Center of Gravity (15 page)

“Chief!” Lamb yelled.
“Watch out!”

The pale flesh underfoot had been trembling slightly all along, Garrison had noticed, but now it gave a convulsive jerk as a meter-wide slit opened up in the organic ground just a short distance away, and something flashed out into the open. Garrison had a blurred impression of something like an enormous segmented worm, pale yellow and brown and covered in chitinous armor. Each segment had three curved spines, like legs, spaced equidistant around the body, giving it the look of an enormous centipede with extra legs running down the back. The head was a nightmare of tentacles spreading out around a gaping mouth full of sharp, bony plates.

The thing exploded from the slit, towering above the startled SEALS for a moment, the upper end of its body swaying back and forth as though it was undecided. The thing was at least three meters long, and not all of its body had emerged as yet. Lamb raised his plasma weapon, but Garrison slapped his armored pauldron with a gloved hand. “Don’t shoot!” he yelled. “No one shoot! No one
move
! I don’t think—”

With blinding speed, the swaying monstrosity whipped around and slashed at one of the blue octopi nearby, its own tentacles closing around the alien parasite and dragging it off the H’rulka giant’s looped tentacles. Garrison saw a ripple pass down the length of the thing’s body as it swallowed… and then it rippled across the platform and out over the mass of tentacles curling up just beyond. As the barbed and hooked tail of the thing emerged and vanished over the side, Garrison estimated that the creature was something more than ten meters long.

The three-armed octopi, the ones that hadn’t been eaten, had vanished. The severed tips of two slender blue tentacles remained curled about a larger tentacle, showing where the one had been hanging when it was devoured.

“What the hell was
that
?” Lamb demanded. “Pest control?”

“Something like it,” Garrison said. He was remembering an old, humorous poem he’d heard somewhere.

Big bugs have little bugs upon their backs to bite ’em.

And little bugs have lesser bugs, and so
ad infinitum.

Curious, he thoughtclicked for a quick search of
America
’s e-Net. The lines had been written by Jonathan Swift.

“Admiral Koenig?” he said.

“Go ahead, Black One.”

“Is everything flowing okay?”

“We have solid telemetry,” Dr. Wilkerson’s voice said. “What we’re going to be able to do with it, I don’t know.”

“Permission to exfiltrate, sir,” Garrison said. “It just occurred to me that this critter might have other symbiotic defenses in place… something with a taste for Navy SEALS.”

“Use your best judgment, son,” Koenig’s voice came back. “If the prick is secure and nothing’s trying to eat it, I’d say there’s no reason for you to stay there.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Garrison turned to the other SEALS. “Gentlemen, I think it’s time for us to get the hell out of Dodge.”

H’rulka Warship 442

Sol System

2330 hours, TFT

Swift Pouncer wondered if it was going mad. It was beginning to hear voices.

The nuclear detonations had left Ship 442 adrift, with no hope of rescue. The faster-than-light drive was out, communications were out, weapons were out, even the ability to see outside was gone, and the rest of the H’rulka ship-group would by now have dropped into metaspace and be out of reach. Swift Pouncer felt trapped within the too-small confines of its ship. Some 12
3
vu
ago, a tiny portion of the ship’s interior display had failed, and Swift Pouncer had nearly discorporated with shock and fear. The thought that the reassuring vista of cloud, sky, and other All of Us adrift in the distance might fail, that Swift Pouncer would find itself in a close, tight, and utterly lightless and claustrophobic enclosure was terrifying.

So when it began hearing voices—or, at least, unintelligible noises—on its primary communications wavelengths, it could only imagine that the awareness of its confinement had begun causing it to hallucinate.

There was
always
a hiss and buzz of radio static in the background, of course. The homeworld, as did most real planets, continually broadcast radio noise which was… simply
there
, without meaning, and part of Swift Pouncer’s illusory surroundings were recordings of that comforting crackling hiss.

This, however, was different: sharply voiced and modulated spikes of radio noise that had the pacing and timbre of speech… but which it couldn’t understand.

Swift Pouncer considered the possibility that the vermin outside were attempting to communicate at radio wavelengths, but discarded the thought. Warship 442’s communications suite was disabled, the external antennae burned away by nuclear explosions, and radio waves simply could not penetrate the ship’s hull structure otherwise.

Odd. If someone outside of Warship 442 had been trying to communicate, the message would have come through the ship’s comm suite, broadcast to Swift Pouncer’s organic receivers from the hull of the ship. These… noises, however, appeared to be originating from Swift Pouncer’s body itself, almost as though one of the colony components of the H’rulka floater were trying to speak to the others.

Which, of course, was flatly impossible. Only a few of the individual colony organisms that made up an adult H’rulka were self-aware, and those possessed very little individual sentience and had no way of communicating with the rest of the body on anything more than a purely biochemical level. Intelligence, for the H’rulka, was an emergent phenomenon arising from the cooperation of several different brains.

Madness!
. . . C
onfinement is destroying my sanity!
. . .

And then the seemingly random noises dropped several distinct and comprehensible words into Swift Pouncer’s awareness, and, somehow, that was worse.

