Center of Gravity

by Ian Douglas

  Switching to forward view, Gray saw Arcturus gleaming brilliantly directly ahead, a small, intensely bright disk. A navigation reticule marked the location of the objective, off to one side of the orange sun.

  Gray let his Starhawk drift until Tucker drew up alongside, and then the two accelerated together, falling in with the other fighters that had already launched. Green-diamond icons marked the other ships, each with a string of alphanumerics giving ship number and pilot id. More and more fighters joined the tight phalanx already falling in-system, until all twelve Starhawks were in tight formation.

  “Dragonstrike,” Commander Marissa Allyn said over the squadron comnet, using the codename for this op. “Configure for high-G flight.”

  The SG–92 Starhawk possessed transmorphic hulls that allowed them to change their outward configuration in flight. They’d launched as twenty-meter black needles, each with a central bulge housing the pilot and the control and weapons systems. At Gray’s command, his Starhawk reformed itself, the complex nanolaminates of its outer structure dissolving and recombining into a blunt and mirror-smooth egg shape with a slender field-bleed tail-spike off the stern. Technically, this was boost configuration, but the pilots, with the humor typical of military personnel, routinely called it “sperm mode.” His Starhawk was now only seven meters long, not counting the field-bleed spike astern, and five wide, though it still massed twenty-two tons.

  “Dragonstrike Leader, Dragon Nine,” he reported. “Sperm mode engaged. Ready for boost.”

  “America CIC, this is Dragonstrike,” Allyn said. “Handing off from PriFly. All Dragons clear of the ship, formed up, and ready for PL boost.”

  “Copy, Dragonstrike Leader,” a voice replied from America’s Combat Information Center. “Primary Flight Control confirms handoff to America CIC. You are clear for high-grav boost.”

  “Acknowledge squadron clear for boost,” Allyn said. “Keep the lights on, people. We’ll be back.”

  “Roger that, Dragonstrike. You’re the sharp, pointy end of the stick, but we’ll be right behind you.”

  “Dragonstrike,” Allyn said over the squadron’s tac channel. “Engage squadron taclink.”

  Gray focused a thought, his left hand on the palm contact. The onboard AIs of all twelve fighters were interconnected now by laser-optic comnet feeds. The squadron could move, could maneuver, could think as one.

  “And gravitic boost at fifty K,” Allyn said, “in three . . . two . . . one . . . punch it!”

  A gravitational singularity opened up just ahead of Gray’s Starhawk, a focused bending of space that inexorably dragged the starfighter forward. The singularity winked out, then switched on once more a fraction of an instant later. And again. And again.

  Gray was falling now under an acceleration of fifty thousand gravities, but, since the projected gravitational field affected every atom of his gravfighter uniformly, Gray felt none of the acceleration he’d experienced during the diamagnetic launch from America.

  He was in free fall, his speed increasing by half a million meters per second with each passing second. The stars remained unmoving despite his velocity. After one minute he was falling forward at three thousand kilometers per second, or 1 percent of the speed of light.

  And in ten minutes he was swiftly approaching the speed of light itself.

  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

  Arcturus System

  0918 hours, TFT

  America had dropped into Arcturus space at precisely 0848:16.4 TFT, and the light announcing her arrival had started spreading out in all directions. Thirty minutes later, other ships in the battlegroup up to thirty light minutes out could see her. As other ships continued to arrive, the light bearing news of their arrival began spreading out across local space in overlapping bubbles.

  As each ship became aware of the position of other ships in the battlegroup, optical communications lasers flashed out, linking the fleet into an interconnected whole.

  America’s Combat Information Center was the heart of the battlegroup’s command, control, and communications, the nexus of that vast web of precisely aimed laser-optical communications, but the web’s growth was agonizingly slow. The CBG ships were emerging within a zone nearly a light hour across, and the speed of light imposed a hindering time lag to the fleet’s organization.

  “How are we doing?” Koenig asked, joining a knot of CIC officers floating above the main tacsit display, a tank three meters across filled with glowing, colored icons marking the CBG fleet.

