"Bud Sparhawk - Etiquette" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sparhawk Bud)

What was the Rix's intentions in demanding the salt from her? Was it playing some damn dominance
game, hoping that she'd submit to the request without a whimper? Was it thinking that she, and most
humans for that matter, were a pitiable lot, easy to control and easier to kill? And what was the
relationship between the Rix and these others; this assortment of aliens that the Imperials had gathered
together under their ever-so-polite "invitation" that allowed no refusal?

For the past few years Angel had been running organics from her home world across the rift to the
Chrrh's home planet, or at least one that was developed enough to be called their main base. For all she
knew they had a dozen or more similarly developed planets around this region. What they did with the
stuff she delivered she neither knew nor cared. The only thing she cared about were the products they
gave in return -- rare earths ("What a strange, old world term," she'd always thought) and access rights to
their stations. The rare earths paid for the trips while the access rights were her bank account for the
future; a future in which she would collect an bountiful stream of returns when the wave of human
expansion headed this way.

The Imperial ship that had swept her up was so vast that some would consider it a planet in its own right,
although there was hardly enough mass in it to hold a decent gravity field. She had done a little
surreptitious measuring when they had parked her ship along one edge and found that the ship was
nearly a full light second across. She could see the delicate-appearing strands of the distant sides of the
structure obstructing the stars as the Imperial's ship rotated. Gradually her computer had built up an
image of the structural details as it interpolated the rotation rate and the eclipsed star fields. Their huge
ship resembled an empty, broken sphere, where long curving strips of the thin outer shell surrounded an
empty interior. There was no pattern to the strands so far as she could detect. Even the computer
reported that the paths the strands followed were entirely random and chaotic, as if accidentally created
from an explosion. Why the structure was so huge and how it could hold together and act in concert
were mysteries beyond her capability to solve.

But much of the technology of the Imperials was like that; inexplicable and unknowable. Huge ships of
uncertain design, capture fields that were undetectable by any measurement the few human scientists
that had access to their ships could take, and behaviors that defied rational analysis. While it was true
that they had stood quietly by as the Rix had expunged humanity from Scroffulous IV they had also
relocated the human colony on Omicron Delta Primus nearly eighty light years away to a much more
attractive planet. The fact that they had not asked anyone on ODP if they wanted to relocate was
balanced by the fact that they had not demanded payment for their services either: They had simply
picked up all traces of human colonization on Omicron and deposited them elsewhere without a word of
explanation or apology. Since then there had been a continual surveillance watch on ODP to see what
developed; maybe a nova, a new wave of migration, or something completely unexpected. Who knew
what incentives the Imperials acted upon?

For years the Imperials had been a background player in the far flung human expansion. None of the


file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswij...%20documenten/spaar/Bud%20Sparhawk%20-%20Etiquette.htm (2 of 8)23-2-2006 17:07:32
 Etiquette

races seemed to have contact or deep knowledge of them. There were no Imperial trade goods, no one
had located an Imperial planet or settlement, and no Imperial artifacts had ever been found. Instead they
were a shadowy culture, always present, occasionally active, and never communicative.

Two more Imperials sat further down the table, watching her carefully with their multifaceted eyes. She