Center of Gravity (19 page)

“Second-guessing an enemy that is
alien
, who literally doesn’t think the way you do, is always a risky proposition. Still, they took Arcturus Station away from us a year ago. I don’t care how alien they are, they must be giving at least some thought to the possibility that we’re going to launch a counterattack… either at Eta Boötis, which we lost two months ago… or at Arcturus, which is parked right next door… three light years. Smart money says they’re reinforcing
both
systems. If we show up at one, they can bring reinforcements in from the other.”

“Three light years,” Gregory said. “Two days’ travel time?”

“About forty-one hours, actually, if their Alcubierre Effect has the same efficiency as ours. The Turusch, the Agletsch, and the Nungiirtok all have FTL drive technology that seems to be about as good as ours. The H’rulka—we’ve only encountered them twice, now. Given the accelerations they demonstrated here the other day—over ten thousand gravities!—they likely can manage much better metaspace transit times. Fortunately, they’re also not very common. Just the one ship at Arcturus, picked up by our probe, and we think that was the same ship that entered the Sol System last week. We saw none at Eta Boötis.

“So… we hit Arcturus, a quick in-and-out raid.” As he spoke, colored symbols representing the ships of a task force passed Arcturus and closed on other symbols, representing the Jovian gas giant Alchameth; its largest moon, Jasper; and the tiny attendant gleams of Arcturus Station and a number of Turusch ships.

“We stay in-system no more than eighty hours, time for an enemy ship to get from Arcturus to Eta Boötis, and for reinforcements to return. The raid should, if it goes as planned, cause the enemy to delay further strikes against Sol, and to attempt to locate our task force.”

The 3-D image pulled back, showing again a cloud of local stars—Arcturus and Eta Boötis close beside each other, drawing together as the scale of the image increased. Another star appeared in the display, again orange in color, and located about 4.2 light years farther out from Earth than the others.

A green line connected Arcturus with the new star.

“Just over three days, Arcturus to Alphekka,” Koenig said. “We have reason to believe that there is a major enemy staging area there. We hit that, causing as much damage as we can manage. That should bring in the enemy forces from Arcturus and from Eta Boötis, and buy Earth some additional time.”

“And then, Admiral? Where after Alphekka?”

“That will depend at least in part on the enemy response. I suspect we’ll have captured the attention of the Sh’daar themselves, as well as other Sh’daar allies.

“But what I
hope
is that Alphekka will be only the beginning… .”

Naval Aviation Training Command

USNANS Oceana, Virginia

United States, Earth

0815 hours, EST

Lieutenant Shay Ryan stood at attention in front of Captain Pollard’s desk. She’d been expecting a dressing-down after the incident at Port Richmond, but hadn’t expected things to get quite this serious.

“You never, I repeat,
never
get into a brawl with your brother officers,” Pollard told her. “Enlisted personnel do that sort of thing with appalling regularity. Officers do
not
. What the hell were you thinking of, anyway?”

“No excuse, sir,” she replied. Six years in the Navy had taught her the best, the
only
reply to this kind of question.

“No, Lieutenant. None of that ‘no excuse’ shit. I really want to know what made you take leave of your senses enough that you assaulted three other naval flight officers with the table in a bar.”

“Well… it kind of seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

“You broke Lieutenant Baskin’s right arm. He’ll be off duty for a week until the nanomeds regrow that bone. Why did you do it?”

Ryan was staring past Pollard’s left shoulder, looking out through the transplas window that filled the bulkhead at his back. A full gale was blowing outside; it was early morning, but the sky was a dirty blue black, with low-flying clouds racing in from the northeast. Snow mixed with sleet was blowing horizontally past the window, and the force of the winds sent tremors through the deck.

Once, centuries before, NAS Oceana had been a naval air station located just inshore from the city of Virginia Beach. The gradual rise in the world’s ocean levels, however, had drowned Virginia Beach by the end of the twenty-first century, and flooded the air station’s runways with each higher-than-normal tide or storm surge. Rather than move inland, the Navy had rebuilt on the same site.

The world ocean had continued to rise, and in another century the base site had been under a depth of twenty-five meters and more than eighty kilometers offshore, as an enormous bite of tidewater Virginia and North Carolina had vanished beneath the sea. A cluster of domes rising above mean sea level on massive pylons marked the naval air station now. The base had ridden out the tsunami from the Wormwood asteroid strike with no damage, and suffered only a minor battering when the Turusch kinetic-kill impactor had struck in the Atlantic two months ago. The structure was designed to yield, slightly, under high winds and heavy waves, but the effect could be disconcerting if you weren’t familiar with it.

The dome
creaked
as the wind clawed at it.

“I
said
, Lieutenant…”

“Sorry, sir! I was thinking. I suppose… I guess I’ve just been having some trouble fitting in. Sir.”

Pollard sighed, leaning back in his seat. “Lieutenant… for better or for worse, you are an officer of the USNA Stellar Navy. Your training here is intended to make you ready for deployment with the Confederation Navy. You understand that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“As director of the RAG squadrons at NAS Oceana, it is my duty to make certain that you do fit in… because you and your brother officers will be representing the United States in your new billets.”

“I understand that, sir.”

“I suppose Baskin, Pettigrew, and Johanson were, ah, having issues with your family background?”

“Something like that, sir.”

