Centre of Gravity. Ian DouglasЧитать онлайн книгу.
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The All of Us race was unaccustomed to dealing with other sentient species. One of the primary reasons for this was, simply, their size; by almost any standards, the H’rulka were giants.
An adult H’rulka consisted of a floatation gas bag measuring anywhere from two to three hundred meters across, with brain, locomotion and feeding organs, sensory apparatus and manipulators clustered at the bottom. Most other sentient species with which they’d had direct experience possessed roughly the same size and mass ratio to a H’rulka as an ant compared to a human.
When the H’rulka thought of other life forms as “vermin,” the thought was less insult than it was a statement of fact, at least as they perceived it. Within the complex biosphere of the H’rulka homeworld, there were parasites living on each All of Us colony that were some meters across. H’rulka simply found it difficult to imagine creatures as intelligent that were almost literally beneath their notice in terms of scale.
“Commence acceleration,” Ordered Ascent directed. “We will move into the region of heavy radio transmission, and destroy targets of opportunity as they present themselves.”
The H’rulka warship, more than twenty kilometers across, began falling toward Sol, the inner system, and Earth.
To Brea, my guiding star
Table of Contents
12 December 2404
Emergence, Arcturus System
36.7 light years from Earth
0310 hours, TFT
The recon probe emerged from its Alcubierre bubble of tightly warped space, bleeding off excess velocity in a burst of high-energy photons. An artificial gravitational singularity the size of a small dust particle and as massive as a star flicked on and off a few meters beyond the craft’s bulbous nose, dragging it forward with an acceleration of nearly five thousand standard gravities. At that rate, the craft would be crowding the speed of light within another one hundred minutes.
Only slightly larger than a VG–10 Krait smart missile, the ISVR–120 probe was too small to carry sentient organics; its pilot was a Gödel 2500 artificial intelligence packed into the solid-state circuitry that filled the pod’s core and so, technically, could be said to take up no space at all. Certainly it needed none of the bulky life-support equipment necessary for organic life.
The AI was called Alan, named after Alan Turing, one of the giants in the development of the first computers four and a half centuries earlier.
Within seconds of the probe craft’s emergence from the warp bubble, Alan had scanned the system ahead, a volume of space dominated by a single bloated and brilliant orange star. The Confederation Naval Standard Ephemeris entry on the star resided within Alan’s surface memory.
STAR: Alpha Boötis
COORDINATES: RA: 14h 15m 39.7s Dec: +19˚ 10’ 56” D 11.24p
ALTERNATE NAMES: Arcturus, Alramech, Abramech, 16 Boötes