Ian Douglas - Battlespace

Copyright Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

About the Publisher Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

“Of course they’re friendly!” Paul replied. “All the legends about gods from Sirius emphasized that they were friendly, taught humans how to plant crops, that kind of thing. They’re just coming out to greet us!”

The shipboard alert clamored in their minds. Now hear this, now hear this , intoned the voice of the Marine detachment’s resident AI. Battle stations, battle stations. All hands man your battle stations.

A precaution only, she thought. Here, almost nine light-years from what was known and understood, it paid to be doubly cautious.

“Damn,” she said. “I sure hope you’re right.”

She began to disconnect from the noumenal feed. Battle stations for the Marines was in the squad bay aft, suited and armed, ready to repel an attack on the ship or to deploy planetside in their TAL-S Dragonflies to meet an enemy. There was no planetside here, and the golden ship, or whatever it was, had made no hostile moves as yet, had it?

Just a precaution … just a precaution. …

Then something made her hesitate, to look again at the approaching golden vessel.

And then she felt her soul and mind being dragged from her body. …

She began screaming. …

15 AUGUST 2148

Lance Corporal Lynnley Collins, UFR/US Marines, drifted free within inexpressible beauty.

From her vantage point, she seemed to float in the depths of space, but a space turned glorious by the blue-silver-white beacons of two nearby stars: gleaming Sirius A and its tiny white-dwarf brother, Sirius B.

The Sirius system was thick with dust and debris that caught the starlight and twisted it into hazy knots of pale color. The noumenal display revealed the hard radiation searing the encircling sky as a faint purple background glow.

Noumenal space —such a bland and uninformative description of the sheer miraculous. If a phenomenon is something that happens in the world around us, within that collection of events and happenstance and knock-on-wood solid matter humans are pleased to call reality, then a noumenon is that which happens within a person’s mind.

Thought, wonder, visualization, imagination … such are the bone and sinew of the noumenal. With the appropriate nanochelates forming hypolinks and neural access stacks at certain points within the sulci of the brain, with implanted microcircuitry and perhaps twenty grams of other hardware grown nanobit by nanobit into key nerve bundles to provide sensory input, a human could link in to the data feed from a computer or an AI and become an organic SUI, a sensory user’s interface, experiencing downloads not on a computer monitor or wallscreen, but as unfolding visual and aural imagery within the mind itself.

Lance Corporal Collins, then, was not really adrift in open space, bathed in the fiercely radiant glare of Sirius A. Remote cameras and other sensors on the hull of the explorer ship Wings of Isis provided the cascade of data flooding through her brain by way of the ship’s communications systems. The sky around her was dramatically, impossibly beautiful, bands of dust and gas aglow in actinic Sirian light. Sirius A was distant enough that she didn’t even show a disk, yet still was so brilliant that even within the artfully massaged illusion of the noumenal sensorium it was difficult to look at the star directly.

Closer by some hundreds of millions of kilometers, Sirius B radiated its own hot light, illuminating the stellar debris within which it was imbedded in blues, silvers, violets, and harshly glaring white. A white dwarf, a shrunken star the size of Earth and so dense that a teaspoonful possessed the mass of a good-sized mountain, Sirius B was too small even at this relatively close range to show as more than a blinding spark embedded in its glowing cloud of dust.

Lynnley was not watching the stellar panorama, however. Opposite the two arc-brilliant suns—and harshly illuminated by them—drifted the Wheel.

Ten kilometers away from Wings of Isis , and at least twenty kilometers across, the thing was clearly an artifact, something deliberately created by intelligence, a hubless wheel of roughly the same proportions as a wedding band. Under magnification, the outer surface was black, cracked, and broken, which might indicate that the Wheel had been constructed from asteroidal debris. The inner surface was smooth, almost polished, marked by geometric shapes and lines, and here and there lights glowed like neatly ordered stars, indicating power usage and the possibility of life. Gravitometric readings, however, teased and confused. If they could be believed, the Wheel was incredibly dense, the mass of a large planet collapsed into an enigmatic, clearly artificial hoop.

In fact, there were no planets in the Sirian system. Sirius A was far too hot and bright a star to allow for a comfortably Earthlike planet, and it was young, too young for life to have evolved, even had there been such a world; once Sirius B had been nearly as bright as its big brother before it had vomited part of its mass and collapsed into its present shrunken state. The background radiation, barely held at bay by the Isis ’s magnetic screens, would have fried any unprotected life-form in seconds. Whoever had built that structure had come here from somewhere else.

Why? What was the ring for?

And who had built it, here in the harsh and deadly glare of the Sirian suns?

Unseen, but sensed in the imaginal space at her side, Sergeant Paul Watson watched and wondered with her. Paul was a shipboard lover, but, more, he was a friend, a bulwark against the loneliness. John Garroway, the man she loved, was another Marine, one now even more distant from the Wings of Isis than was Earth. As much as she liked Paul, she wished John was here now instead.

“My God!” Paul said suddenly, his voice sharp in her mind.

“What?”

“Look! There in the center. You’ll need to magnify. …”

She set her attention on the center of that massive Wheel, giving the mental command to narrow in on the field of view. Yes, she saw it now … something drifting out from the center of the artifact. If the known diameter of the Wheel was any indication, the object must be a couple of kilometers long at least, as slender as a needle and gleaming in the hard starlight like pure gold.