Steve White - Shirley Meier - Starfire 5

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Exodus

ADVANCE READER COPY

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO THE

BEST SELLING STARS AT WAR SERIES

Take a Stand Against the Alien Menace!

A Hero Reborn!

An implacable foe with telepathic cohesion in battle, near-immortality, and eons-advanced engineering

skills threatens to wipe humanity from the galaxy. Their one weakness? No FTL. But that won’t last long.

Now a hard-bitten and brilliant admiral, his brain plucked from cryo and fitted to a new body, must put

aside a generation of differences and join with his greatest foe to face the alien ravagers. For when human

existence is on the line, we need all the heroes we can get—even if we have to bring them back from the

dead!

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Steve White, Vietnam vet, long-time David Weber collaborator and co-author, with Weber, of the New

York Times best-seller The Shiva Option, joins with martial arts expert and popular fantasy writer Shirley

Meier to carve another notch in White and Weber’s “Starfire” adventure saga!

“[Leaves] the reader both exhilarated and enriched.”

—Publishers Weekly on David Weber and Steve White’s The Shiva Option.

Cover Art by Clyde Caldwell

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Exodus

Table of Contents

BOOK ONE

Prologue

Chapter One: Rebirth

Chapter Two: Bug-Eyed Monsters

Chapter Three: "They're all insane."

Chapter Four: "They've fired on us!"

Chapter Five: "We can't let her get away with this."

Chapter Six: "What do you mean, 'We're surrendering?' "

Chapter Seven: "It's a war, all right."

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Chapter Eight: Arming

Chapter Nine: "Just keep your heads down."

Chapter Ten: Fighting Back

Chapter Eleven: A Long Bloody War

Chapter Twelve: In a Horse-Head's Teeth

BOOK TWO

Chapter Thirteen: No Rosetta Stones Here

Chapter Forteen: The Jaws That Bite

Chapter Fifteen: The Claws That Catch . . .

Chapter Sixteen: As Useful as Tits on a Bull

Chapter Seventeen: "My God, there are more of them!"

Chapter Eighteen: "She's come back to haunt me."

Chapter Nineteen: "Will you walk into my parlor?"

Chapter Twenty: "They have the Desai drive."

Chapter Twenty-One: Art Is Either Plagiarism or Revolution

Chapter Twenty-Two: "Welcome to Zephrain, Admiral Li."

Epilogue

Appendix: Arduan Glossary

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

BOOK ONE

Prologue

There could be no true night with Sekahmant in the sky.

The sun had set, turning the Auriel Ocean molten in shades of red and orange andmurn , leaving the

giant star unchallenged. Of course, it was only a point source of actinic bluish-vrellight—no imaginable

object could show a visible disk across even a minor interstellar distance—but that light was of an

intensity to banish every other star and trigger the color sensitivity of one's central eye. So Harrok,

standing on the terrace of his mountainside villa high above the west coast of Kormat, could clearly see

the town below, the coast curving northward in a succession of coves separated by wave-lapped

mountains, the mercury-like ocean to the west, and the peaks rising in range upon snowcapped range

into the eastern distance.

He could also see this same coast from the tarry deck of a sailing vessel of the Asthians who would, in

later centuries, build the town below his villa, for he wasshaxzhu , and his memories of all his lives was

good. But that was a different kind of seeing.

The view had never failed to move him. What a thought in the Mind of Illudor! So much beauty, to be

obliterated by that which now only illuminated it! Harrok was no astrophysicist, but he never doubted the

truth of the horror that they had revealed with their orbital instruments. After all, educated people had

known for generations that the ethereal loveliness of Sekahmant must someday turn destroyer. But so

soon?

A rustling sound distracted him as his daughter stepped from the doorway into the Sekahmant-light.

Ankaht was the image of her now discarnate mother, tiny and dark, in contrast to Harrok, whose skin

was translucent gold—though dulling with age, now—and whose long, thick neck lifted his head to an

above-average height. But these were superficial differences. In what really mattered, they were alike, for

she, too, wasshaxzhu. For both parent and child to possess the gift was rare but not unheard of. It lent

the father-daughter relationship a sometimes disturbing closeness.

"The decision has been made," she announced without preamble. She had been linked into the global

datanet, which Harrok found himself less and less inclined to do these days, when almost all the news

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

was bad. "The nations have granted the new government all the emergency powers it asked for—in

effect, dissolved their own existence. (Excitement, tempered by mourning for the old ways.) And the

proponents of extended research and development have been overruled. Construction of the first ships

will begin with the technology we have now, although further discoveries will be incorporated into later

ships if possible. (Deep reservations.)"

