Center of Gravity

by Ian Douglas

  Gray had three Krait missiles left. Swiftly, he programmed them, targeting the rising H’rulka warship.

  And as his Starhawk dipped ever deeper into the giant’s atmosphere, the thin hydrogen wind shrieking outside his ship, he locked onto the target and fired.

  Chapter Sixteen

  29 January 2405

  H’rulka Warship 434

  Alchameth

  Arcturus System

  1416 hours, TFT

  Ordered Ascent took the H’rulka ship up, punching through the upper layers of thin haze above the Gathering. Warship 434 had been reassembled after the battle in the alien star system, with the missing ship-section and crew members replaced by volunteers here at the Wall of Golden Clouds.

  They—the composite being called Ordered Ascent—were worried.

  The Golden Clouds Gathering was in effect a nomadic city, a temporary meeting place for some thirty thousand H’rulka colonizing this world. It was a delicate structure spun from metals and hydrocarbons brought down from the gas giant’s rings and smaller, innermost satellites. Suspended on antigravity generators, it rode with the planet’s storms and currents of wind, providing the “solid ground” the sky-borne H’rulka required for manufacturing and technology.

  Ordered Ascent and their crew had been scattered about the Golden Clouds Gathering and riding the winds nearby when the alert had come through from the Sh’daar Seeds. The Turusch, orbiting among the debris-worlds above the planet, were under attack.

  The creatures calling themselves human had shown unexpected strength and resilience in their technology. The incoming ships were so tiny they might easily be overlooked, but they channeled significant energies, energies sufficient to destroy even a H’rulka warship.

  And if their warships were vulnerable, so, too, would be the Gathering below. Ordered Ascent wanted to get Warship 434 clear of the planet’s atmosphere, up where it could maneuver freely and deploy the full effect of its weaponry.

  One . . . no, two of the alien vermin were passing through the gas giant’s upper atmosphere as Warship 434 rose. One was already leaving the gas giant’s atmosphere. The other was approaching, dipping deep into the planet’s gaseous envelope. Ordered Ascent felt, through the ship’s senses, the release of three minute knots of gravitational energy.

  “Maneuver clear!” Ordered Ascent broadcast to the others. “Fusion warheads descending!”

  The enormous H’rulka composite vessel began shifting out of the path of the incoming missiles, but too slowly . . . too slowly. Capable of enormous acceleration in free space, the massive warship was hobbled this deep within an atmosphere and, worse, within the gravitational field of the gas giant.

  “Close defense!” they boomed . . . but the incoming missiles were already too close as proton beams snapped and flared from the huge vessel’s flanks.

  Aiming charged particle beams within an atmosphere and this deep within a gas giant’s magnetic field was a problem in any case. Shrill lightning crackled and thundered . . . and missed.

  The first missile struck high and to one side, a minute and intolerably brilliant spark of light, ballooning in an instant against Warship 434’s screens and shields. The detonation rocked the H’rulka vessel, slamming several of the colony-beings inside the ship against one another.

  An instant later, the second and third warheads detonated against the expanding shock wave of the first blast. The electromagnetic pulse released by three twenty-kiloton fusion reactions overpowered the vessel’s screens and smashed down its shields a fraction of a second later. In the hard vacuum of space, a near miss by a nuclear weapon could scour a ship’s hull with an expanding bubble of plasma from the vaporized mass of the missile itself and with high-velocity clouds of charged particles generated by the blast, but there could be no shock wave as such—not when there was no air through which a shock wave could be transmitted.

  Here in the high atmosphere of the gas giant, though, the ragged trio of detonations compressed hydrogen gas to create a hypersonic pressure wave that slammed into and through the H’rulka vessel. Debris spilled out, then vaporized—or folded in a blink into the nest of black holes at the ship’s lower core that provided the vessel with energy tapped from the zero-point field.

  Far worse, the three expanding bubbles of compressed hydrogen collided within temperatures and pressures typically found within the cores of suns, and the detonation grew, fusion fury running wild. . . .

