Center of Gravity

by Ian Douglas

  The rock walls of this fortress are too thick. . . .

  “Not,” Diligent Effort replied, “for very much longer.” It felt a telltale rumbling deep within the rock and metal surrounding it, a steady pounding that appeared to be getting louder moment by moment. The vibrations, it knew, were caused by the black hole used to extract energy from the vacuum, sealed deep within the heart of the ship. That singularity had broken free, was moving now slowly out from the center of the ship.

  Or, to be more precise, the massive singularity was continuing on its original course in orbit around the two distant stars of this system; the asteroid ship around it, nudged by a succession of nuclear detonations, was drifting now to one side, with a difference in vector of several degrees and several d’lurm’n per g’nya. And as it moved, the singularity continued devouring rock and steel and Turusch bodies and everything else that it touched, growing as it moved and spilling a steady blaze of X-rays as it relentlessly fed.

  The Shining Silence, Diligent Effort knew, was finished.

  “Your guidance in this battle was flawed,” it said aloud. There! It had spoken at last the thought, the unthinkable thought, that had been growing within the Mind Here for g’nya upon g’nya. “We should have been free to meet the enemy fleet sooner, and farther from the factory.”

  It felt something that was the equivalent of a shrug within, felt meaning form, as if in a rising memory. The defenses were dictated by the situation. More enemy ships might have been coming in behind the first wave. That initial assault might have been designed to draw you out of position.

  “Our instincts said otherwise,” Diligent Effort replied.

  Your instincts are flawed. They require . . . guidance.

  Tactician Diligent Effort bristled at the implied insult, but couldn’t reply. The steady shriek of denial from its Mind Above was growing louder and more shrill as the loose singularity grew closer.

  If Shining Silence was finished, the rest of the fleet was not. The Turusch squadron had taken terrible damage from the human high-velocity strike, but the enemy was still badly outnumbered. Command now devolved upon the enforcer warship Intrusive Storm, positioned nearly twelve-twelves of light-g’nya out-system. Before losing contact with the rest of the fleet, Diligent Effort had noted that the enemy appeared to have begun slowing once again. They intended to stay and fight.

  Intrusive Storm would react, and the enemy would die.

  But so, too, would Shining Silence and so many other vessels of the Turusch fleet.

  Diligent Effort at Reconciliation, however, was feeling its own and personal loss too keenly to mourn the loss of others.

  Gray

  VFA–44

  Alphekka System

  2045 hours, TFT

  What, Gray thought to himself, are my chances?

  Not good, he decided. Not good at all. Koenig was returning the CBG to Al–01, and when he got there, the Turusch would be waiting.

  Maybe Koenig had some devious trick up his sleeve. Maybe he was counting on the sheer audacity of turning back to face the surviving enemy ships.

  And maybe he’d just run out of options, had decided to stay and fight if only to give people like Collins a ghost of a fighting chance.

  Maybe there were no answers, no strategy, no meaning, no hope.

  Maybe . . .

  Gray refused to think about that. The fleet was still there, decelerating down from its hell-bent charge at nearly a third of c. There was no indication that the other Turusch ships in the system had reacted yet. They were spread out so far from one another and from Al–01 that they wouldn’t even know the result of the battle so far for an hour or more to come.

  His particle cannon fired, triggered by the AI with super-human reflexes. Radar had detected a bit of rock on a collision course, and the AI used the proton beam to vaporize and it. Individual atoms of hit gas were less damaging to the fighter than lumps of rock.

  Collins was eight thousand kilometers ahead now. He was gaining on her, very slowly.

  Gray couldn’t accelerate at his Starhawk’s full potential. He could fry particles larger than thumb-size to avoid hitting them, but even his AI couldn’t identify dust motes, and without forward shields even a dust mote might cause serious damage at these speeds. In fact, at this point he was relying on his own projected singularity to sweep most of the gas and dust clear from his path, creating a dustball of his own.

