скачать книгу бесплатно
Galactic Corps
Ian Douglas
War is foreverThe people on Earth no longer remember how the human race was nearly obliterated centuries earlier during the terror visited upon them by the merciless Xul. But the Star Marines, thirty thousand light years from home, know all too well the horror that still lives.In the year 2886, in the midst of the intergalactic war that has been raging non-stop for nearly a decade, the unthinkable has occurred. Intelligence has located the gargantuan hidden homeworld of humankind's dedicated foe, the brutal, unstoppable Xul.The time has come for the courageous men and women of the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force to strike the killing blow. But misguided politics on an Earth that no longer supports their mission could prove the Marine's greatest enemy—as they plunge bravely into the maelstrom of conflict . . . and into the heart of a million-year-old mystery.
GALACTIC CORPS
BOOK TWO OF THE INHERITANCE TRILOGY
IAN DOUGLAS
As always, for Brea. My light. My life. My muse.
Table of Contents
Title Page (#ua51248bc-99dc-5480-a249-b57bd2020cb2)
Dedication (#ud873a137-b042-5406-8de6-7e5cda16b5ec)
Timeline of the Inheritance Universe (#u1e68a9e2-8cbe-5104-a75d-c30a9c6df34d)
Countdown … (#u429affe2-b9c1-5487-801a-3d970077c75c)
Prologue (#u0c3ce4a0-f5d2-5d1f-84cf-6b5f86057cd1)
Chapter 1 (#u6da0bcd9-55cf-54f2-aefa-9a147d21e1c2)
Chapter 2 (#u41f1ac95-5544-5023-bc1c-a6cbdb4e364c)
Chapter 3 (#uf5252056-bfe0-59a8-bc1b-45cc79deb790)
Chapter 4 (#u0e9cd22e-f76c-5058-abc9-86f6e02a18ff)
Chapter 5 (#ua40e6b2b-eb66-56d0-997b-014c928e3fc5)
Chapter 6 (#ua5ea34b0-ead5-5ec4-91e5-f53817187470)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Ian Douglas (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Timeline of the Inheritance Universe (#ulink_f7126e2c-c6fb-55b4-8ddb-e8e208f4c0b7)
Years before present
50,000,000–30,000,000: Galaxy dominated by the One Mind, sentient organic superconductors with hive mentality. They create the network of stargates across the Galaxy, and build the Encyclopedia Galactica Node at the Galactic Core.
30,000,000–10,000,000: Dominance of Children of the Night, nocturnal psychovores. They replace the One Mind, which may have transcended material instrumentality.
10,000,000 TO PRESENT: Dominance of the Xul, also known as the Hunters of the Dawn. Originally polyspecific pantovores, they eventually exist solely as downloaded mentalities within artificial cybernetic complexes.
Circa 500,000 B.C.E.: Advanced polyspecific machine intelligence, later called variously the Ancients or the Builders, extends a high-technology empire across a volume of space several thousand light years in extent. Extensive planoforming of Chiron, at Alpha Centauri A, of Mars in the nearby Sol System, and of numerous other worlds. QCC networks provide instantaneous communications across the entire empire. Ultimately, the Builder civilization is destroyed by the Xul. Asteroid impacts strip away the newly generated Martian atmosphere and seas, but Earth, with no technological presence, is ignored. A Xul huntership is badly damaged in the battle over Mars; it later crashes into the Europan world-sea and is frozen beneath the ice. Survivors of the Martian holocaust migrate to Earth and upload themselves into gene-tailored primates that later will be known as Homo sapiens.
10,000 B.C.E.–7500 B.C.E.: Earth and Earth’s Moon colonized by the Ahannu, or An, who are later remembered as the gods of ancient Sumeria. Around 7500 B.C.E., asteroid strikes by the Xul destroy An colonies across their empire. Earth is devastated by asteroid strikes. One colony, at Lalande 21185, survives.
Circa 6000 B.C.E.: Amphibious N’mah visit Earth and help human survivors of Xul attack develop civilization. They are later remembered as the Nommo of the Dogon tribe of Africa, and as civilizing/agricultural gods by other cultures in the Mideast and the Americas.
