possibly went back to the time of the Builders and their genetic tinkerings creating Homo sapiens out of Homo erectus half a million years before, but more recent information had, thankfully, been destroyed at Night’s Edge.
If there was new information on Species 2824, however …
And there was. With an inward shock, Chesty2 felt the match-up of duplicated chunks of code.
Briefly, he heard the interweaving voices of the Xul choral harmonies. …
“… Species 2824 has been noted in the past. …”
“… Species 2824 has been of interest in the past. …”
“… Species 2824 has been of significant danger in the past. …”
“…Survival remains the first and only law. …”
“… Species 2824 may well pose a threat to We Who Are. …”
“… Survival remains the first and only law. …”
“… Species 2824 shall not be allowed to circumvent the first and only law. …”
“…Species 2824. …”
Each line of code was linked by threads of coded logic to other lines, and as verse followed verse, Chesty2 probed and listened and recorded, gathering a treasure trove of raw data, cascades of data, most of it too intricately complex to permit analyses or even translation here and now.
But everything he heard, he recorded and transmitted, sending it back over the initial carrier wave as a weak, low-frequency, and highly directional modulation just strong enough to reach the FR-100 Night Owl, some ten kilometers distant.
Chesty2, as an artificially sentient software package, was both powerful and sophisticated in terms of creative scope, but there was no room in his coding matrix for such data-extravagant luxuries as emotion. He could not feel fear or excitement as the chorus sounded and resounded about him, speaking of the patterning of a host of alien soul-minds from an artifact identified as Argo. He couldn’t even feel the thrill of recognition when he touched a familiar pattern of code indeed … another artificial intelligence that called itself Perseus.
But Chesty could and did recognize the seriousness of the encounter, and its importance to Humankind.
Earth had to be warned, and swiftly …
… or “Species 2824” might very soon become extinct.
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 tech specialists and theoreticians who would have disagreed with her, of course; the debate over whether a string of software commands and associated data clusters was alive or merely mimicking life through clever responses had been raging unabated in those circles for the entirety of the current millennium. The Turing Test, that ancient assessment of machine intelligence, said far more about human programming skills than it did about the presence or the nature of sentience itself.
Leaving Chesty3 behind was tantamount, in her mind, to leaving behind a fellow Marine.
“It’s not the same, Lieutenant Lee,” Chesty2, whispered in her thoughts, apparently reading them. “We would have left him in any case. Beaming a data package requires duplication. What remains behind must dissociate in order to avoid detection.”
“I