Center of Gravity

by Ian Douglas

  He’d tried to get out of coming tonight. Lieutenant Commander Allyn had told him yesterday, in the squadron ready room on board America, that he’d been volunteered for the fly-by show, with attendance at the Yule Festival afterward.

  “Why me?” he’d asked. “I’ve got nothing to do with Earthies anymore.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” the Dragonfires’ skipper had replied. “Maybe because you had something to do with saving all of their asses?”

  That again. “Fuck that, sir,” he said, using the Navy’s preferred gender-neutral honorific, though ma’am would have done as well. “I was doing my job.”

  “And maybe your job includes being a visible symbol of the Confederation Navy,” she’d told him. “Don’t give me grief, Gray. You’re on the flight roster, like it or not.”

  And here he was.

  In a nearby temporary alcove, Donovan was holding a young woman very closely indeed. She was wearing a sheath of golden, rippling light, and appeared to have extended the field to include Ben in her embrace. Gray looked away, embarrassed, and found himself looking into another alcove, this one with two men and a woman on a round sofa bed, engaged in some extremely passionate foreplay.

  Angry, he turned his head again and strode forward, determined to find something to eat. He felt so damned out of place here. . . .

  Within the Periphery, the necessities of survival tended to draw people into close, monogamous couples. Elsewhere, at least through much of North America, family groupings tended to be larger and extended, polyamorous, and impermanent. Throughout much of the background culture of the Confederation, the half-barbaric denizens of the Periphery were seen as amusingly quaint, or worse: as narrow-minded or even sexually perverted. They were commonly called “Prims,” which was short for “primitives,” of course, but the epithet held the double meaning of someone who was self-righteously prudish or closed sexually. “Monogies” was another derogative term for Prims who preferred a monogamous lifestyle; why would anyone want to restrict their life and their love to a single person?

  Gray was neither prudish nor self-righteous. He knew other communities did things differently when it came to sex and marriage, and had no problem with the fact. Extended social group marriages and sexcircles simply weren’t for him. The thought of casually coupling with a woman he didn’t know—and couldn’t trust—left him vaguely uneasy.

  A table extruded from the floor beneath an enormous transparency overlooking the Hudson was covered by dishes of various kinds, all of them pretty, few of them things he actually recognized. America had a decent mess deck and good food-processing software, but nothing as fancy as this. Some of the items actually looked as though they’d started out as vegetation growing in the ground or an aerophonics module rather than a collection of CHON turned appetizing by a molecular assembler.

  He tried something green and crunchy with an orange paste spread across the top. Interesting . . .

  “You are being pinged again by the same person,” his PA told him. His internal direction sense said, That way, toward an outside veranda. “Range: thirty-one meters and approaching.”

  “Let her,” Gray said.

  He kept eating.

  H’rulka Warship 434

  Saturn Space, Sol System

  1242 hours, TFT

  The H’rulka didn’t name their starships. A name suggested an individual personality, and the concept of the individual was one only barely grasped by H’rulka psychology. The H’rulka were, in fact, colony organisms; a very rough terrestrial analogue would have been the Portuguese Man of War . . . though the H’rulka were not marine creatures, and each was composed of several hundred types of communal polyps, rather than just four. Even their name for themselves—which came across in a hydrogen atmosphere as a shrill, high-pitched thunder generated by gas bags beneath the primary flotation sac—meant something like “All of Us,” and could refer either to a single colony, in the first person, or to the race as a whole.

  Individual H’rulka colonies took on temporary names, however, as dictated by their responsibilities within the community. Ordered Ascent was the commander of Warship 434, itself until recently a part of a larger vessel, Warship 432. The species didn’t have a government as humans would have understood the term, and even the captain of a starship was more of a principal decision maker than a leader.

  Ordered Ascent was linked in with 434’s external sensors, and was studying the planet just ahead. The alien solar system comprised a single star and four planets, plus the usual scattering of rubble and debris. The planet some eighty thousand shu ahead was almost achingly familiar in size and mass and gently banded color, a near twin to the homeworld so many shishu away, right down to the sweeping rings of minute, reflective particles circling it.

  “It looks like home,” the aggregate being called Swift Pouncer whispered over the private radio link. H’rulka possessed two entirely separate means of speech, two separate languages—one by means of vibrations in the atmosphere, the other by means of biologically generated radio bursts. Their natural radio transceivers, located just beneath the doughnut-shaped cluster of polyps forming their brains, allowed them to interface directly with their machines.

  “Similar,” Ordered Ascent replied. “It appears to be inhabited.”

  “We are receiving speech from one of the debris-chunks orbiting the world,” Swift Pouncer replied. “It may be a vermin-nest. And . . . we are receiving speech from numerous sources much closer to the local star.”

  Ordered Ascent tuned in to the broadband scanners and saw the other signals.

  Those members of Ordered Ascent capable of rational thought chided themselves. No matter how long they served within the far-flung fleets of the Sh’daar, it was difficult to remember that vermin-nests frequently occurred, not within the atmospheres of true planets, but on the inhospitable solid surfaces of debris.

