Alliance Rising: The Hinder Stars - Softcover

Buch 1 von 2: The Hinder Stars

Cherryh, C. J.; Fancher, Jane S.

 
9780756416072: Alliance Rising: The Hinder Stars
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0756416078 ISBN 13: 9780756416072
Verlag: DAW, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

SFWA Grand Master C. J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher  return to the Hugo-award winning Alliance-Union Universe with a thrilling entry in her far-reaching sci-fi saga.

For years, the stations of the Hinder Stars, those old stations closest to Sol, have lagged behind the great megastations of the Beyond, like Pell and Cyteen. But new opportunities and fears arise when Alpha station, the oldest of them all, receives news of a huge incoming faster-than-light ship with no identification. The denizens of Alpha wait anxiously for news about the outsiders, each with their own suspicions about the ship and its motivations.

Ross and Fallan, crew members of the Galway, believe the unidentified ship belongs to Pell and has come to investigate another massive ship docked at Alpha, The Rights of Man. Though Rights is under the command of the Earth Company, it is not quite perfected—and its true purpose is shrouded in mystery.

James Robert Neihart, the captain of the strange ship—finally identified as one of the two largest ships of the Beyond, the Merchanter vessel Finity's End—has heard whispers of The Rights of Man and wonders at its design and purpose, especially as Sol has struggled to rival the progress of the Farther Stars. Now docked at Alpha, he must convince the crews that there is more to The Rights of Man than meets the eye.

Because the reasons behind the creation of The Rights of Man, and its true plans, could change everything—not just for Sol, but for the Hinder Stars and the Beyond itself.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

With more than seventy books to her credit, and the winner of three Hugo Awards, C. J. Cherryh is one of the most prolific and highly respected authors in the science fiction field, and has been named a Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. She lives in Washington state.

Born in Renton, Washington, Jane S. Fancher grew up raising and training horses, learning to fly a plane, playing piano, singing, drawing, and studying math, physics, astronomy, and anthropology. While working for WaRP Graphics (Elfquest), she joined a project to produce a graphic adaptation of C. J. Cherryh’s Gate of Ivrel. This endeavor led her to a new home in Oklahoma City, where she found her calling and began writing her own novels. She lives in Spokane, Washington with partner C. J. Cherryh.

