Center of Gravity

by Ian Douglas

  But he knew those orders were coming, and by boosting out of the Sol System before they could have reached him, he was violating the spirit of the law, if not the letter.

  Sooner or later, those orders would catch up with the CBG, and then he would face a truly difficult decision. . . .

  “Why so gloomy?” his personal assistant asked.

  “You’re dead,” he told her in his mind. “You’re dead and I’m talking to an electronic ghost. It’s not the same as having . . . as having you here.”

  God, but he missed her.

  On the bulkhead display, the Sleipnir packet had rotated to face a relatively empty patch of sky—the unremarkable constellation Cetus. Even this far from the Sol, the constellations still held their familiar shapes, with a few minor distortions.

  From Arcturus, Sol appeared in Cetus, a seventh-magnitude star invisible to the naked eye.

  Aligned with that unseen star, the packet began accelerating, vanishing within a handful of seconds into star-strewn emptiness. She carried a complete record of the battle. That, at least, would be welcome news to the Senate and to the Confederation at large. She also carried a list of the personnel rescued from Arcturus Station, and the news that they would be arriving on the AFS Mars after a three-week voyage.

  The packet should reach Sol in one week.

  Mess Hall 2, TC/USNA CVS America

  Arcturus System

  0812 hours, TFT

  America had no fewer than three separate mess halls, one in each arm of the rotating hab-module cluster behind the carrier’s forward shield. With more than five thousand people on board, the mess halls still had to work in shifts.

  Gray had come in to grab a late third-shift breakfast. Shay Ryan was already there, seated at one of the tables. “Morning.”

  She looked up. “Good morning. Here to take in the view?”

  Like other common areas on board America, the mess hall bulkheads and overheads could project live hemispherical panoramas. During the visually dull weeks when the ship was under Alcubierre Drive, wrapped up in its own, tight little bubble of spacetime, those images were generally from an extensive library of land- and seascapes, both from Earth and from other worlds Humankind had visited.

  When in planetary orbit, however, the views usually were from external camera feeds, showing surrounding space with a resolution high enough that it was easy to forget that there were walls. Although the mess halls were in the rotating outer hab modules, with a half G of artificial gravity, the panorama was from a non-rotating perspective. Having the sky swing around the ship for a complete turn every thirty seconds had turned out to be a bad idea where people were eating.

  Much of the panorama at the moment was dominated by Jasper, swirls and flecks of orange-gold clouds above red oceans and ocher continents. On the opposite bulkhead, Alchameth was a slender crescent pierced by the thread-slender silver streak of its rings. Arcturus shone brilliant beyond the crescent’s bow, the orange-hued daylight casting shadows across tables and deck.

  But Gray grinned and winked at Ryan. “You do look lovely this morning.”

  “That view,” she said, pointing up. “Not me!”

  “You take in your view,” Gray said with a shrug, “and I’ll take in mine. How are you feeling?”

  “Clean bill of health,” she said. She’d been suffering from hypothermia by the time the SAR tug had reached them. Her fighter’s power systems had been down, and her life support throttled back to a battery-powered minimum. She’d also picked up a few rads from the thermonuclear blast that had disabled her ship and from Alchameth’s radiation belts, so Ryan had spent all of yesterday in America’s sick bay.

  “Good to hear it.”

  “I . . . didn’t get the chance to thank you, Trevor,” she said.

  He picked up a plastic cup of fruit juice—grapefruit juice, it was supposed to be—and took a cautious sip. All food on the ships of the fleet was nanoconstituted from the CHON lockers—supplies of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, the basic compounds of life, with the necessary trace elements added in. The food assemblers were pretty good, but the output tended to be a bit on the bland side . . . and sometimes it was tough to distinguish what a given item of food or drink was supposed to be.

  Definitely grapefruit juice.

  “No thanks necessary,” he replied, putting the cup down. “All part of our friendly Prim service.”

  “Don’t joke about that, please,” she said.

  “About what? Prims?”

  “I’ve worked hard to get away from that . . . that part of my past,” she told him. “My family worked hard. But the only thing open to us was shitwork.” She gave a bitter laugh. “How do people show off their affluence, the fact that they have money, when every home has an assembler to nanufacture everything you could possibly need? You hire servants. Human servants. People you can dress in ridiculous livery and train to bow and scrape and say ‘yes, sir’ and ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘yes, master’ and . . . and . . .”

  She broke off the increasingly shrill tirade. Gray shrugged. “Sorry. For me . . . it’s just something I’ve lived with.”

  “Being a second-class citizen? Being a non-citizen, a non-person?” She was trying to control her anger. “We finally get out of the D.C. swamp, and we end up being servants for the Chevys. Cleaning their bathrooms. Serving their meals. Sleeping in their fucking beds.”

  “Chevys?”

  “What D.C. swamptsers call the rich people up north of Georgetown. From the Chevy Chase Arcology. That’s a tower community where a lot of the local elite live. The citizens.” She said the word as if it had a foul taste.

  “A lot of the people on Manhattan went north too,” he said.

  She shrugged. “You go where the work is. Growing crops on top of half-flooded buildings gets old after a while.”

