"Ian Douglas - Inheritance Trilogy 1 - Star Strike" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglas Ian)

many other things. The inhabitants of Earth, once, had called them тАЬXul,тАЭ a name that in ancient Sumeria
had come to mean тАЬdemon.тАЭ

A far older civilization had called them the Hunters of the Dawn.

However they were known to themselves or to others, how they were identified was less important for
their view of themselves than was their evolutionary imperative, the drive, refined over millions of years,
that made them what they were. For the Xul, existenceтАФmore, survivalтАФwas an absolute, the defining
characteristic of their universe. In their worldview, survival meant eliminating all potential competition.
Their culture did not have anything like religion, but if it had, their religion would have been a kind of
Darwinian dogmatism, with the fact that they had so far survived serving as proof that they were, indeed,
the fittest.
For the Xul, the first requirement for continued survival was the detection and identification of potential
threats to existence. An object with the mass of a fair-sized asteroid traveling through the Galaxy at
near-c velocities indicated both sentience and a technology that might represent a serious threat.

With an analytical detachment more characteristic of the computers in its ancestry than of organic beings,
the Sentry tracked the disturbance through local space. A ripple twisted the fabric of space/time, and the
Sentry shifted across light-years, emerging alongside the massive object, traveling at precisely the
objectтАЩs velocity.

At this speed, a hairтАЩs breadth short of the speed of light itself, the universe appeared weirdly and
beautifully compressed, a ring of solid starlight encircling the heavens slightly ahead of the hurtling vessels.
With the patient calm of a lifespan measured in millennia, the Sentry reached out with myriad senses,
tasting the anomalous traveler.

Outwardly, the object was an ordinary asteroid, a carbonaceous chondrite of fairly typical composition,
with a dusty, pocked surface of such a dark gray color as to be nearly coal black. Outwardly, there was
no indication of intelligent designтАФno lights, no artificial structures on the surface, no thruster venturis or
other obvious clues to the objectтАЩs propulsive system. Even the high velocity might be an artifactтАжa
souvenir of a long-ago close-passage of a black hole or neutron star, with the resultant slingshot effect
whipping a random, dead rock to within one percent of c.

But the SentryтАЩs gentle probings elicited other evidence, proof that the fast-moving object was both the
product of technology and inhabited. A steady trickle of neutrinos proved the presence of hydrogen
fusion plants, providing power for life-support and secondary systems. The tick and flux of even more
subtle, virtual particles revealed the operation of a quantum effect power system, tapping the base state
of space itself for the energies necessary to move that much mass at that high a speed. The drive was
quiescent now, but the potential remained, a subtle aura of shifting energies representing fields and forces
that might engage at any moment. Perhaps most telling of all, a powerful shield composed of interplaying
gravitic and magnetic fields swept space far ahead of the starshipтАФfor starship is what the object
wasтАФclearing its path of stray subatomic particles lest they strike rock and cascade into deadly
secondary radiation, frying the shipтАЩs passengers as they slept away the objective decades.

For passengers there wereтАФsome fifty thousand of them, stored in a cybernetic hibernation that let them
pass decades of subjective time without the need for millions of tons of food, water, and other
expendables. At the moment, the only member of the starshipтАЩs crew that was actually awake was a
being far more closely related, in its basic nature, to the Sentry than it was to the slumbering beings in its
care, a sentient computer program named Perseus.