  He stayed on Collins’ tail and pushed as hard as he dared, slowly, slowly closing the range between them. Collins’ path had taken her in-system, almost directly through the plane of the protoplanetary cloud. The two stars of Alphekka, one brilliant, one smaller and dimmer, shone almost directly ahead, just over thirty astronomical units distant. They should, he thought, be emerging from the inner edge of the debris-field ring any moment now. His AI had marked a nascent planet just ahead and to one side; that planet, he recalled, was just inside the inner edge of the ring, having swept its orbital path clear over the course of some millions of years as it grew.

  “Dragon Five, this is Dragon Nine,” he called. “Do you copy?”

  No answer. He wondered if the bitch was dead.

  Why, he wondered, was he even trying this? It wasn’t as though he liked Collins. Since he’d joined the Dragonfires a year ago, she’d given him more than the usual allotment of grief. She was a “risty,” a hypocrite, a bitter and angry zero with a special prejudice against Prims like Gray. He hated the creature; a part of him was still telling him he should let her go.

  He would have come after Ben Donovan, if it had been him. He would have gone after Commander Allyn had he noted her trajectory before she’d been swallowed up by emptiness. He did go after Shay Ryan at Alchameth.

  Why try to save Collins?

  And he honestly didn’t know the answer. She was a fellow naval officer and pilot, a fellow Dragonfire, a fellow member of America’s officers and crew. Perhaps he owed her that much. She might have the vector data on the skipper. Maybe saving Collins would save Marissa Allyn.

  And maybe he was doing it just because he would have wanted someone else, anyone else, to do it for him had he been in her situation.

  You stood up for your fellow warriors, pulled for them, helped them, and by God went after them and saved them even if you hated their guts.

  His fighter emerged from the debris field with startling suddenness. With the CGI overlay of red behind him, he could see more clearly ahead. Comets blazed in every direction; the newborn planet shone as a brilliant spark to port. Collins’ hurtling fighter was seven hundred kilometers ahead.

  Five hundred.

  One hundred.

  Decelerating now, Gray crept up behind her. He could see her ship, now, black against the glow of the two Alphekkan suns thirty AUs ahead.

  They were traveling at a bit over two astronomical units per hour, with fifteen hours to go before they fell into the vicinity of those stars. Plenty of time.

  If nothing went wrong.

  Gently, he moved toward Collins’ Starhawk. She wasn’t tumbling, thank God.

  And Gray had practiced this maneuver before.

  He knew exactly what to do. . . .

  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

  Alphekka System

  2350 hours, TFT

  Three hours had passed since the fiery flyby of Al–01. America and the other battlegroup ships had finally killed their forward momentum, and had been accelerating again back toward the factory for an hour now.

  “Admiral!” Commander Craig called. “We’re getting movement from the enemy fleet!”

  Here it comes, Koenig thought. He was in his CIC command chair, leaning back, eyes closed, his in-head displays switched off. He’d been trying to catch some sleep at his station. “Tell me.”

  “Two groups of ships . . . the ones still at Al–01 . . . and group Fox-Sierra Se
ven. They’ve begun accelerating.”

  “How long until intercept?” Koenig asked, his eyes still closed.

  “Sir . . . no, you don’t understand! They’re accelerating outbound! Away from us!”

  Koenig’s eyes snapped open and he released his chair’s harness, floating over to the display tank. “Away? You’re sure?”

  Commander Craig pointed into the display tank, which showed a large portion of this side of the Alphekkan system—translucent red protoplanetary disk, a tight cluster of green stars marking CBG–18, and several widely scattered clumps of red icons marking Turusch vessels under drive. As he watched, a third group, even farther out, began accelerating as well.

  All were headed in the same direction, roughly toward the galactic center. None were on a course that would bring them anywhere near the battlegroup.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Koenig said. “Reduce scale.”

  The display dropped to a lower scale, showing even more of the star system, all the way out to the thin and ragged red edge of the debris ring.

  “There,” Sinclair said, pointing, and a new cluster of icons was highlighted by the display. “We have new incoming!”

  Turusch reinforcements, was Koenig’s first thought.

  And then the id tags for the newcomers began appearing in the depths of the tank.

