The Xenocide Mission Read Online Free PDF

– and she ignored these with a practised mental flip. Not only would it have been bad manners to proceed down that road, but she could sense the looming motherlode of far more interesting and relevant information that the nodule carried. She moved her mind towards it and began to drink it in.
    A dark rock, no name, catalogue number 136750#48,
half a mile long, a quarter wide, trailing the planet
Firegod. Discovered by astronomers eighty-seven years
ago, surveyed by robot probe twenty-four years ago,
attacked five days ago by armed units of the Space
Presence . . .
    Oomoing convulsed with surprise, but even as one part of her mind was framing the obvious question, ‘Why attack an asteroid?’ further information was coming in.
    . . . to reveal the presence of a base populated by
intelligent, non-Kin lifeforms.
    It was like a physical shock; she had to go back to it again. And then again. Non-Kin!
Extraterrestrials!
Her mind was divided. Part of it, the scientific part, the part that made her a reasoning, thinking scientist, crowed
at last
! Proof of all those theories. There were others out there. They were not alone.
    The other part, the part that made her Kin, shuddered. Extraterrestrials. Outlanders.
Not Us
.
    She kept going.
    Subsequent to its capture, surveillance equipment was
discovered orbiting the asteroid: painted black, floating
free in space rather than tethered to the rock where it
would be visible to any Kin who glanced that way
through a telescope, disposing of its heat by refrigeration
laser. It was virtually undetectable. However, it was the
refrigeration lasers which had first hinted at the
extraterrestrial presence: astronomers on Homeworld
observing the first conjunction of the planets Firegod
and Stormwind in nearly five centuries had noticed hot
spots moving across the surface of the former. The
hardest part of the subsequent investigation was
speculating what might be causing these spots. Once the
correct hypothesis had been devised then it was easy to
trace them back to their source.
    Neat: Oomoing loved to see science and logic being used properly. She also had to admit that the logistics of getting the soldiers there were quite clever:
    Armed units were chosen from those about to go to sleep.
They were launched into space on unpowered
trajectories that would take them to within a few miles of
the asteroid half a year later. Hence the ships carrying
them could be small, light, and much harder for anyone
on the asteroid to spot.
    Utilizing the natural half-year sleep cycle was an elegant touch. But what about their waking frenzy? Launching a carefully planned attack on an asteroid would be the last thing on the mind of a recently woken soldier, so how. . .?
    And again, with that question came the answer:
    The waking frenzy can be circumvented by the
introduction of certain chemicals into the bloodstream.
    ‘Interfere with the frenzy?’ Oomoing said out loud, aghast. ‘That’s . . . that’s unnatural!’
    ‘But doable,’ Fleet said complacently. ‘Incidentally, that’s another military secret I must ask you not to talk about, Learned Mother, so please keep your voice down.’
    Oomoing growled and went back to the memories, to learn the details of the attack: the lasers that took out the asteroid’s defences; the burrowing machines that let out its air; the more than sixty bodies discovered.
    Prisoners? she thought.
    No quarter was given.
    ‘Oh, brilliant!’ Oomoing exploded. ‘The first sign of non-Kin life and we go in with guns blazing . . .’ Fleet was looking, well, stony. ‘It was one of your mother’s ideas, wasn’t it, Loyal Son?’
    ‘Indeed, Learned Mother.’
    ‘I promise that from now on, if I’m to insult your mother I’ll do it to her face.’
    ‘You will have the opportunity, Learned Mother.’
    She subsided into her chair again, but part of her mind was still whirling and it wasn’t just with the surprise revelation. To attack without challenge or proper warning