Circa 6000–5000 B.C.E.: N’mah starfaring culture destroyed by the Xul. Survivors exist in low-technology communities within the Sirius Stargate and, possibly, elsewhere.
1200 B.C.E. [Speculative]: The Xul revisit Earth and discover an advanced Bronze Age culture. Asteroid impacts cause devastating floods worldwide, and may be the root of the Atlantis myth.
700 C.E.: The deep abyssal intelligence later named the Eulers fight the Xul to a standstill by detonating their own stars. The astronomical conflagration of artificial novae is seen in the skies of Earth, in the constellation Aquila, some 1,200 years later.
The Heritage Trilogy
2039–2042: Semper Mars
2040: 1st UN War. March by “Sands of Mars Garroway.” Battle of Cydonia. Discovery of the Cydonian Cave of Wonders.
2040–2042: Luna Marine
2042: Battle of Tsiolkovsky. Discovery of An base on the Moon.
2067: Europa Strike
2067: Sino-American War. Discovery of the Singer under the Europan ice.
The Legacy Trilogy
2138–2148: Star Corps
2148: Battle of Ishtar. Treaty with An of Lalande 21185. Earth survey vessel The Wings of Isis destroyed while approaching the Sirius Stargate.
2148–2170: Battlespace
2170: Battle of Sirius Gate. Contact with the N’mah, an amphibious species living inside the gate structure. Data collected electronically fills in some information about the Xul, and leads to a Xul node in Cluster Space, 30,000 light years from Sol. A Marine assault force uses the gate to enter Cluster Space and destroy this gate.
2314–2333: Star Marines
2314: Armageddonfall
2323: Battle of Night’s Edge. Destruction of Xul fleet and world in Night’s Edge Space.
The Inheritance Trilogy
2877: Star Strike
2877 [1102 M.E.]: 1MIEF departs for Puller 659. Battle of Puller 659 against Pan-Europe ans. Contact with Eulers in Cygni Space. Battle of Cygni Space. Destruction of star in Starwall Space, eliminating local Xul node.
2886: Galactic Corps
2886 [1111 M.E.]: Raid on Cluster Space by 1MIEF. Discovery of stargate path to major Xul node at Galactic Core.
2887 [1112 M.E.]: Operation Heartfire. Assault on the Galactic Core.
Countdown …
They had about ten and a half minutes yet, give or take a bit, before the expanding blast wave of the nova reached them. Plenty of time if nothing unexpected happened.
“Skipper! I’ve got a bender coming through dead ahead!”
She checked the ID. The call was from second lieutenant Trace Wayne, only thirty kilometers off Lee’s port wing. A bender was something warping space, possibly one of the Euless triggerships … but there was a chance it was something else.
It was. She saw the brilliant flash of twisted starlight, saw the Xul Type IV materialize out of empty space fifty kilometers ahead. Like humans, the Xul used the Galaxy-spanning network of stargates, but their ships also possessed FTL capability which sharply warped local space.
And the alien warship had dropped into the normal space time matrix directly between most of Lee’s squadron and the stargate.
They were going to have to fight to get through.
Prologue (#ulink_457e313a-166c-5728-9fda-f355b2423db7)
They were not omnipotent.
Throughout their multi-million-year period of galactic dominance, they’d been known by many names. The Destroyers. The Hunters of the Dawn. The Enemy. The Xul. They called themselves by a thought symbol that might translate as We Who Are.
Perhaps ten million years ago, give or take some few hundreds of thousands of years, We Who Are had possessed organic bodies; as such, they’d been a species, like all heirs of flesh, shaped and constrained by the impersonal forces of evolution. In common with all products of the evolutionary process, they’d possessed a marked will to survive.
What most clearly distinguished We Who Are from most other species was simply the extremes to which that will carried them.
Early in their history, they’d survived—barely—a traumatic encounter with another species upon their home planet. That encounter left them shaken, brutalized, and monomaniacally mistrustful of the motives of anything Other.
It left the other species extinct.
