Center of Gravity (14 page)

“Atmospheric readout coming through,” one of the SEALS reported. Koenig saw a window open in his mind, giving a breakdown of the ship’s interior atmosphere. The temperature, surprisingly, was twelve degrees Celsius, warmer, somehow, than Koenig had expected. The gas mix was mostly hydrogen—no surprise there—and helium, with methane, ammonia, water vapor, and other compounds in trace amounts. As expected, a typical gas-giant atmosphere, quite similar, in fact, to that of Saturn.

The sheer scale of the scene was so alien that Garrison didn’t notice the aliens at first. When Lamb called his attention to them, however, he saw them clearly enough… a vast field of pale mushroom shapes in front of one of the cloud walls. It appeared to be a herd, some hundreds of individuals, adrift on alien winds. He studied them for a long moment before deciding that these, too, were a part of the background display. An illusion…

A shadow moved across the cloudscape.

Garrison looked up, and Koenig saw through his eyes the alien… if that was what it actually was. It was hard to make sense of what he was seeing—an immense island of pale and plastic-looking surfaces, a ring of growth encircling the base, like an upside-down forest of vines and branches.

And it was descending—descending
rapidly
, directly toward the SEALS… .

Chapter Seven

21 December 2404

Black Recon One

H’rulka Ship, Sol System

2248 hours, TFT

Chief Garrison had only a second or two to make a decision—to pull back into the alien vessel’s bulkhead or push the pod forward and into the interior. The H’rulka, an enormous ivory-colored balloon, was dropping toward the point at which the boarding pod was emerging. It would take time to unship the pod’s stern docking collar, too much time…

He gave the mental command to squeeze the pod forward and into the open.

A fringe covered tentacle as thick as a sequoia and twice as high swept past the pod, shaking it with the shock wave of its passage. The boarding pod darted forward, narrowly missed by the tentacle, which brushed across the portion of the bulkhead from which the pod had just emerged.

Garrison’s first thought was that the giant alien had been trying to crush the pod, but once the SEALS were in the open, the monster took no notice of them at all. Instead, it appeared to be concerned about a patch of tarry black interrupting the cloudscape projected on the bulkhead. When the pod’s docking collar had melted its way out of the ship’s bulkhead, it appeared to have interfered with the cloud-display illusion, leaving a blank space perhaps twenty meters across. The alien—a mushroom-shaped gas bag fully 280 meters across at the top, with a forest of tentacles and fuzzy-looking appendages hanging from a narrow circle below—appeared agitated, and seemed to be feeling the damaged section with questing appendages.

The pod had deposited a second radio transceiver there, connected by the fiber-optic thread with the one outside. Garrison held his breath, wondering if the creature was going to scrape the transceiver away, cutting off all communications with the outside world… but the device was flat and slightly inset within the black wall. His telemetry coming through his IHD showed that they were still in touch with the Star Carrier
America
outside.

The pod shuddered, then started to fall.

“We’re not going to be able to hold altitude, Chief,” EN1 Roykowski said. “These pods aren’t designed for this sort of thing.”

The local gravity field, he noted, was 890 centimeters per second squared… about nine-tenths of a G. Good. There’d been some concern going in that they might find the aliens’ artificial gravity, if they had such a thing, set to something appropriate for Jupiter—two or three Gs, say. That would have made getting around difficult.

Even in near-Earth gravity, though, the VBSS pod wouldn’t serve as an aircraft. Designed to get a boarding team onto an enemy vessel, it possessed a small gravitic drive, but delicate maneuvering—hovering, for example—just wasn’t possible. It could move forward with a fair acceleration, but was not designed as a lifting body, and its dorsal grav thrusters were for changing attitude, not resisting a steady .9-G pull. Archie Lamb was keeping the pod airborne at low speed, but the craft was starting to fall.

What, Garrison wondered, were the options? The pod was intended to deposit its payload of combat boarders on the interior decks of an enemy ship… but this thing didn’t
have
internal decks other than the featureless and gently curving spherical wall of this kilometer-wide inner chamber. He studied the alien for a moment longer. Although attaching emotion or rational meaning to something that alien was problematical, to say the least, it truly appeared to be anxious about the bulkhead surface area damaged by the pod’s entry, and didn’t even seem to be aware of the pod itself. He thought about it. A human might be aware of it when a portion of a large flatscreen monitor a few centimeters across went dead… but he probably would not notice an ant crawling across the sofa he was sitting on, not unless he was looking for it.

