unpardonable sin of surviving two months ago when her partner, Howie Spaas, had been killed.
“I still want to talk, Trev,” Angela was saying. “I don’t want us to be… enemies.”
He gave her a cold look. “The enemies are out there,” he told her. “The Turusch. The Sh’daar. You’re just… someone I used to know.”
“Trevor—”
“Attention, everyone,” a new voice said, booming from somewhere in the auroral radiance shifting overhead and cutting across the crowd noise and conversations of the eudaimonium. “We apologize for the interruption, but all military personnel will return to their duty stations now. Special shuttles are being deployed to the Giuliani Spaceport for those who came down the Quito Elevator.”
As the message went out over the concourse speakers, another message was winking inside Gray’s head: recall .
“Trevor? What is it?”
“I’ve got to get back to my ship,” he told her. “Something’s happening.”
“Happening? What?” She looked around wildly, as guests at the party wearing military uniforms began gathering into groups and moving off.
And when she turned to look at Gray again, he was already gone.
H’rulka Warship 434
Cis-Lunar Space, Sol System
1446 hours, TFT
The H’rulka vessel decelerated hard, approaching the sources of the heaviest radio traffic in the alien star system designated as System 784,857. Ahead—though they didn’t think of them as planets—were two large planetary bodies, a double planet, in fact. The smaller one was typical subplanetary rubble, airless and cratered; the other possessed a trace of poisonous atmosphere and vast regions of liquid dihydrogen oxide. This last was important. The H’rulka lived at an altitude within their homeworld’s atmosphere where that compound was liquid, which suggested the possibility of life despite near-vacuum conditions and the deadly presence of free oxygen.
Thousands of points of radiant energy clustered around the double worldlet marked hives of the creatures—bases, cities, and industrial facilities, some in orbit around the planet, some deep within its atmosphere… or, though it was hard to imagine such a thing, on the surface itself.
And ships. So many ships… all as tiny and as insubstantial as the worlds among which they traveled.
This, then, was the star system to which the fragmented intruder probe had traveled. It was impossible to tell, of course, precisely where the probe fragment had gone in this teeming sea of energy and space-borne craft. The heavy concentration of energy-radiating points on and near the sub-planet directly ahead, however, the one with the poisonous atmosphere and liquid surface, appeared to be the heart of this system’s activity.
Ordered Ascent called up Warship 434’s encounter records, and swiftly found a match there with some of the alien ship energy patterns ahead. The H’rulka had drifted into this species just once before, some ten-twelfths of a gnyii , one rotation of the homeworld about its sun, ago. Evidently, they called themselves humanity , a burst of low-frequency sound without meaning. The Sh’daar masters called them Nah-voh-grah-nu-greh Trafhyedrefschladreh , a complex collection of sonic phonemes that meant something like “20,415-carbon-oxygen-water.” Humanity was very nearly the twelve to the fourth intelligent species encountered so far by the Masters that was carbon-based, breathed oxygen, and used liquid dihydrogen oxide as a solvent and transport medium.
Repulsive vermin. No floater sac, no feeder nets or filter sieves, no manipulators—unless the two jointed appendages sprouting from near the top of the creature were used for that purpose. Only two tiny photoreceptors, instead of broad photoreceptor patches of integument. Surface crawlers. Poison breathers. The images in the H’rulka records had been made of creatures captured in that one encounter, but none of the specimens had survived long enough for their
Krystal Shannan, Camryn Rhys