The Cruel Stars by John Birmingham

Author:John Birmingham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

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He went dark as soon as the canopy closed over him again. The return journey to the Voortrekker would take most of the night. McLennan couldn’t run straight in at high speed. As advanced as the sled’s cloaking systems were, a cannonball run would create more than enough environmental disturbance to draw the attention of the Sturm’s active sensor arrays. And so he advanced in dribs and drabs, fits and starts, mimicking the movement of the desert’s night creatures. Running like a sand fox, spiraling in the great long loops of the ground hawk, crawling over the basin floor in the slow, creeping advance of the stone gorgon. The sled reformatted its heat signature to sim each animal as needed. The military-grade infiltrator unit, a contract rider he had insisted on with Miyazaki, had no sentient intellect. But its AI systems were still very advanced. It could easily handle the approach to the Voortrekker. For much of the night McLennan alternated between light sleep and contemplation, trusting his safety to the early-warning systems.

This at least, he would concede, was where Hero might be right. With a neural net and cortical augmentation he would be able to call up vast archives of perfectly preserved data. The history of the Sturm, the Civil War, the Exile into Dark Space. Instead, reliant on his all too fallible human memory, which seemed to get much less reliable as the centuries piled on, he struggled to recall fine detail and even the broader sweep of a 700-year narrative arc. And he had contributed a good deal of the scholarship to the study of that narrative.

It would be different if he were back at the dig site, where he had maintained a comprehensive library, or, even better, at his campus suite on the main university Habitat, where he could consult the archives of the wider Volume and talk with colleagues on campus or back on Earth via wormhole link. But speeding across the wilderness of the Sukaurno Basin, itself a minor wasteland within the greater emptiness of the Ironstone Desert, Frazer McLennan felt himself isolated and unmoored. He could see the glowing bowl of the newly illuminated dig site over the dark line of the horizon. The dropships would be down and the landing forces well established.

The fact of his own work on the Voortrekker, if not the exact details, would be known to the Sturm by now, and doubtless they’d have worked themselves into a yammering fit of violent hypercrazia over the blasphemy done to their sacred fucking site.

They really were a bunch of tedious flogs and pointy great sticks in the arse about their precious fucking piety and purity and…

McLennan shook himself out of the darkening spiral.

The Sturm. He hated those animals, but that wasn’t nearly enough to go at them with.

He’d beaten them once before, at great cost, aye, but he had beaten them. And if he kept his wits about him this time, he was sure they could be knocked over again.

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