A Man From Planet Earth by Giancarlo Genta

Author:Giancarlo Genta
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

16 The Fourteenth Fleet

The round trip to Isqaht, Ytl and Gorkh’ar took more than a month, and Tom got back to the Gatlaat system on the 35th day.

The cruiser had hardly come out of hyperspace when Tom realized that the evacuation was proceeding at full speed. On the screen he could see a group of six cruisers close to the hyperspace gate. Farther away, there was a convoy of several hundred of the Merchants’ freighters, escorted by a dozen cruisers, ready to leave the system. On another screen there was a second convoy, similar to the first one, that had entered the system no more than two hours earlier and was heading towards the planet. A third convoy, still near Gatlaat, was hardly detectable by the instruments.

The computer remained silent for some minutes, because it was downloading data from the memories of all the ships that were close to them, to get all the relevant information. “All operations are proceeding normally, and are, in fact, slightly in advance of the schedule,” she said as soon as she had been able to evaluate the situation. They still had twenty days before the expected arrival of the Qhrun invasion fleet and, according to plan, more than two-thirds of the planet had already been evacuated. After about ten minutes they passed close to a convoy. Instinctively Tom thought of going to the library to see the show from the window but he immediately realized that, while the show was really impressive on the bridge screens, the ships were travelling at such a speed that the encounter would be over too quickly to see anything.

The cruiser entered the atmosphere of the planet straight away, landing on the beach close to the Presidential palace. The beach was crowded with ships, almost all freighters from the Fleet, that were being used by the teams working to the trap they were preparing for the invasion fleet. Even before landing, Tom saw Sinqwahan waiting for their arrival.

In the landing place it was evening, even though the sun was still high above the horizon, thanks to the latitude of their landing site. Tom insisted on dining on board with Sinqwahan, so that he could have a complete report of the events in the last month, before meeting anyone else. The Aswaqat confirmed that everything was going to plan and that most people had already left the planet. The Iskrat-is-Thn had not shown up and there had been only limited disorder from groups who opposed the evacuation. “Yinlad is very influential and, once she decided to evacuate, her people didn’t make any significant problem,” he concluded.

Tom thought that everything had perhaps gone too well, but he knew the Aswaqat well enough not to notice from the way he was speaking that there was something wrong. The psychology of Aswaqats had always seemed difficult for him to grasp, but nevertheless that impression persisted. A glance at Susan was enough to see that she had the same feeling. “Sinqwahan, is there anything

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