  “Twenty-three ships have merged and linked in, Admiral,” Commander Sinclair announced. “We estimate that all of the others have arrived by now. We just can’t see them yet.”

  Koenig nodded. Space combat was dominated by the speed-of-light time lag.

  The other ships, having established communications with America, were beginning to close with her. One by one, the vessels aligned themselves within a few thousand kilometers of the America and then gradually began accelerating.

  At five hundred gravities, Alchameth and its moon, Jasper, were nearly fourteen hours away. The fleet would accelerate steadily for half of that time, at which point they would be traveling at four-tenths of the speed of light. They would then begin decelerating for the second half of the journey into circum-Alchameth space.

  Five fighter squadrons had been launched so far—the Nighthawks, the Impactors, the Dragonfires, the Night Demons, and the Black Lightnings; the remaining two, the Death Rattlers and the Star Tigers, would be held in reserve for combat space patrol during the CBG’s close passage of Alchameth. Only the Dragonfires and the Night Demons had been fired off through the launch tubes. The rest had dropped from the centripetal launch bays and were accelerating now down the first two squadrons’ wakes.

  The Dragonfires, the Lightnings, and the Night Demons would decelerate into circum-Alchameth space in 178 minutes, the sharp, pointy end of the stick, as Wizewski had just told Commander Allyn. Just three hours from now, they would hit the enemy ships close to Alchameth and Jasper, arriving minutes after the photon wavefronts generated by the emerging battlegroup reached them.

  Their mission would be to pin the enemy vessels near Alchameth until the rest of the battlegroup reached them, some ten hours later.

  According to the oplan, the America battlegroup would stage a “shoot-and-scoot,” a fast and furious in-and-out moving at high velocity past the gas giant and its moon, smashing every enemy ship and installation it could reach. The idea was to cause as much damage as possible and, in particular, to destroy Arcturus Station, the large orbital base above Jasper.

  That, it was hoped, would get the Sh’daar’s attention, and perhaps cause enemy fleets now threatening the inner core of the Confederation to break off and return to Arcturus.

  By the time they did so, of course, America and her consorts would be long gone.

  Key to the attack were the three squadrons sent in ahead of the rest of the fleet. They could cause tremendous damage to capital ships with their Krait missiles and particle beams, especially if the enemy was caught napping, and their sensors would locate every enemy ship for the fleet’s targeting AIs. The problem lay in how long it would take the rest of the fleet to arrive.

  For the thirty-six fighters of those three squadrons, it would be an agonizingly long ten hours before the fleet came zorching in behind them.

  Arcturus Station

  Jasper/Alchameth

  Arcturus System

  1136 hours, TFT

  Vrilkmathav wondered if the Sh’daar Seed could have made a mistake.

  The very thought was disturbing, of course. Unthinkable . . . if not for the fact that it had, indeed, thought it. It checked to see if the Seed had picked up the thought, and decided that it had not.

  Vrilkmathav was a Jivad Rallam, a species that had served the Sh’daar faithfully for tens of thousands of cycles. The Jivad had witnesse
d the Change that had seen the Old Sh’daar disappear . . . and since the Jivad had not been able to follow them, they had continued to serve the Remnant ever since, ultimately accepting the Seeds as marks of honor, as emblems of the close bond the Jivad Rallam still maintained with the galaxy’s masters.

  Could the Masters have made a mistake?

  Vrilkmathav rolled through the alien corridors, rippling its way toward the captives’ den. The Jivad were massive tentacular decapods, with under-body tentacles held in a tight, writhing ball as they moved forward on undulating twists, tasting the ground as they moved.

  It reached the hatch leading into the den, a massive nanoseal entryway flanked by two armed and heavily armored Nungiirtok guards.

  “Here for another one?” the lead guard asked him in thickly accented Drukrhu, the Agletsch-designed Lingua Galactica used by most of those of the masters’ servant races that relied on audible, air-generated phonemes for communication. “You thabbik are going to use them all up soon.”

