Center of Gravity (2 page)

Chapter One

21 December 2404

TC/USNA CVS
America

Approaching SupraQuito Fleet Base

Earth Synchorbit, Sol System

1235 hours, TFT

The star carrier approached the gossamer structure with a delicate grace that belied the vessel’s titanic mass. Her hemispherical forward shield, pitted and scarred by innumerable impacts with dust motes and radiation, bore her name in sandblasted letters ten meters high:
America
.

Mushroom-shaped, the ship was 1,150 meters long. The forward cap, 500 meters across and 150 deep, served as both radiation shielding and as holding tank for 27 billion liters of water, reaction mass for the ship’s maneuvering thrusters. The slender kilometer-long spine was taken up primarily by quantum-field power plants, maneuvering thrusters, and stores; twin counter-rotating hab rings tucked in just behind the shield cap carried the ship’s crew of nearly five thousand. Around her, escorting vessels paced themselves to their ponderous consort’s deceleration, minnows in the shadow of a whale.

Thirty-six thousand kilometers ahead, Earth gleamed at half phase—with dawn breaking across eastern North America, while the Atlantic, Europe, and Africa lay in full light between swirls and shreds of brilliant white cloud. At this distance, the planet spread across just 20 degrees of arc pole to pole, appearing delicate and impossibly fragile.

More fragile still, though, was the web of orbital structures just ahead in
America
’s path. SupraQuito hung suspended on the slender tether of its elevator cable in synch-orbit, directly above Earth’s equator some 35,783 kilometers above the top of the mountain to which it was anchored. The structure—or interconnected series of structures, actually—was an enormous collection of hab modules, shipyards, orbital factories, environmental facilities, power plants and collectors, agro spheres, and docking facilities suspended between the elevator dropping to Earth, and the support tether leading up to the anchor some thirty thousand kilometers farther out.

From here, SupraQuito—including the tangle of structures that housed the Earth Confederation government—was visible, barely, as a thread-slender gleam of reflected sunlight, with constellations of tiny stars showing in the shadows. Some day, a thousand years hence, perhaps, SupraQuito would join with the other two space elevators, at Singapore and at Tanganyika, and become a true, inhabited ring encircling the Earth. At the moment, the entire massive structure appeared gossamer and delicate, far too insubstantial to trap the oncoming bulk of the Star Carrier
America
.

America
herself was at the helm. The powerful AI residing within the carrier’s electronic network possessed far more memory and processing power—by several orders of magnitude—than did a merely human brain. Exact comparisons between the relative brainpower of man and machine were meaningless, however, and probably impossible to calculate in any case.
America
’s mind, if that was the proper term, was wholly focused on the ship, its systems, its functioning, its navigation and control. At the moment, she was judging the remaining distance between her prow and Docking Tube One at the SupraQuito Military Fleet Base now just a few hundred kilometers ahead, and her own rate of deceleration. With a closing velocity of 8.64 kilometers per second, she needed to increase the gravitational mass currently being projected dead astern by 37 percent in three… two… one…
now
.

America
kept up a running dialogue with her counterpart at Fleet Base Approach Control, with every aspect of her vector checked hundreds of times each passing second. The docking facility was not stationary, of course. Its
omega
, its angular velocity, kept it precisely above its attachment point in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador. At synchronous orbit, this worked out to 3.0476 kilometers per second.

For ten long seconds,
America
decelerated. With the ship enmeshed within the gravitational field of the projected singularity aft, the deceleration was unfelt by the vessel’s passengers and crew. For them, the slowly rotating hab rings provided spin gravity.
America
slowed… slowed…

A final, precisely timed nudge from singularities to starboard gave her the necessary 3.0476 kps lateral velocity.

And with perfect choreography the massive carrier dropped into the sweet spot just five kilometers off the docking port, all singularities winking out before they could warp the delicate structure of the base. Grappling tethers, extended along the carrier’s length, reached toward the dock.
America
would be warped into her berthing space—an ancient seafaring term that had nothing to do with her space-bending Alcubierre faster-than-light drives. The tethers connected with grappling points along the berthing area and began to contract. A small fleet of powerful little tugs emerged from the base, taking up station and nudging the carrier toward the dock. Slowly, very slowly, the quarter-million-ton carrier was hauled into port.

While
America
’s AI was far more powerful in most respects than human intelligence, the ship possessed nothing like human emotion. She heard the cheers from personnel on her bridge and in her CIC, from lounge decks and ready rooms and flight decks where members of her crew had gathered to watch the docking. Most of them, evidently, were delighted to be
home
, though the carrier had only an academic understanding of what that might mean.
America
had been on extended patrol for the past six weeks, watching for evidence of further incursions by the enemy Turusch. Her admiral had been ordered home to attend a ritual that
America
did not understand at all, even in theory.

The tether cables continued to contract and the dockyard tugs continued to nudge, drawing the ship closer and closer to her berth. Braces gently swung out to arrest that movement with a jar barely felt by the humans on board. Magnetic clamps snapped home, and the debarkation tube extended from the berthing module to
America
’s quarterdeck, located in zero-G at her central spine, immediately abaft the shield cap and just forward of the still rotating hab modules.

“All hands, this is the Captain.” The voice was that of Captain Randolph Buchanan,
America
’s commanding officer. “Welcome home!”

