Perry Rhodan Lemuria 1: Ark of the Stars by Frank Borsch Read Free Book Online

syntron and its subsystems.
    Sharita cleared her throat and paced. The fingers of her right hand tapped heavily on the grip of her uniform's holstered beamer. Rhodan felt each tap like a heavy drumbeat.
    "Hyperdetection!" Omer Driscoll exclaimed. It was a cry of joy. "Object at distance of just one light-hour. Mass ... "
    "Yes?"
    "Mass triple that of a crawler," the hyperdetection officer replied tonelessly. "No idea what it is, but it isn't our people."
    "Is the syntron getting a visual of it?"
    "Just now coming in. The outliers of the hyperstorm are still interfering with detection. And whatever it is, it's moving damned fast. But we've got something."
    "Put it up!"
    In the middle of the control center, a holo taller than a man appeared, like a window into the blackness of space.
    The object shown in the holo was nothing more than a dark shadow racing through space, blocking the stars in sections as it flowed past. The blunt, stocky shape reminded Rhodan of a thumb. It lacked any hint of the flattened appearance to which the crawlers owed their name.
    At their first sight of the object, the control crew broke out in angry curses. Rhodan felt relieved at their reaction: he had wondered if the crew of the Palenque would ever release its tension.
    But at what cost ... ?
    "Let's take a closer look at that thing," Sharita ordered.
    Rhodan felt a vibration under his feet as the Palenque 's engines accelerated to maximum and sent the ship after the object.
    In the control center holo, the rotating shadow grew ever larger, its outlines becoming increasingly sharper. Rhodan thought he saw metal reflecting the dim light of the stars. Long, regular lines, and at one end ... a black abyss, framed by sharp-edged tongues of metal that twisted in all directions. One prominent spike looked like it was being pulled back and forth by the rotation of the object, almost as though it was waving. What an absurd thought.
    "Hey, that thing is waving at us!" Alemaheyu exclaimed. Apparently, he had no concerns about expressing even the craziest interpretations out loud.
    "Can the chatter! That thing out there is just a piece of dead metal, nothing else."
    Dead metal ... Rhodan thought there was a grain of truth in what Sharita said.
    The Palenque made a short hyper-light jump. When it reentered normal space, the object was immediately in front of it—at a distance of a quarter-million kilometers.
    It was unmistakably a technological artifact. It reminded Rhodan of the rockets used by the human race during his time with the U.S. Space Force nearly three thousand years ago, before man discovered the Arkonides.
    Except that this rocket had been torn in half. They were looking at a remnant, and the burn marks on the metal tangle at one end indicated that the split had been the result of an explosion. Had an accident occurred on board? Or had someone shot at the ship? And—Rhodan realized it was the critical question at the moment—what had happened to the other half?
    He turned to the hyperdetection officer. "Any other objects like this one in the vicinity?"
    Driscol hesitated, then shook his head.
    Sharita gave Driscol an angry look. To Rhodan she said, "You are forgetting your status. You are on the Palenque ... "
    " ... as a guest. I know. Nor am I claiming any authority to command. I just asked a question. And I only took it upon myself to do that because there isn't much time."
    "You don't say!"
    "I do. And there are other things you act like you're not aware of. That thing out there"—Rhodan pointed to the control center holo, in which the wreckage now took up almost all of the image—"is moving at just under light-speed, and we've matched our velocity to its."
    "So?"
    "That means we're in relativistic territory. At the moment I can only make a rough estimate in my head since I don't have access to the ship's syntron, but I'd guess that for each minute we spend at this speed, something like a hundred minutes are going by on Terra and the other