Chain of Attack by Gene DeWeese Read Free Book Online Page A

said, his eyes flickering apprehensively at the sheer savagery of the destruction still visible on the viewscreen. "And if they were capable of this thousands of years ago, what kind of weapons do you imagine they've developed by now?"

 
Chapter Four

    ON THE COURSE the Enterprise followed to the next system, two more of the "booby traps" were found, both still partially functional. Once the nature of the objects was determined, both were destroyed by phaser fire, thereby preventing the fusion weapons aboard from detonating and flooding nearby space with the kind of radioactivity the first had left behind when its antimatter fuel had exploded.
    In the system itself, two once habitable worlds had been destroyed just as thoroughly as the world in the first system. Whether the worlds in both systems had been destroyed by the same enemy or they had destroyed each other was impossible to say. Spock's sensors could only indicate that the destruction in the second system had occurred somewhere during roughly the same six-thousand-year period they had indicated for the first system.
    In the third system, there were no habitable worlds and hence no destruction.
    In the fourth, there was one habitable world. It, too, had had life scoured from its surface, but in a different, less permanent way. Here, it appeared that spaceborne lasers had been used. There was no radioactivity, and life survived in the oceans. On the land, some plant life survived as well, and, except for the lack of any animal life larger than insects and except for deserts that had been turned to glass, certain areas looked pleasantly pastoral. The time of the destruction, Spock estimated, was also different—in the twenty-to-thirty-thousand-year range.
    In two more systems, no habitable worlds were found. In another, antimatter missiles had apparently been used less than five thousand years ago. In another, there was two-thousand-year-old evidence that massive phasers had been the agent of destruction, along with weapons similar to the photon torpedoes the Enterprise carried. In yet another, there was the residue of a deadly, corrosive chemical gas that had blanketed an entire planet, still present after at least thirty-five thousand years. And in still another, a world destroyed by the same hellish radioactive weapons that had obliterated the first two was still hideously barren after more than forty thousand years. Between systems, more than a dozen of the spacegoing booby traps were found and destroyed.
    On only one planet in all the systems they visited on that first leg of exploration was there anything that didn't fit the pattern of total destruction.
    The planet itself, dead for at least thirty-five thousand years, was no different from a half-dozen others. All plant and animal life was gone from the land, devoured by enough antimatter missiles to do the job a hundred times over. Deep beneath the surface, however, apparently beyond even the reach of the radiation that still poisoned space for a thousand kilometers around, Spock's sensors detected an operating antimatter power source. More than five kilometers below the surface, small amounts of power were being produced and used, and at the same point there were peculiar and extremely low-level life readings.
    "Fascinating, Captain," Spock said after nearly two minutes of steady concentration on the readouts. "I have never encountered anything quite like it."
    "Artificial life, perhaps?" Kirk suggested.
    "Negative, Captain, at least no type of artificial life I am familiar with."
    "Don't forget, this is another part of the universe. Who knows what could have been created here?"
    "Granted, Captain. But this reading is not only different but…diffuse. In some ways it appears to be a single being, and yet it is not." Spock paused, looking again at the readouts.
    "I apologize, Captain," he continued after a moment, "that I must express myself so imprecisely. It is a most disturbing feeling to suspect a