Harrok and Ankaht never misinterpreted one another's emotions. The empathetic sense ofselnarm was

extraordinarily strong among allshaxzhu , and especially so among those who were also close blood

relations.

"Well," he said, "they had little choice. (Resignation.) The last I heard, estimates of the supernova's date

had been moved up to two hundred years from now."No more than three or four incarnations for me,

he thought bleakly, even assuming minimal time spent discarnate.

Not that any such assumption was likely to be justified, given the draconic population control measures

that were being proposed. But, again, what choice was there? There was not enough metal in the crust of

Ardu to build a fleet of ships that would carry a significant fraction of the present population, or even

keep up with its increase.More time in the dreary less-than-existence of discarnate status for all of

us, he thought.

But it never occurred to him to doubt that the project would succeed, at least in the sense of savingsome

of the Race, nor was his confidence based on the power-urge of politics or the proofs of science or

economics. His certitude was a simple philosophical imperative. After all, supernovae also had their

existence in the Mind of Illudor. Could Illudor will His own obliteration? It seemed unlikely. It was also

too disturbing a thought to dwell upon—that a Deity might commit suicide—though far less disturbing

than the heretical whisper heard more and more of late: that the universe was Illudor'sdream . . . and that

the dream had now turned to nightmare.

He shook off his philosophical musings to listen as Ankaht spoke again.

"I've been asked to join the group that will be planning for the social organization of the ships . . .

especially the problem of maintaining cultural continuity for hundreds of years in an environment like that.

(Disgust.) Weshaxzhu will be specially important in maintaining a link with the world we've known. How

else will the others even understand thereis a universe outside those steel walls?" She shuddered. "They

want your help, too Father. You probably won't be incarnate when the first ships depart, but your

wisdom will be invaluable in the planning stages."

"Of course I'll help in any way I can," Harrok replied. Strongshaxzhutok carried obligations as well as

privileges and, to be honest, the problems were not without interest. He turned to lead Ankaht inside,

then suddenly stopped and loudly clicked the strong, curved claws that tipped his left hand's two primary

tentacles. "Oh, yes! I forgot to mention when you arrived this morning; your sister was in a skimmer

accident. She's all right, but her new son was killed."

"Oh. (Mild regret.) He was less than half a year old, wasn't he? You don't happen to know who . . .?"

"No. I wasn't there for the birth, and afterwards I couldn't get any sense of who'd picked him. Couldn't

have been anyone close."

"I suppose not. Still, it's too bad for whoever he was. I can dimly remember going discarnate in infancy

once. What an annoyance! Nothing more frustrating. Anyway, tell Kathmeer I'm glad she's all right. I

haven't kept in touch as I should have, but I happen to know that disincarnation would be very

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

inconvenient for her just now. (Grimness.) Inconvenient for everyone, with the birth restrictions we all

know are coming."

The reminder of his own earlier thoughts saddened Harrok—sadness which, of course, communicated

itself to Ankaht. Silently, father and daughter stepped inside and closed the sliding glass door behind

them.

Outside, in an evening filled with wild flixit song and the buzz of second-light insects, Sekahmant

continued to glow as if it were an enduring star.

Chapter One

Rebirth

Prescott City had changed.

No,she reminded herself, for the thousandth time but with undiminished irritation.Not "Prescott City."

Just "Prescott."

She couldn't remember precisely when, during the past couple of generations, the "City" part had been

dropped from popular parlance. But by now the shortened name stood triumphant even in official

paperwork and maps. To say "Prescott City" was to declare oneself an incorrigible old fogy. And the

Honorable Miriam Ortega—onetime chairperson of the Rim Federation's constitutional convention,

subsequently its prime minister for five nonconsecutive terms totaling over forty years, and currently chief

justice of its Supreme Judicial Court—was not ready to do that. Even though her one hundred and eleven

Standard years arguably gave her every right to.

She shook off the thought. The antigerone treatments to which she was entitled from at least two

standpoints—her inarguable contributions to the community, and her residence on a planet the least of

whose worries was population pressure—rendered her apparent physiological age a very well-preserved

late sixties, and therefore deprived her of whatever excuse senile decay might have provided.

Besides, she told herself,why shouldn't the name have changed? Everything else has.