  Dragonfire Nine

  Alchameth-Jasper Space

  Arcturus System

  1417 hours, TFT

  Gray’s fighter streaked through Alchameth’s upper atmosphere at hypersonic velocity, leaving a meteor trail of ionized gas across ten thousand kilometers of sky. He saw the trio of flashes as his Krait missiles detonated ahead and below, the intensity of the unfolding glare damped down by his ship’s AI to save his eyes.

  He wasn’t certain at first exactly what had happened. The explosions had appeared to merge, and then a small and swiftly growing sun had burned in Alchameth’s sky. In another instant, his hurtling fighter had flashed past the short-lived sun and the enigmatic pattern of lights bathed in its glow below. As the Starhawk continued its straight-line high-speed pass, it punched through and out of the envelope of Alchameth’s hydrogen atmosphere. The flare from his missile strike formed an intolerably bright spark still fiercely radiating on the giant’s limb astern.

  For several minutes afterward, a large, circular portion of Alchameth’s night side was bathed in the light of full day.

  “What the hell was that?” Gray asked.

  “Sensory data is consistent with a fusion reaction of some hundreds of millions of megatons,” the fighter’s AI replied. “The alien structure beneath the H’rulka ship may have contributed to the release of energy . . . or the planet’s hydrogen atmosphere may have compounded the effects of the initial detonations.”

  “My God . . .” As the Starhawk continued to recede into space, it looked as though a small but brilliant white star was rising behind the planet.

  “Okay,” he said after a long and shaky moment. “Where’s Shay’s fighter?”

  A green icon flashed in his in-head display, and the fighter’s AI began shaping possible vectors for an intercept.

  “Match course and speed,” he told the AI. “It’s time to pull our heads in and ride this out.”

  Kinkaid Squadron

  Alchameth-Jasper Space

  Arcturus System

  2218 hours, TFT

  Thirteen hours after the carrier battlegroup had begun accelerating in toward Arcturus, the squadron of eighteen Confederation warships led by the heavy railgun cruiser Kinkaid arrived in circum-Alchameth space.

  Over the past hour, as the range to Alchameth closed, the Confederation ships had been refining their target picture of the enemy ships around the gas giant, updating their speeds and course information constantly. Thirty seconds before passing the orbit of Jasper, the cruisers had begun firing both kinetic-kill and thermonuclear weaponry, aiming the rounds at the precise spots where their weapons AIs predicted that each target would be thirty seconds hence.

  At roughly the same time, the defending vessels fired a volley of their own, hoping to claw some of the swift-moving attackers from the sky. Their most effective weapon was a series of shotgun blasts firing clouds of pellets and sand; the high speed of this accelerated debris combined with the inbound velocity of the Confederation vessels—some ninety thousand kilometers per second—added up to a devastating kinetic-kill volley.

  The Confederation ships had been jinking for some minutes, now, adjusting their vectors left or right, up or down, in order to avoid aimed fire from the waiting defenders. The clouds of high-speed debris, however, expanded as they flashed toward the incoming ships. The Confederation vessels’ shields flared white-hot as pellets and sand vaporized against them.


  The destroyer Emmons fell through a particularly dense cloud of sand, her shields failed, and her blunt prow flashed into vapor. Her store of reaction mass, some tens of thousands of liters of water, exploded into space. A second destroyer, the Austin, suffered shield failure, and her forward sensors were scoured away by what amounted to a handful of sand, sand traveling with a relative velocity close to a third of the speed of light.

  At about the same moment, the squadron’s long-range salvo swept into Alchameth space seconds ahead of the Confederation ships. Many rounds missed, some by thousands of kilometers; AI targeting from almost three million kilometers away was art as much as science, and a miscalculation of a target’s course and speed, even by some hundredths of 1 percent, could result in a warhead missing by many kilometers.

