Read Online The Xenocide Mission by Ben Jeapes - Free Book Online

again. Her eyes were shrewd and her gaze darted here and there, taking everything in. The muscles beneath the skin were tense and powerful.
    ‘Please, sit down,’ Barabadar said, indicating a cushion that faced her own across a work tray. Both females crouched. ‘Keeping busy?’
    ‘Extremely,’ Oomoing said. The Marshal of Space’s whole stance was putting her on the edge of combat herself. ‘There are plenty of bodies to observe.’ She emphasized the point,
to observe
. Barabadar had been explicitly clear that Oomoing could do what she liked with the extraterrestrial technology, run whatever tests came to mind, make whatever observations . . . but no autopsies. The bodies were to be treated with respect. Oomoing wondered if it was some kind of amends for the unprovoked, unchallenged attacked.
    Barabadar’s forehead muscles rippled in a smile, though there wasn’t much humour there. ‘I’ve read the preliminary reports you transmitted,’ she said. ‘Your assessments so far sound plausible.’
    ‘Why, thank you, Learned Sister,’ Oomoing said. She wondered how Barabadar would react if she complimented the Marshal of Space on being good at tactics.
    ‘In fact, you’ve covered things so thoroughly it’s barely worth Sharing,’ Barabadar said casually. She picked up some notes from the tray in front of her and ran her eyes over the front page. ‘They’re clearly a long way ahead of us, but I’d already guessed that . . . You think they have control of gravity?’
    ‘A hypothesis that fits the facts,’ Oomoing said. The corridors in the asteroid were smooth, round tunnels with metal grids that provided a flat surface; there were no handholds, nothing to assist someone trying to get round in freefall, which was the base’s current state. Something must have held the extraterrestrials against those grids. And she had seen the recording of the extraterrestrials’ escape ship – even she knew that no conventionally driven ship moved like that. It had effortlessly bridged the space between the rock and Firegod, after which it had vanished behind the gas giant, never to reappear.
    ‘And they must be able to travel at phenomenal speeds, to travel between stars at all. Any clues?’
    Oomoing shrugged. ‘There are two main theories amongst the scientific community as to how it could be done. Some think it should be possible to warp the local area of time and space in a way that seems to propel you faster than light . . .’
    ‘Seems?’
    ‘
You
don’t feel you’re moving at all; it would be as if the rest of the universe came to you rather than the other way round. But from everyone else’s perspective you would just vanish. The other theory is about opening up small holes in space, which are predicted by some of the latest theories, and passing through them. For that, of course, you could just use a conventionally powered ship that just happened to have the means for opening a hole on board.’
    ‘Not very convenient,’ Barabadar commented. Oomoing paused; this was a practical point from a professional spacegoing Kin that had never occurred to her in her flights of theory. No, you wouldn’t want to open up the hole on board the ship itself.
    ‘Well, perhaps the means for opening the hole is
outside
the ship . . .’
    ‘Much better,’ Barabadar agreed.
    ‘But either way would take a prodigious amount of energy, much more than we can easily produce, and as to clues here on this base – no, none at all.’
    ‘All the information we could possibly need must be inside their heads,’ Barabadar mused. She waved the notes. ‘And yet I don’t see anything here which suggests how they Shared.’
    ‘I’ve no idea if they did Share,’ Oomoing said. ‘There’s nothing that even looks like a Sharemass on the bodies that I’ve been able to locate externally.’ No autopsies . . .
    Barabadar went back to the notes and changed the subject. ‘The energy weapons they used against us were formidable,’