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

room. And then, one day just over fifteen years after it had awakened, the stars responded.

Comp Cents sensitive instruments detected the incoming hyper wake weeks before it arrived.
Once more it reported its findings to its commanders, and once more they did not respond. Comp
Cent considered the silence, far this was a report its programming told it must be answered. "Yet
its designers had allowed for the remote possibility that it might not be received by its intended
addressees. And so Comp Cent consulted its menus, selected the appropriate command fie, and
reconfigured its hypercom to multi-directional broadcast. The GHQ signal vanished, replaced by
an all-ships warning addressed to any unit of Battle Fleet.

Still there was no answer, but this time no backup program told Comp Cent to do anything else,
for its builders had never considered that possibility, and so it continued its warning broadcasts,
unconcerned by the lack of response.

The hyper wake came closer, and Comp Cent analyzed its pattern and its speed, adding the new
data to the warning no one acknowledged, watching incuriously as the wake suddenly terminated
eighteen lightminutes from the star it orbited, it observed new energy sources approaching, now
at sublight speeds, and added its analysts of their patterns to its broadcast.

The drive fields closed upon the sensor array, wrapped about cylindrical hulls twenty kilometers in
length. They were not Imperial hulls, but Comp Cent recognized them and added their identity to
its transmission.

The starships came closer still at twenty-eight percent of light-speed, approaching the sensor array
whose emissions had attracted their attention, and Comp Cent sang to them, and beckoned to
them, and trolled them in while passive instrumentation probed and pried, stealing all the data
from them that it could. They entered attack range and locked their targeting systems upon the
sensor array, but no one fired, and impulses tumbled through fresh logic trees as Comp Cent filed
that fact away, as well.

The starships approached within five hundred kilometers, and a tractor beamтАФa rather crude
one, but nonetheless effective, Comp Cent notedтАФreached out to the sensor array. And as it did,
Comp Cent activated the instructions stored deep within its heart for this specific contingency.

Matter met antimatter, and the sensor array vanished in a boil of light brighter than the star it
orbited. The detonation was too terrible to call an "explosion," and it reduced the half-dozen
closest starships to stripped atoms, ripped a dozen more to incandescent splinters, damaged
others, andтАФjust as its long-dead masters had intendedтАФdeprived the survivors of any
opportunity to evaluate the technology which had built it.

Comp Cent had performed its final function, and it neither knew nor cared why no one had ever
answered its warning that, after sixty thousand years, the Achuultani had returned

Chapter One

It was raining in the captain's quarters.

More precisely, it was raining in the three-acre atrium inside the captain's quarters. Senior Fleet Captain
Colin MacIntyre, self-proclaimed Governor of Earth and latest commanding officer of the Imperial
planetoid Dahak, sat on his balcony and soaked his feet in his hottub, but Fleet Captain Jihanith, his tall,