Anderson, Kevin J - Saga of Seven Suns 01 - A Forest Of Stars by Anderson Kevin J

Author:Anderson, Kevin J [Anderson, Kevin J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-09-02T20:18:06+00:00

He scrolled to the end of the file. "Margaret was compiling all this information for the next regular report to be sent via telink, but apparently the green priest was killed before she could transmit it."

"Think he was murdered to prevent the information from getting out?"

"Margaret's report gives no indication that she feared for her life, no suspicions at all. Whatever killed Louis Colicos and the green priest must have done so unexpectedly. The Klikiss robots and the compy are gone, and so is Margaret herself. Maybe the robots turned on them? Maybe Margaret went berserk from something she found? Maybe the threat was entirely external-say, an Ildiran assassin squad-something that wanted to prevent the Hansa from learning whatever they had discovered? At this point, I am considering every possibility equally."

Rlinda took a longer drink of her wine and looked out through the tent flap into the clear desert night. "And now we're here trying to learn the same information. Aren't you concerned that we might be in danger, too?"

He met her gaze with his large brown eyes. "I am always concerned."

At the barest hint of dawn, Davlin led a sleep-groggy Rlinda Kett out to the second set of ancient ruins. They entered the echoing ghost city they had already explored, but this time the shadows and mysteries had been pushed back a bit further. With the information from Margaret's datawafer, Davlin could look at the evidence with a fresh eye and maybe-finally-find some answers.

He went straight into the large gallery that contained the blank trapezoidal surface. Davlin stared at Louis's bloody palm print on the flat stone, then scrutinized the complex symbol tiles that framed the unmarked area. He went to a side alcove of the big chamber where he had found strange geometric mechanical units, partly dismantled and open.

On his portable screen he referred to some of the notes Margaret Colicos had jotted down-her husband's incomplete speculations included. Davlin could imagine the woman pestering Louis to write up his own summary, but the old man would probably have put off paperwork, tinkering and learning new things faster than he could document what he had already uncovered.

"So, have you figured out what it is?" Rlinda asked. "Or are the details too obscure even for you?"

"Louis believed this was some sort of travel system, a 'transportal' that could be activated for instantaneous jumps across vast distances. The equations in Margaret's report showed that the Klikiss machinery had some way of punching a doorway through the fabric of the universe, creating a shortcut where the distance variable goes to zero."

"Sounds impossible. Of course, so does the Ildiran stardrive... and so does the existence of intelligent aliens living at the cores of gas giants, I suppose."

Davlin looked at the frame of symbols around the trapezoid, hundreds and hundreds of tiles, each one with a unique marking-like a destination code. During the voyage to Rheindic Co, Davlin had memorized reports of known Klikiss archaeological sites. Counterparts of this strange stone window occurred in

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