Center of Gravity

by Ian Douglas

  “A human expression,” Gray explained. “Donovan meant that Lieutenant Ryan and I have some things in common.”

  “Then good bleep meeting are,” Dra’ethde said. “Yes-no? Bleep . . . this.”

  “Bleep,” Gru’mulkisch agreed.

  “Lieutenant Gray,” a voice said in his head. “This is Lieutenant Commander Hanson of ONI. We have downloaded a rider into your ICH.”

  ICH stood for intracerebral hardware, Gray’s brain implants. A rider was a limited-scope AI that could see and hear everything Gray saw and heard, and transmit everything to another site.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Gray replied, subvocalizing so no one at the table would hear. By almost speaking out loud, the neural impulses associated with speech still traveled to his larynx; nano-grown devices in his throat picked them up there, translated them, and redirected them to Gray’s Netlink.

  “Your secmon alerted us to the fact that you were having an extended conversation with two aliens,” Hanson told him. “It also told us that you’d overridden the secmon’s security warning. That gives us the authority to monitor the conversation, under the provisions of the Enemy Alien Act of 2375, Chapter One, Paragraph—”

  “Fuck off,” Gray told the voice, “and get the hell out of my head!”

  “I’ll remind you, Lieutenant, that you are addressing a superior officer.” Hanson paused, then added, “We understand that this . . . intrusion might have caught you off guard. No charges will be filed this time. However, we do wish to elicit your cooperation. The two intelligence targets with you appear to have had their inhibitions somewhat relaxed under the influence of acetic acid. We would like you to casually question them about why the Sh’daar have attacked us.”

  “Do your own damned spying,” Gray snarled, and he said it loud enough that the other humans at the table looked at him curiously. “And get out of my head!”

  He braced himself, expecting an argument, but the voice remained silent.

  “Are you okay, Trev?” Tucker asked him.

  “Yeah. Sorry. Must’ve been a software glitch.” He wondered if the rider was still there, and how much it had already seen and heard. Damn it, life in the Periphery had been brutal and it had been rough, but the one perk out there had been a distinct lack of government intrusion into people’s electronic enhancements, because they’d had no enhancements in the first place. Privacy was more or less taken for granted in the wild areas outside of government control; you might not have healthcare or free transportation as a right, but you didn’t have some bureaucrat looking out through your eyes and spying on you either.

  Donovan drained his glass, an unlikely-looking green concoction called a Nasty Fish, then turned to the two Agletsch. “So . . . one thing I always wondered about,” he said. “How come the Sh’daar are so hot to kill us?”

  “Yeah,” Carstairs said. “We never did anything to them.”

  “Ah . . . ah . . . ah . . .” Dra’ethde said with a curious weaving motion of her top left leg-arm. “Information bleep-bleep-bleep price.”

  “I, ah, didn’t quite catch that,” Donovan said.

  Gray palmed a table contact and ordered another drink for himself. The damned ONI must have electronically canvassed all of the humans at the table. He wondered if any of the others had refused to help them.

  “I think she’s saying,” Gray said carefully, “that the Agletsch trade information, and don’t give it away. Is that right?”

  He’d seen that in a download someplace. The Agletsch were, first and foremost, traders, interstellar merchants seeking new markets and outlets for their wares. There actually were very few things found in one star system that would be worth the price of shipping them to another, however—especially when applied nanotechnology could create vast supplies of anything from software blueprints. Every star system had vast amounts of raw material in the form of cometary and asteroidal debris—every natural element from hydrogen to uranium—and even works of art could be perfectly duplicated and nanufactured from detailed scanning specs.

  Which meant that information was the one unique commodity that made interstellar trade feasible.

  For almost forty years now, humans had tried to elicit information about the Sh’daar from Agletsch traders, but with little success. The alien traders appeared to value such information quite highly—so much so that no one had ever found any information that they were willing to accept in exchange.

  Did the ONI actually think these two would reveal their most precious secrets just because they were drunk on vinegar?

  “Truth,” Dra’ethde said, replying to Gray’s question.

  “Bleep,” Gru’mulkisch added. “Yes-no?”

  Gray palmed the table contact and ordered himself another grav squeezer. The Agletsch, he thought, must have their own credit accounts through the ConDepXR, allowing them to buy their own vinegar.

  “Look, there’s no point in asking them about the Sh’daar,” Gray told the others. “For one thing, most of them are within Sh’daar space. These two got trapped behind the lines, as it were. They’re not going to tell us anything that would jeopardize their homeworld, right?”

  “Bleep,” Dra’ethde agreed.

  “Besides, it sounds like their translators are having a bit of trouble with the nuances right now.”

  “Well, that’s gratitude for you,” Donovan said. “We help these two, keep them from getting picked up by Security . . . and they won’t even say why their masters want to pound us back into the Stone Age. Hell, I’d think that anything that helped end this damned war would be worth something to both sides.”

  “That one,” Dra’ethde said, pointing at Donovan with an unsteady leg-arm, “bleep right about thing. Information bleep all species. Human. Agletsch. Sh’daar. Even Turusch. Even Nungiirtok.”

