The Arsenal Out of Time

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 The Arsenal Out of Time, by David McDaniel  

One final vintage SF novel to round things out!  This story was almost exactly like a very long Stargate episode.

Lawrence Alexander is a scholar, an expert in the long-vanished XXX civilization that once spread through the galaxy, but disappeared before humans even got started.  Every so often someone finds a lost ship or something, and Lawrence studies any documents that are found -- usually business-related.  It's very boring, really, until the day he realizes that a bill of lading contains a reference to a preserved cache of weapons, hidden deep in a planet that may, or may not, exist any longer.

This is important, because Earth is very worried about aggression from the Old Colonies.  Centuries ago, Earth sent out colonizing spaceships, and then a sudden and massive plague wiped out nearly the whole Earth population.  From the colonies' point of view, they were simply abandoned to die, and those that survived now have an ingrained fear and hostility to Earth people that has not been conquered by the knowledge that it wasn't on purpose.  They're building up to attack, and if they can get the cache, they will.  Earth hopes to get it first and avert a war.

So Lawrence meets up with an experienced field agent, and they're on their way to try to find the XXX weapons.  They collect a limpet of a young woman companion who wants in on the adventure, and then it's a spy vs. spy race to see who can get there first, or be killed in the attempt.

It's a fun one!  I liked it.

Pretty much the characters in this story

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