As he watched, the black area of the inner surface lit once more, a seamless part of the surrounding vista of cloud-cliffs and sky. The alien, like some unimaginably vast medusoid jelly in Earth’s seas, began rising again, rotating slowly in the clear, crystalline air.

Garrison was using the pod’s optical sensors, zooming in on the alien. The surface of the thing seemed smooth from a distance, but under high magnification, much of it appeared rough, even convoluted.

In his mind, using the in-head display he was sharing with the others, he indicated a portion of the enormous being’s anatomy.
“There,”
he said. “Take us
there
.”

The pod accelerated toward the H’rulka giant.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America

Sol System

2302 hours, TFT

“This is incredible,” Dr. Wilkerson said. “Absolutely amazing!”

Koenig smiled. Wilkerson had patched into Koenig’s link with the SEALS on board the alien ship, and he seemed to be drunk with excitement. “Are you talking about the alien, Doctor? Or the way Chief Garrison is carrying out his mission?”

“Oh, your SEALS are obviously remarkable individuals,” Wilkerson said. “But I was referring to that… that life form. That is a H’rulka?”

“We think it must be,” Koenig told him. “It seems to fit what the Agletsch told us about them twelve years ago. Hot-hydrogen floaters, very large… though I didn’t expect them to be
this
large!”

“How big is it?”

Koenig glanced at the telemetry being transmitted from the SEALS. “Just over 280 meters across the top. The gas bag is two hundred meters high… and the tentacles hang about a hundred meters below that.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever get over just how inventive life is. Do you know… there was actually a time, back before we’d made contact with other species, when we assumed that anything we met out among the stars would be more or less like us?”

“I guess the Agletsch were a bit of a shock, then.”

“I guess they were.”

Garrison was taking the pod directly toward the H’rulka’s underbelly. The other H’rulka in the image, the huge swarm of them far off, appeared to be part of the background projection. That, Koenig reasoned, might be a clue to the aliens’ psychology. The illusion of wide-open, cloud-walled spaces must be there to remind the ship’s crew of home. They might well be claustrophobic if they couldn’t see clouds and open sky… which would be a serious disadvantage for any star-faring race.

And if that drifting herd of gas bags visible in the far distance was any indication, individual H’rulka might get nervous or depressed if they couldn’t see other members of their own species. There apparently was only one real H’rulka on this ship… or in this chamber, at any rate.

It occurred to Koenig that this ten-kilometer-long vessel might be the H’rulka equivalent of a single-seat fighter.

“Damn,” Wilkerson said. “What the hell are those SEALS trying to do?”

The VBT–80 was close enough to the H’rulka now that the thing’s body blotted out the entire view forward—a red-brown-yellow-black forest of feathery tentacles and things like trailing vines hanging down around the upward-drifting balloon. The pod brushed across a number of tentacles, which had the appearance of an enormous and complex tangle of tree roots, but the touch didn’t seem to elicit a reaction from the titanic being. The pod was angling over now, flying level instead of up. It emerged above the twisting mass of tentacles, and seemed to be moving toward a kind of ledge or organic platform running around the creature just above the base of the gas bag.

“I think Chief Garrison has found a place to land,” Koenig said.

“Base, Black One,” Garrison’s voice said. “Any ideas for talking with this thing?”

“Can you patch me through to him?” Wilkerson asked Koenig.

“You’re on.”

“Yes, actually,” Wilkerson told the SEALS. “I understand you have a PRC–2020 SMRS?”

“The Prick–2020, yeah.”

“Uh… yes. If you can get that onto the creature, we might have a chance.”

“Listen,” Garrison said, “we’re getting a lot of background radio noise in here. Some of it seems to be coming from our big friend, the rest from the surrounding bulkheads.”

“Modulated radio signals, yes. We think that is the H’rulka speaking.”

“Yeah? Who’s he talking to?”

“His ship.”

