Center of Gravity (42 page)

And through the Agletsch they’d met the Sh’daar, received the Gift of the Sh’daar Seed, and becoming, in time, one of the Sh’daar’s principal warrior species.

And this was a part of Diligent Effort’s problem. It was senior tactician—the commanding officer, though it didn’t think of the position in those terms—both of the Gweh warship
Shining Silence
and of twelve twelves of warships protecting the manufactory in this infant star system. Its Mind Below was tracking the incoming enemy warships, preparing the fleet to engage them. Its Mind Above was shrieking battle cries, eager to engage the enemy and destroy it… and Diligent Effort’s Mind Here felt that an
offensive
operation would best interpret its orders.

But Diligent Effort also carried a Sh’daar Seed, that tiny implant running a bit of programmed Sh’daar awareness that intertwined with the Mind Below and guided each decision he made.

And the Seed was requiring, was
demanding
, that the fleet stay in place, guarding the immense star-orbiting factory.

As a result, Diligent Effort’s consciousness was fragmenting, and that could be deadly in combat. Mind Here was being torn between Mind Above and Mind Below; normally, Mind Here and Mind Below could agree to tune out Mind Above’s shrill fight-or-flight cacophony of hate, fear, and action, but the discordance caused by the Seed was actually causing the Mind Here of the two
physical
components of Diligent Effort’s being to diverge. The harmonics of its two voices were dissolving into chaos, and that threatened its communications link with others of the
Shining Silence
crew, and with the rest of the fleet.

Normally, the Seed simply suggested and the joint Mind went along… but with the divergence, Diligent Effort was momentarily paralyzed by uncertainty. The Gweh—the Turusch—worked through internal consensus, not by blindly obeying orders. The dissonance was… crippling.

The Seed had warned the system’s defenders that the humans would be coming here, had directed the disposition of the fleet. Now, though, the Seed appeared confused, even conflicted. It had expected the enemy to see the numbers of Turusch, Jival, and Soru waiting here and flee, Diligent Effort thought. That the enemy fleet had been accelerating toward the manufactory for several
g’nyuu’m
, now, was unexpected, worrisome, and internally divisive. As the Seed hesitated, the link within Mind Below trembled and threatened to fail.

An enemy long-range bombardment might already be on the way. At such long range, it was difficult to determine if or when they’d loosed a volley, but Diligent Effort would have fired one some time ago, had he been the tactician commanding the enemy fleet.

“We
must
move the ships, at least,” Diligent Effort told the Seed. “If the enemy has already begun a bombardment, they will have targeted them first, knowing that they can be moved once we know we are under fire.”

As always, the Seed’s reply was more emotion and a sense of knowing, as if from a memory, rather than an inner voice or coherent thought.

The memory seemed to be one of dismissal… and an awareness that the enemy could not decelerate as quickly as Turusch vessels. When the human ships arrived, they would be traveling far too quickly to pose a serious danger to the fleet.

“But they may have already released a volley. They will target our ships… .”

Again, an unspoken memory. What was important was the manufactory, nothing else. The Fleet would stay tucked in close to protect it from enemy fighters. Those
could
pose a threat to the huge structure, like
d’cha
swarming in for the kill on a huge, drifting
grolludh
on far distant
Xchee’ga’gwah.

Diligent Effort did not understand the Sh’daar. No, it decided. That wasn’t quite true. Rather, it didn’t understand the intelligence encapsulated within the Seed. It had never met a physical Sh’daar, and knew no Gweh that had. It wondered if they were as abrupt, as hard, as seemingly unconcerned with the survival and well-being of individual Gweh pairs as were their electronic avatars.

The tactician understood, it thought, why the Sh’daar Seed was holding back. If the Turusch vessels had begun accelerating toward the oncoming enemy fleet, they would have to pass through that fleet, decelerate, then turn and accelerate again… and at this point they would not be able to accelerate long enough to catch up with them. Sound tactical thinking demanded that they stay put near the manufactory, and try to engage the enemy ships when they passed through this volume of space.

But surely that didn’t require that individual ships stay where they were, as helpless targets.

“All ships will begin low-order acceleration,” it said. “We will shift position by a few
lurm’m
only, just enough to avoid incoming kinetic-kill missiles.”

The Seed disagreed… and Diligent Effort felt its Mind Below ripping apart. Its twin, the other physical part of Diligent Effort, felt that it was necessary to obey the Seed precisely, to the letter; the Seed seemed to have difficulty grasping distances in the real world, as opposed to its own virtual universe, and thought that movement meant more than a slight change of position. Diligent Effort’s communications link with the rest of the fleet wavered, the harmonics of the Mind Below momentarily broken.

The tactician’s full name, Diligent Effort at Reconciliation, was derived from its talent in finding compromise and unity among disparate points of view. Partly, this grew from its rather keen sense of rationality, its experience at seeing how things were, even through a haze of conflicting emotions. Partly, too, it grew out of its native talent, its ability to use its voices—all three of them—to
impose
unity of purpose and thought within a dissenting Gweh community. Essentially, its heterodyned Mind Below voice could sing louder than the voices of others around it, forcing acquiescence, then agreement, then harmony.

For a moment, for a horrible moment, it could not find that third voice.

He could not give the necessary command.

“Turusch!” a harsh voice rasped over the fleet communications link. “Give the order to maneuver!”

That was the commander of one of the three Soru vessels in the fleet. Unable to pronounce the twittering, singsong chirps of the Gweh, it used the Agletsch
lingua franca
, and so referred to the Gweh by the alien version of the species’ name.

