Center of Gravity (35 page)

When it analyzed Koenig’s speech, it noted several data of interest.

“Our objective is the Alphekka star system, 41.5 light years from Arcturus… and 72 light years from Sol.”

“It’s twenty-four days to Alphekka.”

“Intelligence has identified the Alphekka system as a possible Sh’daar base and staging area, quite possibly for their operations at Arcturus and Eta Boötis and, ultimately, against Sol. We are going to hit whatever is at Alphekka, and we are going to hit it hard… .”

With no direct link to the portions of Gru’mulkisch’s brain containing navigational data, the Sh’daar Seed had no way of knowing what was meant by the word “Alphekka.” It was a human star system name, obviously… but
which
star, of some hundreds of billions in the galaxy? The Seed did not know what was meant by “light years,” either, or by the word “days.”

But none of that mattered, because the Sh’daar Seed inhabiting Gru’mulkisch was still sensing the local H’rulka radio net and, within it, the echoes of other Seeds inhabiting other beings… the H’rulka of the gas giant the humans called Alchameth.

Drawing energy from its host’s metabolism, the Seed accessed the local net and uploaded Koenig’s speech.

By the time
America
and her consorts got up to speed and had folded space around themselves, the data was being shared by the Sh’daar Seeds inhabiting some hundreds of H’rulka on Alchameth, including those readying the starship for boost.

Other Sh’daar agents, higher up in the hierarchy of Sh’daar sentience, would know just what to do with it.

Chapter Eighteen

25 February 2405

Admiral’s Office, TC/USNA CVS
America

Approaching Alphekka System

0915 hours, TFT

Admiral Koenig had been studying the data for so long he had it memorized.

Star:
Alpha Coronae Borealis

Coordinates:
RA: 15
h
 34
m
 41.2681
s
DEC: +26˚ 42’52.895” D 22p

Alternate names:
Alphekka or Alphecca, Gemma, Gnosia Stella Coronae or Gnosia, Asteroth or Ashtaroth, 5 CrB.

Type:
A0V/G5V;
Period:
17.3599
d
;
Semimajor Axis:
2.781 × 10
7km
;

Orbital Eccentricity:
0.37

Mass
: 2.58/0.92 SOL;
Radius:
2.89/0.9 SOL;
Luminosity:
74/0.81 SOL

Surface temperature:
~9,700
o
/5,800
o
K

Age:
314 million years

Apparent magnitude (Sol):
2.21 (2.24 / 7.1);

Absolute magnitude:
+0.16/+5.05

Distance from Sol:
72 LY

Planetary system:
Probably none. IR evidence suggests the presence of a large protoplanetary disk of dust, gas, and cometary debris.

He’d pulled the data up once again on the large projected display in his office. After three weeks in a metaspace bubble,
America
was preparing to re-enter normal space, and the question occupying the mind of every CIC officer and fleet tactician was what they would find waiting for them when they emerged. In particular… why did the Sh’daar or their clients have any interest whatsoever in a star like Alphekka?

Obviously it wasn’t for the ambiance. Alphekka was a double star—an A0 star two to three times bigger and 74 times brighter than Sol orbited by a G5 sun a bit smaller and a bit dimmer than Sol. The semimajor axis of that orbit was less than thirty million kilometers, the two swinging around one another with a period of seventeen days, so the two stars were close. The two stars would have a single habitable zone, extending from about seven to twelve AUs from their common center of gravity.

The problem was that there wouldn’t be planets there, at least not
mature
ones. Alphekka was an extremely young star system, just 314 million years old. IR satellite readings going as far back as the late twentieth century showed an excess of infrared energy at wavelengths of twenty-four and seventy micrometers, suggesting the presence of a thick and very broad disk of dust and gas circling the two stars, the raw material out of which planets might one day form. If there were any planetary bodies in the system now, they would be small and molten protoplanets, subject to ferocious meteoric bombardment as planetesimals continued to come together within Alphekka’s stellar womb. A number of stars possessed protoplanetary clouds; Beta Pictoris was one, Vega another, Fomalhaut a third. Stars so young could not possibly be host to native civilizations; life would not be able to evolve for some hundreds of millions of years, yet; on Earth, it had taken 800 million years before the first single-celled organisms had appeared within the planet’s newborn oceans, and another 2.8
billion
years before the appearance of multicellular life. Alphekka didn’t yet have any real estate worth colonizing.