Nowhere was the change more clearly on view than here, at the window of the chief justice's private

office on the top floor of Government House.

A hundred and fifty-five years ago—the Standard years that everyone still used, the time it took Old

Terra to revolve around Sol—Government House had been built to house the provisional government of

this planet of Xanadu, then little more than a raw new military outpost whose civilian workforce had

mushroomed to the point of needing such a government . . . but not to the point of needing (or being able

to afford) an edifice which would have done credit to some long-established colony world. But

Government House had been less a building than a grand gesture—a madly extravagant exercise in what

Miriam's mother would have called outrageouschutzpah.

Xanadu had been colonized halfway through the Fourth Interstellar War, when humanity and its allies

had faced the very real likelihood of something far worse than extermination at the hands of the Bugs:

survival not even as slaves, but as meat animals whoknew . It had been colonized because this system,

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

named Zephrain by its discoverers from the Khanate of Orion, had been only one warp jump away from

a teeming Bug "Home Hive" system. Those colonists had known full well that they were living on the front

lines of a war whose only outcome could be genocide in one direction or the other. By shaping the

planet's native stone into neoclassical monumentality, looming above their prefab "cities," those people

(Miriam had often wished she could have known them) had made an eloquent declaration of

uncompromising commitment: "This world is ours. We can be killed, but we cannot be moved." In the

end they had been neither . . . thanks to the man after whom they had named this city, and whose statue

they had raised on a column.

Thus it was that, after the war, Government House had been maintained but never modified. And when a

young lawyer named Miriam Ortega had moved here after her mother's death, to be near her father,

Sergei Ortega, the local Terran Federation Navy commander, it had still loomed over all it surveyed,

crowning its hilltop in a bend of the Alph River, even though the city had grown enough to finally deserve

the name.

Now, though, the waves of galactic cosmopolitanism had finally washed over the Rim. Government

House lay in the shadows of kilometer-high towers of plasteel and synthetic diamond. Abu'said Field,

which had once provided it with an impressive backdrop, had long since yielded to the economics of

efficient land use, and a new spaceport served Prescott from what were now the city's outskirts. But the

extensive grounds of Government House remained sacrosanct, despite being almost beyond price as real

estate, and one could almost imagine that Commodore Prescott looked down with bronze eyes over an

unchanged scene from atop his column. . . .

Except that now there was a second column beside it. Miriam's eyes strayed to the statue that crowned

that one, and she could no longer put off her reason for being here—this meeting that had nothing to do

with the Supreme Judicial Court at all.

Unconsciously, she took out a cigarette and lit it. Cancer, of the lungs and otherwise, had long since

been banished into the mists of history for everyone with access to up-to-date biotechnology. But her

first inhalation of smoke awakened a scowl on a face that had never been conventionally pretty even in

her youth. (Although, the more you looked at it . . .) She angrily stubbed the cigarette out and turned to

the two men who had been sitting patiently at the conference table.

"Stupid damned habit," she muttered. "I'm going to quit this summer."

The two men kept straight faces. They'd had a lot of practice at it. They had heard those last six words

from Miriam Ortega before each of the last 105 of Xanadu's summers, as it swung around its G5v

primary in 0.73 standard year.

As usual, the small dapper man in academic-style civvies did a better job of concealing his amusement.

Admiral Genji Yoshinaka, RFN (ret.), had the pure white hair his one hundred and twenty-eight

Standard years warranted, but his skin held the finely wrinkled firmness of one who had started on the

antigerone treatments relatively late. His features were of the cast of Old Terra's east Asia, and in fact he

was that rarest of birds in the Rim Federation: a native of the mother planet. He had always been a

master at keeping those features unreadable, and age had not diminished his subtlety.

The other man could hardly have presented a more striking contrast. Fleet Admiral Sean F. X. Remko,

TFN, was still on the active list—although, at one hundred and forty Standard years—he was beginning

to think the unthinkable about retirement), and his bear-like frame was clothed in the Rim Federation

uniform. That uniform was essentially the black-and-silver of the Terran Federation Navy . . . but the

TFN of seven and a half Standard decades ago, forgoing the changes in style that had since overtaken

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

the parent service—a sartorial eccentricity fraught with political meaning. Similarly, the beard that had

been fashionable among male TFN officers then still adorned a face that reflected more ethnic strains than

just the ones his name suggested, for Remko was a product of the melting-pot slums of New Detroit, and

his bass voice still held harsh residues of an accent that conferred no great prestige.