  But many of the warheads and projectiles struck home . . . and the incoming squadron had dedicated numerous warheads to each target. Both Beta-class battleships were consumed in flares of white-hot fury, hammered time after time after time by kinetic-kill warheads traveling at tens of thousands of kilometers per second, and by tactical nuclear warheads, each with a destructive power ranging anywhere from ten kilotons to ten megatons of high explosive.

  The Turusch fleet, scattered across much of circum-Alchameth space, crumpled, flared, and burned.

  Two Juliet-class cruisers, jinking to avoid incoming warheads, remained untouched, and two more were unharmed save for damage inflicted by Starhawk fighters ten hours before. Three destroyers were accelerating at high speed, attempting to escape the Arcturus system. And several hundred Toad fighters remained to put up a desperate defense.

  And then the Kinkaid squadron arrived, hurtling in just behind their long-range salvo.

  Decelerating, they were still traveling so fast that they crossed the 1.8-million-kilometer gap between Alchameth and Jasper in just twenty seconds. During that time, automated weapon systems tracked, locked on, and fired, crisscrossing battlespace with bolts of artificial lightning, with gigajoule pulses of laser energy, with kinetic-kill slugs, with detonating nuclear warheads.

  The defending ships returned fire.

  Emmons, disabled, her shields and screens down, was hit multiple times, engulfed by a tiny, brief sun. The cruiser Decatur, by chance falling through a cloud of Toad fighters, began taking heavy fire, slammed again and again by particle beams and KK projectiles. The Decatur lashed out in reply with high-energy lasers and bolts of charged particles, knocking out Toad fighters one after another in searing flashes of hard radiation.

  Austin, blinded by the defensive volley, her tactical link with the other Confederation ships cut off, had continued jinking to make herself as tough a target as possible. As it happened, she came just a little too close to the looming bulk of Alchameth, passing through the outermost parts of the gas giant’s ring system. Slamming into those orbiting bits of ice and rock at ninety thousand kilometers per second, the cruiser disintegrated in a blast of raw energy. Her drive singularity continued on its original course, flaring as bright as a tiny star as it plowed through ice and rubble, leaving a shooting-star trail of brilliant light.

  Both sides were taking heavy losses.

  Dragonfire Nine

  Alchameth-Jasper Space

  Arcturus System

  2249 hours, TFT

  Gray had matched velocities with Ryan’s fighter some hours before. Connecting with her ship once more, embracing it between his combat-mode wings, he’d applied brief and gentle bursts from his grav drive—gentle enough to avoid tearing the two linked fighters apart, gentle enough that his AI could keep the rapidly pulsed singularities balanced against the mass of two fighters. Very, very slowly, they’d decelerated together.

  Astern, Alchameth was a brilliant star, accompanied by a scattering of dimmer pinpoints of light, the giant’s system of moons. One of those, the brightest, was Jasper.

  Between those two stars, silent detonations flickered, flashed, and pulsed, the titanic energies unleashed as the Confederation squadron zorched through the gas giant system.

  “It looks . . . beautiful,” Ryan said. “At least from out here.”

  “I’m glad we’re out here,” Gray replied. Fighters wouldn’t last long in that firestorm.”

  He wondered how many of the other fighters in the three advance strike squadrons had survived, and where they were. All IFF transponders were shut down now, to keep the Turusch from hunting the Starhawks down one by one with RF-homing missiles. His AI had found Ryan’s ship solely by calculating trajectories and velocities once she’d been flung clear of Alchameth.

  “What’s Alchameth mean, anyway?” she asked him.

  They both were cut off from the fleet’s datanet, of course, but as it happened he’d downloaded that bit of information some days ago. “It’s actually an alternate name for the star Arcturus,” he told her. “Back in the Middle Ages, in the occult traditions, there were fifteen special stars that were used in ceremonial magic. The Behenian fixed stars, they called them. Alchameth was what the magicians called Arcturus. Each star was associated with a different gemstone. Alchameth’s was jasper. Hence the name.”

  “Magicians, huh? Sounds kind of far-fetched.”