  “Well, well. The two Prim sweeties having breakfast together by Jasperlight. How romantic.” Lieutenant Collins had just walked up and was standing beside them with an unfriendly grin. Evidently, she’d just finished breakfast and was on her way out.

  “Good morning, Lieutenant,” Gray said, his voice held neutral. He knew Collins was trying to bait him, trying to get him to lose control. She and her cronies had been riding him since he’d joined the battlegroup. It had started off as a kind of vicious hazing. Gray had tried to ignore it . . . then managed to get himself in trouble when he decked Collins’ wing and bed partner, Howie Spaas, a few months ago.

  But then at Eta Boötis, Spaas had ridden a damaged ’Hawk into one of America’s landing bays for a very bad trap and died. After that, the hazing by others in the squadron had continued, more or less . . . but Collins had turned downright bitter, as though she personally blamed him for Spaas’ death.

  “Where the hell were you during the furball out there the other day?” Collins said. “They say you scorched the gas-bag city, Gray . . . and wiped out a few thousand civilians. Then you hightailed it and sat out the rest of the fight with your girlfriend, here.”

  “So, when does your buddy Kirkpatrick go back to duty?” Gray asked, ignoring her comments. Kirkpatrick had been confined to quarters for a month after bypassing his deet and getting spaced on novasuns at the eudaimonium solstice gig. Collins had pulled a couple of weeks of extra duty for trying to cover for him, and for showing up late to the scramble recall from America. “I missed him out there.”

  She laughed, a harsh noise. “You should talk! Is that how squatties do it? Running out on their squadron? Or couldn’t you figure out how to work the interface on your Starhawk?”

  “Fuck you, Collins.”

  “I’m serious, Prim. You think you can pull out of a firefight and play the hero by floating out beyond the battlespace, you’re wrong.”

  “I used up the last of my Kraits on the H’rulka ship,” he told her. “My Gatling was almost dry.” He shr
ugged. “Everybody was pulling a drift-off, okay?”

  “Drift-off” was the term employed by fighter pilots referring to the battle’s endgame, when combat damage and dry expendables lockers forced them to break off contact and get clear of the enemy.

  “Not everybody, Prim. Some of us were fighting for our lives in there. If you couldn’t kill the enemy, you could have distracted him.”

  “Ryan’s fighter was disabled. The enemy had toads out in hunter-killer packs. I was covering her.”

  “She’s not your fucking wing, Prim. Tucker is, last I heard, and she was in there turning and burning with the rest of us! Seems just a bit too convenient, you two squatties going off by yourself! You know what I think?”

  “I don’t particularly care what you think, Collins.”

  “I think you’re a damned coward, and you ought to be hauled up in front of a court-martial board.”

  Gray looked at the woman for a moment, thoughtful. Then he stood up, picked up his cup of grapefruit juice, and emptied it in her face.

  “Oops,” he said.

  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

  Arcturus System

  0845 hours, TFT

  “Admiral?” Ramirez said. “The transport Mars reports readiness for boost.”

  “Very well. She’s clear to leave the battlegroup at her skipper’s discretion. Signal good luck.”

  “Very well, Admiral.”

  The Mars was currently invisibly distant, half a million kilometers away, but she would soon begin her transit back to Sol as well, arriving two weeks after the packet.

  “Admiral?” Commander Sinclair said. “General Mathers reports that his people are standing ready to dust the station.”

  The facility was visible now on another of the CIC screens, a few kilometers off America’s port bow. Koenig nodded. “Do it.”

  Arcturus Station itself had posed something of a problem, now that it was back in Confederation hands. The battlegroup would be leaving the system momentarily, leaving no ships and no personnel behind to hold the Arcturus system; there would be nothing to stop the Jivad or Turusch from reoccupying the orbital base.

  And so Koenig had ordered Marine combat engineers to disassemble it.

  The Marine assault force had encountered only twelve Jivad Rallam and fifteen of the smaller creatures called Kobolds when they’d stormed aboard the station. Eight Jivad had been killed in the firefight. The four survivors, all of them wounded, plus the Kobolds, had been packed into a cylindrical hab container set to maintain their CO2-rich atmospheric preference, along with a supply of water and CHON for the life support nanoassembler inside. The pod had been transferred to the Mars; with luck, the prisoners would survive the claustrophobic three-week voyage to Earth. Little was known about the Jivad, other than their ferocity on the battlefield. Perhaps the ONI xeno department could uncover more about them and how they related to the Sh’daar back at the Mare Crisium.

  The orbital facility appeared to be growing fuzzy, the edges softening, then blurring into a growing haze.

  Rather than detonating a nuclear warhead inside the empty station, Koenig had suggested using a nano-D device, releasing a cloud of programmed nanodisassemblers that could be dispersed throughout the station by way of the air circulation ducts. “Dusting,” the process was called, because by the time the molecule-sized nanodisassemblers reached the end of their carefully programmed life span and switched themselves off, the target would be reduced to a cloud of debris, sand-grain-sized and smaller. The cloud would remain in orbit around Jasper, where the H’rulka would find it once their ships returned to Arcturus. Perhaps they would use the cloud as a source of raw materials for their airborne platform.