But for the Star Carrier
America
, this certainly was not home.

This was a temporary waypoint, a momentary interruption of her duties, of her electronic life.

For
America
, home was always…
out there
.

Admiral’s Quarters, TC/USNA CVS
America

SupraQuito Fleet Base

Earth Synchorbit, Sol System

1405 hours, TFT

“Why in a quantum-warped hell do I have to
go
to this thing?” Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig glared at his own image projected on the wall screen in his quarters.

“Your adoring public, of course,” a voice replied in his head. “They want to see you, shake your hand, and give you the worship due a conquering hero.”

“Bullshit,” Koenig growled. “I think it’s just more politics, and the sooner I’m back on
America
’s flag deck the better, so far as I’m concerned.”

“Harsh words from the man who saved Earth.”

He winced a bit at that. He’d saved Earth, yes, in what was now being called the Defense of Earth, a rare and hard-won naval victory just two months ago. But there’d been losses… terrible losses. And one of them…

“Let me see you, Karyn,” he said.

The room’s electronics projected a holographic image into the suite’s sunken living area, a smiling woman Koenig’s age in the black-and-gray dress uniform of a Confederation Navy rear admiral. She looked… perfect, exactly as he remembered her.

Exactly as she’d been before the high-velocity Turusch impactor had slashed through the military synchorbital base above Mars known as Phobia, wrecking Mars Fleet CIC, the fleet dockyard, and killing thousands of civilian, Marine, and Navy personnel… including Karyn Mendelson.

He’d recovered her PA, her personal assistant. Copies had resided within his own communications implants, and in his office on board the Star Carrier
America
, and elsewhere. When she’d been alive, it had been able to project an AI simulacrum, an avatar, of Karyn indistinguishable from the living person over any communications or virtual net links. PAs could project the owner’s image to field the flood of routine requests and calls received every day. Such avatars were smart enough to hold conversations and even make routine decisions for the original.

They weren’t the same, though, weren’t as responsive or as smart, and most important, they weren’t flesh and blood.

God, he missed her.

The image in front of him looked a little sad. “You really should see the psych department,” she told him. “You’re hanging on to the… memories, using them to keep yourself from having to grieve.”

“Since when did you get reprogrammed as a psytech?” he asked the image. He tried to keep the words light and bantering, and knew he’d failed.

“Karyn Mendelson had considerable psych experience,” the image told him. “She commanded the fleet at Arcturus Station last year, remember, before she was assigned to Admiral Harrison’s command staff.”

“I know, damn it, I know. I just… I just don’t want to lose you.”
Again
. . . .

“Alex, you
have
lost me. Lost
her
, rather. A PA simulacrum cannot substitute for a real human.”

“Maybe not,” he replied, stubbornly sullen. “And maybe you’re how I can… get used to the idea that she’s gone.”

“A psytherapy session would be better, Alex.”

“Look, I don’t want to talk about it now, okay? I’m supposed to be at this damned reception tonight. The Eudaimonium Arcology.”

“Yes, Alex.”

And that, he thought glumly, perfectly summed up the difference between a PA avatar and the real person—ignoring the fact that you couldn’t
touch
an avatar. The real Karyn would never have let things rest there, would have kept arguing with him if she thought he was doing something stupid. Her PA’s holographic projection, directed by certain software protocols, simply agreed with whatever he told it to do.

It didn’t help that the AI program, likely, was right. The Navy relied heavily on advanced psychiatric medicine these days, including the use of elaborate virtual psytherapeutic replays of traumatic events, to treat the casualties of modern warfare. He’d been through virtual simulations himself more than once. Nothing to it… .

He just didn’t want to forget her.

A comm signal chimed in his head. “Admiral?” It was his senior aide, Lieutenant Commander Nahan Cleary.

“Yes, Mr. Cleary.”

“It’s time to go ashore if you want to get there in plenty of time.”

“I’ll be right there.” He checked his inner time readout. Just past nineteen, Fleet Time, which was GMT for Earth. SupraQuito was in the same planetary time zone as the Eudaimonium Arcology, a five-hour difference; it was now 1409 EST.

Lieutenant Commander Cleary was stretching somewhat the need for urgency. Admirals did
not
ride the space elevator with the general public, which would have meant a two-hour trip down the express to Quito, and another hour in the subsurface gravtube to New New York. The admiral’s barge on board the
America
would get him to the Eudaimonium Arc in less than an hour. The invitation was for seventeen, local time, so he still had almost two hours before he absolutely had to leave. Cleary, however, like all good aides, tended to fuss worse than a nagging PA, and didn’t like to entertain even the possibility that his admiral would be late.

He wished he could blow off the invitation entirely, though. He was busy working on a set of tactical evaluations with Fleet HQ, and he didn’t have time for this nonsense.

But for military personnel an invitation from the president of the Confederation Senate himself was an order, not a suggestion, and Fleet Admiral Rodriguez would be there as well.

Better to go and get the damned thing over with.

Another chime sounded, and this time Karyn’s image appeared, his personal assistant serving now as his secretary.

“What is it, Karyn?” he asked.

“An incoming fleet communication, Alex,” she said. “You’re really going to want to see this.”

“Put it through.”