Center of Gravity (26 page)

The Dragonfires, the Lightnings, and the Night Demons would decelerate into circum-Alchameth space in 178 minutes, the sharp, pointy end of the stick, as Wizewski had just told Commander Allyn. Just three hours from now, they would hit the enemy ships close to Alchameth and Jasper, arriving minutes after the photon wavefronts generated by the emerging battlegroup reached them.

Their mission would be to pin the enemy vessels near Alchameth until the rest of the battlegroup reached them, some ten hours later.

According to the oplan, the
America
battlegroup would stage a “shoot-and-scoot,” a fast and furious in-and-out moving at high velocity past the gas giant and its moon, smashing every enemy ship and installation it could reach. The idea was to cause as much damage as possible and, in particular, to destroy Arcturus Station, the large orbital base above Jasper.

That, it was hoped, would get the Sh’daar’s attention, and perhaps cause enemy fleets now threatening the inner core of the Confederation to break off and return to Arcturus.

By the time they did so, of course,
America
and her consorts would be long gone.

Key to the attack were the three squadrons sent in ahead of the rest of the fleet. They could cause tremendous damage to capital ships with their Krait missiles and particle beams, especially if the enemy was caught napping, and their sensors would locate every enemy ship for the fleet’s targeting AIs. The problem lay in how long it would take the rest of the fleet to arrive.

For the thirty-six fighters of those three squadrons, it would be an agonizingly long ten hours before the fleet came zorching in behind them.

Arcturus Station

Jasper/Alchameth

Arcturus System

1136 hours, TFT

Vrilkmathav wondered if the Sh’daar Seed could have made a mistake.

The very thought was disturbing, of course.
Unthinkable
. . . if not for the fact that it had, indeed, thought it. It checked to see if the Seed had picked up the thought, and decided that it had not.

Vrilkmathav was a Jivad Rallam, a species that had served the Sh’daar faithfully for tens of thousands of cycles. The Jivad had witnessed the Change that had seen the Old Sh’daar disappear… and since the Jivad had not been able to follow them, they had continued to serve the Remnant ever since, ultimately accepting the Seeds as marks of honor, as emblems of the close bond the Jivad Rallam still maintained with the galaxy’s masters.

Could
the Masters have made a mistake?

Vrilkmathav rolled through the alien corridors, rippling its way toward the captives’ den. The Jivad were massive tentacular decapods, with under-body tentacles held in a tight, writhing ball as they moved forward on undulating twists, tasting the ground as they moved.

It reached the hatch leading into the den, a massive nanoseal entryway flanked by two armed and heavily armored Nungiirtok guards.

“Here for another one?” the lead guard asked him in thickly accented
Drukrhu
, the Agletsch-designed
Lingua Galactica
used by most of those of the masters’ servant races that relied on audible, air-generated phonemes for communication. “You
thabbik
are going to use them all up soon.”

Vrilkmathav didn’t know what
thabbik
were, and didn’t particularly care. It suspected that the guard was attempting to be humorous, but they didn’t appear to have the capacity for making jokes. In any case, the ponderously rumbling Nungiirtok were difficult to understand even with a perfect translation interface through a Seed.

These guards didn’t have Seeds, however, so Vrilkmathav simply produced a memory card from its pouch and waved it above the reader beside the door. Recognizing Vrilkmathav’s clearance, the device turned the black metal of the seal to cool, rigid liquid, and the Jivad rippled through.

One of the guards followed it in. “The
klippnizh ag
have been troublesome lately,” he said. “You’ll want me in there with you, believe me.”

“Fine,” Vrilkmathav replied. “Just try not to burn so many of them if there’s trouble. As you say, we don’t have many to spare.”

A small airlock had been built beyond the first door, with a second seal. Vrilkmathav took down a Jivad respirator, fitting the two masks tightly over the breathing tubes on either side of its massive body, then waved the data card over a second reader. The doorway liquefied, and the Jivad and the Nungiirtok passed together through the black seal into misery.

The Jivad didn’t believe in anything like the human concept of hell; the closest thing they had to a deity was the Sh’daar Remnant itself. The Agletsch word
ngya
, however, translated roughly within its thoughts as “misery,” did come close. It was a Sh’daar Remnant term referring to the devastation and emptiness of being left behind, to being abandoned and alone. And the mob of filthy creatures beyond the black door certainly seemed to express such emotions.

Several thousand of the creatures calling themselves human had been captured within this huge, orbital base when it had fallen to Turusch forces just over two Jivad years ago. That had been a remarkably lucky break, for until then the masters’ forces had known little about human physiology or psychology. The population of this captured base had provided the Turusch and Jivad researchers with numerous specimens to question, study, and dissect as they attempted to build up a coherent picture of the race of beings comprising the Earth-human Confederation.

The captive population, however, was not doing well. All of the surviving humans had been herded into a single compartment in the space base, the largest space on board—most likely a room for feeding and for group meetings. Nanoreplicators producing food and water had been left intact to keep them alive, but other replicator circuits had been disabled to prevent them from building weapons or escaping the compartment.

At first, the captives had organized themselves, with leaders who’d attempted to establish communications with the Jivad and Turusch scientists who were studying them. They’d shown considerable spirit, too, attempting to break out several times by rushing the Nungiirtok guards when a researcher went in, and trying to tear them apart with their bare manipulators. Hundreds of the creatures had been burned down in those attempts.

Over the past half dozen
matye
or so, however, the humans had… changed, somehow, seeming to sink gradually into a poisonous, sullen squalor. They no longer attempted to communicate, no longer exercised, no longer even kept themselves clean. The prisoners’ den reeked of bodily excretions, filth, and the subtle tastes of ammoniate chemicals Vrilkmathav had come to associate with human fear and hopeless desperation.