  “Don’t like Nungiirtok,” Gru’mulkisch said.

  “Who does?” Dra’ethde said. “But help every being.”

  “Agreement,” Gru’mulkisch said. “And these humans bleep help us.”

  The translation software, Gray decided, was having particular problem with Agletsch verbs. But if he was following the weaving conversation right, the Agletsch were working their way up to justifying some sort of revelation. The possibility outweighed his own dislike for the ONI and the Confederation’s security apparatus. He was curious . . . and knowing what the Sh’daar were actually after might well help the Confederation finally understand its implacable enemy.

  Dra’ethde reached out and grasped Donovan with putty-soft digits emerging from beneath the leathery armor of one leg-arm, holding him by his right wrist. She leaned a bit closer to the human, and Gray could hear her belching a word with exaggerated care, to make sure her translator got it right.

  “Transcendence,” Dra’ethde said, the translator somehow putting a great deal of emphasis into the single word.

  The Agletsch let go of Donovan’s arm and rocked back on its lower legs, as though satisfied at having revealed the greatest secret of the ages.

  “What transcendence?” Tucker asked. “Or whose?”

  “She means that with our technological growth as fast as it is,” Carstairs suggested, “we’ll soon pass the Sh’daar. Transcend them. Right?”

  “Sh’daar,” Gru’mulkisch said, “already transcended. That bleep part of problem.”

  “Transcendence,” Ryan said. “That’s like . . . turning into something else?”

  “I think you’re right,” Gray said. His squeezer arrived on the tabletop, and he picked it up, thoughtful. “What’s the next step after humanity? In terms of evolution, I mean.”

  “You mean ‘transcendence’ as in our technology helps us mutate into something more highly evolved?” Tucker said. “I’ve seen some speculation along those lines.”

  So had Gray. In various articles he’d downloaded on the subject, it appeared
that most people assumed that the Sh’daar were trying to limit human technological development in order to keep them from developing unknown super-weapons that might let them supplant the Sh’daar as masters of half the galaxy. The idea had always seemed narrow-minded and simplistic to him, however.

  He sipped his grav squeezer, a concoction involving grape-orange hybrids, coca extract, and 90 percent alcohol by volume. The drink’s name sparked a question. Gravitics weren’t on the Sh’daar list of proscribed technologies, the GRIN technologies mentioned in their ultimatum, and there were already discussions in various military Netgroups about the possibility of gravitic bombs powerful enough to turn a star into a black hole. Why the hell ignore gravitics while outlawing genetics or nanotech?

  But the GRIN technologies had long been seen as the principal drivers of modern human scientific development technologies that had already changed what was meant by the word “human,” and which might well transform Humankind out of all current understanding in the very near future.

  Was that what the Sh’daar most feared? Humans evolving into something else?

  “So the Sh’daar are afraid of humans evolving into a higher state?” Gray asked.

  Gru’mulkisch’s eyestalks wove back and forth in an unsettling pattern. “Bleep-bleep.”

  “Agreement,” Dra’ethde added. “We bleep all we bleep.” The Agletsch then straightened up, extending its leg-arms as far as it could, inverted its upper stomach, and collapsed in a steaming pile of its own stomach contents.

  Gru’mulkisch had folded its leg-arms and appeared to be unconscious.

  “I think, Commander Hanson,” Gray said out loud, “that you’ve gotten all you’re going to get out of these two tonight.”

  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

  Sol System

  1045 hours, TFT

  “America is cleared for release, Admiral,” Buchanan informed him. “Ship is at full power and ready to proceed.”

  “Is everybody aboard?”

  “The Executive Officer reports the last liberty party came on board at zero-six-twenty, sir.”

  “Very well, Captain Buchanan,” Koenig said formally. “Take us out.”

  “Take us out, aye, sir.”

  Over the command net, Koenig heard Buchanan giving the orders to cast off umbilicals and mooring lines, release magnetic grapples, and engage tugs. He felt a light nudge as the tugs began moving the America away from the naval docks. Slowly, ponderously, the star carrier began the first leg of her new deployment.

  His orders had read “on or before” 5 January, or “as soon as provisioning and resupply for an extended voyage of at least seven months” was complete. Koenig had pulled some strings with the base supply depot, and the larger vessels in CBG–18 now carried consumables enough to last for a full year, while the supply vessels Salt Lake, Mare Orientalis, and Lacus Solis would keep the fleet’s smaller ships—destroyers, frigates, and gunboats—stocked for the same period. With the battlegroup provisioned, there was no reason to stay in synchorbit any longer, though he knew the personnel due for liberty ashore would disagree with that assessment.

  Minutes passed, and the naval base, together with the rest of the SupraQuito facility, receded farther and farther into blackness, until it could barely be seen against the half-phase blue-white body of Earth. Well clear of the synchorbital structures, America rotated on her axis, aligning herself with an invisible point in the constellation Pisces and began accelerating.

