Center of Gravity (48 page)

The
Shining Silence
, Diligent Effort knew, was finished.

“Your guidance in this battle was flawed,” it said aloud.
There!
It had spoken at last the thought, the
unthinkable
thought, that had been growing within the Mind Here for
g’nya
upon
g’nya
. “We should have been free to meet the enemy fleet sooner, and farther from the factory.”

It felt something that was the equivalent of a shrug within, felt meaning form, as if in a rising memory.
The defenses were dictated by the situation. More enemy ships might have been coming in behind the first wave. That initial assault might have been designed to draw you out of position.

“Our instincts said otherwise,” Diligent Effort replied.

Your instincts are flawed. They require… guidance.

Tactician Diligent Effort bristled at the implied insult, but couldn’t reply. The steady shriek of denial from its Mind Above was growing louder and more shrill as the loose singularity grew closer.

If
Shining Silence
was finished, the rest of the fleet was not. The Turusch squadron had taken terrible damage from the human high-velocity strike, but the enemy was still badly outnumbered. Command now devolved upon the enforcer warship
Intrusive Storm
, positioned nearly twelve-twelves of light-
g’nya
out-system. Before losing contact with the rest of the fleet, Diligent Effort had noted that the enemy appeared to have begun slowing once again. They intended to stay and fight.

Intrusive Storm
would react, and the enemy would die.

But so, too, would
Shining Silence
and so many other vessels of the Turusch fleet.

Diligent Effort at Reconciliation, however, was feeling its own and personal loss too keenly to mourn the loss of others.

Gray

VFA–44

Alphekka System

2045 hours, TFT

What
, Gray thought to himself,
are my chances?

Not good
, he decided.
Not good at all.
Koenig was returning the CBG to Al–01, and when he got there, the Turusch would be waiting.

Maybe Koenig had some devious trick up his sleeve. Maybe he was counting on the sheer audacity of turning back to face the surviving enemy ships.

And maybe he’d just run out of options, had decided to stay and fight if only to give people like Collins a ghost of a fighting chance.

Maybe there were no answers, no strategy, no meaning, no hope.

Maybe…

Gray refused to think about that. The fleet was still there, decelerating down from its hell-bent charge at nearly a third of
c
. There was no indication that the other Turusch ships in the system had reacted yet. They were spread out so far from one another and from Al–01 that they wouldn’t even know the result of the battle so far for an hour or more to come.

His particle cannon fired, triggered by the AI with super-human reflexes. Radar had detected a bit of rock on a collision course, and the AI used the proton beam to vaporize and it. Individual atoms of hit gas were less damaging to the fighter than lumps of rock.

Collins was eight thousand kilometers ahead now. He was gaining on her, very slowly.

Gray couldn’t accelerate at his Starhawk’s full potential. He could fry particles larger than thumb-size to avoid hitting them, but even his AI couldn’t identify dust motes, and without forward shields even a dust mote might cause serious damage at these speeds. In fact, at this point he was relying on his own projected singularity to sweep most of the gas and dust clear from his path, creating a dustball of his own.

He stayed on Collins’ tail and pushed as hard as he dared, slowly, slowly closing the range between them. Collins’ path had taken her in-system, almost directly through the plane of the protoplanetary cloud. The two stars of Alphekka, one brilliant, one smaller and dimmer, shone almost directly ahead, just over thirty astronomical units distant. They should, he thought, be emerging from the inner edge of the debris-field ring any moment now. His AI had marked a nascent planet just ahead and to one side; that planet, he recalled, was just inside the inner edge of the ring, having swept its orbital path clear over the course of some millions of years as it grew.

“Dragon Five, this is Dragon Nine,” he called. “Do you copy?”

No answer. He wondered if the bitch was dead.

Why, he wondered, was he even trying this? It wasn’t as though he
liked
Collins. Since he’d joined the Dragonfires a year ago, she’d given him more than the usual allotment of grief. She was a “risty,” a hypocrite, a bitter and angry zero with a special prejudice against Prims like Gray. He hated the creature; a part of him was still telling him he should let her go.

He would have come after Ben Donovan, if it had been him. He would have gone after Commander Allyn had he noted her trajectory before she’d been swallowed up by emptiness. He
did
go after Shay Ryan at Alchameth.

Why try to save Collins?

And he honestly didn’t know the answer. She was a fellow naval officer and pilot, a fellow Dragonfire, a fellow member of
America
’s officers and crew. Perhaps he owed her that much. She might have the vector data on the skipper. Maybe saving Collins would save Marissa Allyn.

And maybe he was doing it just because he would have wanted someone else,
anyone
else, to do it for him had he been in her situation.

You stood up for your fellow warriors, pulled for them, helped them, and by God went after them and
saved
them even if you hated their guts.

His fighter emerged from the debris field with startling suddenness. With the CGI overlay of red behind him, he could see more clearly ahead. Comets blazed in every direction; the newborn planet shone as a brilliant spark to port. Collins’ hurtling fighter was seven hundred kilometers ahead.

Five hundred.

One hundred.

Decelerating now, Gray crept up behind her. He could see her ship, now, black against the glow of the two Alphekkan suns thirty AUs ahead.