Speech…

Understand…

You…

But the words were in a language Swift Pouncer recognized. They weren’t the speech of fellow H’rulka, and with no audio component, the words were flat and completely without an emotional dimension, but they sounded like a computer-generated language that Swift Pouncer thought of as something that might be translated as “Agletsch Trade Pidgin.”

The Agletsch—the Masters called them
Nu-Grah-Grah-Es Trafhyedrefschladreh
, or “1,449-carbon-oxygen-water”—were a vermin species widespread among the stars, best known, perhaps, for their far-reaching information trade network. The All of Us had first met the Agletsch shortly after the Starborn had given them the freedom of space and other worlds. The aliens had presented All of Us with a simplified and artificial language that allowed communications with the Masters, with the Agletsch themselves, and with other species with which the Agletsch were in contact.

Where H’rulka radio speech carried information in the timing of distinct pulses, however, the Masters/Agletsch language conveyed meaning through modulation of pitch, tone, and frequency. These strange signals appeared to be like that, like
audio
speech, in other words. They carried meaning in the same way as the spoken words that normally served as a kind of modifying, secondary language superimposed over the usual radio speech.

It was utterly strange, and wildly confusing.

It was, in fact,
alien
, and must be some form of communications being transmitted from the aliens outside. Just how they’d managed to accomplish that, through the solid walls of Warship 442, was beside the point just now.

Swift Pouncer wondered if it wanted to communicate with such beings… with
vermin
.

If it wanted to avoid death, or the far worse prospect of claustrophobically induced madness, however, there were few alternatives.

Swift Pouncer sent out a questing call.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America

Sol System

2342 hours, TFT

“Admiral?” his aide’s voice said. “Admiral… I’m sorry to interrupt…”

Koenig pulled back from the IHD connection, blinking. “What the hell?”

“Admiral,” Lieutenant Commander Nahan Cleary said. “I’m sorry, but you have an Alpha-priority message. It’s Mr. Quintanilla, sir.”

Koenig was very close to telling Cleary exactly what Quintanilla could do… but bit off the sharp retort. Biting off Cleary’s head would be less than constructive, and an Alpha-priority message was important. Koenig didn’t think that even an officious little prig like Quintanilla would ever dare misuse the urgency protocols.

In any case, his usefulness in the operation was at an end. Garrison and his SEALS had reboarded the pod, given it a nudge from its drives, and sent it toppling over the edge of the fleshy parapet. It fell rapidly through the dense hydrogen atmosphere toward the lower curve of the alien ship’s internal spherical chamber.

Turning the open comm channel with the pod over to Wilkerson, he nodded.

“Okay. I’ll take it here.”

A new channel opened, and Quintanilla’s image appeared hovering in the CIC immediately in front of Koenig’s workstation. It was, Koenig knew, an avatar. The disabled alien spacecraft had been traveling at just over sixty thousand kilometers per second for eight hours and twenty minutes; in that time it had covered twelve astronomical units, a distance so vast that any signal from Earth transmitted to the
America
would take ninety-six minutes to reach her, with another hour and a half plus required for the reply.

It had been all
America
and her escorts could do to catch up with the fast-moving hulk. A number of tugs were now being deployed to begin decelerating the crippled alien vessel, but Koenig didn’t want to give that order until some sort of communications had been established with the craft’s crew.

“Good evening, Admiral Koenig,” the image said. “Special orders are being uploaded to your personal e-comm net.”

“I see. And why the avatar escort?”

“I anticipate a certain amount of… resistance to these orders. I am here to answer questions you may have, and to ensure your full compliance.”

Koenig’s jaw clenched with a momentary, sharp anger. “I am not in the habit of disobeying lawful orders, Mr. Quintanilla.”

“Oh, these orders are lawful. There is no doubt of that.”

“I assume this is something from the Senate Military Directorate?”

“Higher than that, Admiral. This comes from the desk of Confederation Senate President Regis DuPont himself.”

Koenig mindclicked on his personal security code, and the orders opened within a window in his mind.

O
FFICE OF THE
P
RESIDENT OF THE
S
ENATE OF THE
E
ARTH
C
ONFEDERATION

G
ENEVA,
E
UROPEAN
F
EDERATION

2250
HR
21
D
EC
2404

F
ROM:
P
RESIDENT
R
EGIS
D
U
P
ONT

T
O:
A
DMIRAL
A
LEXANDER
K
OENIG,
C
OMMANDER
CBG–18

V
IA:
C
OMM UPLINK
7894
,
G
ENEVA

S
ECLAS:
BLUE DIADEM
/
P
RIORITY
A
LPHA/
U
RGENT

S
UBJ:
R
ETURN ORDER

A
TTACHMENT
1
:
847823 S
PECIAL
A
SSIGNMENT/
S
ENATE
S
PECIAL
O
RDER

1. Y
OU ARE REQUIRED AND DIRECTED TO DECELERATE
TC/USNA CVS
America
AND RETURN AT BEST SPEED TO THE
S
UPRA
Q
UITO NAVAL DOCK FACILITY,
S
YNCHORBIT,
E
ARTH.