"All right," Miriam said with the breezy informality that came naturally to her, and which she could permit

herself in this company. She sat down at the head of the table. "I declare the trustees of the person and

estate of Fleet Admiral Ian Trevayne in session. Thank you both for coming. If there's no objection, I'd

like to dispense with the usual financial report. Instead, I've called this special meeting to discuss the latest

medical evaluation I've received from Dr. Mendez and his team."

Instantly, the two men took on a look of focused alertness.

"We haven't seen this evaluation, Miriam," said Yoshinaka carefully. Remko emitted a confirmatory

rumble.

"I know, and I'm sorry I haven't had time to make it available to you in advance. But I felt we should

meet without delay." She paused with the unconsciously dramatic instinct of a veteran politician. "You

see, it appears that we may be able to discharge the trust's primary purpose in five Standard years."

They stared at her with the incredulity of long-deferred and often-disappointed hope.

"Let me review the basic problem," she hurried on, while they were still speechless. "Essentially, it is as

Dr. Yuan explained to us before his death fifteen years ago, except that since then, advances in medical

technology—about which you can read the details later—have now raised the chances of him surviving

the thawing process to about eighty-five percent."

Yoshinaka cleared his throat. "Well, Miriam, this is certainly encouraging news. Thawing him out, as you

put it, from the cryogenic bath Dr. Yuan used—without the usual elaborate workup—to preserve his life

during the Battle of Zapata has always been half of the problem. Butonly half."

"Right," Remko nodded. "Even if the thawing does succeed, it just brings us back to the reason Dr.

Yuan froze him solid in the first place: the battle damage that he took at Zapata!"

"Yes." Yoshinaka nodded, and began to itemize. "Extensive radiation damage, especially to the lower

body. Spine severed just below the fifth vertebra. Not to mention the effects of extreme anoxia,

concussion . . ." Yoshinaka trailed off miserably as he saw the look on Remko's face, and belatedly

remembered what the man under discussion had meant to the burly admiral.

But Remko surprised him. He brought his expression under control and spoke steadily. "That's right.

And to all that, you have to add the damage done by the quick-freeze itself. Not that I'm criticizing Dr.

Yuan, mind you. It was all he could do. But . . ." He made a baffled gesture.

"Yes," Miriam acknowledged. "Dr. Mendez admits that even today the procedure would be risky in the

extreme. Even if he survived it, the chances are that he would suffer permanent impairment—especially in

light of the radiation damage, which the freezing did nothing for."

"Well, then, we're back where we started," declared Remko.

"Not altogether. What Dr. Mendez is proposing is that we avoid the risks by not even attempting to

salvage this body."

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Yoshinaka was the first to grasp it. "Cloning?" he breathed.

"The crucial point," Miriam replied obliquely, "is that Dr. Yuan didn'tentirely forgo the workup to

cryogenic freezing. He couldn't omit it for the brain tissue, given the potential for really irreparable

damage. So he did a crash job. And Dr. Mendez has been able to confirm that the brain itself is

essentially undamaged."

"Just a moment, Miriam," Yoshinaka interrupted. "I think I see where this is heading. And while I'm

certainly no expert, I am aware that selective cloning and force-growing of organs and tissue is almost

routine by now. I also have no doubt of the ability of Dr. Mendez's people to graft a 'bridge' into a

severed spinal cord, and to make the necessary neural connections. But we're talking about alot of

replacements, each one carrying a potential for rejection or other failure. So we're still faced with the

mathematics of cumulative risk."

"Actually, Genji, you don't quite see it. We're not talking about a bunch of transplants, but only one: the

brain itself. Granted, it's a highly—indeed, uniquely—complex transplant. But Dr. Mendez is confident he

and his people can do it."

The two men stared at her. For once, it was Remko who spoke first.

"A . . . a full-body clone?" His voice held a succession of emotions: incredulity rising to horrified

realization and then to revulsion.

"Miriam," Yoshinaka said sternly, "we all want this. But you, of all people, should know the law on the

subject of human clones: they are legal persons, with all the rights pertaining thereto. In fact, this very

legal principle provided the incentive to develop the technology of selective body-part cloning. To use a

clone of oneself as a . . . a source of spare parts is as illegal—and, I might add, as morally leprous—as

using one's child for such a purpose. And if this is true of chopping organs out of such a clone one by

one, it must apply equally to taking the brain out of it and putting another one in!"