  He shrugged. “Blame Cornelius Agrippa,” he said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “A medieval magician and astrologer.”

  “Dark ages stuff.”

  “Not really,” Gray told her. “The dark ages is a kind of vague term referring to the time right after the fall of the Roman Empire. No science. The Church had the last word on everything. But what we call the Middle Ages was different. People were starting to experiment with new ideas. Astrology started to become astronomy. Alchemy flowed into chemistry and physics. Magic became science. Magicians like Cornelius Agrippa were trying to jump-start observation and hypothesis into something we’d recognize today as science, and they were doing so in defiance of the Church. It took a few centuries to get from Agrippa to Newton, and then again from Newton to Einstein . . . but eventually the new way of thinking took hold. Ah. Looks like the excitement is settling down. No more flashes. No more shooting.”

  “The battlegroup must have passed the planet and moved out of range,” Ryan said.

  “Right. They were supposed to zorch through, hitting everything they could.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Now? Just what we’ve been doing. We drift, and we wait.”

  Alone, they drifted through a vast and empty night.

  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

  Arcturus System

  2318 hours, TFT

  Alchameth showed a huge golden crescent on the CIC’s forward viewer, the rings a bright white slash across its center, Jasper a gold-red sphere in half phase off to the right. America and the ships remaining with her, still decelerating, drifted into circum-Alchameth space. Drifting above the tactical display tank, Koenig gripped an overhead handhold and rotated to face Wizewski. “CAG, you may launch your fighters.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral.”

  The situation was better than Koenig could have hoped, a near perfect attack that had left few of the defending forces intact in near Alchameth space. A few dozen Toad fighters were still under power, but they were scattered, many were damaged, and they posed little threat to the carriers. Within the next few moments, the carriers began spilling clouds of fighters—Starhawks, the older War Eagles, and rugged Marine Hornets from the Marine carriers Vera Cruz and Nassau—which dispersed throughout the battlespace, hunting down and destroying surviving enemy ships.

  The enemy’s capital ships had fled or were out of commission—destroyed or crippled. Two—one of the huge Turusch Betas and the unknown Juliet-sized vessel designated “Red-One”—still had a few weapons in service and were adrift, all but helpless, but the fighters would make short work of those.

  Koenig was pleased, but the price had been steep
. Three Confederation ships—Emmons, Austin, and Decatur—had been destroyed in the flyby, along with an estimated fifteen fighters. The surviving fighters were scattered all over the inner system. One of the first orders of business as America drew close to Jasper was the release of a dozen SAR tugs, search-and-rescue vessels with muscle enough to match velocities with outbound derelicts, dock with them, and drag them to a halt, hauling them back to the immediate vicinity of the fleet.

  “All remaining fighters are deployed, Admiral,” Wizewski told him. “The Rattlers have begun engaging a flock of Toads near Jasper.”

  “Very well. Get the SAR tugs away. We need to start rounding up our people out there.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  The surviving fighter pilots had been locked up in their ships for fourteen hours now. It was time to bring them home.

  As America slid into orbit around Jasper, Nassau released six Marine Crocodiles, combat boarding craft each carrying forty Marines and their equipment. They were ugly, slow brutes, heavily armored, like space-going tanks, sporting a pair of turret-mounted particle cannon and a nano-docking collar at their prows. Arcturus Station was eight thousand kilometers ahead, around the curve of the cloud-smeared moon.

  “Admiral?” Commander Sinclair, America’s tactical officer, looked puzzled.

  “What is it, Tacs?”

  “We may want to send a team down to that target Lieutenant Gray waxed in the gas giant’s atmosphere.

  “The H’rulka ship?”

  “As near as we can tell, there’s nothing left of the warship. But according to Gray’s telemetry, there was some sort of a brightly lit structure down deep in the atmosphere, a base, possibly, or a city. Sir, we’re getting signals from them in Agletsch.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “ ‘Duresnye n’drath,’ sir.” He hesitated, then added the translation. “ ‘Help us.’ ”