  They were scattered across a full light hour or more, ships emerging one by one from Alcubierre Drive. They were above the plane of the ring, the nearest nearly twenty-five AUs out.

  “Sir!” Sinclair said. “That’s the Jeanne d’Arc!”

  “And, by God!” Craig added. “The Abraham Lincoln! And the United States of North America!”

  “De Gaul,” Sinclair continued. “Frederich der Grosse. Illustrious. Haiping. Cheng Hua. . . .”

  “They’re ours!” Craig yelled. “They’re fucking ours!”

  It was . . . a miracle. Twenty-one ships had already materialized, emerging from Alcubierre metaspace twenty-five AUs out from the America, a distance of some three and a half light hours. More were emerging every moment.

  Koenig thought rapidly. At that distance, they must have dropped out of metaspace at just about the same time as CBG–18 had made its close passage of Al–01, and were just now catching the wavefront bearing the images of that brief and terrible battle. In the same three and a half hours, the images of the emerging ships reached America’s sensors.

  “Admiral!” Ramirez said. “Incoming transmission! Sir . . . it’s Grand Admiral Giraurd, of the Jeanne d’Arc!”

  “Put it on speaker! Let them all hear this! . . .”

  “. . . have emerged from Alcubierre Drive, and see the battle taking place in-system three point five light hours from here. We are deploying to assist. Message repeats. Attention Star Carrier America. This is Grand Admiral Giraurd of the Pan-European Star Carrier Jean d’Arc, in command of a Confederation naval task force, operating in concert with the Chinese Hegemony Eastern Dawn Expeditionary Force, a total of forty-one combatants. We have emerged from Alcubierre Drive, and see the battle taking place in-system three point five light hours from here. We are deploying to assist. Message repeats. . . .”

  Pandemonium ensued within the CIC, cheers and shouts and even a few somersaults in zero-G.

  Koenig let them cheer.

  Forty-one ships, some Pan-European, some Chinese. They must have been the vessels that were supposed to have reinforced CBG–18 at Pluto. No . . . forty-one ships? He’d not been expecting that many. He detected the hand of Admiral Carruthers and the Confederation Joint Chiefs here.

  Captain Buchanan emerged from the ship’s bridge, grinning from ear to ear. “You did it, Admiral! You damn well did it!”

  “Hardly, Randy. We didn’t know they were coming!”

  “Yeah, and neither did the Tushies! Look at ’em run!”

  Across the Alphekkan system, group by group, the Turusch battlegroups were beginning to accelerate, clearly moving to leave the system, clearly not attempting to intercept and engage the newly arrived Confederation forces. It would take time for the wavefront bearing news of the human fleet’s arrival to reach every Turusch ship . . . but none of them were staying to contest ownership of the system.

  Well, they couldn’t know how many more Confederation and Hegemony ships were coming in. The Sh’daar’s minions tended, it seemed, to play a somewhat conservative game.

  And the humans could use that as a weapon against them.

  Victory . . .

  “Commander Craig?”

  “Yes, Admiral!”

  “Pass the word to all ships of CBG–18. We will cease acceleration in order to bring fighters on board, and to dispatch SAR units.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “CAG?”

  “Yes, Admiral!”

  “Put out the word to our pilots. We’re bringing them in.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral!”

  America’s children, those who remained, would be coming home.

  Epilogue

  28 February 2405

  VFA–44 Ready Room, TC/USNA CVS America

  Alphekka System

  1437 hours, TFT

  Trevor Gray stood on the Dragonfires’ ready-room deck, facing the viewall that covered an entire bulkhead, deck to overhead and fifteen meters wide. It showed local space, but from the perspective of a nonrotating camera mounted somewhere on America’s shield cap. Comets gleamed icy and cold across blackness. A planet drifted in the distance, its surface a black and tortured disk with cracks and craters exposing its hot-glowing interior.

  The world had been named Elpheia, the ancient magicians’ name for Alphekka within the list of Behenian fixed stars. If you looked closely, you could occasionally see the twinkling flash of an impact as it continued to draw in meteoric debris and asteroids. America’s astrophysics department estimated that Elpheia was a rocky planet already twice Earth’s mass, that one day it would be a “super-Earth,” with three to four times Earth’s mass, and—this far from its suns—a deep and frigid, dense atmosphere. Rocky planet? Gas giant? The experts didn’t know yet. A lot of things out here didn’t fall neatly into established categorical boxes.

