Center of Gravity

by Ian Douglas

  “I’m fine!” She pulled away from his touch.

  “If you say so.”

  “I’m just . . .” She stopped, and tried again. “Trevor, I don’t know if I can still do this.”

  “What? Strap on a fighter?”

  “That. And, and everything. Blend in with these people, be a part of them. Sometimes they seem as . . . as alien as those bugs at the Overlook.”

  “The Agletsch? I thought you liked them.”

  “I did. I do.” She shrugged. “Hell, I stick up for anyone who’s getting stepped on. Those two were getting a raw deal.”

  “Just like a couple of Prims from the Periphery, eh?”

  “That’s just it. We’re fucking Prims. How do you do it, Trev? How do you keep from killing Kirkpatrick and Collins and the rest of those zeroes?”

  “I dunno. Take it a day at a time.”

  “When I was falling into Alchameth, you came for me. I’m grateful.”

  “All in a day’s work.”

  “And then you took a load of shit because you did help me.”

  “Take nothing. I tossed a cup of grapefruit juice in the troll-bitch’s face.”

  “And got in trouble for it.”

  “Not so much. Three weeks off duty and a stretch with the neuropsytherapy people? That was nothing.”

  “Well, the point is that you came and got me. But . . . but despite that, I feel so damned alone. And when I was out there off Alchameth, drifting into nothingness in a junked fighter . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve felt alone most of my life. Even when I was still . . . home. In the D.C. swamps. But I never felt the way I felt at Alchameth. No other human for a million kilometers. No one but you.”

  “Like I said, all in a day’s work. Us Prims need to stick together.”

  “Bullshit. You won’t always be there to rescue my ass. You can’t.”

  On the viewall, the tug was now clear of America’s shield cap. A moment later, the carrier’s deceleration resumed and the tug vanished off the screen in an eye’s blink, flashing past the shield cap and into the emptiness ahead of the larger ship.

  “Shay . . . you’re not alone. And you won’t be. Some of these pilots, the risty zeroes, especially, are hard to live with, yeah. But they’re all part of the family and we all look out for one another.” He nodded at the viewall. “Koenig’s sent a tug out after our lost Rattler. He’ll send one out after you, too.”

  She nodded, but not because she believed him. At the moment, paradoxically, what she wanted more than anything else was to be alone, to be left alone. And at the same time, she was terrified of dying alone. . . .

  Shay Ryan often wondered why they’d steered her into naval aviation, back when she’d joined the military and left the risty enclaves of Bethesda and Chevy Chase forever. They’d claimed the battery of aptitude tests and simulations they’d given her at Oceana had shown she was perfect as a fighter pilot . . . but why? What the hell had they been looking for?

  For some reason, she remembered the chase. . . .

  At last, that was how she thought of it. She’d been fifteen, that day, not long before her family had decided to leave the swamps and head north. She’d been trapping out on the Mall, which meant running her twelve-foot skiff from buoy to buoy, checking the fish traps that had been set beneath each colored, tethered balloon floating on the dark and oily water. The Rebs had ambushed her among the huge mangrove trees that now filled what once had been the Washington Mall—had almost caught her.

  The Rebs—the Virginia Rebels—were a Prim gang that came over from Arlington once in a while to raid the Community’s fish traps or moored barge farms. Usually they weren’t more than a nuisance . . . but if you were an attractive young woman living in the D.C. swamps you did not want to get caught by them. Some girls from the Community had vanished when the Rebs came raiding, and had never come back. The adults told dark stories. . . .

  They’d come at her in boats from two directions, but she’d switched on her skiff’s little hydrogen-cell powered electric motor and rammed one of them, banging hard against the bigger boat’s side and bumping along its hull, scraping midship to stern, as leering faces yelled at her and outstretched hands tried to grab her. She fended one of them off, slashing at his face with her trap hook, the long-handled tool she used to fish up the traps, and as she slid past the other boat’s stern, she’d used the hook to rip the jury-rigged fuel line from the gasoline-powered outboard motor and then opened her own throttle wide.

