Center of Gravity (41 page)

The different lengths of launch rails throughout the fleet meant different velocities for the projectiles, which, in turn, meant a long temporal footprint for the impacts. Incoming rounds would begin striking Al–01 and nearby targets within another two hours, and would continue striking them for another half hour after that.

For that reason, the higher-velocity rounds, like those from
Kinkaid
, were targeted against enemy warships, since the fastest rounds would arrive first. Slower-moving rounds, like those from
America
—which had launch rails only two hundred meters long—would arrive long after the Turusch vessels had begun to move out of the way.

Instead, they were aimed at Al–01, the massive space factory in orbit around the Alphekkan double star, which couldn’t change course or speed and which would, therefore, be precisely at the point
America
’s targeting AIs predicted it would be 138 minutes after firing.

The barrage caused two logistical difficulties, but had been timed and tuned to keep those to a minimum. Each KK launch had the effect of slightly slowing each firing ship, in accord with Newton’s Third Law. Since each ship type had launch rails of different lengths—
America
’s, designed for launching manned fighters at low accelerations, were only two hundred meters long, while
Kinkaid
’s were half a kilometer—each ship was decelerated at a different rate, less for massive, short-railed ships like
America
, more for less massive, longer-railed ships like
Kinkaid
.

The result was that the battlegroup was scattering again… not by much, but enough that the different fleet elements were forced to maneuver in order to regain a semblance of their original flight formation.

The second problem was that
America
needed to bring some of the CSP fighters back on board—specifically the Starhawks of VFA–36 and VFA–44. Both squadrons had expended a considerable percentage of their Krait missiles and KK Gatling ammunition in the short, sharp firefight around the
Remington
, and they needed to re-arm.

America
had answered the second problem by matching it with the first. The carrier had cut all acceleration, so that she could take the Dragonfires and the Death Rattlers back on board. The other squadrons flying close CSP around the main fleet had not been in the fight, and would continue holding position around the battlegroup’s defensive sphere. The other capital ships would use
America
as a steady-velocity marker, and would form on her.

Remington
, Koenig noted, had taken some damage in the fight—a couple of near misses by thermonuclear warheads and Turusch particle beams. Several of her shields were down, she was leaking reaction mass from her shield cap, and one of her SKR–7s, mounted on her hull, had been badly damaged. The shield cap leak was the most serious problem;
Remington
’s CO had deployed nanorepair robots to fix the leak. Other damage could be repaired later, though the SKR might well be a total loss.

That wasn’t an insurmountable problem so far as the battlegroup went, however. The fleet still had seven operational Scroungers, more than enough to meet battlegroup needs for the foreseeable future.

And
Remington
had now rejoined the CBG and was under the umbrella of
America
’s CSP. There didn’t appear to be any further threats out there in the making, not until the battlegroup made its close passage of the Turusch factory some three and a half hours from now.

“Admiral Koenig?” the space boss’s voice said over the shipboard link. “The first fighter is coming in now, sir.”

“Thanks, Randy,” Koenig replied. “Let me know when the last one is on board.”

“Right.”

Commander Avery, right now, had the tough job on board the carrier—sorting out the survivors from twenty-four space fighters, some of them damaged and limping, and bringing them all in for a safe trap on board the carrier. He did not envy the man his job.

Koenig checked the tactical records. The cost of the fighter action had been heavy. Four fighters from VFA–44 had been lost—Canby, Walsh, Tomlinson, and Dulaney. Three had been lost from VFA–36—Burke, Mayall, and Zebrowski—plus one streaker.

Fighters could be replaced; that was the purpose of the CBG’s lone manufactory ship, the AVM
Richard Arkwright
. Experienced pilots could not. Basic pilot training could be downloaded through a recruit’s implants, but it still required experience and the relentless accumulation of flight-time hours to become proficient. The combat losses, both at Arcturus and here at Alphekka, would be damned tough to make up.

And what Koenig had in mind after Operation Crown Arrow would require
lots
of experienced pilots.

The single streaker—thank God there hadn’t been more of them—was a particularly vexing problem.

“Commander Craig?” he asked.

“Yessir.”

“That one streaker… from VFA–36.”

“Lieutenant Rafferty, Admiral.”

It was tougher when they had a name.

“Is he alive?”

