Priam's Lens by Jack Chalker

Priam's Lens by Jack Chalker

Author:Jack Chalker [Chalker, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf
Published: 1999-04-30T20:00:00+00:00


There was curiously little conversation on the way, even when they were awake, and then it was entirely about practical things like eating and drinking and power consumption.

Emerging back into normal space from the very small genhole and into the Trojan system was done very quickly, and they knew it from the sudden drop into red warning lights and the sudden and complex maneuvering of the craft.

On the screen, though, came a sun and four very distinct planets.

“Save for a trickle charge that keeps it from imploding, the small genhole is inactive inside the orbit of two of the moons of one of the larger gas giants in the system,” Krill explained to him, knowing that he alone would not have been fully briefed. “The amount of surge produced when it powers up and allows us through is masked by the magnetic field and electrical storms in the upper atmosphere of the giant, so unless we literally run into a Titan ship or patrol they won’t be able to pull us out of the muck. That’s how they move these little ships in and out.”

“So they say,” he commented.

“Oh, there’s no problem with this. As totally incomprehensible as the Titans are, they still obey the general laws of physics. We just haven’t figured out how they do it all yet.”

We haven’t figured out how they do most of it, he thought sourly, but he let it pass. Much worse, we haven’t the vaguest idea why. How could you deal with an adversary this powerful who would not even accept a surrender?

Cockroaches…

Maybe it wasn’t so bad being a cockroach after all, he thought. The buggers survived virtually everything and you never could completely get rid of them no matter how hard you tried. No other creature in the universe had ever been encountered that was as versatile and persistent as the various kinds of Terran cockroaches. That, at least, had been a blessing. So if we’re the second Terran evolutionary species to be too ornery and tough to die, maybe there’s something to be said for the whole thing.

“The trickiest part is right now,” she told him, inadvertently reminding the others of the tremendous danger they were now in. Krill was as much computer as human, or so it seemed. She’d clinically describe in great detail her own dissection. “We need to use power to get close to them, and the closer we get, the more likely we are to be detected. I understand that the theory here is to make our signature similar to that of a small comet or meteor. They may count them, but they do not shut them down.”

This solar system as originally constituted had been a very good one for humans. Discovered more than four hundred years earlier, it had one planet in the life zone that was so easily and inexpensively terraformable that it was habitable in a matter of decades, and a second world that, though not nearly as nice to live on, was



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.