They were traveling at a bit over two astronomical units per hour, with fifteen hours to go before they fell into the vicinity of those stars.
Plenty
of time.

If nothing went wrong.

Gently, he moved toward Collins’ Starhawk. She wasn’t tumbling, thank God.

And Gray had practiced this maneuver before.

He knew exactly what to do… .

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America

Alphekka System

2350 hours, TFT

Three hours had passed since the fiery flyby of Al–01.
America
and the other battlegroup ships had finally killed their forward momentum, and had been accelerating again back toward the factory for an hour now.

“Admiral!” Commander Craig called. “We’re getting movement from the enemy fleet!”

Here it comes
, Koenig thought. He was in his CIC command chair, leaning back, eyes closed, his in-head displays switched off. He’d been trying to catch some sleep at his station. “Tell me.”

“Two groups of ships… the ones still at Al–01… and group Fox-Sierra Seven. They’ve begun accelerating.”

“How long until intercept?” Koenig asked, his eyes still closed.

“Sir… no, you don’t understand! They’re accelerating
out
bound!
Away
from us!”

Koenig’s eyes snapped open and he released his chair’s harness, floating over to the display tank. “
Away?
You’re sure?”

Commander Craig pointed into the display tank, which showed a large portion of this side of the Alphekkan system—translucent red protoplanetary disk, a tight cluster of green stars marking CBG–18, and several widely scattered clumps of red icons marking Turusch vessels under drive. As he watched, a third group, even farther out, began accelerating as well.

All were headed in the same direction, roughly toward the galactic center. None were on a course that would bring them anywhere near the battlegroup.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Koenig said. “Reduce scale.”

The display dropped to a lower scale, showing even more of the star system, all the way out to the thin and ragged red edge of the debris ring.

“There,” Sinclair said, pointing, and a new cluster of icons was highlighted by the display. “We have new incoming!”

Turusch reinforcements
, was Koenig’s first thought.

And then the id tags for the newcomers began appearing in the depths of the tank.

They were scattered across a full light hour or more, ships emerging one by one from Alcubierre Drive. They were above the plane of the ring, the nearest nearly twenty-five AUs out.

“Sir!” Sinclair said. “That’s the
Jeanne d’Arc
!”

“And, by God!” Craig added. “The
Abraham Lincoln
! And the
United States of North America
!”

“De Gaul,”
Sinclair continued.
“Frederich der Grosse. Illustrious. Haiping. Cheng Hua… .”

“They’re
ours
!” Craig yelled. “They’re fucking
ours
!”

It was… a miracle. Twenty-one ships had already materialized, emerging from Alcubierre metaspace twenty-five AUs out from the
America
, a distance of some three and a half light hours. More were emerging every moment.

Koenig thought rapidly. At that distance, they must have dropped out of metaspace at just about the same time as CBG–18 had made its close passage of Al–01, and were just now catching the wavefront bearing the images of that brief and terrible battle. In the same three and a half hours, the images of the emerging ships reached
America
’s sensors.

“Admiral!” Ramirez said. “Incoming transmission! Sir… it’s Grand Admiral Giraurd, of the
Jeanne d’Arc
!”

“Put it on speaker! Let them
all
hear this! . . .”

“. . . have emerged from Alcubierre Drive, and see the battle taking place in-system three point five light hours from here. We are deploying to assist. Message repeats. Attention Star Carrier
America
. This is Grand Admiral Giraurd of the Pan-European Star Carrier
Jean d’Arc
, in command of a Confederation naval task force, operating in concert with the Chinese Hegemony Eastern Dawn Expeditionary Force, a total of forty-one combatants. We have emerged from Alcubierre Drive, and see the battle taking place in-system three point five light hours from here. We are deploying to assist. Message repeats… .”

Pandemonium ensued within the CIC, cheers and shouts and even a few somersaults in zero-G.

Koenig let them cheer.

Forty-one ships, some Pan-European, some Chinese. They must have been the vessels that were supposed to have reinforced CBG–18 at Pluto. No… forty-one ships? He’d not been expecting that many. He detected the hand of Admiral Carruthers and the Confederation Joint Chiefs here.

Captain Buchanan emerged from the ship’s bridge, grinning from ear to ear. “You
did
it, Admiral! You damn well
did
it!”

“Hardly, Randy. We didn’t know they were coming!”

“Yeah, and neither did the Tushies! Look at ’em run!”

Across the Alphekkan system, group by group, the Turusch battlegroups were beginning to accelerate, clearly moving to leave the system, clearly not attempting to intercept and engage the newly arrived Confederation forces. It would take time for the wavefront bearing news of the human fleet’s arrival to reach every Turusch ship… but none of them were staying to contest ownership of the system.

Well, they couldn’t know how many more Confederation and Hegemony ships were coming in. The Sh’daar’s minions tended, it seemed, to play a somewhat conservative game.

And the humans could use that as a weapon against them.

Victory 
. . .

“Commander Craig?”

“Yes, Admiral!”

“Pass the word to all ships of CBG–18. We will cease acceleration in order to bring fighters on board, and to dispatch SAR units.”

“Yes, sir!”