Center of Gravity (22 page)

“Stow, it Lieutenant,” Sandowski replied. “They need to know what’s going down out here, back home. You can come back with the relief force.”

“Yes, sir.” He did a fast mental calculation. Three days to Earth… nine days back. “See you in two weeks.”

He heard the hesitation in Sandowski’s voice. “Roger that, Marine. Two weeks!”

“Semper fi!”
Quinton yelled, and he brought his hand down on the control contact pad. He felt movement, then gathering acceleration, pressing him back against the embrace of the seat. He overrode the safeties with a thought command already downloaded into his implant by the chief programmer at the colony. Instantly, the gravs engaged, dropping him into weightlessness as the tiny ship hurtled forward.

Engaging the gravitic drive while he was still underground was not standard practice… but no one was expecting to use the launch system again anytime soon. At over three hundred gravities, the mail packet flashed out of the launch tube, the tube structure collapsing in a rippling pulse of twisted space as he exited the tube mouth.

If there’d been any Nungies in the tube, he didn’t feel the impact. If there’d been any there, or any close by the mouth of the launch tube, he doubted that they’d felt a thing either… unfortunately.

Trailing his own sonic boom, Quinton flashed through the overcast, emerging in the bright yellow-orange light of Seventy-A, the green-tinted sky fading to ultramarine, then to black emptiness in seconds.

Sensors recorded ships in orbit,
lots
of them, but his launch time had been deliberately chosen to correspond to the time when the majority of the Turusch fleet was on Osiris’s night side. The nearest ships were firing at him, but he was already outpacing everything they were throwing at him save light, and he was far enough from the nearest of the enemy vessels that they couldn’t accurately track him.

The HAMP–20 Sleipnir-class mail packet was the smallest human-made vessel capable of interstellar travel, and the fastest. The boat could accelerate to over a thousand gravities, and during FTL flight, where most fleet ships had a maximum Alcubierre rate of 1.7 to 1.9 light years per day, the mail packet could manage 5.33.

Earth, sixteen light years distant, was a nine-day flight for the fleet, but only three days for the mail packet.

But it was going to be a hell of a long three days… .

Chapter Eleven

4 January 2405

Sarnelli’s

Earth Synchorbit, Sol System

0035 hours, EST

Half an hour later, the five of them were at a bar called Sarnelli’s, located in the same hab but five decks down. It didn’t have the Overlook’s view, but erotic dancers writhed and twisted on the elevated stage to free-form AI music, and cozy alcoves grew themselves around the patrons, creating the illusion of privacy despite the crowds.

“You risk much by intervening in this, yes-no?” Gru’mulkisch was saying. “With your fellow humans? With the human-in-authority at the place of feeding?”

“Nah,” Gray replied. “That guy doesn’t mean anything. I just wanted to get you two out of there before the damned Authorities showed up.”

“Does that kind of prejudice bother you two?” Tucker asked. “I mean… being treated that way…”

“Treated in what way?” Dra’ethde asked.

“Being turned away like that. Being told humans didn’t want to eat with you.”

“As we explained,” Dra’ethde said, “we do not eat in public as you do. It would be, what is the word… taboo? Impolite?”

“A breaking of proper etiquette,” Gru’mulkisch suggested.

“We are learning Human social customs,” Dra’ethde added. “For us to violate accepted taboo would be expected. Yes-no?”

Gray shook his head. The two Agletsch seemed remarkably friendly, open, and sociable. It was difficult to guess what they were really thinking or feeling, however, because no emotion came across with their translated speech. The movements of their upper-manipulator leg-arms, the way they moved and shifted their eyestalks, and even the way they held their bodies might all have been clues to what they were actually feeling, but the humans simply couldn’t read them.

Going by the translated words alone, however, they weren’t at all upset by the rudeness of the Overlook’s maître d’, and Gray was having some trouble understanding that. He’d been refused service more than once when some officious twit had scanned his id and realized from his place of birth that he was a Prim, or that he didn’t have the rights of a full citizen.

At least Sarnelli’s didn’t seem to be as stuffy as the Overlook. A number of people had looked at them oddly when they’d walked in with their two alien friends, but no one had said anything. Service was strictly electronic, with no human waitstaff, and if some of the patrons didn’t like it, they could leave.

Two of the other Navy people who’d left the Overlook had joined them. Lieutenant Carstairs was another pilot, from VFA–31, the Impactors, and Lieutenant Ryan was a newbie, just arrived from Oceana with VFA–96, the Night Demons. “So what
was
that jerk’s problem with these two?” Ryan asked. “Just that they’re nonhuman?”

