Center of Gravity (20 page)

And the chance to leave Earth…

“I would like to volunteer, sir.”

Pollard nodded. “Very well. I’ll have personnel draw up your orders. Get your kit together, because you’ll be up-boosting tonight.”

“Thank you, sir!”

He shook his head. “Don’t thank me, Lieutenant. You don’t hear that much about it planetside nowadays, but there’s a
war
going on out there, a bloody, brutal, and deadly knife fight that chews up our best aviators and spits out the remains. You might not survive your first month of deployment.”

“I’ll manage, sir.”

“Indeed?”

“I’m a survivor, sir.”

He shrugged. “If you say so, Lieutenant. Just, for God’s sake, lose the goddamned fairies, okay?”

Chapter Ten

3 January 2405

The Overlook

Earth Synchorbit, Sol System

2323 hours, EST

The Overlook was a moderately fancy civilian restaurant in a large, rotating hab module adjoining the naval docks and government node buildings at SupraQuito. It took its name from its elevated position above a broad, open plaza, part of the Greenhab office complex. Transparent bulkheads—revolving a full three-sixty every ten minutes—provided an unparalleled view of stars, the delicate traceries of the Synchorbit construction, and, of course, Earth in the distance.

It was close to midnight local time, so at the moment, Earth showed as a black sphere edged on one side by all of the sunsets in the world. North and South America’s outlines were clear, however, picked out in a dusting of lights from the various megalopoli. Earth and stars drifted across the background in stately procession. Closer at hand, the dockyard and naval base slid past the transparencies slowly enough that observers could easily make out the details of the enormous
America
, in port a few kilometers away along with several other ships of the battlegroup.

Trevor Gray, Ben Donovan, and Katerine Tucker had come to the Overlook this evening for a final onshore fling. The scuttlebutt was that
America
would be departing from Synchorbit in two more days, and since the three of them had the duty for the next three, this would be their last chance for time onshore. The rumored destination was off Pluto, but everyone knew that that would be a stopover, where the fleet would wait for reinforcements. The real jump into the Unknown would come sometime after that.

If the rumors were true, it would be a long time before their next opportunity for a fancy meal in a fancy restaurant.

“Expensive,” Tucker said, eyes closed and one hand on a palm contact on the table in front of her as she examined the menu. Tucker was one of the few in the squadron, like Ben Donovan, who didn’t seem to mind the fact of Gray being a Prim. She was a gentle, easygoing sort… but when she strapped on a Starhawk she was solid nitrogen ice. She often flew as Gray’s wing.

“Hey, it’s not like we’re going to have anything to spend money on,” Donovan said. “I hear the lobster here is good.”

“I don’t eat bugs,” Tucker said, making a face.

“I wonder if they have rat,” Gray said. “Back in the Manhattan Ruins, giant rats were a delicacy.”

“How big were they?” Donovan asked, one eyebrow arching high.

“Oh, about yea big.” Gray held his hands a half meter apart. “The big ones, anyway.”

“I think I’d rather try the bugs,” Tucker said.

“Man, there’s just no pleasing some people!” Gray laughed.

“Do people really hunt rats with spears and stuff in the Ruins?” Donovan asked. “That always struck me as kind of a tall tale.”

Gray shrugged. “Some did. We also traded with the people inland, though. The government didn’t like that, of course. They couldn’t tax it. It wasn’t a
bad
life… .”

“Huh,” Donovan said, looking up. “Speaking of bugs…”

Gray turned in his seat. The Overlook was pricey because it actually had a human waitstaff, including a maître d’ in a formal black skinsuit and shoulder shortcloak with gold braid and heavy silver trim. At this kind of place, you ordered your meals through an e-link at the table, but actual
people
prepared it and brought it to your table. They’d been seated in a booth not far from the entrance to the main dining area, where the maître d’ appeared to be having a confrontation of some sort with two would-be diners… a pair of Agletsch.

“What’s going on?” Tucker asked.

“I can’t hear,” Gray said, “but it looks like the staff is turning the Aggies away.”

“Why would they want to eat in a human restaurant anyway?” Donovan asked.

“Their biochemistries are supposed to be pretty much like ours,” Gray said. He’d studied available information on all of the known nonhuman sentient species. “Same carbon chemistry… dextro-sugars, levo-amino acids. They can eat what we eat, and get nourishment from it.”

“It still doesn’t seem
right,
them coming in here,” Tucker said.

The Agletsch were becoming quite animated. Popularly called “bugs” or “spiders,” the Agletsch were actually very little like either. Each had an ovoid and unsegmented body a meter plus across, supported by sixteen spindly limbs. The rear legs were considerably shorter than those in the front—little more than stubs ending in sucker tips—while the foreleg-manipulators were long enough to cock the body at a forty-five degree angle off the floor, supporting the head end a good meter and a half off the ground. The rotund body was covered by a leathery skin rather than by chitin. Most of it was a soft, velvety red brown in color with yellow and blue reticulations; the legs and the flat face, with its four oddly stalked eyes, were dark gray mottled with black. Silver glinted in the restaurant’s lighting; the complex metallic curlicues painted in strips along the leathery hide might have been writing, or simply decorative tattoos.

Gray heard an inner tone over his link. “Shit,” he said. “They just sounded the security alarm.”

“Who did?”

“The head waiter, I assume. Hang on. I want to see what’s going on.”

“Trevor—”

“I’ll be right back.”

Gray slipped out of the booth and walked toward the front of the restaurant. That alarm bothered him. It was being Netcast on a channel that most civilians would not pick up, but which would bring police or military personnel running. Normally, Gray would have stayed in the background with his friends and left the matter to the Authorities, but damn it, he’d been on the receiving end of shit from the Authorities often enough in his life that he wanted to step in. The maître d’ looked like the stuffy, officious type, and he was ordering the two little aliens around with just a bit too much in the way of sneering and peremptory drama.

“This is no place for the likes of you!” the man was saying. “You have no right to be here! What were you thinking, coming into this establishment like this? . . .”

“We want no trouble,” one of the Agletsch was saying. “We will go… .”

The aliens were wearing translators, of course, and the voice was coming from one of these. As Gray had just noted to the others, the Agletsch were similar to humans in many ways, though their outward forms were disquieting to anyone with a phobia of spiders or insects. They spoke by belching air from their upper stomachs through their mouths, which were located underneath their bodies, in their lower abdomens.

The actual Agletsch homeworld was unknown, though it was assumed it lay somewhere deep within Sh’daar space, out in the direction of Canopus, where they’d first been encountered, the very first technic nonhuman species Humankind had met after they’d begun spreading out among the stars. The Agletsch didn’t seem to go in for colonizing other worlds, but they did have numerous trade outposts, with
information
as their primary unit of exchange. When the Sh’daar had issued their ultimatum, some dozens of those outposts inside Confederation space had been cut off from the rest. Some tens of thousands of Agletsch, it was believed, still lived inside human space—perhaps a quarter of them on the three Earth Synchorbits.

There were enough Agletsch living now within the solar system that they were a reasonably familiar sight to humans, far more so than those species with which Humankind was currently at war… or the atechnic species discovered on various worlds but which had never developed technology of their own. Despite this, the Agletsch were not entirely trusted. They were remembered as the ones who’d presented Humankind with the Sh’daar Ultimatum almost forty years before, and there was always the unspoken assumption that they must somehow be in league with the enemy.

“What’s going on here?” Gray asked, coming up behind the maître d’.

The man turned and took in Gray’s dress Navy uniform. “Ah, sir. Nothing of importance. These… ah…
gentlemen
were just leaving.”

Gray looked at the two aliens. “Is this guy giving you a hard time?”