“ ‘She,’ Admiral. Alma Rafferty. Telemetry from Rattler Five has ceased. We don’t know if she’s alive or not. Commander Corbin reports he’s ready to launch a capture mission.”

Corbin was the CO of the DinoSARs, one of
America
’s SAR squadrons.

Koenig thought for a moment.

Streaker
was fighter slang for a ship that had been damaged but not destroyed, and which was traveling on a high-speed vector away from battlespace, unable to decelerate or to change course. That sort of thing happened in fighter combat a lot. Grav-singularity projectors were particularly prone to crippling damage if a fighter was badly smashed about, and a fighter simply couldn’t carry enough reaction mass to use conventional thrusters to slow or change course.

Carriers carried SAR tugs for this purpose, search-and-rescue craft with powerful projectors, able to match outbound vectors with damaged fighters, latch on, and drag them home.
America
possessed two SAR squadrons, the DinoSARs and the Jolly Blacks, each with six tugs; and the two Marine assault carriers,
Nassau
and
Vera Cruz
, each carried one more SAR squadron.

That was a total of twenty-four tugs. In another few hours, the fighter squadrons of all three carriers were going to be locked in an epic furball, and losses—including streakers—might be high. Koenig had to decide whether to dispatch one of
America
’s SAR tugs after Rafferty’s damaged fighter. The longer he waited, the farther Rafferty would be from the fleet, the tougher it would be to catch her, and the longer it would take to bring her back,
if
she could be found in all that emptiness at all.

If he dispatched a SAR tug, though, that tug might not rejoin the fleet for many hours, possibly days. Worse, since the CBG was committed to a high-speed pass of Al–01, it was possible that tactical necessity would force them to keep going and jump into Alcubierre Drive after completing that pass. That would doom both Rafferty and the five-man crew of a tug when the vessels were left behind.

The conservative play was to preserve his assets this early in the game. Losing one pilot—who might well be dead already—was better than losing a pilot
and
a tug with five experienced crewmen. There were no guarantees that the CBG would survive the close passage of Al–01.

And yet…

Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig was fifty-four years old, and had been in the Navy for thirty-two of them. He’d joined as a midshipman cadet in 2372. Two years later, he’d been a very junior lieutenant j.g. on his first deployment, flying one of the old SG–12 Assassins off the star carrier
Constellation
. After two years of download-training at the academy, he’d been posted aboard the
“Connie”
just in time for the Battle of Rasalhague.

Rasalhague—also known as Ras Alhague or Alpha Ophiuchi—was a type A5III giant forty-seven light years from Earth. The star had a companion star, Rasalhague B, 7 AUs away and with an orbital period of 8.7 years.

There hadn’t been much there—an astronomical research station on an airless rock called Rasalhague B II. Rasalhague A was at the point of evolving off the Main Sequence, turning into a giant some twenty-five times brighter than Sol. The research station, supporting a couple of hundred astronomers and cosmologists, was there to watch the contraction of the helium core that would mark the beginning of the star’s death.

Unknown ships had arrived suddenly and obliterated the colony. Confederation Intelligence wouldn’t learn the identity of the attackers for several years yet, but the bicolored spacecraft would turn out eventually to be those of the Turusch—that species’ first confrontation with Humankind.

Connie
and seven escorts had been at a deep-space naval base twelve light years from Rasalhague when a badly shot-up scout-courier had come in with news of the attack. Admiral Benedix had ordered the squadron in for a closer look.

The Battle of Rasalhague had been a nasty defeat for Confederation forces. All six escorts, two cruisers and four frigates, plus a stores ship, had been destroyed before they could slip back into their Alcubierre FTL bubbles. The
Constellation
had escaped—barely—but she’d lost two of her three hab modules in the process, and nearly two thousand members of her crew; another five hundred had suffered severe radiation burns and died before the ship could get to a safe port.

Benedix had been court-martialed upon his return to Fleet Base Mars. He’d delayed the jump to metaspace in order to recover a dozen tugs hauling in disabled fighters. Because of that delay, a quartet of thermonuclear warheads had gotten through the point-defense fire, and the cruisers
Milwaukee
and
Vancouver
, which had closed with the
Connie
to provide covering fire against the oncoming waves of Toads, had been destroyed.

