Read Online Sunset of the Gods by Steve White - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Steve White
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what it meant.
He let Landry pause and stare for a few moments.
As those moments slid by, the sun rose just a trifle higher, and its rays moved to strike a certain cleft in the rocks. For a split second, Jason got a glimpse of—
At first his mind refused to accept it.
Mondrago must have been looking in same direction. He ripped out a non-verbal roar, grasped his walking stick in a martial-arts grip, and sprinted for the cleft.
Chantal’s eyes had been following Landry’s in the direction of Athens. Neither of them had seen it. Now they whirled around, wide-eyed.
“Stay here!” Jason commanded, and ran after Mondrago, who was already out of sight.
He scrambled up to the cleft and looked left and right. Mondrago was just vanishing from sight behind a boulder. Jason followed and caught up with him in a tiny glade where he stood, gripping his walking stick like the lethal weapon which, in his hands, it was. He was looking around intently and, it seemed, a little wildly.
“Gone?” Jason asked, approaching with a certain caution.
“Gone,” Mondrago exhaled. He relaxed, and something guttered out in his eyes.
“Did you see what I saw?”
“Depends on what you saw, sir.”
“I think I saw a short humanoid with wooly, goat-like legs and, possibly, horns.”
“On the basis of a very brief glimpse, I confirm that. Doesn’t seem likely that we’d both have the same hallucination, does it?”
“It’s even less likely that we’d actually see something corresponding to the mythological descriptions of the god Pan.”
“I don’t know, sir. You saw some actual Greek gods on your last trip into the past—or at least some actual aliens masquerading as gods.”
Jason shook his head. “Even if any of the Teloi are still around eleven and a half centuries after I encountered them, what we saw was definitely not one of them. It also bore no resemblance to any nonhuman race known to us in our era. And speaking of nonhuman races . . . I couldn’t help noticing your reaction to this particular nonhuman.”
Mondrago’s face took on the carefully neutral look of one being questioned by an officer. “I was startled, sir.”
“No doubt. But what I saw went a little beyond startlement.” Jason sighed to himself. This could no longer be put off. He should, he now realized, have brought it up that day in the exercise room. But his hopes had led him to avoid the issue. He paused and chose his words with care. “As I mentioned to you once before, I studied your record during our orientation period. Among other things, I learned that you served with Shahanian’s Irregulars in the Newhome Pacification.”
“I did, sir,” Mondrago said stiffly. His expression grew even more noncommittal.
As far back as the end of the twentieth century, the end of the Cold War had led to a proliferation of PMCs, or “private military companies” like Executive Outcomes and L-3 MPRI, offering customized military expertise to anyone who could pay. This had proven to be a harbinger of the future. The need of fledgling extrasolar colonies for emergency military aid had soon outstripped the response capabilities of the chronically underfunded armed services, leading to a revival of the “free companies” of Earth’s history, although in a strictly regulated form. The need arose in large part from the recurring failure of human colonists to recognize until too late that a new planetary home was already occupied by a sentient race, simply because that race lacked all the obvious indicia of civilization. Civilization, it had turned out, was a statistical freak. Tool-using intelligence, however, was not. Neither was the capacity to feel resentment at the environmental disruption that even the most minimal terraforming unavoidably caused.
Newhome, DM-37 10500 III, had been a case in point. The autochthones had been physically formidable to a degree that was exceptional for tool-users: steel-muscled hexapods whose three pairs of limbs
He let Landry pause and stare for a few moments.
As those moments slid by, the sun rose just a trifle higher, and its rays moved to strike a certain cleft in the rocks. For a split second, Jason got a glimpse of—
At first his mind refused to accept it.
Mondrago must have been looking in same direction. He ripped out a non-verbal roar, grasped his walking stick in a martial-arts grip, and sprinted for the cleft.
Chantal’s eyes had been following Landry’s in the direction of Athens. Neither of them had seen it. Now they whirled around, wide-eyed.
“Stay here!” Jason commanded, and ran after Mondrago, who was already out of sight.
He scrambled up to the cleft and looked left and right. Mondrago was just vanishing from sight behind a boulder. Jason followed and caught up with him in a tiny glade where he stood, gripping his walking stick like the lethal weapon which, in his hands, it was. He was looking around intently and, it seemed, a little wildly.
“Gone?” Jason asked, approaching with a certain caution.
“Gone,” Mondrago exhaled. He relaxed, and something guttered out in his eyes.
“Did you see what I saw?”
“Depends on what you saw, sir.”
“I think I saw a short humanoid with wooly, goat-like legs and, possibly, horns.”
“On the basis of a very brief glimpse, I confirm that. Doesn’t seem likely that we’d both have the same hallucination, does it?”
“It’s even less likely that we’d actually see something corresponding to the mythological descriptions of the god Pan.”
“I don’t know, sir. You saw some actual Greek gods on your last trip into the past—or at least some actual aliens masquerading as gods.”
Jason shook his head. “Even if any of the Teloi are still around eleven and a half centuries after I encountered them, what we saw was definitely not one of them. It also bore no resemblance to any nonhuman race known to us in our era. And speaking of nonhuman races . . . I couldn’t help noticing your reaction to this particular nonhuman.”
Mondrago’s face took on the carefully neutral look of one being questioned by an officer. “I was startled, sir.”
“No doubt. But what I saw went a little beyond startlement.” Jason sighed to himself. This could no longer be put off. He should, he now realized, have brought it up that day in the exercise room. But his hopes had led him to avoid the issue. He paused and chose his words with care. “As I mentioned to you once before, I studied your record during our orientation period. Among other things, I learned that you served with Shahanian’s Irregulars in the Newhome Pacification.”
“I did, sir,” Mondrago said stiffly. His expression grew even more noncommittal.
As far back as the end of the twentieth century, the end of the Cold War had led to a proliferation of PMCs, or “private military companies” like Executive Outcomes and L-3 MPRI, offering customized military expertise to anyone who could pay. This had proven to be a harbinger of the future. The need of fledgling extrasolar colonies for emergency military aid had soon outstripped the response capabilities of the chronically underfunded armed services, leading to a revival of the “free companies” of Earth’s history, although in a strictly regulated form. The need arose in large part from the recurring failure of human colonists to recognize until too late that a new planetary home was already occupied by a sentient race, simply because that race lacked all the obvious indicia of civilization. Civilization, it had turned out, was a statistical freak. Tool-using intelligence, however, was not. Neither was the capacity to feel resentment at the environmental disruption that even the most minimal terraforming unavoidably caused.
Newhome, DM-37 10500 III, had been a case in point. The autochthones had been physically formidable to a degree that was exceptional for tool-users: steel-muscled hexapods whose three pairs of limbs
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