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For Brea, who saw me through the worst of times
Table of Contents
“They’ve Found the Intruder, Sir.”
Books in the Legacy Trilogy by Ian Douglas
“They’ve found the intruder, sir.”
“Let me see.”
A three-dimensional schematic opened in a new mental window. The intruder’s course was clearly marked, as were the last known positions of the monitor Prometheus and the patrol frigate Rasmusson, several High Guard drones, and Mars. A tiny white star had detached from the crimson star marking the intruder. “What’s that?”
Data unfolded in columns down the right side of the window. “Mass analyses suggests it’s a small asteroid, sir,” Bettisly told him. “About one kilometer across … mass approximately two billion tons. The intruder seems to have nudged it onto a new vector.”
Garroway studied the data with growing horror. “Two thousand kilometers per second?”
“Yes sir.”
“That’s a hell of a nudge.” A cold thought gripped his heart. “Where’s it going? What’s the target?”
The schematic shrank in the window, showing more of the orbit of Mars … and then of Earth. A yellow line projected itself along the rock’s projected path, which passed just in front of Earth’s current position. The white star tracked down the slightly curving line as Earth moved forward …
“Great Father in Heaven …”
Prologue
They were called the Hunters of the Dawn.
Their own name for themselves did not translate well into the languages of lesser beings. It might have been rendered, very approximately, as “the Sentient Ones,” or even, more approximately, as “Living Ones,” or simply as “We Who Are.”
All who were not We Who Are were lesser life forms, scarcely worthy of notice save when they became threats. When that happened, they became prey.
The name Hunters of the Dawn had been applied to them by others long ago, members of an interstellar cooperative now long extinct. More recently—several thousand years before, another species had named them Xul … a word that translated, again approximately, as “Demons.”
What other species called them, or thought of them, scarcely mattered. The Ones Who Are obeyed Darwinian dictates hard-wired into the genome of their distant ancestors a billion years in the past, dictates that drove them to seek out and eliminate any civilization capable of posing a threat to their eons-long dominion over the Galaxy.
Lately, a star system at the edge of a minor branching on one of the galactic spiral arms had become of particular interest