"I don't know anything about legalities," Remko growled. "But I do know the admiral wouldn't want to

have anything to do with this!" Whenever Remko saidthe admiral in that particular tone of voice, there

was no doubt in anyone's mind which admiral he meant. "It's ghoulish! He'd rather be . . . the way he is

now." He gestured vaguely toward the city, in the direction of the medical center whose subbasement

held an obscenely coffinlike tank, perennially filmed with frost.

"Of course I'm aware of the legal precedents," Miriam said evenly. "With all due modesty, I must claim a

better knowledge of them than either of you. And I also know how he would react to what you think I'm

suggesting. Actually, I think I can claim a better knowledge ofthat as well."

That silenced them. They had only been Ian Trevayne's friends and comrades in arms. Miriam Ortega

had been his lover.

"In fact," she continued, "when Dr. Mendez broached the idea, I raised all the objections you've thought

of—and also a few you haven't—in the strongest possible language." Both her listeners knew whatthat

could mean in Miriam Ortega's case. "He hastened to assure me that what he was offering was a way

around these very difficulties. He believes that by a special application of the techniques used to produce

individual organs—a kind of 'reverse engineering'—his team can produce a full body cloneminus one

organ: in this case, the brain.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"The clone would be effectively anencephalic—incapable of any higher brain functions. In effect, it would

be born 'brain dead.' Now, for a very long time—I'd have to look it up to tell you just exactly how long,

but certainly reaching back to the dawn of the Space Age, before the discovery of warp points—the

definition of 'death' has been legally settled. In those days, you see, it had become possible to artificially

keep a human body 'alive' by the traditional definition—a heartbeat and a pulse—after the brain function

had irrevocably ceased. So the definitions had to change. A brainless clone will be legally dead, and

therefore will have no rights. It will be kept in that state while it is brought to maturation—a process

which can be accelerated by a factor of four, which is why I mentioned the figure of five years. That's

how long it will take to grow the clone to the physiological age of eighteen to twenty, while keeping it

exercised with the same techniques used for other forms of long-term life support, to prevent muscular

deterioration. At that point, we transplant the brain."

"So," said Yoshinaka slowly, "his fiftyish mind will wake up inside a twenty-year-old body."

"Hisown twenty-year-old body," Miriam said firmly. "That's what makes Dr. Mendez so confident of his

ability to perform the transplant."

"But . . . Well, as I said before, I'm no expert. But I seem to recall reading somewhere that if a clone is

produced from postembryonic cells—cells taken from an adult, that is—then the clone's cells may 'wear

out' faster, resulting in premature aging."

"Oh, yes; that problem has been recognized since the early days of cloning, more than five centuries ago.

But today we have the antigerone treatments to counteract it."

"All right. You and Dr. Mendez have obviously thought this through. And just as obviously, youbelieve

you have thought through the legal repercussions." Yoshinaka held up a hand as the chief justice started

to speak. "Yes, I know. It's your field. But hear me out. I don't doubt you're right in principle. But are

you sure your desire for this to happen isn't clouding your judgment about whether this will really stand up

to a legal challenge? There may be a revulsion from it on ethical grounds, whatever the law may say. As

Sean said earlier, there's something about the whole idea that seems—"

"Ghoulish," Remko repeated, but with less vehemence than before.

"Yes. And you should know, Miriam, that when people want badly enough for the law to produce a

certain result, they can usually find a way to make it do so."

"Of course. I know all about the 'court of public opinion.' And I'mcounting on it!" For the first time, she

flashed the expressive smile that had never lost its power to transfigure her face. "Have you forgotten

who it is we're talking about? And what he means to the people of the Rim Federation? If you need a

reminder, just go to that window over there and look down at the second column out front, beside

Prescott's."

This silenced them. Of course they hadn't forgotten. How could they?

Eight decades before, in the darkest days of the Terran Federation's terminal civil war, Yoshinaka had

been Vice Admiral Ian Trevayne's chief of staff and Remko his flag captain. They had helped him lead his

task force through the rebelling Fringe World systems to Zephrain, gateway to the still-loyal Rim systems.

There, he had forged a legend as well as a military dynamo that had taken the last resources of the Fringe

Worlds' new "Terran Republic" to finally batter to a halt in the bloodbath of Zapata—blood that had

included Trevayne's own. But his sacrifice had saved the Rim for the Terran Federation.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Steve White - Shirley Meier - Starfire 5 - Exodus

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: