Center of Gravity (21 page)

“The Authorities will be here in a moment,” the maître d’ said, frowning. “I suggest that you tell your… your friends to leave.”

Gray shot a quick e-call to Tucker and Donovan and told them what was happening. “I think I just lost my appetite,” Donovan said.

“Let’s go someplace else,” Gray suggested. “There’s a bar a few levels down.”

“We’re with you,” Donovan replied.

Both Tucker and Donovan joined the tableau at the front seconds later.

“And what,” Gray asked the headwaiter, “if we choose to eat with our friends here?” He glanced at Tucker and Donovan, and shot them an in-head query. “You two sure you’re okay with this?”

“Of course, Trev,” Tucker said out loud. She made a face. “This joint is too rich for my blood anyway.”

“We’ll just take our custom elsewhere,” Gray told the maître d’. He felt Donovan sending out a general text message and grinned.

“But sir, the Overlook is
honored
to serve our young heroes of the Confederation military! . . .”

“Seems to me that these two are doing more for the war effort than you are, friend,” Gray said. “So far from home, coming on board a Confederation star carrier to serve as guides and liaisons…”

“That’s right,” Donovan added. “And I think we’ll be telling the rest of our shipmates what we think of your service here.” As he spoke, several other naval personnel in the restaurant began standing up, leaving their tables, and moving toward the front. Some Gray recognized from the
America
—either ship’s crew or from other squadrons. There were a couple of enlisted people off of the
Kinkaid
 . . . and one from the heavy monitor
Warden
. Donovan’s near-broadcast text message wasn’t emptying the place, by any means, but a good quarter of the clientele were military, some in uniform, many in civvies. Those who’d already been served were paying their bills… but many others had already canceled their orders and were on their way out.

“Don’t worry, sir,” Gray said, still grinning. “I imagine you’ll have enough civilian customers that you won’t miss the fleet at all!” Turning, he gestured to the Agletsch, then followed them out, Donovan and Tucker close behind him.

“Thanks, guys,” Gray told them. “Sorry to cut our dinner short.”

“Hey, we stick together,” Donovan said.

“Besides, it really
was
too expensive,” Tucker added. “The bastards are fleet-gougers.”

There were always places like that springing up around the perimeter of any military base—restaurants, bars, sim-sensies and ViRs, e-sexies and old-fashioned whorehouses, uniform nanoprogrammers, tattoo clinics and tobbo shops—ranging from the respectable down to the thoroughly seedy, and existing almost solely on the income provided by thousands of young men and women on their off-duty hours.

And a certain percentage of these businesses took outrageous advantage of service people—the fleet-gougers, the liberty traps, and the shit-city hustlers.

But for Gray, the Overlook’s treatment of the two aliens was more telling.

“Let’s go find someplace
decent
to eat,” he said.

Osiris

70 Ophiuchi A

2358 hours, TFT

“Incoming!”

Marine captain Thomas Quinton dove headfirst into a shell hole as the hivel impactor struck the colony’s defensive shields. The ground bucked beneath his scarred battle armor, rattling his teeth and driving the breath from his chest.

The warning had been shouted by his battlesuit’s AI; there was no way to hear an incoming round before it struck, since high-velocity impactors typically traveled at forty or fifty times the speed of sound. His suit’s radar could give him a second or so of warning if it picked the round up fifteen to twenty kilometers away.

Rising carefully, he looked back toward the colony. Laser fire, impactors, and plasma bolts continued to slam into the gravfield dome, which was shimmering and flickering like a pale, transparent ghost under the barrage. He’d made it safely out underneath the shield and screen projectors and was now in the rubble that, until fifty-four hours ago, had been the city of New Egypt’s Nuit Starport, five kilometers outside of town. Thank God the bombardment hadn’t turned the ground surrounding the city into molten lava yet. That would come later, if the bombardment continued.

It was possible, of course, that the enemy wanted to capture the colony more or less intact, rather than scrape it off the surface of the planet. Ground troops—the hulking, vaguely humanoid giants identified as Nungiirtok—had been sighted in the blasted ruins outside the central city, and that suggested that the bad guys wanted to take and hold the planet rather than sterilize it.

A trio of tactical nukes went off against the city’s shields, dazzling flares of raw, white light, followed seconds later by the sound of the detonations and the shrieks of the shock waves. Well, maybe they didn’t want the city after all… .

Quinton lay flat in his hole and let the storm-fury rage overhead. As the noise subsided, he crawled up and over the crater’s lip. Three mushroom clouds boiled into the overcast sky on the horizon now, bracketing the colony’s defensive shield dome.

Osiris—70 Ophiuchi AII—had been a garden world until the Turusch and their Nungiirtok allies arrived. That had been three short, local days ago.

Osiris, along with Chiron, New Earth, and Kore, was one of the handful of worlds among the near stars enough like Earth that humans could live there without elaborate environmental protection, where they could even breathe the air without filter masks or helmets. The primary was a double star—a K0 yellow-orange sun circled by a slightly smaller, cooler K4 star. Seventy-A was mildly variable—the star was a BY Draconis type, with heavy starspot activity—and that drove the planet’s often-stormy weather.

New Egypt was the colony’s capital, with a few outlying cities—Luxor, Dendara, Sais, and others—on the same southern continent. There was a thriving native ecology biochemically similar to its terrestrial counterpart, and even a native species that might well prove to be sentient—the atechnic marine cuttlewyrms.

Quinton’s motion detector picked up a mass fifty meters to his right, and he went to ground once more. There was something out there, probably on the other side of that tumbledown mass of wreckage that was all that was left of a spacecraft hangar. He could hear it, now… a
crunch-crunch-crunch
of heavy limbs moving through piles of broken ferrocrete. He brought his linac rifle up, pressed the power-up, and waited.