The population of imprisoned humans still numbered almost a thousand individuals crammed into a space roughly two hundred by three hundred
vri
in floor area, but they were dying off at an increasing and alarming rate. Nungiirtok servitors moved through the compartment every diurnal period, removing the newly dead.

But they kept dying, whether from disease or from despair, Vrilkmathav could not tell.

Vrilkmathav surveyed the room, the Nungiirtok standing uneasily beside and in front of him. It was aware of the stares of human eyes; humans possessed eyes quite similar to those of the Jivad, though fewer of them. It could also sense the fear, the loathing, the horror behind those stares.

“I require only one,” it told the guard. “A female, if possible.”

The guard lumbered toward the mass of creatures, which struggled backward, the front ranks pressing back against those behind. A vast keening of moans and wails and shouts—meaningless words—rose from the group as the Nungiirtok picked out one creature. It struggled as the guard lifted it off the floor with its massive, armored hand. The guard then turned the specimen, extending it for Vrilkmathav’s inspection.

The Jivad accepted the creature, holding the squirming thing gently but firmly with one manipulator tentacle while using others to strip away the filthy and half-shredded textiles with which these creatures ornamented themselves. Humans, unlike the Jivad, were bisexual, with numerous morphological differences between the genders to distinguish them from each other, but it was difficult for the Jivad to tell at a glance which was which.

There was one gender-related difference, however, that made sexing the creatures easy. They generally wore decorations over that difference, however, hiding it for some reason.

“No,” Vrilkmathav said, tossing the squalling creature aside. “Another one.”

The guard picked another struggling, screaming human and held it up for Vrilkmathav’s inspection. It checked the creature’s sex, then gave an assenting flick of its fourth manipulator. “This one will do,” it said, pinning the creature’s thrashing limbs with its first and third manipulators. It could taste the sour tang of ammoniates, the bite of sodium chloride on the thing’s outer integument.

“Stop you!”
one of the creatures shrieked in clumsy but intelligible
Drukrhu
. “Why you this do?”

Vrilkmathav rolled one of its eyes to regard the human, which had stepped out from the crowd and was looking up at the Jivad with outstretched manipulators. “No do!
No do!
”

Several of the humans, apparently, had already known
Drukrhu
when the base had fallen to the masters’ forces, apparently through earlier trade relations with the Agletsch. The Jivad had been encouraging those few to teach the language to the rest, since it made verbal interrogations easier.

This one took another unsteady step forward, pointed at the creature Vrilkmathav held, and said something unintelligible, probably in its native language. Than it straightened up, still pointing. “No take…” and it lapsed into gibberish again. “Take me!”

Vrilkmathav thought the daring human was male, though it couldn’t be sure. A sexual-bond pairing of some sort—a mate?

It scarcely mattered. Vrilkmathav had the specimen it needed.
“Myeh,”
it said
,
one of several basic
Drukrhu
terms for negation.

“No do! Why you this do?
. . .
”

“To understand your kind,” Vrilkmathav rumbled in reply. “So that we may save you.”

It turned away, rolling on its tentacles toward the door. Vrilkmathav felt an emotion similar to compassion for these imprisoned beings, and didn’t like doing what had to be done. Jivad Rallam biology had three reproductive sexes, plus the maternal-neuters evolved as child rearers and protectors. Vrilkmathav was a neuter, completely sexless… but it possessed a powerful nurturing instinct that, it found, tended to interfere when it worked with these humans. The creatures were small and helpless and tended to squall like a clutch of Jivad young still trapped in the nursery tidal pools. They evidently were not adapting well to their long imprisonment here, and were failing. The knowledge tormented Vrilkmathav. They’d been put in Vrilkmathav’s care; it wanted to
help
them.

Which led it to the central question once more. Had the masters made a mistake, ordering some thousands of human prisoners to be confined here as Turusch and Jivad Rallam researchers interrogated, experimented on, and studied them? Would it have been better, perhaps, to release them as a gesture of goodwill, in order to get the human Confederation to talk to the masters’ representatives?

Was so much pain and death really necessary? Vrilkmathav didn’t know how much the creatures really felt what was done to them, but they appeared to feel pain in a manner similar to Jivad. The agitation of this human male seemed to indicate that they felt emotions akin to their captors. And why not? They were a star-faring species, like the Javid Rallam, and passion, curiosity, intellect, and self-awareness all were necessary for such exploratory ventures, surely.

Vrilkmathav was approaching the doorway seal when the human male shrieked and charged. The Nungiirtok burned the creature down with the flamer built into the black armor encasing one of its manipulators. The human gave a piercing wail, sickeningly like the cry of a Jivad youngster baking in the sun… and then all of the humans were surging forward, screaming, gesturing, a rolling tide of unthinking fury. The guard turned the flamer on them; orange fire hissed, splashed, and clung, as several humans dropped and writhed on the floor, engulfed by burning fuel. Vrilkmathav laid a tentacle on the guard’s shoulder, restraining him. “
Myeh!
Leave them!”

Reluctantly, the guard began backing toward the door. Vrilkmathav rippled through first, then waited for the guard to enter the airlock as well. Reaching up, it plucked one of the respirator masks designed for humans from the wall. The human captive struggled, trying to pull the mask off, but once it was in place, a touch of one tentacle sealed it to the creature’s integument.

Humans and Jivad Rallam breathed
almost
identical oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres, but Jivad required a higher percentage of carbon dioxide—almost 2 percent by volume—than did humans, and Vrilkmathav’s respirator added the missing CO
2
when it entered the human den. If the human didn’t wear the mask to filter out the excess CO
2
now present throughout the rest of the base, it would swiftly lose consciousness and die. Humans didn’t seem to react well to carbon monoxide, either, or to several other trace compounds in the standard Jivad Rallam atmospheric gas mix.