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.”“In other words,” Vic said, nodding, “alongside another stargate.”“Exactly.But I think you can all appreciate the importance of sticking to the flight vectors exactly.Any shipjacker who lets himself drift is going to have one hell of a long walk home.”The audience laughed.At least their morale is high, Kara thought.“So,” Captain Hernandez said.The skipper of the cruiser Independence was a small, dark-skinned man with a black mustache and a brusque, no-nonsense manner.“The idea is that we travel into the future, from one Stargate to another.Looking for… what? Allies, like our orders say? Or something else? Information, you said.”“We wrote the orders to state explicitly that we were looking for allies,” Dev said.“As much as anything else, that was to sell the idea to the Confederation Senate.”Briefly, Dev’s eyes met Kara’s.They had a haunted, empty look to them, and his form showed a distinct translucency.My God, she thought.What happened to him during the battle?“That was Senator Alessandro’s idea, actually,” Dev continued.“Sometimes it’s hard to sell civilians on how a key piece of intelligence can turn a battle, or a campaign.If we tell them we’re going into the remote future to find a way to beat the Web, they’d ask why we don’t just keep sending probes.And… maybe they’d be right.If we sent out enough, we might get lucky.But I’m convinced that we’ll be luckier still if we send a sizable contingent up there, people able to get a good look and make solid decisions.Decisions that may, literally, reshape our own universe of possible futures.Instead of arguing the point, we’ve told them we’re looking for allies, somebody big enough and powerful enough to help us put the Web in its place.Simple, direct, and easy to say ‘yes’ to.”“We might meet such allies,” Admiral Barnes pointed out.“We shouldn’t overlook the possibility, anyway.”“We might meet allies,” Dev conceded.“Or the Web, grown so powerful that humanity and every other species in the Galaxy is extinct.Or ourselves, for that matter, if we survive.Where are we going to be in a thousand years?”“Where’s the Web going to be a thousand years from now,” Vic said.“That’s a damned frightening thought.”“Well, it’s a fair bet that either we’re going to win, or they will.It might take more than a thousand years to decide the thing, though.The Galaxy is one hell of a big place.In any case, our primary objective is to get information.Any information.About the Web.About our war with them.Anything that might help us shape strategy here in the twenty-sixth century.As a secondary objective, we’ll be looking for some sign of where all of this…” He stopped and gestured again at the image hanging in the darkness, indicating the streams of plasma spiraling in from the stars.“Where this, and the plasma they must be stripping from thousands of other stars gone nova, is going.Or when it is going.They must be using it somewhere, or somewhen, to build or power something.It would be useful to know what.”“Any reason why you use a thousand years in your argument?”“Not really.We want to select a figure where some change has manifested itself, one way or the other.” He spread his hands.“Theoretically, I guess, we could travel billions of years into the future, without a problem.We would just need to select the appropriate course and approach speed to the Stargate.”“A billion years might be no problem for you,” one of the company commanders off the Karyu said, and the others in the audience laughed.Kara felt a small stab of concern for Dev, though, as the laughter broke down into scattered chuckles.He looked… almost translucent, and that was something that just shouldn’t happen to normal image projection through a Companion or—as in Dev’s case—the Naga fragment residing in the computer net where he was currently resident.What was wrong with him? It was almost as though he was having trouble hanging on to his own conceptualization of himself.“We tried to make this clear from the beginning,” Dev said, “but let me restate it now, for the record.There are no guarantees here [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]