  The other boat had chased her . . . and it was a bigger, faster speedboat with a more powerful engine that should have caught her easily, but she knew the mangroves crowding the Mall and she knew the tangled architecture of the ancient and half-fallen public buildings beyond. Weaving in and out, she’d led the second Reb boat on a desperate chase through forest and ruins, never emerging into the open where her pursuers could catch her in a flat-out run.

  That nightmare game of hide-and-seek had continued for fifteen minutes, until an arrow had sprouted from the chest of one of the Rebs, knocking him overboard into the shallow water. A Community Watch boat had roared in then, with Jeb Fullerton in the bow, drawing his bow and loosing arrow after arrow at the raiders. The rebs hadn’t stayed to fight, fortunately, but had put about and roared off toward the south, back to the Virginia side of the swamp.

  Her interviewer at Oceana, she remembered, had been very interested in the details of that chase, had talked a lot about hand-eye coordination and a good sense of distance and vector over the water.

  Had they figured that she would be good at piloting a fighter because she could zigzag among the mangrove roots without crashing into one of the massive, looming trees?

  Maybe. But what they hadn’t questioned her about was her problems with fitting in, either with her own family, or among the damned risties of Chevy Chase.

  Being alone . . . being cut off from anyone who cared . . .

  The thought still terrified her.

  Enforcer Shining Silence

  Alphekka System

  1915 hours, TFT

  Tactician Diligent Effort at Reconciliation was, in fact, a single three-part mind with two bodies. And it had a problem.

  Eons ago, geological ages before the rise of Mind Below, the Gweh—slow and patient armored gastropods dwelling within the mountaintop biomes of the storm-wracked homeworld they called Xchee’ga’gwah, the Place of Coming Forth in Light—had begun making foraging expeditions into the depths they called the Abyss. Food and certain necessary metallic supplements were scarce in the Heights Above, abundant in the Abyss Below.

  There was another sophont species on the homeworld. They were called Ma’agh, and they lived down there among the storms and lava flows of the Abyss, breathing the thick and poison-laden air. The small, exoskeletal creatures were primitive and violent, but willing to trade with the Gweh. They gave the foragers food and metals in exchange for the mildly narcotic circulatory fluid harvested from grolludh, the immense hydrogen-floater filter-feeders adrift among the mountaintop plateaus. The Ma’agh could leave their steaming pools only briefly, and would have suffocated in the cold, pure, thin air of the Heights.

  Individual Gweh attempting to make the journey into the Abyss, however, rarely returned to the bright, clear safety of the Heights. The Ma’agh were capable of ambushing and killing lone Gweh if they thought they could get away with it, and there were countless other dangers within the Depths. Would-be traders faced abyssal whirlwinds, searing lava flows, poisonous gasses, and the d’dhuthchweh, a diminutive relative of the grolludh. The name meant “emphatic blossom,” and it could kill with an electric charge anything that brushed against the sweep of its dangling tentacles.

  But pairs of Gweh, generally, had returned.

  So vital to the species’ survival was the trade with the Abyss-dwellers that over twelve
s upon twelves upon twelves of g’nyi, close pairings of Gweh had become, first, a cultural imperative, and eventually, a biological one. Exquisitely sensitive to sound, they read one another’s droning hum of subvocalized thoughts in a way that seemed to be telepathic to aliens, their thought processes intermingled to the point where the two spoke simultaneously, the sounds blending to carry three meanings: those of the two individuals, and a third, expressed by the two heterodyned frequencies. So powerful a survival mechanism had been this pairing that within 125 g’nyi, the individual members of a Gweh pairing no longer thought of themselves as separate beings. They were one, in a sense that non-Gweh observers found it difficult to understand.

  And yet, despite this essential oneness, each Gweh was divided. Their earliest, most primitive mind, what they called the “Mind Above,” was impulsive, direct, and savage—a necessary tool in dealing with a world as inherently hostile as Xchee’ga’gwah. The Mind Here had evolved later, while the Mind Below, a synthesis of the Mind Here of two or more individual Gweh, was the most recent, the most civilized development in the species’ psychology.

