Wild Cards [02] Aces High by George R.R. Martin

Author:George R.R. Martin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy - General, Epic, Magic, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Non-Classifiable, Juvenile Fiction, Fiction - Fantasy, General, Science Fiction, Science Fiction - General, Fantasy, Fiction, Short Stories
ISBN: 9780553264647
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 1987-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

JUBE: FIVE

The trace was unmistakable.

Jube sat at his console as the readings crawled across his holocube, his hearts thundering away with fear and hope. He had spent most of his first four months on Earth in darkened movie theaters, sitting through the same films a dozen times, reinforcing his English and broadening his grasp of human cultural nuances as reflected in their fiction. He'd learned to love their movies, especially westerns, and his favorite part had always been when the cavalry came thundering over the hill, all its banners flying.

The Network flew no banners; still, Jube thought he could hear the faint sound of bugles and the pounding of hoofbeats in those spiderly twists of light within his holocube.

Tachyons! Bugles and tachyons!

His observation satellites had detected a wash of tachyons, and that could mean only one thing: a starship in nearEarth orbit. Deliverance was at hand.

Now the satellites swept the skies for the source. It was not the Swarm Mother, Jhubben knew that. The Mother crept between the stars at speeds slower than light; time was nothing to her. Only the civilized races used tachyon-drive starships.

If Ekkedme had gotten off a transmission before the singleship was smashed from the skies . . . if the Master Trader had decided to check on human progress earlier than planned . . . if the Mother had somehow been detected by some new technology undreamed of when Jhubben began his assignment on Earth . . . if, if, if . . . then it might well be the Opportunity up there, the Network returned to deliver this world, with only the means and price yet to be determined. It would not be easy even then, but of the ultimate result he had no doubt. Jube smiled as his satellites probed and his computers analyzed.

Then the holocube turned violet, and his smile died. He made a low gurgly sound deep in the back of his throat. The sophisticated sensors in his satellites stripped away the screens that cloaked the starship from human instrumentation and displayed its image within the ominous violet of the cube. It revolved slowly, etched in lines of red and white light like some terrible construct of fire and ice. The readouts flashed below the image: dimensions, tachyon output, course. But everything Jube needed to know was written on the lines of the ship: written in every twisted spire, proclaimed by every fanciful excrescence, trumpeted by every baroque whorl and projection, shouted in that panoply of unnecessary lights. It looked like the results of a high-speed collision between a Christmas ornament and a prickly pear. Only the Takisians had such rococo aesthetics.

Jube lurched to his feet. Takisians! Had Dr. Tachyon summoned them? He found that hard to believe, after all the years the doctor had spent in exile. What did it mean? Had Takis been monitoring Earth all this time, observing the wild card experiment even as the Network had? If so, why had Jhubben found no trace of them until

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