That ancient struggle for dominance, ultimately for survival, imprinted itself upon the psyche of We Who Are. When, in due time, they began moving out into the Galaxy, they carried that imprint with them. No other species posing a threat, however remote, to We Who Are could be permitted to survive.
Over the course of some millions of years, We Who Are extended and expanded the range of their lonely suzerainty over the Galaxy. Eventually, however, they encountered the far-flung bastions of another starfaring species, nocturnal psychovores who styled themselves as the Children of the Night. Like We Who Are, the Children possessed as a racial trait the need to exterminate all competition. Unlike We Who Are at that time, perhaps eight million years ago, the Children were already ancient, their line extending back into a murkily remote past when they, in their season, had wrested dominance of the Galaxy from a still more remote species, a self-aware congeries of organic superconductors that called themselves the One Mind.
Young, fired with righteous ambition and an instinctive determination to crush all competition in order to be alone, and therefore safe, within their Galactic fastnesses, We Who Are eventually triumphed after a savage no-quarters war that scoured a hundred thousand worlds of life. The Children of the Night passed into the ultimate Night of extinction, as had the One Mind before them.
And with that victory, the We Who Are became the new xenophobically senticidal caretakers of the Galaxy.
More millions of years passed. Eventually, like the majority of technically oriented species before them, We Who Are chose to discard their organic bodies, uploading their consciousnesses into nearly immortal cybernetic shells. They carried with them, however, the racial traits of mind and awareness that had distinguished them as organic beings—including the blatantly Darwinian imperative to eliminate all possible competitors, all possible threats to their existence.
In fact, this radical form of natural selection had dominated the galactic scene ever since sentient life had first emerged, some eight billion years before. In any given epoch, it took only a single intelligent species with technic aptitude and a lack of empathy for anything Other to emerge from the cauldron of its birthworld and insure its survival by eliminating all possible rivals. Galactic civilizations rarely overlapped perfectly in terms of their scientific and technical levels; with each encounter, one species tended to be older than the other, usually by many thousands or tens of thousands of years, and hence far more technically advanced.
As new civilizations emerged and achieved technical capabilities permitting space flight and long-distance communication, most wondered why the skies of their worlds, which should have been humming with the signs of advanced civilizations, seemed so silent, so empty. Each time new races, new civilizations took their first tentative steps out beyond the worlds of their genesis, We Who Are, sooner or later, detected their efforts from their scattered bastions, descended upon their worlds, and relentlessly exterminated them. Hence, the silent sky.
But like the Children of the Night, the One Mind, and so many others who’d come before, We Who Are were not omnipotent. The vast, sprawling spiral of the Galaxy, possessing some three hundred billion stars, is far too large, with far too many worlds, for any one race to monitor every possible lifeworld, every emerging sentient species.
And there were so many of these. …
In the outlying regions of the Galaxy’s Perseus Arm, within the dense polar jungles of the warm, inner world of a class-G5 star, a race of brachiating mollusks—morphologically, at least, they somewhat resembled certain members of that terrestrial phylum—swung from the interwoven branches of sessile thermovores not unlike Earthly trees. The species was young, as yet, but had developed an elaborate philosophy based on mating calls, territoriality, music, and mathematics. One day, they might have much to offer an evolving Galactic polylogue, but they hadn’t yet developed electronics or radio, much less the instantaneous magic of quantum-coupled communications. The huntership-communes of We Who Are had passed through this star system several times within the past ten thousand or so years, but not noticed the species’ thriving, arboreal cities.
Not yet.
Closer in toward the galactic core, within the teeming star clouds of the Sagittarius Arm, on the rugged, tide-strained volcanic moon of a superjovian gas giant, a race of armored paraholothurids built water’s-edge hive-cities of compacted excrement and composed palendromic epics celebrating their having been chosen as slaves of the sky-disk they saw as the eye of God. Natural radio emitters, they broadcast the glory of the one true religion to the stars. We Who Are had detected those signals and searched for their origin; so far, they’d not found the holothurids’ world, for they tended not to think of planetary bodies outside of the star’s liquid-water habitable zone as a possible abode of life.
That particular blind spot had given them trouble more than once in the past, and likely would again.