The bastards had been on her case since she’d been assigned to the RAG, the replacement air group stationed at Oceana. Ryan was a Prim, born and raised in a Periphery region outside of the so-called still civilized USNA. Washington, D.C., once the capital of the old United States of America, had for several centuries now been a tidal estuary, with vine-smothered, once white monuments rising from the swamp that had reclaimed the low-lying ground as far north as the Georgetown Heights. Buildings in the areas of Eckington, Gateway, and DuPont Park, many half-submerged now, offered shelter for some thousands of local squatties, the Prims, who lacked Net access, modern health care, civil security, and the basic rights of citizens.

Ryan’s family eventually had managed to move out of the swamp and up to the Bethesda Enclave, fifteen kilometers north of the former national capital, on ground far enough above sea level that flooding wasn’t a problem; but the community—living in the slums in the shadow of the kilometer-high Institute of Health tower and the even higher Chevy Chase Arcology—was made up of people who were citizens in name only. Most were refugees from the Washington Swamps; most could not afford modern cerebral implants, which barred them from basic civilized necessities, like banking and electronic communications. The most successful bootstrapped their way up the social ladder by taking service jobs, by working in the Alexandria Reclamation Projects, or by joining the military.

Shay Ryan had chosen the last option, knowing it meant a useful education download and free hardware implants that would grant her full citizenship when she got out. When they tested her at the recruiting center at Rockville, they’d discovered in her a higher-than-normal aptitude for three-dimensional thinking, and at the recommendation of her proctors, she had been shunted into officer’s training and, eventually, flight training.

Four years later, she was a newly minted USNA Navy lieutenant fresh from the flight-training center at the Sea Tower at Pensacola, and assigned to the Oceana RAG with the opportunity for assignment to a Confederation unit.

It would have been great if things had been as easy as that… but it seemed that her background had a way of following her. The USNA naval service and—even more so—the Terran Confederation Star Navy—were the most aristocratic of the various military services. Enlisted personnel might wear animated tattoos that writhed across their backs, or get into fights at local drinkeries, but that
never
happened to officers. Even a newbie lieutenant was expected to be “an officer and a gentleman or -woman,” and any behavior construed as bringing disgrace to the uniform was unacceptable.

“It was the tattoo that started it, wasn’t it?” Pollard asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know, sir. They
were
teasing me about what they called my ‘tramp stamp.’ ”

She’d gotten the animation not long after she’d moved to Bethesda—paying for it out of her income as a member of a cleaning crew in the IST basement levels. Several million dermopixels nanogrown within the skin covering her back had, in effect, turned her into a 2-D display screen. Any of a number of tattoos could be loaded into her hardware, but the only one she’d been able to afford was a pair of delicate fairies—one male, one female, with brilliant rainbow-hued gossamer wings—that fluttered, danced, and embraced randomly, back and forth across the space between her hips and shoulders. She’d obeyed regulations and kept the tatto switched off during duty hours, but at Raphael’s the other night, Ryan had been in civvies and it had seemed to be the place to let down her skinsuit’s back and put her winged friends on display.

Animated tattoos as an art form had waxed and waned in popularity for centuries now—sometimes as affectations of the rich, sometimes as poor man’s body art. Currently, they were rather fashionable in the upscale civilian world, and it had seemed like a mark of distinction, of
success
, and a great way to celebrate her escape from the mangrove swamps and estuaries of Washington.

She’d honestly not been aware that male-female fairy pairs were considered perverse in most circles—an animated advertisement for monogamous marriage. When Baskin had made that comment about her married parents, she’d picked up the table and hit him with it.

She hadn’t
really
been trying to kill Baskin, and Pettigrew and Johanson had just caught some of the shrapnel. But the Shore Patrol had written her up for assault, and she’d ended up here in front of Captain Pollard.

Pollard sighed. “If I were you, Lieutenant, I’d lose the fairies. They won’t do your naval career any good. As for what to do with you, however…”

He swiveled in his chair, looking out the transplas at the sleet-laden gale outside. “You’ve already put in for Confed duty, haven’t you?”

“Yes, sir.” Ryan felt a stab of fear at that. Military service with the Confederation was considered more prestigious than service with a mere national star navy. You had more chances for advancement, more opportunities for high-end hardware implants, and a better shot at good jobs when you decided to get out. Pollard, she thought, must be considering punishment that would deny her a chance at transferring to the Connies.

“I have in here,” he said, turning back in his chair and sharply tapping on his desk, “a request for two squadrons to be transferred to the CVS
America
. I’m sending up the Night Demons and the Merry Reapers, but the Demons are one short. I’m thinking that if we transfer you to star duty, get you out of Oceana and the, ah, reputation you’ve made for yourself here, it might give you a fresh start with new people. It’s Confederation service… but I do need to inform you, before you decide, that CBG–18 is about to be deployed on deep-star ops.
Very
deep. The deployment will last at least seven months, and quite possibly longer.”

Her heart quickened. She’d heard scuttlebutt about a new deep-star mission, a multi-carrier task force heading deep into Sh’daar space to hit enemy supply dumps and reinforcement centers, to knock the enemy off balance and forestall future strikes against Earth.

“Yes, sir?”

“Are you interested?”

Was he kidding? A chance to get off this rock and out among the stars? “Yes,
sir
.”

“Some of
America
’s squadrons were badly chewed up in the fight two months ago. One squadron, I believe, was down to two ships left out of twelve—that’s eighty-four percent casualties. It’s not going to be a picnic out there.”

Ryan drew a deep breath. Her father had died shortly after the move to Bethesda. Her mother was still alive, and Ryan sent her a big chunk of her paycheck each month to help her and her sister get by. But the tiny apartment in Bethesda wasn’t home, not really. In a way, she’d found a new home when she’d joined the service, and even assholes like Baskin and Pettigrew couldn’t entirely take away that sweet sense of belonging.