  Vrilkmathav didn’t know what thabbik were, and didn’t particularly care. It suspected that the guard was attempting to be humorous, but they didn’t appear to have the capacity for making jokes. In any case, the ponderously rumbling Nungiirtok were difficult to understand even with a perfect translation interface through a Seed.

  These guards didn’t have Seeds, however, so Vrilkmathav simply produced a memory card from its pouch and waved it above the reader beside the door. Recognizing Vrilkmathav’s clearance, the device turned the black metal of the seal to cool, rigid liquid, and the Jivad rippled through.

  One of the guards followed it in. “The klippnizh ag have been troublesome lately,” he said. “You’ll want me in there with you, believe me.”

  “Fine,” Vrilkmathav replied. “Just try not to burn so many of them if there’s trouble. As you say, we don’t have many to spare.”

  A small airlock had been built beyond the first door, with a second seal. Vrilkmathav took down a Jivad respirator, fitting the two masks tightly over the breathing tubes on either side of its massive body, then waved the data card over a second reader. The doorway liquefied, and the Jivad and the Nungiirtok passed together through the black seal into misery.

  The Jivad didn’t believe in anything like the human concept of hell; the closest thing they had to a deity was the Sh’daar Remnant itself. The Agletsch word ngya, however, translated roughly within its thoughts as “misery,” did come close. It was a Sh’daar Remnant term referring to the devastation and emptiness of being left behind, to being abandoned and alone. And the mob of filthy creatures beyond the black door certainly seemed to express such emotions.

  Several thousand of the creatures calling themselves human had been captured within this huge, orbital base when it had fallen to Turusch forces just over two Jivad years ago. That had been a remarkably lucky break, for until then the masters’ forces had known little about human physiology or psychology. The population of this captured base had provided the Turusch and Jivad researchers with numerous specimens to question, study, and dissect as they attempted to build up a coherent picture of the race of beings comprising the Earth-human Confederation.

  The captive population, however, was not doing well. All of the surviving humans had been herded into a single compartment in the space base, the largest space on board—most likely a room for feeding and for group meetings. Nanoreplicators producing food and water had been left intact to keep them alive, but other replicator circuits had been disabled to prevent them from building weapons or escaping the compartment.

  At first, the captives had organized themselves, with leaders who’d attempted to establish communications with the Jivad and Turusch scientists who were studying them. They’d shown considerable spirit, too, attempting to break out several times by rushing the Nungiirtok guards when a researcher went in, and trying to tear them apart with their bare manipulators. Hundreds of the creatures had been burned down in those attempts.

  Over the past half dozen matye or so, however, the humans had . . . changed, somehow, seeming to sink gradually into a poisonous, sullen squalor. They no longer attempted to communicate, no longer exercised, no longer even kept themselves clean. The prisoners’ den reeked of bodily excretions, filth, and the subtle tastes of ammoniate chemicals Vrilkmathav had come to associate with human fear and hopeless desperation.

  The population of imprisoned humans still numbered almost a thousand individuals crammed into a space roughly two hundred by three hundred vri in floor area, but they were dying off at an increasing and alarming rate. Nungiirtok servitors moved through the compartment every diurnal period, removing the newly dead.

  But they kept dying, whether from disease or from despair, Vrilkmathav could not tell.

  Vrilkmathav surveyed the room, the Nungiirtok standing uneasily beside and in front of him. It was aware of the stares of human eyes; humans possessed eyes quite similar to those of the Jivad, though fewer of them. It could also sense the fear, the loathing, the horror behind those stares.

  “I require only one,” it told the guard. “A female, if possible.”

  The guard lumbered toward the mass of creatures, which struggled backward, the front ranks pressing back against those behind. A vast keening of moans and wails and shouts—meaningless words—rose from the group as the Nungiirtok picked out one creature. It struggled as the guard lifted it off the floor with its massive, armored hand. The guard then turned the specimen, extending it for Vrilkmathav’s inspection.

