Center of Gravity (32 page)

They both were cut off from the fleet’s datanet, of course, but as it happened he’d downloaded that bit of information some days ago. “It’s actually an alternate name for the star Arcturus,” he told her. “Back in the Middle Ages, in the occult traditions, there were fifteen special stars that were used in ceremonial magic. The Behenian fixed stars, they called them.
Alchameth
was what the magicians called Arcturus. Each star was associated with a different gemstone. Alchameth’s was jasper. Hence the name.”

“Magicians, huh? Sounds kind of far-fetched.”

He shrugged. “Blame Cornelius Agrippa,” he said.

“Who’s that?”

“A medieval magician and astrologer.”

“Dark ages stuff.”

“Not really,” Gray told her. “The dark ages is a kind of vague term referring to the time right after the fall of the Roman Empire. No science. The Church had the last word on everything. But what we call the Middle Ages was different. People were starting to experiment with new ideas. Astrology started to become astronomy. Alchemy flowed into chemistry and physics. Magic became science. Magicians like Cornelius Agrippa were trying to jump-start observation and hypothesis into something we’d recognize today as science, and they were doing so in defiance of the Church. It took a few centuries to get from Agrippa to Newton, and then again from Newton to Einstein… but eventually the new way of thinking took hold. Ah. Looks like the excitement is settling down. No more flashes. No more shooting.”

“The battlegroup must have passed the planet and moved out of range,” Ryan said.

“Right. They were supposed to zorch through, hitting everything they could.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Now? Just what we’ve been doing. We drift, and we wait.”

Alone, they drifted through a vast and empty night.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America

Arcturus System

2318 hours, TFT

Alchameth showed a huge golden crescent on the CIC’s forward viewer, the rings a bright white slash across its center, Jasper a gold-red sphere in half phase off to the right.
America
and the ships remaining with her, still decelerating, drifted into circum-Alchameth space. Drifting above the tactical display tank, Koenig gripped an overhead handhold and rotated to face Wizewski. “CAG, you may launch your fighters.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

The situation was better than Koenig could have hoped, a near perfect attack that had left few of the defending forces intact in near Alchameth space. A few dozen Toad fighters were still under power, but they were scattered, many were damaged, and they posed little threat to the carriers. Within the next few moments, the carriers began spilling clouds of fighters—Starhawks, the older War Eagles, and rugged Marine Hornets from the Marine carriers
Vera Cruz
and
Nassau
—which dispersed throughout the battlespace, hunting down and destroying surviving enemy ships.

The enemy’s capital ships had fled or were out of commission—destroyed or crippled. Two—one of the huge Turusch Betas and the unknown Juliet-sized vessel designated “Red-One”—still had a few weapons in service and were adrift, all but helpless, but the fighters would make short work of those.

Koenig was pleased, but the price had been steep. Three Confederation ships—
Emmons
,
Austin
, and
Decatur
—had been destroyed in the flyby, along with an estimated fifteen fighters. The surviving fighters were scattered all over the inner system. One of the first orders of business as
America
drew close to Jasper was the release of a dozen SAR tugs, search-and-rescue vessels with muscle enough to match velocities with outbound derelicts, dock with them, and drag them to a halt, hauling them back to the immediate vicinity of the fleet.

“All remaining fighters are deployed, Admiral,” Wizewski told him. “The Rattlers have begun engaging a flock of Toads near Jasper.”

“Very well. Get the SAR tugs away. We need to start rounding up our people out there.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The surviving fighter pilots had been locked up in their ships for fourteen hours now. It was time to bring them home.

As
America
slid into orbit around Jasper, Nassau released six Marine Crocodiles, combat boarding craft each carrying forty Marines and their equipment. They were ugly, slow brutes, heavily armored, like space-going tanks, sporting a pair of turret-mounted particle cannon and a nano-docking collar at their prows. Arcturus Station was eight thousand kilometers ahead, around the curve of the cloud-smeared moon.

“Admiral?” Commander Sinclair,
America
’s tactical officer, looked puzzled.

“What is it, Tacs?”

“We may want to send a team down to that target Lieutenant Gray waxed in the gas giant’s atmosphere.

“The H’rulka ship?”

“As near as we can tell, there’s nothing left of the warship. But according to Gray’s telemetry, there was some sort of a brightly lit structure down deep in the atmosphere, a base, possibly, or a city. Sir, we’re getting signals from them in Agletsch.”

“What are they saying?”

“ ‘Duresnye n’drath,’
sir.” He hesitated, then added the translation. “ ‘Help us.’ ”

“Get some probes where we can see in there.”

“I’ve already dispatched battlespace drones, Admiral. We should be getting images in a few minutes.”

“Good.” He thought for a moment. “The spooks were working on the H’rulka language after that last fight back home. They might want in on this.”

“I’ll patch a call through to Commander Morrissey and Dr. Wilkerson, sir.”

“Very well.”

He was glad that Wilkerson had transferred back on board
America
after his brief deployment on the
Kinkaid
. The man had an excellent working knowledge of Turusch thought processes—the odd layering of two individuals’ thoughts. He had a gift for being able to drop human bias and opinion from the equation when dealing with the genuinely alien.

“Images coming through from Alchameth now, sir,” a CIC sensor technician reported.

A bulkhead screen lit up, showing the broad curve of the giant’s limb. The city, or whatever it was, still lay in darkness, but the dawn terminator was fast approaching over the horizon a few thousand kilometers ahead. Though dark, the tops of the cloud bands were visible by moonlight—light scattering off of Jasper, especially—and also from the underside of the rings sweeping overhead. The canyon depths between the cloud bands were in deep darkness, though pulses and flickers of silent lightning flared against the night, each flash briefly illuminating the nearest clouds.