“I think he must have heard how Agletsch eat,” Tucker said. “It
would
upset humans nearby trying to enjoy their own food.” She glanced at the two Agletsch. “Uh… no offense.”

Neither of the beings responded. Perhaps they hadn’t understood her disclaimer as having been directed at them.

Curious, Gray pulled down an encyclopedia entry on Agletsch physiology, opening the download window in his mind. The spidery beings were actually similar to houseflies in one respect: they regurgitated their upper stomach contents onto their food before ingesting it again. That could be a pretty serious business in a creature over a meter long and massing forty kilos.

He wondered if Gru’mulkisch’s statement about Agletsch only eating in private had been a polite lie to reassure the humans. In the century or so that humans and Agletsch had interacted with one another, perhaps they’d learned that humans reacted strangely to them when they sat down together for a meal.

How the hell did you know when an alien was lying?

“I hate seeing
anyone
discriminated against,” Ryan told Tucker. “Calling the fucking Authorities. I don’t care how these two eat!”

Gray looked at Shay Ryan, intrigued. Her id said she was from Maryland, on the USNA East Coast. Her accent, though, as well as her attitude, suggested that she might be from the Periphery. She was attractive in a hard-edged way, wearing her uniform instead of civvies like the rest of them.

“Same here,” he said. “I don’t like to see people pushed around, even if they do have more legs than us. Where are you from, anyway?”

“Bethesda. What business is it of yours, Lieutenant?”

He shrugged. “Just wondering. I’m from—”

He felt her ping his id, and her eyes widened. “Manhattan, huh?” she said. Her attitude seemed to soften a bit. “My family is in Bethesda… but we started out in D.C.”

“Thought I recognized the accent.”

“Old home week for you two, huh?” Donovan said.

“Not exactly pleasant memories,” Ryan said. She looked hard at Gray. “What’s wrong with the way I talk?”

“Not a thing. But growing up peri-free, without being linked into the Nets… the way we say some words tends to drift a bit. And the way you said
Authorities
, like it left a bad taste in your mouth… .”

“Please,” Dra’ethde said. “What…
bleep
. . . weak about old home?” She placed a small data disk on the table’s ordering contact panel, transmitting a credit exchange and an order to the bar’s AI.

Whatever their dining preferences, the Agletsch had no problem
drinking
with humans. After a moment, a glass filled with vinegar rose from the table’s dispenser, and Dra’ethde grasped it with all four upper leg-arms and placed it carefully on the floor.

Agletsch anatomy didn’t permit them to use human chairs, of course; to drink, they squatted above the glass and unfolded a kind of pouch in their lower abdomen from which a fleshy, black organ disturbingly like a tongue emerged, filling the glass and sopping up the liquid. Acetic acid, Gru’mulkisch had explained earlier, was a mild euphoric to Agletsch physiology, acting something like alcohol in humans. Gru’mulkisch had already ordered four glasses of vinegar, and Dra’ethde five. Their translators appeared to be struggling now with the language—perhaps as their belchings of words became less and less distinct. The programs were having trouble with both English syntax and grammar, and occasionally a word that simply could not be translated emerged as a sharp electronic bleep.

“A human expression,” Gray explained. “Donovan meant that Lieutenant Ryan and I have some things in common.”

“Then good
bleep
meeting are,” Dra’ethde said. “Yes-no?
Bleep
. . . this.”

“Bleep,”
Gru’mulkisch agreed.

“Lieutenant Gray,” a voice said in his head. “This is Lieutenant Commander Hanson of ONI. We have downloaded a rider into your ICH.”

ICH stood for intracerebral hardware, Gray’s brain implants. A rider was a limited-scope AI that could see and hear everything Gray saw and heard, and transmit everything to another site.

“What the hell are
you
doing here?” Gray replied, subvocalizing so no one at the table would hear. By
almost
speaking out loud, the neural impulses associated with speech still traveled to his larynx; nano-grown devices in his throat picked them up there, translated them, and redirected them to Gray’s Netlink.

“Your secmon alerted us to the fact that you were having an extended conversation with two aliens,” Hanson told him. “It also told us that you’d overridden the secmon’s security warning. That gives us the authority to monitor the conversation, under the provisions of the Enemy Alien Act of 2375, Chapter One, Paragraph—”

“Fuck off,” Gray told the voice, “and get the hell out of my head!”