  A peace offering, of sorts.

  “Captain Buchanan,” Koenig said. “Prepare the battlegroup for acceleration.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral.”

  He palmed a contact, ordering a fleet-wide link.

  “Officers and enlisted personnel of the fleet,” he said. “At Arcturus two days ago, you won an important victory. Together with the victory won in the Sol system last October, the Second Battle of Arcturus marks the turning point in the long war against the Sh’daar Empire. Until now, victories over the Sh’daar’s client races have been few and far between. Until now, Humankind was on the run, desperately trying to hold on against a numerically and a technically superior enemy. Until now, Humankind was losing this war.

  “But no more. Two days ago we took back the Arcturus system. And now, today, we take the war to the enemy.

  “There is, in modern space warfare, a military axiom which describes the ability to put your forces deep inside the enemy’s lines, to take the fight to him, to put him on the defensive and force him to react to you. The axiom is called center of gravity, and suggests the idea of keeping the war out of our backyard, and inside his. This morning, we are going to shift this conflict’s center of gravity deep into Sh’daar space. Our objective is the Alphekka star system, 41.5 light years from Arcturus . . . and 72 light years from Sol. I don’t need to tell you that we will be going farther out into the galaxy than humans have ever been before.”

  The farthest extent of human explorations so far had been the nascent system of Beta Pictoris, 63 light years from Earth.

  “Intelligence has identified the Alphekka system as a possible Sh’daar base and staging area, quite possibly for their operations at Arcturus and Eta Boötis and, ultimately, against Sol. We are going to hit whatever is at Alphekka, and we are going to hit it hard. We’re going to take it down before the enemy fully realizes what we’ve done here at Arcturus. We hope that this will make them, at the very least, reconsider their operations against Sol and the Confederation’s inner colonies, and force them to pull back to regroup. This will, at the very least, buy time for the Confederation, allowing them to build up their own defenses.

  “The Confederation is counting on us. And I am counting on all of you. It’s twenty-four days to Alphekka.” He paused for a moment before adding the Confederation’s motto. “Ad astra!”

  As a speech, he thought, it was probably a bit overblown . . . but the crews of the battlefleet’s ships needed something impressive to mark this moment. Once they dropped into the metaspace bubbles of their Alcubierre Drives, they would be putting themselves beyond reinforcements or resupply from Earth. The fleet would be utterly on its own, unless and until Koenig decided to reestablish contact.

  Someone in the CIC, one of the techs, had begun clapping his hands. Commander Sinclair joined in, followed by more and more men and women, until the compartment was ringing with sustained applause. The applause, the wild cheering, Koenig learned later, had spread throughout the fleet, accompanied by crew members chanting, over and over, “Ad astra! Ad astra! Ad astra! . . .”

  “Captain Buchanan?” Koenig said, as the noise began to dwindle. “Set course for Alphekka.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  If they hadn’t been committed before, they were now.

  Slowly, America began gathering speed, sliding past the growing gray cloud of the disintegrating orbital station, picking up speed, and breaking orbit.

  He wondered if the H’rulka on their jury-rigged platform were watching the battlegroup leave, and what they might be thinking.

  Alien Visitors’ Quarters, TC/USNA CVS America

  Arcturus System

  0849 hours, TFT

  The Sh’daar Seed was listening to Koenig’s inspirational speech.

  A portion of a supply locker on the Number Three Hangar Deck had been sealed off for the use of the nonhumans currently on board America, a place where temperature and humidity could be maintained at comfortable levels, and where private eating booths gave the two Agletsch the civilized amenities.

  Dra’ethde and Gru’mulkisch were still attached to the Confederation Department of Extraterrestrial Relations, but had been “
seconded,” as the humans called it, to America’s intelligence department. “Native guides,” one human had called them. In the coming weeks and months, America and the ships with her would be traveling deep into space no human had ever visited, and their knowledge of Sh’daar client species and worlds would be invaluable.

  Gru’mulkisch was carrying a Sh’daar Seed.

  She wasn’t aware of it, of course. The Seed was a tiny complex of artificially grown and interconnected molecules embracing a quantum computer smaller than a typical bacterium. It had been ingested by one of her males and transferred to her circulatory system when he had attached himself to her face. Eventually, it had lodged within her brain and attached itself to certain ganglia associated with her auditory system; the Seed could not see, but it could hear quite well . . . and it could use Gru’mulkisch’s own memory to translate languages—including English.

  By itself, the Seed was not intelligent or self-aware, and had neither volition nor judgment of its own. It was simply a listening device programmed to store conversations overheard by its host, to analyze what it heard based on certain fairly narrow criteria, and to upload data deemed important by that criteria to network nodes when the opportunity presented itself. Sh’daar Seeds could, at times, serve as hosts for more intelligent subsets of the Sh’daar Remnant’s metamind, but that was not the case with the artificial virus currently inhabiting Gru’mulkisch’s auditory center.

  When it analyzed Koenig’s speech, it noted several data of interest.

  “Our objective is the Alphekka star system, 41.5 light years from Arcturus . . . and 72 light years from Sol.”