So why had the Sh’daar chosen the place? What could they be doing here?

Evidence of a Sh’daar presence at the system had come from WHISPERS, the weak heterodyned interstellar signal passband-emission radio search. Ten-kilometer-wide radio telescope antennae orbiting Pluto, Eris, Orca, and Sedna formed a very wide baseline for interferometric studies of other radio signals coming in from other stars. Although radio signals tended to fade out and become lost in the hash of background noise from the galaxy, large antennas and interferometric baselines several hundred AUs across let AI listeners sift the noise for heterodyned signals. Hundreds of thousands of heterodyned signal sources were known today; Alphekka had been identified not long after WHISPERS had come on-line in the twenty-second century.
Someone
had been out there for over two hundred years at least, and while ONI couldn’t read what those signals were saying, they seemed to match frequency patterns and modulations favored by the Turusch, the Jivad, and other Sh’daar species.

There was a very good chance that those signals were military.

The ONI’s best guess was that Alphekka was a supply depot and military staging area for Turusch fleet elements, possibly for operations directed at Arcturus and Eta Boötis, though it was important to remember that the signals WHISPERS was picking up today were seventy-two years old. Had the Turusch been planning their attack on Arcturus Station that long ago? Or were enemy activities at Alphekka simply directed at reconnaissance of star systems along the periphery of human-explored space?

A sneak-and-peek reconnaissance probe to Alphekka might have answered some of those questions. Koenig had suggested sending one when he’d originally written up the proposal for Operation Crown Arrow a year ago. The idea had been down-checked by the Senate Military Directorate, however, for fear that a probe
might
be detected… and if it was, that would call the enemy’s attention to the Confederation’s interest in the system, and even, possibly, result in the Turusch laying some sort of a trap in advance of the CBG’s arrival.

Given that the enemy had spotted the ISVR–120 probe passing through the Arcturus system last December and followed it back to Sol, Koenig had to admit that the concern was valid. Once the battlegroup had reached Arcturus, the question was moot; the fleet could not afford to wait seven weeks for a probe to make the voyage out to Alphekka, record what it found, then travel all the way back to Arcturus to report. Having hit Arcturus, they needed to move on to Alphekka
now
, with an absolute minimum of delay, before the enemy figured out that Alphekka might be the battlegroup’s next target.

They would know soon enough, now.
America
was scheduled to break out of metaspace in just two more hours.

“And what will you do then?” Karyn’s voice asked him.

“Depends on what happens at Alphekka, doesn’t it?” he replied.

“Operation Crown Arrow ends there,” the PA avatar said. “But you’ve been thinking about other operations, deeper into Sh’daar space.”

“Of course. Every good senior military officer is always thinking about the next step, even while he’s carrying out the last one. I do know we, the Confederation, can’t fall back on the defensive. If we carry the war’s center of gravity to the enemy, we have to keep it there.”

“But for how long, Alex? The Confederation is still an insignificant fraction of the entire galaxy… a few hundred star systems against four hundred billion stars, untold billions of worlds, hundreds of thousands of civilizations.”

He gave a wry grin. “It’s worse than that, Karyn. The Confederation would make peace with the Sh’daar if they could. And they may yet. We have thirty-one ships in the battlegroup. Thirty-one ships against a galactic empire.”

“But you don’t believe in a Sh’daar Empire.”

“No, but the concept will do until something more descriptive comes along. Whatever the Sh’daar are, they seem to have won the hearts and minds of a lot of sentient beings—the Turusch and the Jivad, especially. And the H’rulka, unless what we did at Arcturus makes a difference there.”