  It was an unsettling thought. For just a moment, Ordered Ascent allowed themselves to pull back from the instrumentation feeds, to find steadiness and reassurance in the sight of the Collective Globe.

  The interior of the H’rulka warship was immense by human standards, but cramped to the point of stark claustrophobia for the species called All of Us. The area that served as the equivalent of the bridge on a human starship was well over two kilometers across, a vast spherical space filled by twelve free-floating H’rulka colonies in a dodecahedral array. Connected by radio to their ship, they used radio commands to direct and maneuver the huge vessel, fire the weapons, and observe their surroundings.

  They lived in the high-pressure atmosphere of gas giants, breathing hydrogen and metabolizing methane, ammonia, and drifting organic tidbits analogous to the plankton of Terran oceans. Until one of the Sh’daar’s client species had shown them how to use solid materials to build spacecraft that defied both gravity and hard vacuum, they’d never known the interior of anything, never known what it was like to be enclosed, to be trapped inside. The interior of Warship 434 was large enough—just—to avoid triggering a serious claustrophobic-panic reflex in All of Us aggregates. Sometimes, they needed to see other aggregates adrift in the sky simply in order to feel safe.

  Feeling steadier, Ordered Ascent relinked with the ship and their fellow H’rulka. “Can we be sure that this is the system to which the alien probe fled?” they asked.

  “Yes, with a probability of eighty-six percent plus,” one of the others replied. “The shard that we followed almost certainly came here.”

  Warship 432 had pursued the probe that had passed through System 783,451. The probe abruptly had split onto four pieces, four shards each independently powered, each traveling in a different direction.

  The H’rulka ship had split into four sections as well in response. Warship 434 had followed one fragment, a difficult feat in the weirdly distorted continuum of faster-than-light travel, but possible given the power of certain Sh’daar
instrumentation. The selected shard had dropped out of faster-than-light drive after some periods of travel, changed heading, and accelerated once more. The new path had brought it, and the pursuing All of Us, here.

  “The system is known to the Sh’daar,” Pouncer reported. “They list it as System 784,857.”

  Data streamed down the radio link through Directed Ascent’s consciousness. The inhabitants of this system were indeed native to the system debris.

  Vermin . . .

  The All of Us race was unaccustomed to dealing with other sentient species. One of the primary reasons for this was, simply, their size; by almost any standards, the H’rulka were giants.

  An adult H’rulka consisted of a floatation gas bag measuring anywhere from two to three hundred meters across, with brain, locomotion and feeding organs, sensory apparatus and manipulators clustered at the bottom. Most other sentient species with which they’d had direct experience possessed roughly the same size and mass ratio to a H’rulka as an ant compared to a human.

  When the H’rulka thought of other life forms as “vermin,” the thought was less insult than it was a statement of fact, at least as they perceived it. Within the complex biosphere of the H’rulka homeworld, there were parasites living on each All of Us colony that were some meters across. H’rulka simply found it difficult to imagine creatures as intelligent that were almost literally beneath their notice in terms of scale.

  “Commence acceleration,” Ordered Ascent directed. “We will move into the region of heavy radio transmission, and destroy targets of opportunity as they present themselves.”

  The H’rulka warship, more than twenty kilometers across, began falling toward Sol, the inner system, and Earth.

  Palisades Eudaimonium

  New York State, Earth

  1750 hours, EST

  Admiral Koenig looked out over the sea of people filling the Grand Concourse of the eudaimonium and wondered, again, just what he was supposed to be doing here.

  He’d been the center of attention for a number of politicians and Confederation military leaders ever since arriving here an hour before, but there seemed to be no particular point to it, other than allowing wealthy or important civilians to get a sense of their own importance by being close to the Man Who Saved Earth.

  What unmitigated bullshit.

  He was standing on a railed platform high above the bowl-shaped main floor filling much of the Grand Concourse, along with a number of senators and high-ranking military officers, members of the Confederation Senate and of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  John Quintanilla, a senior political liaison between the Senate and the military, stood next to him. “Well, Admiral?” Quintanilla asked. “Are you ready?”

  “No,” Koenig told him. “But I don’t suppose that’s going to change things, is it?”

  Quintanilla grinned. “Not in the least!”

  The man seemed . . . animated. Koenig rarely got to see this side of Quintanilla. Usually, the liaison was, if not an enemy, exactly, at least in the way . . . obstructionistic, fussy, and difficult. Political liaisons were a necessity, Koenig supposed, a means for the civilian government to exercise their control over a potentially dangerous military, but he didn’t like it. For member-states of the Confederation with long traditions of having a military subject to government oversight—in particular the United States of North America—that tradition and a sense of duty alone was enough to guarantee the military’s loyalty to the government. Other members of the Confederation, though—the European Union, los Estados de las Americas del Sur, the Empire of Brazil, the North India Federation, and many of the extrasolar colonies—had long histories of having their militaries dictating in one way or another to their governments, hence the need for direct oversight of military operations.

  Koenig had thrown Quintanilla off of his flag bridge once, an act that could have inflicted serious harm on Koenig’s career. Success, however, covered a multitude of sins. The incident had been quietly smoothed over and forgotten.