Benedix was acquitted by the court-martial board. After beating off that first wave of fighters, there’d been no way of knowing that there were so many more coming in behind the first. Benedix had ordered the radars shut down to avoid giving away their position. The board decided he’d done everything possible, given the bad hand he’d been forced to play.

But he never commanded a fleet again.

The Battle of Rasalhague was just one of the long string of defeats suffered by Confederation forces early in the war, and a relatively minor one at that. But it held special significance for Koenig.

Lieutenant j.g. Koenig had been one of the pilots rescued by Benedix’s delay. Those old Assassins were no match for Turusch Toads. During the first encounter, every SG–12 in two fighter squadrons had been destroyed or sent tumbling helplessly into the void. The young Koenig spent a
very
cold and lonely couple of hours with no power and a dying life support system, until the tug pulled him into
Connie
’s single remaining landing bay.

Benedix had gambled that there were no more nearby enemy fighters tracking the fleet, and he’d lost. Twelve pilots had been saved… but 4,500 people had died, counting the crews on board those cruisers. “Benedix Exchange” became a catchphrase throughout the Navy and the Confederation Marines, meaning to save a little by losing a lot.

And ever since, Koenig had wondered what he would have done in that nightmare situation.

This situation was different, of course, but he was facing the distinct possibility of having to employ a Benedix Exchange of his own.

But the deciding factor was Koenig’s own experience. He’d been in the position of Alma Rafferty—alone in a crippled hulk, tumbling helplessly through the night, alone in a way that very few people could begin to imagine.

“Tell Commander Corbin to dispatch a SAR. Make sure the crew is volunteer-only… and make sure they know we might not be able to wait for them.”

“Yes, sir. I was told volunteers are already standing by.”

Koenig nodded. He had a good crew, devoted to one another.

And that, he believed, was the most powerful asset he possessed in the fleet.

Chapter Twenty-two

25 February 2405

Squadron Common Area, TC/USNA CVS
America

Alphekka System

1722 hours, TFT

“Are you okay?” Gray asked her.

Shay Ryan turned away from the viewall, her arms still crossed, hands tightly clutching opposite elbows. Ryan was trembling inside and she couldn’t stop it. She despised showing weakness, any weakness at all… .

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m… fine.”

Gray nodded at the viewall. “The Admiral takes good care of his people.”

The screen currently showed a view of the
America
from a camera mounted on the outer rim of the shield cap, looking aft. One of the Brandt space tugs, a clumsy-looking assembly of spheres and canisters and folded grappling legs that gave it the look of an enormous mechanical insect, was emerging from Auxiliary Docking Bay One.
America
had, once again, cut her deceleration, in order to launch the SAR recovery vehicle.

“Who is it going after?” Ryan asked.

“Not sure,” Gray replied. “Scuttlebutt says it’s a streaker from the Rattlers. Lafferty? Rafferty? Something like that. Anyway, it wasn’t someone from the Dragonfires, and the Death Rattlers was the only other squadron turning and burning with us out there.”

“You don’t
know
?”

“Hey!” Gray said, grinning. “We have, what? Something like two hundred fighter pilots on board
America
, counting the reserves? I can’t know
all
of them.”

“Fewer than that,” Ryan replied slowly, “after that last fight. But… I know what you mean. I don’t play well with others either.”

“There is that,” Gray said, the smile vanishing. “Not what I meant, but… yeah.”

On the screen, the SAR tug was accelerating under thrusters. The ugly little craft had singularity projectors far stronger than those mounted on fighters, drives powerful enough to stop a fighter in mid-tumble, bring it to a halt, and boost it back to the star carrier. Those faceted globes at the bow that looked so eerily like the compound eyes of an ungainly insect were particularly powerful field compensators, which extended the free-fall zone far enough that tug and fighter together wouldn’t be torn apart by tidal effects. SAR tugs, though, had to be
very
careful about switching those projectors on in the vicinity of a larger ship to avoid twisting
part
of another vessel into unrecognizable wreckage. The usual safety radius was two kilometers, twice the length of the
America
.

“Do you think they’ll find the pilot?”

“I imagine so. They wouldn’t launch a SAR tug if they didn’t have a good idea where the streaker was. Especially while we’re still in the middle of a combat op.”

