Regeneration (Czerneda) Read Online Free PDF

232. Oh, it had a world capable of supporting life. Once. It became so much orbiting rubble—by my dating, three thousand years ago, give or take a decade.” She paused as if this was significant.
    “One of us,” Mac hinted, “didn’t take astrophysics.”
    “Think about it, Mac. We know the Chasm worlds were destroyed by the Dhryn three thousand years ago; by your Brymn’s estimate, that’s the Moment, when the Ro locked his kind in the Haven System.” Emily’s voice held unusual patience. “Here we have a planet destroyed at the same time, in a completely different way.”
    “And no else one noticed?” Mac pursued. “C’mon, Emily.”
    “The team who originally mapped Chasm 232 pegged it as a natural disaster. There was no reason to look at it more closely—not with all those planets with ruins waiting to be explored. But we both know the Dhryn aren’t Their only weapon.”
    Oh, they knew. The Ro had toppled a mountainside to cover their tracks. Sing-li Jones, chief among the Ministry personnel still assigned to her, admitted they didn’t know how the aliens had done it. Mac shifted to another rock. She was no more at ease talking out loud about their invisible enemy than Emily was.
    She always listened. The wind ruffling the grass. The scurry of something small and careful. The cheerful babble of water over stone. Nothing unusual.
    Nothing unusual now. Mac didn’t quite shiver.
    What she didn’t understand was where Emily was going with this. “Say I accept your dating,” Mac suggested. “I don’t follow what this has to do with aquatic aliens.”
    “Not so fast, Mac. This one world wasn’t destroyed by the Dhryn. Think what that means.”
    “You think the inhabitants of Chasm 232 had some way to protect themselves. There’s an easier explanation, Em,” she frowned. “That world could have been home to—to Them —and discarded when they were finished with it.”
    “ They abandoned orbiting rock before humanity stood up.” As if uneasy, Emily moved at last, to pull her shawl tighter as the breeze lifted its edge. “It couldn’t have been Theirs . But it was a world that somehow evaded the Chasm catastrophe. So I studied long-range scans of the rubble, looking for anything to set this place apart from the others. Insufficient. I had Sencor divert a salvage ship to collect samples for their experts to analyze. You should have been there when the first results came in, confirming my remote dating, showing refined materials. It was quite a thrill.”
    Given her intense lack of interest toward anything off-Earth in those days, Mac sincerely doubted that, but made a noncommittal noise to be polite.
    Emily continued. “We found abundant evidence the world in Chasm 232 had supported a technologically advanced civilization during the same time span as the others. Perhaps they’d died with their world. But what if they hadn’t? There was legend, other hints. So if these were the Survivors, the question became: how could they have escaped? They controlled the transects; the Dhryn attacked through the gates.” Her hand lifted skyward. “Leaving sub-light. Maybe they had ships from a time of exploration before the transects; maybe they were warned to build them. What matters, Mac, is where they could have gone. Chasm 232 doesn’t have many neighbors. At one-tenth light, we’re talking almost a thousand years to the nearest world suited to you or me. Multigeneration ship—or stasis.”
    A raindrop hit her nose. Mac looked up in reflex and another hit her in the eye. She pulled her sweater over her head, feeling nostalgic.
    “Long trip,” she commented.
    “If you need our kind of planet. But there’s something closer. Much closer. Within a couple of centuries. A system with a similar star, a planet of the right mass. But with no signs of civilization or technology. On land, that is. But it has oceans. Lovely, deep, wide oceans.”
    “You don’t have to be aquatic to live underwater,”