  “The president’s about to start his speech,” Quintanilla told him. “You stand . . . here.” Quintanilla guided Koenig to a holographic transmission disk set into the floor. The disk was inactive, its light off.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice boomed from somewhere overhead. “The President of the Confederation Senate!”

  Accompanied by the powerful, martial beat of Ad Astra, the Confederation’s anthem, a glowing figure materialized in the air above the crowded bowl, an older man in a stylish formal robe, ten stories tall and eerily translucent.

  “We are here,” the looming figure boomed in somber tones and without preamble, “to honor the Man Who Saved Earth. . . .”

  The president’s speech went on for a long time.

  Under the terms of the original Constitution of the United States, government had been divided three ways between a two-house legislative congress, a president, and a supreme court, each applying checks and balances against the others in order, it was hoped, to limit government and avoid tyranny. That system, ultimately, had failed with a succession of weak presidents and corrupt legislators. The devastation wreaked by the Wormwood asteroid strike 272 years before had shattered much of the old United States and very nearly ended the fragile experiment in democracy begun in 1776.

  The Earth Confederation had been an attempt to create a single-world government and end the possibility that any single nation-state would ever again threaten another nation—or the entire human species—with extinction. The attempt had been only partly successful. The Chinese Hegemony, which had launched the asteroid strike in the first place, back at the end of the Second Sino-Western War, was still not a full member, and the Islamic Theocracy was barely tolerated, permitted to exist only under the terms of the earlier White Covenant at gunpoint.

  The system creaked and tottered. There were no checks and balances now, and corruption was as much of a problem as it had ever been. A Confederation Senate oversaw both the legislative and executive processes of government, with numerous directorates handling individual areas of interest—lawmaking, the military, the economy, and others. The president of the Senate was largely a figurehead, elected by the Senate body once every ten years.

  The current president of the Confederation Senate, now towering above the crowds filling the eudaimonium’s Grand Concourse, was a former representative of the European Union named Dolph Schneider.

  “ . . . for it is in times like these, times of crisis, that History herself steps forward and presents us with the man or the woman of the hour, the person who can and will confront the crisis and unite the people in their struggle against . . .”

  Koenig listened with only half an ear, more aware of the inflection and meter of the speech than of the words themselves. He cared nothing for politics, and dismissed most political speeches as hand waving designed to justify decisions already made. But the outward form of democracy, of political debate and accountability, had to be preserved.

  “. . . and it gives me great pleasure, great satisfaction, to introduce Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig, the Man Who Saved Earth!”

  The disk beneath Koenig’s boots winked on, and the immense figure of the president hovering above the Concourse was replaced by his own.

  Koenig had been briefed shortly after his arrival at the event. He came smartly to attention and said nothing. A shadowy figure hovering in the surrounding crowd nearby detached itself and walked toward him, stepping onto the disk and entering the holographic field.

  Admiral of the Fleet John C. Carruthers was the senior naval officer of the Confederation Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the highest-ranking military man within the Senate Military Directorate . . . meaning the highest-ranking without being a senator.

  “Admiral Koenig,” Carruthers said, facing him directly, “for service above and beyond the call of duty in the defense of Earth, it is my pleasure to be
stow upon you this, the Star of Earth.” An aide at his side offered Carruthers a box. Reaching inside, he removed the decoration, a gold medal hanging from a deep-blue ribbon agleam with stars. He placed the ribbon over Koenig’s head.

  Koenig executed a crisp salute. “Thank you, Fleet Admiral.”

  Carruthers returned the salute. “Thank you, Admiral, from a grateful planet, a grateful Confederation.” And he shook Koenig’s hand.

  Somehow, Koenig kept a straight face. Bullshit, he thought.

  As Carruthers stepped back, Koenig looked out over the audience. They’d told him several million people would be watching from various parts of the Palisades Eudaimonium, and with as many as two billion watching from around Earth and near-Earth space. The ceremony would be rebroadcast across the entire Confederation once courier ships could carry it across the light years.

  “This medal,” he said, tapping the device lightly, “rightfully belongs to the men and women of Carrier Battlegroup America, not me. . . .”

  And the light beneath his feet winked out.

  His image, however, remained huge within the cavernous Concourse, continuing to speak, to gesture.

  “. . . and I am especially grateful to President Schneider and the august assembly of the Confederation Senate, whose support . . .”

  Platitudes. Empty words. Damn them!

  “Well done, Admiral,” Quintanilla said, stepping up to his side. A burst of wild cheering rose from the concourse floor, thousands of voices yelling, many chanting his name. “Your public adores you!”

  “It adores my electronic puppet,” Koenig said, bitter.

  “Now, I told you we’d have a PA step in for your speech. Military men rarely have the stomach for good speech making. Or the time, come to that.”

  “I meant it.” He tapped the medal again. “This belongs to my people. They saved the planet. They earned it.”

  Quintanilla shrugged. “Do what you want with it, Admiral. It’s just a trinket. But the public needs heroes, people whom it can look up to, whom it can admire. And you, like it or not, are that man.”