  The Jivad accepted the creature, holding the squirming thing gently but firmly with one manipulator tentacle while using others to strip away the filthy and half-shredded textiles with which these creatures ornamented themselves. Humans, unlike the Jivad, were bisexual, with numerous morphological differences between the genders to distinguish them from each other, but it was difficult for the Jivad to tell at a glance which was which.

  There was one gender-related difference, however, that made sexing the creatures easy. They generally wore decorations over that difference, however, hiding it for some reason.

  “No,” Vrilkmathav said, tossing the squalling creature aside. “Another one.”

  The guard picked another struggling, screaming human and held it up for Vrilkmathav’s inspection. It checked the creature’s sex, then gave an assenting flick of its fourth manipulator. “This one will do,” it said, pinning the creature’s thrashing limbs with its first and third manipulators. It could taste the sour tang of ammoniates, the bite of sodium chloride on the thing’s outer integument.

  “Stop you!” one of the creatures shrieked in clumsy but intelligible Drukrhu. “Why you this do?”

  Vrilkmathav rolled one of its eyes to regard the human, which had stepped out from the crowd and was looking up at the Jivad with outstretched manipulators. “No do! No do!”

  Several of the humans, apparently, had already known Drukrhu when the base had fallen to the masters’ forces, apparently through earlier trade relations with the Agletsch. The Jivad had been encouraging those few to teach the language to the rest, since it made verbal interrogations easier.

  This one took another unsteady step forward, pointed at the creature Vrilkmathav held, and said something unintelligible, probably in its native language. Than it straightened up, still pointing. “No take . . .” and it lapsed into gibberish again. “Take me!”

  Vrilkmathav thought the daring human was male, though it couldn’t be sure. A sexual-bond pairing of some sort—a mate?

  It scarcely mattered. Vrilkmathav had the specimen it needed. “Myeh,” it said, one of several basic Drukrhu terms for negation.

  “No do! Why you this do? . . .”

  “To understand your kind,” Vrilkmathav rumbled in reply. “So that we may save you.”

  It turned away, rolling on its tentacles toward the door. Vrilkmathav felt an emotion similar to compassion for these imprisoned being
s, and didn’t like doing what had to be done. Jivad Rallam biology had three reproductive sexes, plus the maternal-neuters evolved as child rearers and protectors. Vrilkmathav was a neuter, completely sexless . . . but it possessed a powerful nurturing instinct that, it found, tended to interfere when it worked with these humans. The creatures were small and helpless and tended to squall like a clutch of Jivad young still trapped in the nursery tidal pools. They evidently were not adapting well to their long imprisonment here, and were failing. The knowledge tormented Vrilkmathav. They’d been put in Vrilkmathav’s care; it wanted to help them.

  Which led it to the central question once more. Had the masters made a mistake, ordering some thousands of human prisoners to be confined here as Turusch and Jivad Rallam researchers interrogated, experimented on, and studied them? Would it have been better, perhaps, to release them as a gesture of goodwill, in order to get the human Confederation to talk to the masters’ representatives?

  Was so much pain and death really necessary? Vrilkmathav didn’t know how much the creatures really felt what was done to them, but they appeared to feel pain in a manner similar to Jivad. The agitation of this human male seemed to indicate that they felt emotions akin to their captors. And why not? They were a star-faring species, like the Javid Rallam, and passion, curiosity, intellect, and self-awareness all were necessary for such exploratory ventures, surely.

  Vrilkmathav was approaching the doorway seal when the human male shrieked and charged. The Nungiirtok burned the creature down with the flamer built into the black armor encasing one of its manipulators. The human gave a piercing wail, sickeningly like the cry of a Jivad youngster baking in the sun . . . and then all of the humans were surging forward, screaming, gesturing, a rolling tide of unthinking fury. The guard turned the flamer on them; orange fire hissed, splashed, and clung, as several humans dropped and writhed on the floor, engulfed by burning fuel. Vrilkmathav laid a tentacle on the guard’s shoulder, restraining him. “Myeh! Leave them!”