"Ian Douglas - Inheritance Trilogy 1 - Star Strike" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglas Ian)

23

General Alexander was listening in on the debriefing of the…

24

Emerging from the tube-car transport from his office, General Alexander…

25
The side of the Euler ship cycled open as Garroway…

26

Garroway took careful note of the time—1258 hours, nine…

Epilogue

“Garroway? How you feeling, son?”


Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by Ian Douglas

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue
Deep within the star clouds of the Second Galactic Spiral Arm, a sentient machine detected the
blue-white shriek of tortured hydrogen atoms, and a program hundreds of thousands of years ancient
switched from standby to active. Something was out there…something massive, something moving at
very nearly the speed of light.

Even the hardest interstellar vacuum contains isolated flecks of matter—hydrogen atoms, mostly, perhaps
one per cubic centimeter or so. The object’s high-speed passage plowed through these atoms, ionizing
many, leaving a boiling hiss in its wake easily detectable by appropriately sensitive instrumentation. The
disturbance was a kind of wake, created by a mass of some hundreds of millions of tons plowing through
the tenuous matter of the interstellar void at near-c.

The sentry machine had taken up its lonely vigil half a million years before, during the desperate and
no-quarter war of extermination against the Associative, a war that had laid waste to ten thousand suns
and countless worlds scattered across a third of the Galaxy. Occasionally, it conversed with others of its
kind—a means of staying sane through the millennia—but for most of its existence it had been asleep,
dreaming the eldritch dreams of a being neither wholly mechanism, nor wholly biological.

The builders of the Sentry called themselves something that might have translated, very approximately, as
“We Who Are.” Other species across light centuries of space and hundreds of millennia called them