Read Online Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber - Free Book Online Page B

a total break with anything which had come before—that he might decide to wipe out all record that there’d ever been a technologically advanced human society. In which case, of course, all memory—or, at least, all accurate memory—of the Gbaba would have to be eliminated as well. He couldn’t very well explain we’d encountered them once we attained interstellar fight without explaining how we’d done that , after all.
    â€œNone of us could question the necessity of ‘going bush’ to evade detection, at least in the short term, yet where Langhorne was determined to prevent any new confrontation with the Gbaba, we felt that one was effectively inevitable. Someday, despite any effort to preclude the development of a high-tech civilization, the descendants of our new colony’s inhabitants would start over again on the same road which had taken us to the stars and our meeting with them.”
    He shook his head sadly.
    â€œIn light of that, we began considering, very quietly, ways to prevent those distant descendants of ours from walking straight back into the same situation we were in. The only solution we could see was to ensure that the memory of the Gbaba wasn’t lost after all. That our descendants would know they had to stay home without attracting attention, in their single star system, until they’d reached a level of technology which would let them defeat the Gbaba. The fact that the Gbaba have been around for so long was what suggested they’d still be a threat when mankind ventured back into space, but the fact that they’ve been around so long without any significant advances also suggested that the level of threat probably wouldn’t be much higher than it was today. So if there was some way for our descendants to know what level of technological capability they required to survive against the Gbaba, they would also know when it ought to be safe—or relatively safe—for them to move back into interstellar flight.
    â€œOne way to do that would be to maintain a preelectric level of technology on our new home for at least the next three or four centuries, avoiding any betraying emissions while preserving the records of our earlier history and the history of our war with the Gbaba. Assuming we could convince Langhorne, or at least a majority of the Administrative Council, to go along with us, we would also place two or three of the expedition’s ships in completely powered-down orbits somewhere in our destination star system, where they’d be only a handful of additional asteroids without any active emissions, impossible to detect or differentiate from any other hunk of rock without direct physical examination, but available for recovery once indigenous spaceflight was redeveloped. They would serve as an enormous bootstrap for technological advancement, and they’d also provide a yardstick by which to evaluate the relative capabilities of later, further developments.”
    His holographic face grimaced, his eyes bitter.
    â€œThat was essentially what the original mission plan for Operation Ark called for, and if Halversen had been in command, it’s what would have been done. But, frankly, with Langhorne in command, we never gave it more than a forty percent chance of happening, although it would obviously have been the best scenario. But because the odds of achieving it were so poor, we looked for a second option. We looked hard, but we couldn’t find one. Not until we were all sitting around after dinner on the very evening before our departure, when you and Elias Proctor came up with the idea which led to this conversation.
    â€œYou were the one who pointed out that the same technology which had gone into building the PICAs could have been used to build an effectively immortal ‘adviser’ for the colony. An adviser who actually remembered everything which ought to have been in the records we were all afraid