“I’ll remind you, Lieutenant, that you are addressing a superior officer.” Hanson paused, then added, “We understand that this… intrusion might have caught you off guard. No charges will be filed
this
time. However, we do wish to elicit your cooperation. The two intelligence targets with you appear to have had their inhibitions somewhat relaxed under the influence of acetic acid. We would like you to casually question them about why the Sh’daar have attacked us.”

“Do your own damned spying,” Gray snarled, and he said it loud enough that the other humans at the table looked at him curiously. “And
get out of my head
!”

He braced himself, expecting an argument, but the voice remained silent.

“Are you okay, Trev?” Tucker asked him.

“Yeah. Sorry. Must’ve been a software glitch.” He wondered if the rider was still there, and how much it had already seen and heard. Damn it, life in the Periphery had been brutal and it had been rough, but the one perk out there had been a distinct lack of government intrusion into people’s electronic enhancements, because they’d had no enhancements in the first place. Privacy was more or less taken for granted in the wild areas outside of government control; you might not have healthcare or free transportation as a right, but you didn’t have some bureaucrat looking out through your eyes and spying on you either.

Donovan drained his glass, an unlikely-looking green concoction called a Nasty Fish, then turned to the two Agletsch. “So… one thing I always wondered about,” he said. “How come the Sh’daar are so hot to kill us?”

“Yeah,” Carstairs said. “We never did anything to
them
.”

“Ah… ah… ah…” Dra’ethde said with a curious weaving motion of her top left leg-arm. “Information
bleep-bleep-bleep
price.”

“I, ah, didn’t quite catch that,” Donovan said.

Gray palmed a table contact and ordered another drink for himself. The damned ONI must have electronically canvassed all of the humans at the table. He wondered if any of the others had refused to help them.

“I think she’s saying,” Gray said carefully, “that the Agletsch
trade
information, and don’t give it away. Is that right?”

He’d seen that in a download someplace. The Agletsch were, first and foremost, traders, interstellar merchants seeking new markets and outlets for their wares. There actually were very few things found in one star system that would be worth the price of shipping them to another, however—especially when applied nanotechnology could create vast supplies of
anything
from software blueprints. Every star system had vast amounts of raw material in the form of cometary and asteroidal debris—every natural element from hydrogen to uranium—and even works of art could be perfectly duplicated and nanufactured from detailed scanning specs.

Which meant that
information
was the one unique commodity that made interstellar trade feasible.

For almost forty years now, humans had tried to elicit information about the Sh’daar from Agletsch traders, but with little success. The alien traders appeared to value such information quite highly—so much so that no one had ever found any information that they were willing to accept in exchange.

Did the ONI actually think these two would reveal their most precious secrets just because they were drunk on vinegar?

“Truth,” Dra’ethde said, replying to Gray’s question.

“Bleep,”
Gru’mulkisch added. “Yes-no?”

Gray palmed the table contact and ordered himself another grav squeezer. The Agletsch, he thought, must have their own credit accounts through the ConDepXR, allowing them to buy their own vinegar.

“Look, there’s no point in asking them about the Sh’daar,” Gray told the others. “For one thing, most of them are within Sh’daar space. These two got trapped behind the lines, as it were. They’re not going to tell us anything that would jeopardize their homeworld, right?”

“Bleep,”
Dra’ethde agreed.

“Besides, it sounds like their translators are having a bit of trouble with the nuances right now.”

“Well, that’s gratitude for you,” Donovan said. “We help these two, keep them from getting picked up by Security… and they won’t even say why their masters want to pound us back into the Stone Age. Hell, I’d think that
anything
that helped end this damned war would be worth something to
both
sides.”

“That one,” Dra’ethde said, pointing at Donovan with an unsteady leg-arm, “
bleep
right about thing. Information
bleep
all species. Human. Agletsch. Sh’daar. Even Turusch. Even Nungiirtok.”

“Don’t like Nungiirtok,” Gru’mulkisch said.

“Who does?” Dra’ethde said. “But help every being.”

“Agreement,” Gru’mulkisch said. “And these humans
bleep
help us.”

The translation software, Gray decided, was having particular problem with Agletsch verbs. But if he was following the weaving conversation right, the Agletsch were working their way up to justifying
some
sort of revelation. The possibility outweighed his own dislike for the ONI and the Confederation’s security apparatus. He
was
curious… and knowing what the Sh’daar were actually after might well help the Confederation finally understand its implacable enemy.