“Y’vasch!”
Diligent Effort managed to say in the same language.
“Go!”

The Soru ships were smaller than most Gweh vessels, curved like slashing claws and brightly painted in ultraviolet. They began to move… .

And then one of the Turusch ships nearby, a converted asteroid enforcer called
Bright Lightning in the Fog
, staggered as a piece of metal traveling at a fair percentage of the speed of light slammed into it, releasing a dazzling flash of liberated kinetic energy with the collision. Sensors detected several other high-velocity impactors passing through the space between the ships.

The enemy bombardment had begun, unguided but precisely targeted rounds flickering in from the night.

“Move! Move! Move!”
That voice was almost wholly from Mind Above, a frantic screaming that overrode the momentary paralysis of the Mind Below. It felt the hard nudge as
Shining Silence
fired its thrusters and slowly began to accelerate. There might still be time… .

A Brilliance in the Night
took a direct hit, the entire forward third of the vessel vanishing in a flash that left the rest tumbling wildly end over end, trailing debris and a glittering spray of freezing atmosphere. Moments later, the remnants began to crumple and vanish as they were inexorably drawn into the singularities of the warship’s power plant.

The Soru ships were already far ahead, still accelerating.

Bring them back
, a memory whispered within Diligent Effort’s thoughts.
Return them to their place!

“I cannot. They have released themselves from the fleet’s control.”

The tactician’s control over the alien Soru had been tenuous at best. It didn’t know if they possessed—or were possessed by—the Seed.

Working with aliens was always difficult. The tactician felt a certain kindred understanding of the H’rulka. Perhaps that was because both species knew an Abyss, and both feared the storms that could arise there, but even the H’rulka gas bags didn’t think properly or in a rational way.

For that matter, neither did the Sh’daar.

It wished the five Jival ships with the fleet would request a release as well. If the tactician could let its Mind Above issue that order, it would be eight ships attacking the humans far out in space, well away from the precious manufactory.

But the Jival tended to stick close to military protocol and refused to stretch the orders given them. They were unimaginative, by Gweh standards, strictly, as a human would say, “by the book.” Their ships, in any case, mingled the jobs of troop transport and fighting vessel, and were not as efficient as single-purpose warships like those of the Soru or the Turusch.

The Soru were fierce and implacable warriors, evolved from chlorine-breathing plains-runners that could bring down fast-galloping prey animals many times larger than they. Perhaps they would be able to deal the approaching enemy a crippling blow.

Another incoming round slashed past a Turusch ship, the
Abyssal Wind
, but it was only a glancing blow, enough to vaporize a few
m’ni
of rock on the converted asteroid but not to cause any serious damage. The fleet was moving, as Diligent Effort had commanded. Other Seeds, within other vessel tacticians, had failed to block the order.

Good… .

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America

Alphekka System

1940 hours, TFT

America
continued to slow, backing down toward the enigmatic artificial moon dubbed Al–01. They were traveling now at 40,149 kilometers per second. The actual passage would take place so quickly that merely human observers would not even be aware when it happened. There would be time for a single focused volley from every ship in the battlegroup, but both the targeting and the firing would be handled by the fleet’s AIs, with reaction times that made human reactions seem glacial by comparison.

“Make to all ships,” Koenig ordered. “On my mark, cut drives. CAG, prepare to bring the CSP back on board.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

There would be no opportunity for dogfighting during that nearly instantaneous passage; Koenig had deployed them against the possibility of the Turusch launching a fighter assault during the long flight in… and the tactic had paid off when the enemy had tried to pick off the
Remington
.

In another sixty-eight minutes, however, the battlegroup would sweep past A1–01; a few heartbeats later, it would pass through the debris field beyond, the vast, flat disk of protoplanetary dust, meteoric rubble, gas, and ice circling the Alphekkan suns. The fighters wouldn’t be able to engage the enemy ships, and with lighter shields than capital ships they’d be at risk trying to pass through the debris field. They would ride out the passage on board the carriers, and redeploy once the battlegroup had slowed and reversed course.

“CSP is now forming up for trap, Admiral,”
America
’s CAG told him.

“Very well.”

The squadrons currently on patrol were the Nighthawks and the Lightnings. Two more, the Night Demons and the Dragonfires, were on ready status, meaning they were loaded up and ready for launch. As soon as
America
had slowed on the far side of the protoplanetary disk, those two squadrons would be launched and, in short order, so would the rest of the fighters on board the carrier. The idea was to hit the enemy as hard as possible with the capital ship volley in a few minutes, then come back with everything they had and mop up what was left.

Of course, it wouldn’t be
that
simple. It never was.

“Admiral!” Commander Craig called. “Trouble!”

“What is it?”

“We’re tracking three enemy warships leaving the fleet, approaching head-on at high acceleration. They’ll be here in… three point one minutes!”

“What kind of warships?”

“Undetermined, sir. They appear to be a new design… possibly a new species we’ve not encountered before.” As she spoke, a window opened in Koenig’s mind and a computer-generated schematic came up, showing an oddly designed ship consisting of three intersecting crescents, like claws. The image rotated, giving a sense of a third dimension. “Mass… about the same as one of our destroyers, sir. Power plant emissions suggest a similar energy curve.”

Destroyers. Assuming they filled the same role as Confederation destroyers, they would be fast, and they would be armed with lethal ship-killers of some sort.