He wasn’t certain how his colloquial English would be translated for them, but he didn’t get a failure-to-translate signal back from the aliens’ speech software. Each wore a human-made translator—a small, flat, silver badge—adhering to the skin beneath the four weirdly stalked eyes.

“You are with the starship
America
, yes-no?” one of the Agletsch asked Gray. The voice sounded human, rather than electronic, but was oddly flat and empty of emotion.

A warning pulse throbbed inside Gray’s head. All Confederation naval personnel had been repeatedly warned against getting friendly with
any
nonhuman intelligence, and especially with the Agletsch. Gray and the others were carrying secmons tonight, of course, as well as corders and deets. It was part of the understood agreement with all military personnel; if you wanted to go ashore, you carried them along, in your head or woven into your clothing.

And Gray’s security monitor was warning him not to tell the aliens anything that might be considered classified information.

On the other hand, Gray was wearing his dress Navy uniform, and his id included the information that he was stationed on the
America
. The Agletsch had communications and information system technology as sophisticated as anything humans possessed. He’d felt them twig his own id as he walked up. It couldn’t hurt to confirm what they already knew.

“America,”
he said, overriding the alarm in his head with a thought. “Yes.”

“And we are
America
as well!” one of the aliens said. “Your guides. Your… escorts? Into unknown, yes-no?”

Both aliens, Gray noted, had ids of their own; a pair of green lights in a window that had just opened in his mind indicated they each had publicly accessible information records, probably running along with their translator software. He thoughtclicked one, then the other, and data scrolled down the window. The two were Dra’ethde and Gru’mulkisch; they were currently attached to the Confederation Department of Extraterrestrial Relations, had security clearances issued by the ONI at Level Five-green, the same as Gray and other pilots, and they’d only just that afternoon been assigned to
America
’s personnel roster.

Gray turned to the maître d’. “These two
ladies
are my shipmates, sir,” he said. Both of them had their males with them, of course… tadpole-sized appendages hanging from their faces just below their eyestalks. Like terrestrial angler fish in Earth’s deep oceans, the Agletsch had solved the problem of finding mates by having males quite different morphologically from the females, tiny external parasites that fed off the female like permanently attached leeches.

“But they’re…
alien
, sir.” The man said the word as though it tasted unpleasant.

“No more to us than we are to them.”

“They would offend the other guests, the human guests! They… they
smell
! And have you ever seen them
eat
?”

In fact, Gray was only just aware of the odor of the two beings, a sweet, smoky aroma similar to burning sage, or possibly marijuana. It was not strong, and not at all unpleasant.

“I don’t find the smell offensive. And no, I’ve never seen one eat. Have you?”

“We are not here to
eat
,” the one identified as Dra’ethde said.

“Oh, no,” the other one added. “In our culture, feeding is an intensely private thing, something to be done alone or with the closest and most intimate of one’s
klathet’chid
, yes-no?”

“So all this”—Gray waved an arm to take in the restaurant half full of people eating in public—“must seem pretty rude to you two.”

Gru’mulkisch made a complicated gesture with all four eyes and its top two left limbs. “It is not our practice to
look
,” she said. “But we were told it is customary for those about to embark on board one of your ships to engage in numbing certain parts of their central nervous systems with certain drugs. This is a ritual that we of the Agletsch share with humans.”

“We’d hoped to find… the word is shipmates, yes-no? Yes, shipmates, and share the drug ritual with them.”

Gru’mulkisch’s eyestalks had extended from the patch of the ovoid body that Gray was thinking of as the “face” and were deeply and seriously focused on him. The stalks were wet and a deep, dark mottled gray in color; the eyes were much like the eyes of an octopus: deep golden yellow, with a black pupil shaped like the letter
Y
. Two of the stalks were stretched far out to either side, the other two stretching just as far top to bottom, each reaching a good thirty centimeters from its attachment point. The four-eyed expression was so fetchingly comical that it was all Gray could do not to laugh out loud.