  Eventually, the Gweh had developed technic civilization and gone to the stars. They’d gone as traders, but also as warriors; the Mind Above made them superb soldiers—fearless, ruthless, and unstoppable. As interstellar traders, then, and as mercenaries, they’d met the alien Agletsch, who’d given them the strange and unpronounceable name “Turusch.”

  And through the Agletsch they’d met the Sh’daar, received the Gift of the Sh’daar Seed, and becoming, in time, one of the Sh’daar’s principal warrior species.

  And this was a part of Diligent Effort’s problem. It was senior tactician—the commanding officer, though it didn’t think of the position in those terms—both of the Gweh warship Shining Silence and of twelve twelves of warships protecting the manufactory in this infant star system. Its Mind Below was tracking the incoming enemy warships, preparing the fleet to engage them. Its Mind Above was shrieking battle cries, eager to engage the enemy and destroy it . . . and Diligent Effort’s Mind Here felt that an offensive operation would best interpret its orders.

  But Diligent Effort also carried a Sh’daar Seed, that tiny implant running a bit of programmed Sh’daar awareness that intertwined with the Mind Below and guided each decision he made.

  And the Seed was requiring, was demanding, that the fleet stay in place, guarding the immense star-orbiting factory.

  As a result, Diligent Effort’s consciousness was fragmenting, and that could be deadly in combat. Mind Here was being torn between Mind Above and Mind Below; normally, Mind Here and Mind Below could agree to tune out Mind Above’s shrill fight-or-flight cacophony of hate, fear, and action, but the discordance caused by the Seed was actually causing the Mind Here of the two physical components of Diligent Effort’s being to diverge. The harmonics of its two voices were dissolving into chaos, and that threatened its communications link with others of the Shining Silence crew, and with the rest of the fleet.

  Normally, the Seed simply suggested and the joint Mind went along . . . but with the divergence, Diligent Effort was momentarily paralyzed by uncertainty. The Gweh—the Turusch—worked through internal consensus, not by blindly obeying orders. The dissonance was . . . crippling.

  The Seed had warned the system’s defenders that the humans would be coming here, had directed the disposition of the fleet. Now, though, the Seed appeared confused, even conflicted. It had expected the enemy to see the numbers of Turusch, Jival, and Soru waiting here and flee, Diligent Effort thought. That the enemy fleet had been accelerating toward the manufactory for several g’nyuu’m, now, was unexpected, worrisome, and internally divisive. As the Seed hesitated, the link within Mind Below trembled and threatened to fail.

  An enemy long-range bombardment might already be on the way. At such long range, it was difficult to determine if or when they’d loosed a volley, but Diligent Effort would have fired one some time ago, had he been the tactician commanding the enemy fleet.

  “We must move the ships, at least,” Diligent Effort told the Seed. “If the enemy has already begun a bombardment, they will have targeted them first, knowing that they can be moved once we know we are under fire.”

  As always, the Seed’s reply was more emotion and a sense of knowing, as if from a memory, rather than an inner voice or coherent thought.

  The memory seemed to be one of dismissal . . . and an awareness that the enemy could not decelerate as quickly as Turusch vessels. When the human ships arrived, they would be traveling far too quickly to pose a serious danger to the fleet.

  “But they may have already released a volley. They will target our ships. . . .”

  Again, an unspoken memory. What was important was the manufactory, nothing else. The Fleet would stay tucked in close to protect it from enemy fighters. Those could pose a threat to the huge structure, like d’cha swarming in for the kill on a huge, drifting grolludh on far distant Xchee’ga’gwah.

  Diligent Effort did not understand the Sh’daar. No, it decided. That wasn’t quite true. Rather, it didn’t understand the intelligence encapsulated within the Seed. It had never met a physical Sh’daar, and knew no Gweh that had. It wondered if they were as abrupt, as hard, as seemingly unconcerned with the survival and well-being of individual Gweh pairs as were their electronic avatars.

