Stargods by Ian Douglas (best summer books TXT) 📕

Search and rescue. Was a SAR shuttle from SupraQuito trying to rendezvous? They had their work damned well cut out for themif so. The pod was a blazing meteor now, its passengers slowly being cooked by the fierce heat of re-entry. For a SAR tugto have any chance of grappling the elevator pod, it would have to match the capsule’s velocity . . . which meant undergoingthe same heat and vibration of re-entry that Koenig and his fellow passengers were enduring now.

And SAR tugs weren’t designed for atmospheric re-entry. They were workhorses deployed strictly for operations in hard vacuum.

Gradually, the bone-shaking vibration of their descent reached a kind of steady plateau as minute followed minute through the terrifying descent. The pod was streamlined to facilitate its passage up or down through the atmosphere along the elevator cable, with top and bottom tapered into slender points. So far, the capsule had maintained its up-and-down orientation, but now Koenig and the others felt a tremendous shock, as if something massive had hit them from outside, threatening to tip them over. Deceleration dragged at them and the raging plasma inferno outside faded, just for a moment. Koenig had a moment’s clear view of the Earth spread out below.

And as the plasma faded, Konstantin’s voice crashed through the static. “—ident Koenig, do you copy?”

“I’m here, Konstantin,” Koenig replied.

And in the next instant, the elevator pod, stressed far beyond its design tolerances, fell into a savage tumble, explodedlike a white-hot bolide, breaking into dozens of burning fragments as it disintegrated forty kilometers above the PacificOcean.

Nungiirtok Warship Ashtongtok Tah

Fighter Bay

Deep Space

1250 hours, FST

The scoutship Krestok Nin had rendezvoused with the far larger Ashtongtok Tah at the stargate leading to the Nungiirtok homeworld and been taken aboard. Inside the cavernous hangar bay, Gartok Nal andShektok Kah faced a Tok Iad, extending their long, jointed lower jaws in a gesture of supreme respect.

“Do you know where these Nungiirtii were taken?” the Tok Iad demanded. The phrase meant simply “Tok Lord”; the Nungiirtiiknew no other name for them and did not know what they called themselves.

“No, Lord,” Gartok Nal replied. “But the cry for nesheguu was clear and urgent.”

Nesheguu meant, roughly, “vengeance,” but the concept was deeply rooted in Nungiirtii codes of honor and responsibility—what eachindividual tok owed both to those above it in the social order, and to those below.

“We must answer that cry, then,” the Tok Lord replied.

Tok Lords were of a completely different species than the hulking Nungiirtok warriors. A pale gray cone one meter high, balanced on three muscular tentacles and possessing a trio of slender, branching tendrils around the cone’s base, their larval forms were parasites, gestating inside the body cavities of Nungiirtii and eating their way out once they were mature. Like many parasites on Earth, the larvae directly affected the brain chemistry of their hosts, making certain the slowly growing implanted larvae were kept safe and healthy. Taken into the Tok Lord community for education and indoctrination, the adults served as leaders and warlords for most Nungiirtok cultures and commanded Nungiirtok ships and ground elements in combat. The relationship of Nungiirtii with Tok Lords had lasted for so many hundreds of thousands of years that the arrangement was never questioned.

It simply was the way things were.

“We shall answer the cry of nesheguu, then,” Gartok Nal said.

The Tok Lord gave the orders, and in moments the ponderous Nungiirtok vessel was under way, shaping a faster-than-light courseback toward Earth.

USNA CVS America

Penrose TRGA

1350 hours, FST

Gray had been worried about just how they were going to get back to their own Milky Way, their own epoch. Passing througha TRGA was like threading a needle, and when that needle was tumbling through space, the task was damned near impossible.If the ships of the squadron missed their alignments and were off course by even a few meters, they might end up anywhere.

Or anywhen.

But during their discussions with the Sh’daar, the aliens had provided the answer in the form of a low-grade computer AI, a non-conscious, non-self-aware software package formatted for human computers and designed to be beamed into a TRGA’s control systems using laser-com technology.

Buried within the cylindrical shell of each TRGA was a computer programmed for station-keeping. When the Sh’daar had fledthe N’gai galactic core, they’d let the Thorne TRGA tumble as a means of discouraging pursuit by the Consciousness. Assuredby the humans that the Consciousness was gone, they provided the software so that the human squadron could get back home.

America and the other vessels had first returned to the spot in space where they’d left the Storozhevoy and taken on board the twenty-five Nungiirtok prisoners before rendezvousing with the Thorne TRGA and beaming the softwareinto its computer. The simpleminded AI immediately reset the station-keeping systems and regained full control of the gravitationalfields surrounding the structure, using the positions of nearby stars to calculate the precise orientation of the device.

With the TRGA again stable, America slipped into the end of the open cylinder, following a precisely calculated angle into the interior and through . . .

. . . and emerged moments later from the gaping maw of the Penrose TRGA, tens of thousands of light years and hundreds ofmillions of years removed from Thorne. One by one, the other ships of the squadron, including the captured Russian vessels,emerged as well, following closely in America’s wake.

They were now seventy-nine light years—about six days’ travel time—from home.

“So,” Gray said, once America was tucked away into its own small bubble of warped space and on course for Earth, “what did we learn, if anything?”

Normally, he ate in the officers’ mess, but this time he’d invited Truitt, Kline, and Mallory to join him in the wardroom for a more formal dinner. While they ate, they went through a relaxed and informal debriefing, discussing the mission so far. Unlike the cafeteria setup of the mess deck, the wardroom was more of a luxury dining room, complete with comfortable chairs and an imitation mahogany table nano-grown from the thickly carpeted decks, and viewalls showing, at