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Rosie’s Pub was Alpha-based spacer turf. It was where you went on the Strip to spend time, to talk with shipmates, friends, and other ships’ crew who were regulars at Alpha Station.
And like other bars on the Strip, Rosie’s maintained, half-lost in the glassware and the bottles of liquor on the shelves above the bar, a sched­ule board—a list of ships coming in, ships leaving, ships currently in dock. Widescreen, three separate displays: interstation FTLers, mainte­nance insystemers, and on the far left, the sub-lighters, those two remain­ing links to Sol Station and Earth, one ship coming, one going, on their ten-year-long voyages—Sol being the only star outside the jump range of the faster-than-light ships: ironic proof, some said, that there was a god.
That part of the screen rarely changed: two ships, two destinations, no surprises there. The other two sections, with FTLers listed in the center and insystemers on the right, ebbed and flowed with the tides of commerce—shifting but generally predictable.
Until three hours ago, when the words in arrival had flashed above the listing of FTL ships and assigned berths.
In arrival. With no name or origin, just an ominous blank where both ought to appear.
Three hours and counting, and still no update.
Nobody remembered that happening. Ever. FTL ships dropped in at system zenith and sent ID before the first vane pulse, so ID arrived nearly simultaneously with the entry wavefront. In arrival always, always, came with a ship name attached. Period. That information kept honest folk from flashing on Beta Station . . . and the ghosts of stationers who had just disappeared, back at the dawn of all the star-stations, when the sub-lighter Santa Maria had come into Beta Station, at Proxima Centauri, and found . . . nothing. No remains, no explanation, no clue.
No one visited Proxima, ever, after that. Alpha Station, at Barnard’s Star, the first station outside Sol system itself, developed daughter stations in the opposite direction, and thrived.
Until FTL changed everything.
Alpha still maintained its unique sub-light trade with Earth, over a twenty-year round trip, a distance only pusher-ships could travel without a break. But one of Alpha’s own daughter stations, Bryant’s, farther on in a direction opposite to the Centauri stars, was close enough to Alpha for modern FTLers to one-hop it, and it was close enough to Glory and Venture to do the same. With those stations, Alpha maintained a modern traffic, always the same ships, generally on a schedule. And give or take the age of Alpha’s systems and the occasional glitches, citizen nerves and the futures market stayed fairly steady.
But who was this inbound now? Locals and spacers alike wanted to know. And they wanted an answer a lot sooner than three hours with no ID.
Malfunction in the display? If so, it was a station-wide malfunction. Crew from bars up and down the strip poked their heads in, asking: was Rosie’s display frozen, too?
In Rosie’s, the early assumption had been that it was just a glitch, that the screen was frozen—except, as various people immediately pointed out, the time kept ticking away in the corner of the display.
And over on another display, behind the blue neon sign for Beloit’s Premium Vodka, the news screen and the station information screen ran on as usual, unglitched. Likewise an entertainment channel at the back of the bar was running smoothly.
God knew, malfunctions were no stranger to Alpha. The station being the oldest of all star-stations, breakdowns happened now and again, though usually not so long-lasting in a system so basic and critical to a station’s well-being. Consolation was that, over near the hand-printed Rosie’s Special Ale, the local market board ticker, that other heartbeat of commerce, was still running. Its clock marked a steady flow of time above the list of current prices for goods on Alpha, and last-known prices for the same goods on other stations. Every ship that came in caused a cascade of changes in those prices—and not only as their cargo went on offer. Along with physical cargo, every ship also brought information safely stowed in its black box, untouchable information vital to every aspect of interstellar trade. And as an arriving ship’s black box fed its last gulp of data from afar into the station’s systems, that data joined the data every other ship had fed in from every other station, some of it way out of current date and from the other end of civilization, some near enough to be useful. The station’s computer would rapidly sort out the relevant market information, and that screen would stabilize, reacting only to in‑station trade—until the next ship arrived.
That information flow affected the markets. It affected plans. It was the routine pulse of trade and business. But in the last three hours since the arrival screen had frozen, local prices had begun to react, wildly, unpre­dictably, for internal reasons. Uncertainty did that. Movement in the mar­ket meant people shifting their bets, freeing money, prepared to draw back and hope to buy in low.
Betting on changes in prices, whatever that incoming ship carried.
People with money at stake were not happy. Spacers and station cus­tomers with agreements ready to sign, now put on hold, would be pissed as hell.
Dammitall, was the frequent comment. With In Arrival lit up, there should be a ship name, not a frozen screen. A manifest should arrive to settle those fluctuating numbers.
Hours on—with no announcement from admin—it was insane. Did admin want a riot on the Strip?
Big question was: what ship was it? Had to be incoming from Bryant’s Star. There was nowhere else for it to originate, sanely speaking. There were a few Alpha regulars not in port, ships who might have changed their mind, done a quick turnaround at Bryant’s, but how would that warrant this silence? And why would they, with their regulars at Venture and Glory waiting?
Unless it had to do with the strangers currently in port: three of them, all from routes farther up the line, from Pell and beyond. Three ships trading in foodstuffs and metals, and not saying why they’d come all the way out here, or when they planned on leaving.
This problem with the schedule boards was downright embarrassing, something major as this malfunctioning in front of these fancy, state-of-the-art outsider ships.
Spacers began to speculate in low tones about, well, maybe station had shut down the flow deliberately. Maybe it was an accident in the jump zone. A mistake could fling a ship into Alpha’s small red sun. Miscalibra­tion of a too-old nav system could send it on a comet’s path, outbound for a million years or so, nobody able to catch it—a cheerful suggestion that came from one of Firenze’s stranded crew. Station might not be getting any information from the arrival and station might still be without any answer.
Maybe it was just a damaged antenna. That had happened. Station might be trying, in the fierce output of a sun, to find a very tiny signal.
So why didn’t they just say? A breakdown? A glitch?
Maybe a ship in serious trouble.
Maybe, nervous-making thought, a ship that chose to run incognito.
The Santiago captain, word came down the strip, had queried Alpha Central—what’s going on with the board? What ship’s coming in?
And gotten just a, “System is down. Be patient.” That . . . to a captain’s direct question about an incoming ship. No denial or confirmation that...

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Verlag
DAW
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0756416078
ISBN 13 
9780756416072
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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