  At five hundred gravities, the Earth and moon fell away astern with startling rapidity, becoming a tiny, double point of light that was swiftly lost in the glare of a dwindling Sun. Other ships in the battlegroup, those that had not preceded the fleet already, kept pace. Even at that fearful acceleration, however, once Earth and Moon vanished, the patterns of stars sprawled across the black emptiness of the sky remained unchanging, so distant were they.

  “Admiral Koenig?” Buchanan said, once ship’s in-system routine had been established. He was using the private, off-record channel.

  “What do have for me, Randy?”

  “Administrative detail, but it’s got some delicate aspects. I wondered if you wanted to take this one.”

  “What is it?”

  “ONI alerted the Exec to a possible security breach this morning involving several of America’s pilots. He referred them to CAG, and CAG referred them to me.”

  “And now you’re bumping them up to me? Okay. What security breach?”

  Buchanan filled Koenig in on the incident, which had happened at a bar in SupraQuito around midnight, ship’s time. Several of America’s flight officers had fallen in with a couple of Agletsch, who themselves had been assigned to America’s battlegroup for this deployment. There didn’t seem to be any problem, actually, but several of America’s officers were reported by the ONI Security Directorate as having been “uncooperative.”

  As Buchanan spoke, Koenig opened the records of the officers in question—Lieutenant Gray of VFA–44, and Lieutenant Ryan of the newly arrived VFA–96. Other officers present during the incident—Lieutenants Donovan, Carstairs, and Tucker—had cooperated with the ONI by asking certain questions of a pair of vinegar-inebriated Agletsch, as ordered. Ryan and Gray had refused those orders, and had done so in direct, abrupt, and insubordinate terms. The remanding officer, a Lieutenant Commander Hanson, had indicated that he was not going to charge either officer at first . . . but that their language and attitudes both had been bad enough that he’d changed his mind.

  He checked the background records of the two officers, and groaned.

  “What about the two Agletsch?” he asked Buchanan.

  “Their shipmates cleaned them up and carried them back on board, Admiral.”

  “Their shipmates—that included Gray and Ryan?”

  “Yes, sir. In fact, Lieutenant Gray told the OOD that they never leave a shipmate behind. There was some concern that the Synchorbit security forces might have been looking for the two Agletsch . . . something about an incident at a restaurant earlier in the evening. No charges were filed, however, and as far as Sam Jones is concerned, they’re clean.”

  “And what was the ONI after with two expatriate Agletsch?”

  “I asked, sir. The local ONI replied that it was a classified matter.”

  Koenig imagined that Naval Intelligence had been trolling, had become aware that some naval officers were drinking with the two Agletsch attachés and tried to get the humans to roll the aliens for some hard intel.

  Damn it, the handful of Agletsch datatraders trapped within the Confederation were the closest thing humans had to allies among the other starfaring species. ONI had probably seen an opportunity to get a couple of drunken bugs to talk about the Sh’daar and their motives for the war. The idiots were going to cost Humankind friends they couldn’t afford to lose.

  “Where are Ryan and Gray now?”

  “In their quarters, sir.”

  “Okay. I’ll talk to them. ViR-patch them through to me here.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Koenig understood why this particular disciplinary problem had been passed up the line to him. So far as he could tell, no crime, no infraction existed, save just possibly for the use of insubordinate language . . . and these two were both ex-squatties from the Periphery, which meant they didn’t care much for official authority figures in the first place, especially when those authorities were bureaucratic, heavy-handed, officious twits.

  A signal light came on in his head, indicating that Ryan was on-line. A moment later, a second light switched on. “Ryan? Gray? This is Admiral Koenig.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  A virtual scene opened around the three of them, a shared space resembling Koenig’s shipboard office. He sat behind his desk, while the two flight officers, in dress blacks, stood at attention before hi
m.

  “At ease,” he said. “I understand you two crossed swords with the spooks last night.”

  “They wanted me to spy for them,” Ryan said. “Ask some questions of a couple of friendly bugs we’d picked up. Can they do that?”

  “Technically,” Koenig replied, “yes. Yes, they can. Both Agletsch were the targets of an ongoing ONI investigation, and intelligence officers are allowed to recruit uniformed military personnel to aid them in such investigations.”

  “Lieutenant Ryan was in uniform, Admiral,” Gray told him. “The rest of us were in civvies, and all of us were off duty. Hanson came in and told me he’d dropped a rider in my hardware after he’d already done so. No warrant, no request. That violates the right to privacy of the Confederation military charter.”

  Koenig gave Gray a cold look. “You striking for space lawyer, son? Think you have all the answers?”

  “Sir, I know the government can’t just come in and start rummaging around in our minds without our permission!”

  “You’d be surprised what the government can do, Mr. Gray . . . especially given that you surrendered a number of basic rights when you volunteered to join the Navy.”

  “As I remember it, Admiral, I didn’t have a hell of a lot of choice.”

  “Both of you are from Periphery areas, right?”

  The two glanced at each other.

  “I’m from D.C.,” the woman said.

  “Manhattan Ruins.”

  “Which means neither of you grew up with having the Confederal Social Authority looking over your shoulder or parked inside your implant hardware. The rest of human civilization has lived with it since the Islamic Wars. That’s what, three and a half centuries now?”