And there was the city… .

The structure, Koenig thought, might not be a city, as such. That was a distinctly human concept, and the H’rulka did not think like humans. The ranks and clusters of lights, however, gave the impression of a city seen from the air at night. One side, however, was dark, and appeared to have crumpled.

“We’re still not sure exactly what happened,” Sinclair said. “Telemetry from Gray’s fighter was spotty—interference from the planet’s magnetosphere. We’ll know more when we can interrogate his fighter directly. But we think that two or more nuclear explosions—Gray’s Kraits—triggered a runaway fusion reaction in Alchameth’s hydrogen atmosphere. The blast obliterated the H’rulka ship… and the shock wave may have damaged the city.”

“It looks like something punched through the platform,” Koenig said. He pointed. “Just there… and there. Those look like god-awful holes.”

“Yes, sir. The H’rulka apparently use artificial singularities to extract zero-point energy from the quantum field, just like us. When the containment fields collapsed…”

“Right. At least two fair-sized black holes heading for the nearest major gravitational mass… in this case, Alchameth.”

“Right. And that gas-bag city happened to be in the way.”

“Admiral?” a familiar voice said, speaking in Koenig’s head. “Wilkerson here. I’m in communication with a H’rulka group-organism that calls itself Abyssal Wind. They claim to speak for the Golden Clouds Gathering. That’s the name of that brightly lit structure adrift in Alchameth’s upper atmosphere.”

“What do they have to say?”

“Admiral, they need our help to evacuate the planet.”

It sounded at first like an offer of surrender. On the other side of the large CIC compartment, dozens of viewscreens were showing a confusion of images coming in from the Marine assault on Arcturus Station. Moments before, the Crocodiles had nudged into the huge, orbiting complex, their docking collars molding themselves into and through the station’s bulkheads, disgorging their combat-armored Marines. There’d been some resistance, but so far it sounded like the Marines were making good progress, and had already reached the compartment where the human prisoners were being kept.

The battlegroup had
won
, a singular victory in a thirty-seven-year war that had seen precious few victories.

“I don’t think we can look at it as a surrender,” Wilkerson told him. “They’re asking for… for cooperation, I think.”

For the past hour, Wilkerson, down in
America
’s intelligence department, had continued to talk with the surviving H’rulka. A round-trip distance of 3.6 million kilometers meant a time-delay of twelve seconds on all radio traffic, but that was an annoyance at worst. The H’rulka were eager, even frantic, to communicate.

The Gathering had indeed been damaged by the shock wave when Gray’s missiles had triggered a runaway fusion reaction, and things had been made much worse when a pair of rogue black holes had plunged through the city’s main deck. Perhaps a third of the platform had broken away and vanished into the black depths of the abyss below. Power was failing, and the surviving H’rulka feared that the antigravity lift pods that supported the massive construct would die. If that happened, the rest of the platform would fall as well.

At first, Koenig thought that the H’rulka wanted to be rescued, and for the life of him he’d not known how he could pull that off. Individual H’rulka were
huge
, hot-air balloons each a couple of kilometers across. Koenig’s battlegroup didn’t have any ship with an internal compartment large enough to carry even one of the group-organisms… and there were over twenty-five thousand survivors down there. There was no way the Confederation fleet could evacuate the platform.

As the conversation continued, however, it became clear that even if the floating city collapsed, the remaining H’rulka were not in immediate danger. They were floaters, after all, at home in the open atmosphere of gas giants like Alchameth. The Golden Cloud Gathering, Koenig was given to understand, was less city than manufacturing center… and apparently it was also the resting place of a small H’rulka starship.

And they wanted to use that ship to send a message home.

“They
are
the enemy, Admiral,” Captain Buchanan pointed out. “We generally try to
block
enemy communications, don’t we? At least, that was the fashion in vogue when I went through the Academy.”

“They are distressed civilians,” Koenig replied.

“Actually, Admiral,” Wilkerson’s voice put in, “we may not be able to make that distinction. Human society tends to assign distinct roles to individuals—doctors, politicians, technicians, soldiers. We haven’t found anything yet in the H’rulka social system that represents a professional military. They may be citizen-soldiers.”

“Meaning everyone in society can double as a soldier?” Buchanan asked.

“Something like that. They don’t seem to differentiate. Makes sense, if you think about it. There’s no such thing as an individual H’rulka. They’re colony organisms, with something like a hundred different life forms working together—gas bag, tentacles, brain, digestive system. Everything works together to create the whole.”

“Wouldn’t it be just as likely that they’d think in terms of different parts of the whole, each with its own function?” Koenig asked. “That would lead to class specialization, I’d think, like in a beehive. Workers, drones, soldiers…”

“Human thinking, Admiral. Because we’re familiar with beehives and anthills, and we still think in terms of the class and caste structures humans have used throughout history. For the H’rulka, it’s not every
one
, it’s every
they
. It’s as if humans thought about being a city, instead of being just one person living in a city. Warfare—deploying soldiers—is just one thing a city might do. It also raises food, communicates with other cities…”

“I’m not entirely sure I’m following that,” Koenig said. “But if I do understand you, it’s vitally important that we help them.”

“How so?” Buchanan asked.

“What is it that defines humans?” Koenig asked.

Buchanan shrugged. “That’s one of the all-time great imponderables, isn’t it? Communication, building societies, adapting the environment, technology…”