Six Against the Stars Omnibus 1 & 2 by Stephen Hunt

Author:Stephen Hunt [Stephen Hunt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Green Nebula Publishing
Published: 1999-07-13T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9. No man is free.

Growing higher as the colonists filed past, their pile of abandoned possessions was swelling into a small hill, jewellery and technological toys spilling across the pulbar vessel’s deck. Already, the dreamers’ ark had been taken off their shuttle and wheeled past the settlers on a cushion of antigravity floats. The few dreamers left alive watched shocked as their ancient virtual world was pushed past, the brethren now permanently marooned in what they considered to be purgatory, trapped while the slavers carried their artificial paradise away. Horatio suspected their lives were going to get a lot closer to purgatory before this particular voyage was over. He needed little imagination to guess what was going to happen next. Their data-stack would be erased and its massive storage capacity sold off to some backwater planet inside the Ebb, the copies of the followers frying alongside its celestial spheres and strange white cities, replaced by administration stacks and some alien’s idea of what sex simulations should look like. That was if they ever got to their destination – having caught a glimpse of the outside of the pulbar vessel on the shuttle across, Horatio thought that was an even wager. She was a crudely cobbled together mess of cargo modules, engines, power cells, rail cannon turrets and ugly-looking starship vanes. Her shield shimmered in places, a sure sign of leaking environmental systems, oxygen burning off the underside of her own field. On the front of the ship, a skyscraper-sized figurehead had been glued to the hull, a metallic statue – clearly of alien origin – ripped out of some Ebb world sacked by the slavers. Horatio coughed from the damp cold of the slave ship. The boat was called the Kon’ripar by their captors: the Savage Bird by the slaves.

Lord Mycroft had reminded Horatio that the pulbars’ need for slaves was fuelled by the necessity of keeping personnel to maintain the technological booty of their conquests. Horatio had read a little about the pulbar in their briefing files. I just never hoped to meet them this close. The natural ceiling of the pulbars’ wits was only a little advanced from the technology of the carbon age. Although the universe, in her own inscrutable way, had compensated by giving their species the rapaciousness of a pack of wolverines. Fate had completed the windfall by ensuring the pulbar homeworld’s large moon possessed a population of intelligent herbivores so timid they had developed hyperspace technology, but never dared to use it. When the parachutes of the first pulbar re-entry capsule opened in their rainy gray skies, the stressful weight of such decisions was quickly relieved from their sodden haunches, as was much else in the way of the achievements of their utopian society. Inside the Charm Cooperation, the pulbar might have been offered conversion to the charm faith, before having a comet dropped on them after they’d couriered back the charm missionaries’ heads. In HUTA, the senate would have blockaded their violent world until its sun finally flared nova.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.