Ian Douglas - Centre of Gravity

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.”

A window opened in his mind, and he felt the flow of the encrypted data feed. Keys within his implanted circuitry opened the message, and he found himself looking down on another world.

“ONI/DeSpaComCent to all units with Crystal Tower clearance and above,” an emotionless voice, probably an AI, said. “We have an incoming transmission from an ISVR–120 dispatched to the Arcturus system six weeks ago. Data is raw, with only preliminary analyses by this department. …”

Within his mental window, Koenig could see the planet and its moon. A cascade of printed data scrolled down one side of his awareness, but he didn’t need to read it to recognize the gas giant Alchameth and its largest satellite, Jasper. A bright blue targeting reticule marked a silvery pinpoint—Arcturus Station in orbit over a cloud-swathed moon. A dozen smaller reticules, each bright red, marked Turusch ships in orbit around Jasper.

His experienced inner eye took in the Turusch ships, each with its id tag giving type, mass, and readiness. Two Beta-class battlewagons, plus at least ten cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers. That was a fair-sized battle fleet, and suggested that the Turusch were waiting for a possible Confederation counterattack into the system.

Not that that was going to happen anytime soon. Confederation Fleet Command had been reluctant to re-engage the enemy. The Defense of Earth might technically have been a victory, but it had been a damned close-run thing.

The gas giant, simmering in the sea of radiation from giant Arcturus just 20 AU distant, showed the bright yellow, orange, red, and brown striations of atmosphere belts, whipped around the massive planet by violent high-altitude winds.

The scene moved jerkily, frame by frame, and the images were grainy and difficult to resolve. They would have been pulled from a seemingly uniform starbow of light by sensory correction software on the probe, and, as the voice had warned, hadn’t yet been massaged by the ONI analysts on Luna. But as the probe moved past planet and moon, the moon dropped from view outside of the camera angle and the probe’s optics began zooming in on Alchameth.

Another blue reticule appeared, highlighting something above the banded cloud tops. Koenig resisted the impulse to squint, patiently waiting as the images—drastically slowed by the relativistic time difference between the probe and the outside world—zoomed in frame by frame.

There was something there. …

Sunlight glinted, a silver-orange glitter above orange clouds. A spacecraft? The probe’s optical sensors zoomed in closer. It looked like a flattened balloon, but it must have been immense to be visible at this range, many kilometers across. And it was rising above the highest cloud layers, now, so it must be a ship … or possibly an aircraft.

A side window opened, showing schematics of a H’rulka ship, something encountered by humans only once so far.

Turusch and H’rulka ships together at Arcturus, just 37 light years from Sol.

The afternoon, suddenly, had become a lot more interesting.

VFA–44 Dragonfire Squadron

Approaching Columbia Arcology

United States, Earth

1655 hours, EST

Lieutenant Trevor Gray descended above the ocean, dropping toward the ruin of Old New York.

Linked in with the AI computer of his SG–92 Starhawk, his cerebral implants were receiving optical feeds from sensors grown temporarily all over the craft’s fuselage. From his point of view, his fighter was invisible—in fact, he was the fighter, hurtling through the early evening sky off the eastern seaboard of the United States. The winter sun had set twenty-five minutes before; the sky was still a crisp and brilliant blue, the twilight illuminating the dark rolling waves below.

Around him, in the crystalline sky, eleven other Starhawks traveled with him in close formation, each jet-black ship now morphed into atmospheric flight mode—broad delta shapes with down-curving wingtips carving through thin air at a sedate four times the speed of sound. They’d departed from the military spaceport at Oceana just five minutes earlier, swinging far out over the ocean to avoid disturbing coastal communities with their sonic boom. The Manhat Ruins now lay only a few kilometers ahead.

“Look smart,” the squadron leader said over the unit’s tactical channel. “They want a nice show down there. Cut back to fifteen hundred kph and descend to twelve hundred. Tighten it up, people.”

Commander Marissa Allyn was the CO of VFA–44, the “Dragonfires,” and flying the lead Starhawk, hull number 101. Until recently, she’d been the CAG of America ’s Space Wing, though she’d never been confirmed and, just days ago, a new CAG had been brought on board. America ’s fighter wing was still reorganizing, still licking its wounds after the terrible casualties suffered during the Defense of Earth.

In three groups of four flying wingtip to wingtip, the Starhawks dropped closer to the blur of blue-gray water beneath their keels.

“And … descending to eight hundred meters,” Allyn continued.

To port, Gray was aware of a smear of movement, the coastline of the old state of New Jersey, a stretch of ground until recently given over to swampland and mangrove but now swept clean, barren and forbidding. Still descending, they rocketed past the sweeping, broken curve of the Verrazano Narrows Dam, one of the megastructures raised in the twenty-first century in what had proven to be an expensive but unsuccessful bid to save the city ahead.

Still slowing, still descending, the squadron passed over what was left of New York City.

Forests of steel superstructure marking the largest building, the crumbling façade of the TriBeCa Tower, all rose above dirty, surging water. Vine-shrouded structures slowly eroding into the sea. Where once there had been a square-grid network of city streets, there were now narrow canals, canyons filled with water and the dark pockets of the coming night.

New York City had first been submerged three centuries before, when Hurricane Cynthia had smashed a half-kilometer gap through the Verrazano Narrows Dam and the sea—now twelve meters higher than the southern tip of Manhattan—had poured in. The vibrant metropolis had been smashed, then drowned; the shattered buildings still standing had rapidly crumbled into decayed ruins or been overgrown by green masses of porcelain-berry, kudzu, and other creeping vines, giving them the look of sheer-sided green islands rising with a curiously geometric orderliness from the sea.

Even so, the Ruins of Manhattan had been … home.

Gray had been a Prim, one of some thousands of people living in the Ruins outside the all-encompassing embrace of modern technology. For him, until five years ago, home had been the shattered shell of the old TriBeCa Tower Arcology, a torn and battered mountain passing now to port.

The scene, spread out around and below him now, however, illuminated by the pale glow of twilight, seemed alien now. The place was changed, shockingly so. During the Defense of Earth two months earlier, a Turusch high-velocity impactor had generated a tidal wave that had smashed north through the Narrows. Hundreds of the remaining buildings sticking up out of the water had been toppled, and a vast forest of tangled debris was now strewn across Morningside Heights, Yonkers, and the swamps of Harlem. Most of the building-islands, once covered by lush vegetation, were naked now, stripped of all life by the passing wave two months before.