  A brand-new world.

  In the foreground, between America’s camera and Elpheia, several of the new ships from Earth drifted in orbit with the carrier.

  “Hey, Trev,” Shay Ryan said at his back. “You okay?”

  He turned, gave her a thin smile. “Yeah. I’m not sure why.” He noticed her mood, bright and positive. Perky. It wasn’t like her. “Why are you so happy?”

  “Why not? We made it! Not bad for a couple of damned misplaced Prims!”

  “Not all of us made it. . . .”

  At the moment, VFA–44 consisted of just three people—Gray, Ben Donovan, and Collins, though Collins was in the sick bay with a dozen broken bones, a punctured lung, and numerous other internal injuries. She’d been all but crushed when she whipped around that Turusch dust ball, and hadn’t yet regained consciousness.

  But Gray had brought her back. It had taken hours of maneuvering, slipping in close to her spacecraft, connecting to it with his nano-tipped grapples, pulling her in tight, then gently putting out a maneuvering singularity to alter course by a few degrees. Eventually, he’d altered her course enough that she was no longer dropping toward the suns. A SAR tug rendezvoused with them a dozen hours later.

  The tugs had been busy for the past two days. They’d brought back the streaker Rattler pilot, Alma Rafferty. They’d even recovered Lieutenant Schiere, alive and well, adrift a billion kilometers from the wrecked alien factory.

  They hadn’t yet found the skipper, though. Commander Allyn was still out there somewhere. The SAR tugs were tracking her. Maybe . . .

  The fleet, meanwhile, had taken up orbit around Elpheia, avoiding the bombed-out mess of Al–01 which
was now highly radioactive. The Turusch fleet-building complex in the Alphekkan system had been rendered utterly useless. Perhaps over the course of the next few million years, it would begin accreting rock, dust, and gas from the protoplanetary belt and become the core of another new, infant world.

  “They say they’re going to rebuild all four squadrons,” Ryan told him. “We’ll be the old hands, y’know? Maybe we can start over, you and me, trying to fit in.”

  “Maybe. I’m more interested in knowing what happens now with the battlegroup. Operation Crown Arrow is complete . . . a success.”

  “Scuttlebutt says we’re going to wait a month or two and find out if the pressure’s been taken off of Earth,” Ryan said.

  Gray managed a grin. “Do you really think Koenig is going to sit on his ass that long?”

  “No, I guess not. But . . . he’s not in command anymore, is he? That Pan-Europe admiral . . .”

  “Giraurd.”

  “Yeah, Giraurd. He outranks Koenig. Grand admiral trumps rear admiral, y’know? I heard he’s going to take over the fleet.”

  And that, Gray decided, helped define his own sense of loss . . . and empty letdown. So many people had died, and for what? To drive the enemy out of a system that had very little in the way of advantages for Earth—no habitable worlds, no new allies. They said that crushing and scattering the enemy fleet here would keep the enemy from attacking Sol again . . . but would it? At worst, the Turusch and their Sh’daar masters had been dealt a setback.

  And if the Confederation government decided now to bring the fleet back to Earth, to abandon what had been won here and at Arcturus . . . then what the hell was the point?

  Gray was unhappy with what seemed to be very limited options, and he knew that a number of other pilots in the fleet felt the same way.

  A pair of ships drifted into the panorama . . . the hulk of the Reasoner within the oddly insectlike embrace of an SKR–7 Scrounger off the Lewis. Several hundred crewmen had been rescued from the frigate, and the Scrounger was now devouring the frigate’s corpse, breaking down hull and control systems and structure, creating stocks of materials that would be used to build new ships, fighters, missiles, and parts for fabrication and repair on board the ships of the fleet. The rebuilding would not be on the same scale, perhaps, as with the destroyed Al–01 factory, but repairs and reconstruction would take place.