"David Weber - Fifth Imperium 02 - The Armageddon Inheritance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

Scanned by Highroller and proofed more or less by Highroller. Less this time I am afraid. It was a mess
to proof.

Book One

The sensor array was the size of a very large asteroid or a very small moon, and it had orbited the
G6 star for a very, very long time, yet it was not remarkable to look upon. Its hull, filmed with
dust except where the electrostatic fields kept the solar panels dear, was a sphere of bronze-gold
alloy, marred only by a few smoothly rounded protrusions, with none of the aerials or receiver
dishes which might have been expected by a radio-age civilization. But then, the people who built
it hadn't used anything as crude as radio for several millennia prior to its construction.

The Fourth Imperium had left it here fifty-two thousand one hundred and eighty-six Terran years
ago, its electronic senses fueled only by a trickle of power, yet the lonely guardian was not dead,
it only slept, and now fresh sparkles of current flickered through kilometers of molecular circuitry.

Internal stasis fields spun down, and a computer roused from millennia of sleep. Stronger flows of
power pulsed as testing programs reported, and Camp Cent noted that seventy-three percent of
its primary systems had failed. Had it been interested in such thing, it might have reflected that
such a low failure rate was near miraculous, but this computer lacked even the most rudimentary
of awarenesses, it simply activated the appropriate secondaries, and a new set of programs
blinked to life.

It wasn't the first time the sensor array had awakened, though more than forty millennia had
passed since last it was commanded to do so. But this time, Comp Cent observed, the signal which
had roused it was no demand from its builders for a systems test. This signal came from another
sensor array over seven hundred light-years to galactic east, and it was a death cry.

Comp Cent's hypercom relayed the signal another thousand tight-years, to a communications
center which had been ancient before Cro-Magnon first trod the Earth, and awaited a response.
But there was no response. Comp Cent was on its unimaginative own, and that awakened still
more autonomous programs. The signal to its silent commanders was replaced by a series of jar
shorter-ranged transmissions, and other sensor arrays stirred and roused and muttered sleepily
back to it.

Comp Cent noted the gaping holes time had torn in what once had been an intricately
interlocking network, but those holes were none of its concern, and it turned to the things which
were. More power plants came on line, brining the array fully alive, and the installation became a
brilliant beacon, emitting in every conceivable portion of the electromagnetic and gravitonic
spectra with more power than many a populated world of the Imperium. It was a signpost, a
billboard proclaiming its presence to anyone who might glance in its direction.

And then it waited once more.

Months passed, and years, and Comp Cent did not care. Just over seven years passed before
Comp Cent received a fresh signal, announcing the death of yet another sensor array. That one
was less than four hundred light-years distant. Whatever was destroying its lonely sisters was
coming closer, and Comp Cent reported to its builders once again. Still no one answered. No one
issued new orders or directives. And so it continued to perform the function it had been
programmed to perform, revealing itself to the silent stars like a man shouting in a darkened