Horizon Storms - Kevin J. Anderson [108]
But Chairman Wenceslas had been eager to unleash his new interstellar land rush, leaving the Chief Scientist with little choice but to do his work by gathering up crumbs of time and information. He found a chair and tried to remain unobtrusive as he called up files on his old datascreen. For now he was just scanning textual notes, and he preferred using the slow and obsolete unit he’d had since his first job as a lab assistant and secondary engineer. His wife had given it to him.
He jabbed a key and called up Louis Colicos’s scattered log entries. It amazed him that one old man had managed to get the first transportal working again, rigging up powerpacks and restarting the mothballed Klikiss machinery. After nearly ten thousand years, the alien equipment was in extraordinarily good condition. So far, only a few of the numerous coordinate tiles were marked black to indicate places from which explorers had not returned. Many of the coordinate tiles around the trapezoidal window remained untried—potential paradises. Or traps.
He switched to another file that displayed a detailed starmap, indicating sites of known Klikiss ruins and functional transportals. If Palawu could decipher the core technology, then the Hansa could establish transportals anywhere they chose, and the economic boom would increase by orders of magnitude…
He also had access to high-resolution astronomical maps that displayed the sweep of standard Hansa colonies, Ildiran worlds, and Klikiss ruins, along with summaries of star types and planetary positions. Glowing dots marked where former stars had been violently snuffed out in recent months, their fires squelched by hydrogues in their incomprehensible conflict against the faeros. Though the blips on the starmap looked innocuous, Palawu shuddered at the implications—whole suns were being extinguished by the titanic beings!
On the starmap, he noted another marker in the Ptoro system, where a Klikiss Torch had recently turned the gas giant into a fresh burning star. The Klikiss had developed that weapon long ago—to fight the hydrogues, presumably? The planet Corribus, one of the new colonization worlds, still showed the battle scars of that final conflict.
Following a hunch, Palawu collated the spectral readings of newly ignited Ptoro and added them to the records from the first test planet, Oncier. Knowing that his old datascreen did not have the processing power he required, he commandeered one of the larger Hansa computers not being used for transporting new colonists. He set the machine working on a fast and intense comparison.
If the Klikiss had developed the Torch, surely they must have used it at least once. Those artificially created stars would be short-lived on a cosmic time scale—a gas giant did not have enough fuel to burn for more than a few thousand years—but even after ten millennia they wouldn’t all be extinguished.
With a thrill of satisfaction, he looked at the results. The computer found twenty-one stars with small burning companions that could well have been gas giants ignited by the Klikiss Torch, long ago. Twenty-one.
Were they ancient battlefields of the Klikiss against the hydrogues? So far, Oncier, Ptoro, and three other hydrogue gas giants had been obliterated in the current war, their funeral pyres still burning.
Though his discovery was amazing, Palawu soon came to the somber realization that even after using their Torch weapon twenty-one times, the Klikiss race had still been exterminated. What possible chance did humanity have?
Chapter 54—ANTON COLICOS
Inside the bright domes of Maratha Prime, Anton stared past the glare into the months-long darkness, feeling very alone. With the return of Designate Avi’h to the mothballed vacation mecca, the skeleton crew had become energized, though they often