“All that emptiness…” She felt cold.
Terrified 
. . .

“Well, they found us okay when we streaked at Alchameth. Right?” He looked concerned, and reached out to touch her arm. “You sure you’re okay, Shay?”

“I’m
fine
!” She pulled away from his touch.

“If you say so.”

“I’m just…” She stopped, and tried again. “Trevor, I don’t know if I can still do this.”

“What? Strap on a fighter?”

“That. And, and
everything
. Blend in with these people, be a part of them. Sometimes they seem as… as alien as those bugs at the Overlook.”

“The Agletsch? I thought you liked them.”

“I did. I do.” She shrugged. “Hell, I stick up for anyone who’s getting stepped on. Those two were getting a raw deal.”

“Just like a couple of Prims from the Periphery, eh?”

“That’s just it. We’re fucking
Prims
. How do you do it, Trev? How do you keep from killing Kirkpatrick and Collins and the rest of those zeroes?”

“I dunno. Take it a day at a time.”

“When I was falling into Alchameth, you came for me. I’m grateful.”

“All in a day’s work.”

“And then you took a load of shit because you
did
help me.”

“Take nothing. I tossed a cup of grapefruit juice in the troll-bitch’s face.”

“And got in trouble for it.”

“Not so much. Three weeks off duty and a stretch with the neuropsytherapy people? That was
nothing
.”

“Well, the point is that you came and got me. But… but despite that, I feel so damned
alone
. And when I was out there off Alchameth, drifting into nothingness in a junked fighter…”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve felt alone most of my life. Even when I was still… home. In the D.C. swamps. But I never felt the way I felt at Alchameth. No other human for a million kilometers. No one but
you
.”

“Like I said, all in a day’s work. Us Prims need to stick together.”

“Bullshit. You won’t always be there to rescue my ass. You
can’t
.”

On the viewall, the tug was now clear of
America
’s shield cap. A moment later, the carrier’s deceleration resumed and the tug vanished off the screen in an eye’s blink, flashing past the shield cap and into the emptiness ahead of the larger ship.

“Shay… you’re not alone. And you won’t be. Some of these pilots, the risty zeroes, especially, are hard to live with, yeah. But they’re all part of the family and we all look out for one another.” He nodded at the viewall. “Koenig’s sent a tug out after our lost Rattler. He’ll send one out after you, too.”

She nodded, but not because she believed him. At the moment, paradoxically, what she wanted more than anything else was to be alone, to be
left
alone. And at the same time, she was terrified of dying alone… .

Shay Ryan often wondered why they’d steered her into naval aviation, back when she’d joined the military and left the risty enclaves of Bethesda and Chevy Chase forever. They’d claimed the battery of aptitude tests and simulations they’d given her at Oceana had shown she was perfect as a fighter pilot… but why? What the hell had they been looking for?

For some reason, she remembered the chase… .

At last, that was how she thought of it. She’d been fifteen, that day, not long before her family had decided to leave the swamps and head north. She’d been trapping out on the Mall, which meant running her twelve-foot skiff from buoy to buoy, checking the fish traps that had been set beneath each colored, tethered balloon floating on the dark and oily water. The Rebs had ambushed her among the huge mangrove trees that now filled what once had been the Washington Mall—had almost caught her.

The Rebs—the Virginia Rebels—were a Prim gang that came over from Arlington once in a while to raid the Community’s fish traps or moored barge farms. Usually they weren’t more than a nuisance… but if you were an attractive young woman living in the D.C. swamps you did
not
want to get caught by them. Some girls from the Community had vanished when the Rebs came raiding, and had never come back. The adults told dark stories… .

They’d come at her in boats from two directions, but she’d switched on her skiff’s little hydrogen-cell powered electric motor and rammed one of them, banging hard against the bigger boat’s side and bumping along its hull, scraping midship to stern, as leering faces yelled at her and outstretched hands tried to grab her. She fended one of them off, slashing at his face with her trap hook, the long-handled tool she used to fish up the traps, and as she slid past the other boat’s stern, she’d used the hook to rip the jury-rigged fuel line from the gasoline-powered outboard motor and then opened her own throttle wide.