The VBT–80 pod grounded on the ivory-white platform, a frilly, pasty white horizontal surface extending out from the swell of the gas bag by a good ten or fifteen meters, and apparently running all away around the body of the thing. The tentacle mass rose slightly above the layer of the platform from underneath, looking a little like a wall of dense jungle vegetation, but moving with a slow, writhing agitation.

“End of the line!” Garrison called. The walls of the boarding pod split wide, and six Navy SEALS spilled out onto the fleshy platform. Each man was wearing highly specialized combat armor, form hugging, with myoplas musculature that responded to his movements and amplified his strength. Their surfaces were coated with nanoflage that absorbed and re-emitted light of appropriate wavelengths, creating… not invisibility, quite, but a hazy blur that rendered each man indistinct against his surroundings.

Three of them carried laser rifles, three packed man-portable plasma weapons. Garrison hauled a large backpack out of the open pod, which he dragged toward the vertical surface of the gas bag close by.

“Now I know how a fuckin’ flea feels,” one of the SEALS said.

Koenig was seeing the SEALS’ surroundings through the eyes of Chief Garrison, and so could only see what the chief was looking at. The glimpses he got of the interior of the sphere were of spectacular vistas of cloud and sky, of an incredible beauty awesome in both its intricate detail and its scale. Unfortunately, the chief was more focused on the job at hand, and had no time for sightseeing. Setting the satchel against the gas bag wall, he opened the pack and exposed the control panel for the PRC–2020. His glove was inset with a mesh of gold and copper threads matching the implant in his palm; he brought that down on the contact pad and opened the primary channels.

“We have data flow,” Wilkerson said. “Good signal… .”

The unit included a powerful linguistic computer coupled with a broadband receiver and spectrum analyzer. The Agletsch, according to the records, had said that the H’rulka used radio for communications both with others and with their own kind. The Turusch colony on Luna that Wilkerson had been working with had confirmed this. The H’rulka talked with one another by radio… and evidently communicated with their machines in the same way. The PRC–2020 would analyze the radio environment inside the H’rulka ship and transmit its findings to the XS teams outside by means of the fiber-optic relays the SEALS had embedded in the alien ship’s hull.

“Shit,” one of the SEALS said. “What the fuck is
that
?”

Koenig’s point of view whipped around to the left. There was…
something
on the wall of jungle a few meters away.

Black Recon One

H’rulka Ship

Sol System

2307 hours, TFT

Garrison’s eyes opened wide. What
was
that thing?

Superficially, it resembled a terrestrial octopus, but possessed only three arms. It was a bright, glossy blue in color, and something like a single round eye with a three-branched pupil was staring at Garrison from the center. Like an octopus, it had lines of suckers down each slender tentacle, but it didn’t seem to be using them to hold on. It was hanging, gibbon-like, from two looping, vine-like tentacles stretched above it,

A second blue creature swung up beside the first… followed by a third. Those cyclopean stares were unnerving.

“Hold your fire,” Garrison’s voice said. “I think they’re harmless… .”

But how did you know whether something this alien was harmless or not? Koenig noticed that several of the larger suckers close to the base of the creatures’ arms were, in fact, openings ringed by bony plates, and pulsing as if in time to breathing or heartbeat. If those were mouths, they could do considerable damage… though probably not to SEALS armor. As he watched, one of the creatures wrapped all three arms around a tentacle the size of a man’s thigh, its central body everting somehow so that the eye remained visible, staring at the humans a few meters away. Garrison had the impression that it was
feeding
on the H’rulka’s tentacle.

Or… was he seeing something else, and simply not understanding it? For a scary moment, he wondered if the blue three-armed octopi were the real H’rulka, the huge floater simply the alien forest in which the octopi lived.

But… no. He’d seen the jellyfish-like floater reacting to the damage to the ship’s inner hull with apparent intelligence… and these blue things didn’t have much room in those bodies for brains. It was far more likely, he thought, that… just as humans were infested with skin mites, chiggers, and other parasites so small they were literally beneath the notice of their hosts, so, too, there might be entire alien ecosystems living in and on the bodies of these enormous beings, tiny by comparison… but in this case as large as a small dog.