The Nungiirtok appeared around the corner of the collapsed hangar seconds later, a three-meter headless mecha, stooped far forward on digitigrade legs, massively armored, and carrying a plasma weapon of alien design in three-fingered gauntlets. The towering threat looked like a machine… but it was the Nungiirtok equivalent of Marine combat armor. At its feet, a dozen armored Kobolds thrashed forward, each on three armored tentacles. No one knew if they were robotic machines under the Nungiirtok’s control or another organic species. They only appeared with the big Nungiirtok, however, apparently in the role of combat scouts.

There could be no doubt that the enemy had already spotted Quinton. It lumbered around the corner with its plasma weapon held high, loosing the first bolts as soon as the weapon was clear of the building. Quinton, flat on the ground, rolled to his left as the white-hot packets of incandescence hissed past him, missing his suit’s backpack by scant centimeters and sending a shrieking hiss of static over his com link.

Quinton triggered his linac as he rolled, using his in-head display to keep the weapon’s targeting cursor centered on the armored giant in front of him. The linear accelerator rifle was considered to be a sniper’s weapon, but with a fully charged battery pack, it had a two-per-second fire/recovery rate that could slam off thirty-gram depleted uranium slivers almost as fast as he could press the trigger button.

At a range of just forty-five meters, Quinton put three rounds into the monster’s center of mass, each magnetically accelerated to nearly 800 kps. The impacts punched through the armor as jets of white-hot molten carbon-fiber-laminate, with explosions like the detonation of thermal grenades. The three-meter giant staggered as it took two rounds in the chest area and a third close by the left shoulder. Shrapnel hurtled from the impacts as the arm tore away, spinning off into the rubble nearby. Quinton stopped his roll as the Nungiirtok dropped the plasma weapon, drawing a careful bead now on the deeply recessed sensor cluster that seemed to serve the Nungies in place of heads and loosing a fourth KK round. The giant lurched backward, then fell, trailing a stream of smoke from its smashed-open visor.

As fast as he could, Quinton began popping the swarming Kobolds as they surged toward his position. Each round was powerful enough to shatter one of the armored little horrors like a bullet-struck eggshell. He smashed five of them before the others began scattering, scuttling off into the rubble.

They would be bringing in more Nungiirtok giants, though, and quickly. Quinton didn’t have much time.

Rising to his feet, but staying bent over and low to the ground, he began running, making his way toward something that looked like a concrete-walled casement with an opening the size of a large garage. The faded and shrapnel-gouged letters
CMS
showed on one side.
Please, God, let the launch tube be open… .

A round caught him in the side, slamming him hard. Spinning and dropping, he saw the Kobolds advancing once more.

His linac rifle had a twenty-round magazine, and he’d already expended nine. Coming up to one knee, he brought the heavy rifle to his shoulder and calmly began squeezing off shots. The rifle’s acceleration compensators took care of most of the recoil, but enough leaked through to pound against his armored pauldron, like a hard slam from a baseball bat with each round.

One target… one shot… one kill… but more and more of the dog-sized horrors were boiling out of the ruins. Either there’d been more than a dozen Kobolds with that Nungie, or a
second
Nungiirtok was close by and moving in. His rifle beeped a warning over his implant at three rounds left… and again for two… and finally for one. Automatically, he palmed the rifle’s slagger, turning its mechanism into molten metal as he flung it away.

He killed the last three Kobolds with his service-issue handgun as they scrabbled over the last pile of debris, just three meters away.

Hurrying ahead, pistol clenched in his glove, he jogged the last ten meters to the packet launch tube. His side hurt. The Kobold shot had not penetrated his armor, but enough force had been transmitted through the shock-absorbing laminates to bruise him, and just possibly to fracture a rib.

Please let the damned tube be open
. . . .

It was. The aboveground opening gave access to a long, ruler-straight tube descending at a slight angle into the ground beneath the starport tarmac, a tube over two hundred meters long. By the time he was halfway down, the opening—the only source of light within the tunnel—was so tiny that he was moving through almost total darkness. Switching to IR, he could see the heated elements of the launch structure ahead, and the dull glow of the HG packet resting on its cradle.

Somehow, he made it up the access ladder. Normally, the packet was reached through a personnel accessway leading from the starport tower, but that structure had been among the first vaporized by Turusch KK rounds fired from orbit. He just hoped the power systems were still intact.

On the gantry at last, he took time to strip off his armor. He wouldn’t need it now, and there was no room for it inside the form-fitting cockpit. He heard a clang, followed by scrabbling noises coming down the tunnel, and the faint light here was momentarily obscured.

Shit. A Nungie was coming down after him.

Stripped to his utility skinsuit, Quinton palmed open the hatch and squeezed inside. To his immense relief, the packet began powering up around him.

He’d been maintaining radio contact once he’d left the city, but there was no need of stealth now, not with the eight-hundred-ton mail packet beginning to power up. Right now, every Trash and Nungie detector in the system must be lighting up, screaming out his intent. He had only seconds now.

“New Egypt Flight Control, I’m aboard the packet and powering up. Everything looks good on this end.” Power was already at 70 percent, and climbing. He could hear the low whine spooling higher behind his cockpit as the power tap engaged.

“Copy that, Lieutenant.” The voice of Colonel Sandowski came over his implant. “We’re tracking a couple of Nungies near the entrance to your tube. Better light that thing and clear out.”

“Aye, aye, Colonel. I…”

He stopped, swallowed hard. There were twelve hundred USNA Marines stationed at New Egypt, and every fiber of his being, every instinct born of training and experience, demanded that he stay, that he not
run
.

But he’d volunteered for this mission, and there was no backing out now.

“I wish I could stay… .” he managed to say at last.