  The tactician understood, it thought, why the Sh’daar Seed was holding back. If the Turusch vessels had begun accelerating toward the oncoming enemy fleet, they would have to pass through that fleet, decelerate, then turn and accelerate again . . . and at this point they would not be able to accelerate long enough to catch up with them. Sound tactical thinking demanded that they stay put near the manufactory, and try to engage the enemy ships when they passed through this volume of space.

  But surely that didn’t require that individual ships stay where they were, as helpless targets.

  “All ships will begin low-order acceleration,” it said. “We will shift position by a few lurm’m only, just enough to avoid incoming kinetic-kill missiles.”

  The Seed disagreed . . . and Diligent Effort felt its Mind Below ripping apart. Its twin, the other physical part of Diligent Effort, felt that it was necessary to obey the Seed precisely, to the letter; the Seed seemed to have difficulty grasping distances in the real world, as opposed to its own virtual universe, and thought that movement meant more than a slight change of position. Diligent Effort’s communications link with the rest of the fleet wavered, the harmonics of the Mind Below momentarily broken.

  The tactician’s full name, Diligent Effort at Reconciliation, was derived from its talent in finding compromise and unity among disparate points of view. Partly, this grew from its rather keen sense of rationality, its experience at seeing how things were, even through a haze of conflicting emotions. Partly, too, it grew out of its native talent, its ability to use its voices—all three of them—to impose unity of purpose and thought within a dissenting Gweh community. Essentially, its heterodyned Mind Below voice could sing louder than the voices of others around it, forcing acquiescence, then agreement, then harmony.

  For a moment, for a horrible moment, it could not find that third voice.

  He could not give the necessary command.

  “Turusch!” a harsh voice rasped over the fleet communications link. “Give the order to maneuver!”

  That was the commander of one of the three Soru vessels in the fleet. Unable to pronounce the twittering, singsong chirps of the Gweh, it used the Agletsch lingua franca, and so referred to the Gweh by the alien version of the species’ name.

  “Y’vasch!” Diligent Effort managed to say in the same language. “Go!”

  The Soru ships were smaller than most Gweh vessels, curved like slashing claws and brightly painted in ultraviolet. They began to move. . . .

  And then one of the Turusch ships nearby, a converted asteroid enforcer called Br
ight Lightning in the Fog, staggered as a piece of metal traveling at a fair percentage of the speed of light slammed into it, releasing a dazzling flash of liberated kinetic energy with the collision. Sensors detected several other high-velocity impactors passing through the space between the ships.

  The enemy bombardment had begun, unguided but precisely targeted rounds flickering in from the night.

  “Move! Move! Move!” That voice was almost wholly from Mind Above, a frantic screaming that overrode the momentary paralysis of the Mind Below. It felt the hard nudge as Shining Silence fired its thrusters and slowly began to accelerate. There might still be time. . . .

  A Brilliance in the Night took a direct hit, the entire forward third of the vessel vanishing in a flash that left the rest tumbling wildly end over end, trailing debris and a glittering spray of freezing atmosphere. Moments later, the remnants began to crumple and vanish as they were inexorably drawn into the singularities of the warship’s power plant.

  The Soru ships were already far ahead, still accelerating.

  Bring them back, a memory whispered within Diligent Effort’s thoughts. Return them to their place!

  “I cannot. They have released themselves from the fleet’s control.”

  The tactician’s control over the alien Soru had been tenuous at best. It didn’t know if they possessed—or were possessed by—the Seed.

  Working with aliens was always difficult. The tactician felt a certain kindred understanding of the H’rulka. Perhaps that was because both species knew an Abyss, and both feared the storms that could arise there, but even the H’rulka gas bags didn’t think properly or in a rational way.

  For that matter, neither did the Sh’daar.

  It wished the five Jival ships with the fleet would request a release as well. If the tactician could let its Mind Above issue that order, it would be eight ships attacking the humans far out in space, well away from the precious manufactory.

  But the Jival tended to stick close to military protocol and refused to stretch the orders given them. They were unimaginative, by Gweh standards, strictly, as a human would say, “by the book.” Their ships, in any case, mingled the jobs of troop transport and fighting vessel, and were not as efficient as single-purpose warships like those of the Soru or the Turusch.