“So… my question still stands. How long will you keep fighting? How far into enemy space do you intend to take your thirty-one ships?”

“As far as I have to,” he replied. “We still have a good chance, so long as we can stay at least one jump ahead of the enemy. A series of lightning-quick raids, taking out their supply depots and advance bases… We may end up with half the galaxy chasing us, but as long as we don’t let ourselves get cornered somewhere, we can pull this off. I wouldn’t be gambling with the lives of my people if there were no chance of survival at all.”

“And Earth? The Confederation Senate?”

“We show them that we can win. We bloody the Sh’daar Empire badly enough that they back off and leave us alone, at least for a few more centuries.”

“You’re gambling on the Vinge Singularity, aren’t you?”

“It’s kind of tough to gamble on a theoretical concept when you don’t have the faintest idea what that concept means,” Koenig said carefully. “Especially when the stakes are forty-two thousand men and women under your command… and, ultimately, your entire civilization. But… yeah. The Confederation needs time to develop new technologies and to let some old ones mature. We know the Sh’daar don’t want us going further with GRIN tech. They
fear
us, or they fear what we may become. That gives us an advantage.”

“Humankind has been on the verge of the Technological Singularity at least since the early twenty-first century,” Karyn pointed out. “There were a number of writers, philosophers, and scientists then who expected that advances in nanotech, computers, and robotics, especially, would bring about a new age where life would essentially be unrecognizable to earlier generations within twenty years or so. But what happens to us if it’s
another
five centuries in coming?”

“You’re unusually cheerful this morning, Karyn.”

“I’m concerned that you’ve not thought this through. It’s possible that you’re putting your career, your life, and the lives of those under your command at risk with little or no justification.”

“It’s called ‘taking a chance,’ Karyn. Something AIs like you have trouble with.”

His PA avatar withdrew then, leaving Koenig with his own dark thoughts.

CAG’s Office, TC/USNA CVS
America

Approaching Alphekka System

0945 hours, TFT

“So, Gray. Have you learned anything?”

“If you mean, sir, that I shouldn’t throw grapefruit juice into the face of another flight officer… yes.”
Even if the little troll deserves it
, he added… but kept the thought to himself.

Although he physically was in a ViR lounger in the Dragonfire ready room, Gray was, in his mind, standing at attention in front of the desk of Captain Barry Wizewski,
America
’s CAG. Wizewski was a lean, leathery-looking man with a heavily creased face. He looked fit but
old
. Scuttlebutt within the squadrons suggested that he consistently refused anagathic treatments for religious reasons, that he was sixty years old and actually
looked
it. White Covenant protocol made it impossible to ask him about his personal religious beliefs… but it was hard to imagine another reason. Even Gray, now that he was a full citizen, received nananagathic treatments every time he went to the sickbay for his once-yearly checkup. Prims were notorious neo-Luddites.

“Last September, Lieutenant,” Wizewski continued, “you got into a brawl with a brother officer, Howie Spaas. Your Fitness Reports over the last five years show a predilection for getting into fights—verbal altercations at the very least—with other officers. You do realize that your naval career depends on your fitreps, right?”

“I’m very much aware, sir.”

“And do you realize that your counseling session will ride with you in your records throughout your naval career.”

“I know, sir.”

Four days after the juice incident in
America
’s Number 2 Mess Hall, Gray had been called on the carpet in front of Wizewski. Collins had been there as well, as the aggrieved party. Wizewski had listened to them both—Gray’s side, that Collins had called him a coward, and Collins’ side, that he’d made himself scarce during the battle off Alchameth. Collins had been dismissed, then, with a warning that she’d better learn to get along with her fellow officers no matter what their social or economic background. Gray had remained for a remarkably thorough out-chewing… followed by an order to report to the neuropsytherapy department for a therapy update.

The year before, Gray had been diagnosed with PTED—Post Traumatic Embitterment Disorder, a potentially serious emotional sickness brought on in his case by the loss of his wife, his former life and home, and his enforced commissioning in the Navy. He’d undergone a therapy set already and been declared fit for duty.