Final Inquiries Read Online Free

ships--or else it had to be big. She craned her neck around to check Kelly's nav display and gasped. Very, very big. For it to be visible at their present range, the ship would have to be at least as big as Center Transit Station itself, and CTS was something like a kilometer across.
    "Caught you peeking, Hannah," Kelly said, glancing over her shoulder. "That's enough backseat driving for now."
    "Ah, yes, ma'am. Sorry."
    "Don't apologize. I want my Senior Special Agents to be inquisitive. But I'm under some to-be-taken-literally orders myself. However, now that we're all safely aboard and clear of the Station, I can tell you a few things that aren't covered by those orders--information from sources other than those covered by the keep-quiet orders."
    Kelly checked her controls, locked them, then swiveled around in her seat to face her passengers. "Seems that about three hours ago, Center System Defense Command got a QuickBeam message from a certain party, a trusted party, on Tifinda, the Vixan home world. All sorts of authenticators and encryption sequences and so on, to prove it was from who it claimed to be from, and warning us that a very big, very fast ship was about to arrive, and that it was not, repeat not, an attack. The message included coordinates for the ship's arrival in system and flight-path data for its transit through the system to planetary orbit around Center.
    "It was obvious that there was some sort of mistake, as the data showed that the ship would arrive about five times closer to CenterStar than any possible transit point, and showed the ship accelerating to more than ninety percent of the speed of light just about instantaneously, heading straight for the planet Center, then stopping dead, decelerating to orbital velocity in less than a heartbeat.
    "Then, sure enough, a ship arrived exactly at the predicted, utterly impossible, coordinates and flew right down the middle of the couldn't-be-right flight path--and, to make a long story short, it's the ship you see straight ahead of us. If not for the warning message from the certain party, Center System Defense Command would have--and should have--opened fire. My guess is that there were plenty of twitchy fingers near the triggers even with the warning." Kelly frowned thoughtfully. "It's damned lucky they didn't fire. Their weapons probably couldn't have hit anything moving that fast anyway, but just shooting at that ship could have made things about six times worse than they already are."
    "More than six times worse, I assure you, Commander Kelly," said Brox. "It would likely have meant war with the--ah, owners of that ship. That war would not have lasted long, or gone well for you. It was likely lucky for my people as well. In my opinion, at least, whatever advantage there might have been for us Kendari, if humanity were eliminated, it could only have been short-term. It would have been a question of where and when, not if, there would be a flash-point incident for us as well."
    That was a bit of cold-blooded analysis that Hannah could have done without hearing.
    "You, ah, used the past tense there," said Jamie. "So if Defense Command had taken a potshot at that ship earlier today, humanity would already have been eliminated ?"
    "Oh, no. Not yet. Not so quickly. It would likely take the Elder Races almost a quarter of an Earth year, at the very least. But, as I said, that would do us Kendari little good if they next turned their attention toward us--and the odds of some peripheral incident or another getting out of hand and causing that would be very high indeed. Or else some Elder Race species might just decide on its own that getting rid of one Younger Race species was really just a good start--and why not wipe out both of the dreary little nuisances, so long as they were at it?"
    Jamie furrowed his eyebrows. "So you believe it's likely that both of our species avoided extinction this morning, and nobody knows about it?"
    "A few beings know about it,"