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they did it slowly, and had used this capability to fashion the perfect
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airlock. This still eluded him but even the admittedly crude
applications that he had achieved held potential for fending off
attacks that were only now being appreciated.
 Of course, Aelanni cautioned,  we have to bear in mind that this
isn t a realistic test. The technicians aboard Liberator knew exactly
when, and from what bearing, those attacks were coming, so they
could put out their deflectors in advance.
 Yeah. It would be nice to be able to travel around inside a
permanent bubble-shaped deflection field. But the effect doesn t
work that way and even if it did, the generators use too much
power to just leave  em switched on all the time. In actual combat,
it ll be a guessing game. Still& 
Thoughtfully, they turned away from the screen and walked across
the control center to the wide viewport. Kurganov Station had
grown from the nucleus of one of Varien s factory ships, and now it
sat like a spider at the center of a vast web of construction and
refitting work that drifted in silent majesty in low Terranova orbit.
The panorama beyond the curving wall of transparent plastic had
never lost its power to raise DiFalco s spirits.
It might have seemed incredible that their small band could have
wrought so much in so short a time. But Varien had brought with
him the capacity to produce all the essentials of Raehaniv industry.
Once established, that industry had grown by geometric
progression, with machines making machines. Their only real
limiting factor had been the shortage of raw materials outside
planetary gravity wells, in this system that lacked a resource-laden
asteroid belt like Sol s. But Terranova s active geology had left its
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many mountainous regions rich in accessible heavy elements. Those
riches had to be lifted into orbit but with Raehaniv shuttles whose
atmospheric drives manipulated the planets gravity into a force that
pushed them to a significant altitude and speed before their fusion
drives nad to take over, this became workable.
After a few moments they spontaneously turned and faced each
other, losing themselves for the moment in common memories.
Soon after landing on Terranova they had been married according to
the forms of the austere Raehaniv tradition, to the music of Varien s
muttering. And they had shortly settled for all time the question of
whether the humanity of Earth and Raehan belonged to the same
species. Jason hle Morna DiFalco (a name to which Varien was still
far from reconciled, although he doted on his grandson whenever he
thought no one was looking) was now in his fourth Earth year, an
age at which he had other things on his mind than the distinction of
being the first Terran-Raehaniv child. He had not been the last.
Rememberance caused them to notice, as they usually did not, the
changes wrought by the years. DiFalco s hair was as thick as ever,
but it was now iron-gray, shading to nearly white at the temples.
Terranova s ultraviolet-rich sun had darkened his skin to a
mahogany tone that was different from Aelanni s dark reddish
copper, and drawn squint-lines at the outer corners of his eyes.
Aelanni snowed fewer visible signs of ageing provided from birth
with the best that Raehaniv medical science could offer, she had a
life expectancy of over a hundred twenty-five Earth years. (Her
prospect of lengthy widowhood had been a source of soul-searching
for them, and of grumbling for Varien. Both had been overcome,
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partly by the argument that they couldn t count on living to peaceful
old age anyway.)
The moment passed, and Aelanni spoke briskly.  Well, let s return
planetside. I want to tell father personally. We can start retrofitting
the ships with deflectors, after which& Eric, it may be that we re
ready! Their drop shuttle had only just landed when a second one
swept in from the south and settled down onto its yielding landing
jacks. It was different from theirs, armed and armored, and a squad
of heavily-equipped infantry emerged from its wide hatches, just
back from the latest of the gruelling exercises laid on by Sergeant
Thompson (now Major Thompson, by grace of one of what Difalco
continued to insist to everyone including himself were
temporary field promotions under extraordinary emergency
circumstances).
It was clear to everyone that their attempt to liberate Raehan would
not necessarily be resolved in the clean, remote abstractness of
space war the only kind of war the Raehaniv had experienced in
fighting the Korvaasha. A ground-combat capability would
probably be needed. So Thompson had set himself grimly to the
task of creating one from his own U. S. Marine detachments, their
Russian counterparts, and whatever promising recruits he had been
able to harvest from the Raehaniv and the upcoming generation of
Terrans. He had welded them all into a single organization and
trained them exhaustively. But to arm them with weapons fit to face
the Korvaasha he had had to turn to Miralann and his beloved
historical databases.
Stepping from their shuttle, DiFalco and Aelanni waved to the
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Raehaniv linguist, who was watching the return of the assault
shuttle from the edge of the landing area. Miralann waved back and
approached through a cloud of dust stirred up by the odd things the
shuttles grav repulsors did to molecular motion. He wasn t as
plump as he had been years under Terranova s high gravity had
seen to that. Like all the Raehaniv, he had a toughened, pared-down-
to-essentials look. But his air of absent-minded geniality remained.
 Hi, Miralann, DiFalco greeted him.  From the smile on your face,
I assume all the bugs are out of the infantry equipment.
 Most of them, Miralann allowed. His exhaustive library
portable, given the density at which the Raehaniv could store data
had yielded the specs from which the infantry weaponry of the
Fourth Global War had been resurrected. Thompson had been
reluctant to give up his tried-and-true M22, with its solidly
reassuring old 2030 s technology. Then he had seen a
demonstration of what the Raehaniv had been using on each other
five hundred years before.
 It still amazes me, DiFalco admitted,  that you people had all this
stuff that far back.
 Remember, Miralann said,  at the time of the Fourth Global War
we were almost as advanced as we are now, with the exception of
artificial gravity; technological change was frozen after that.
 If our history is any indication, DiFalco mused,  all those total
wars must have been a stimulus to technological advancement, with
governments subsidizing R&D.
 Oh, yes. In fact, now that I ve had time to study your history in
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depth, I can see clear parallels with ours. Miralann warmed to his
subject as he watched a second assault shuttle approach.  The First [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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