The other boat had chased her… and it was a bigger, faster speedboat with a more powerful engine that should have caught her easily, but she knew the mangroves crowding the Mall and she knew the tangled architecture of the ancient and half-fallen public buildings beyond. Weaving in and out, she’d led the second Reb boat on a desperate chase through forest and ruins, never emerging into the open where her pursuers could catch her in a flat-out run.

That nightmare game of hide-and-seek had continued for fifteen minutes, until an arrow had sprouted from the chest of one of the Rebs, knocking him overboard into the shallow water. A Community Watch boat had roared in then, with Jeb Fullerton in the bow, drawing his bow and loosing arrow after arrow at the raiders. The rebs hadn’t stayed to fight, fortunately, but had put about and roared off toward the south, back to the Virginia side of the swamp.

Her interviewer at Oceana, she remembered, had been very interested in the details of that chase, had talked a lot about hand-eye coordination and a good sense of distance and vector over the water.

Had they figured that she would be good at piloting a fighter because she could zigzag among the mangrove roots without crashing into one of the massive, looming trees?

Maybe. But what they hadn’t questioned her about was her problems with fitting in, either with her own family, or among the damned risties of Chevy Chase.

Being alone… being cut off from anyone who cared…

The thought still terrified her.

Enforcer
Shining Silence

Alphekka System

1915 hours, TFT

Tactician Diligent Effort at Reconciliation was, in fact, a single three-part mind with two bodies. And it had a problem.

Eons ago, geological ages before the rise of Mind Below, the Gweh—slow and patient armored gastropods dwelling within the mountaintop biomes of the storm-wracked homeworld they called
Xchee’ga’gwah
, the Place of Coming Forth in Light—had begun making foraging expeditions into the depths they called the Abyss. Food and certain necessary metallic supplements were scarce in the Heights Above, abundant in the Abyss Below.

There was another sophont species on the homeworld. They were called Ma’agh, and they lived down there among the storms and lava flows of the Abyss, breathing the thick and poison-laden air. The small, exoskeletal creatures were primitive and violent, but willing to trade with the Gweh. They gave the foragers food and metals in exchange for the mildly narcotic circulatory fluid harvested from
grolludh
, the immense hydrogen-floater filter-feeders adrift among the mountaintop plateaus. The Ma’agh could leave their steaming pools only briefly, and would have suffocated in the cold, pure, thin air of the Heights.

Individual Gweh attempting to make the journey into the Abyss, however, rarely returned to the bright, clear safety of the Heights. The Ma’agh were capable of ambushing and killing lone Gweh if they thought they could get away with it, and there were countless other dangers within the Depths. Would-be traders faced abyssal whirlwinds, searing lava flows, poisonous gasses, and the
d’dhuthchweh
, a diminutive relative of the
grolludh
. The name meant “emphatic blossom,” and it could kill with an electric charge anything that brushed against the sweep of its dangling tentacles.

But
pairs
of Gweh, generally, had returned.

So vital to the species’ survival was the trade with the Abyss-dwellers that over twelves upon twelves upon twelves of
g’nyi
, close pairings of Gweh had become, first, a cultural imperative, and eventually, a biological one. Exquisitely sensitive to sound, they read one another’s droning hum of subvocalized thoughts in a way that seemed to be telepathic to aliens, their thought processes intermingled to the point where the two spoke simultaneously, the sounds blending to carry three meanings: those of the two individuals, and a third, expressed by the two heterodyned frequencies. So powerful a survival mechanism had been this pairing that within 12
5
g’nyi
, the individual members of a Gweh pairing no longer thought of themselves as separate beings. They were
one
, in a sense that non-Gweh observers found it difficult to understand.

And yet, despite this essential oneness, each Gweh was divided. Their earliest, most primitive mind, what they called the “Mind Above,” was impulsive, direct, and savage—a necessary tool in dealing with a world as inherently hostile as
Xchee’ga’gwah
. The Mind Here had evolved later, while the Mind Below, a synthesis of the Mind Here of two or more individual Gweh, was the most recent, the most
civilized
development in the species’ psychology.

Eventually, the Gweh had developed technic civilization and gone to the stars. They’d gone as traders, but also as warriors; the Mind Above made them superb soldiers—fearless, ruthless, and unstoppable. As interstellar traders, then, and as mercenaries, they’d met the alien Agletsch, who’d given them the strange and unpronounceable name “Turusch.”