Center of Gravity (49 page)

“CAG?”

“Yes, Admiral!”

“Put out the word to our pilots. We’re bringing them in.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral!”

America
’s children, those who remained, would be coming home.

Epilogue

28 February 2405

VFA–44 Ready Room, TC/USNA CVS
America

Alphekka System

1437 hours, TFT

Trevor Gray stood on the Dragonfires’ ready-room deck, facing the viewall that covered an entire bulkhead, deck to overhead and fifteen meters wide. It showed local space, but from the perspective of a nonrotating camera mounted somewhere on
America
’s shield cap. Comets gleamed icy and cold across blackness. A planet drifted in the distance, its surface a black and tortured disk with cracks and craters exposing its hot-glowing interior.

The world had been named Elpheia, the ancient magicians’ name for Alphekka within the list of Behenian fixed stars. If you looked closely, you could occasionally see the twinkling flash of an impact as it continued to draw in meteoric debris and asteroids.
America
’s astrophysics department estimated that Elpheia was a rocky planet already twice Earth’s mass, that one day it would be a “super-Earth,” with three to four times Earth’s mass, and—this far from its suns—a deep and frigid, dense atmosphere. Rocky planet? Gas giant? The experts didn’t know yet. A lot of things out here didn’t fall neatly into established categorical boxes.

A brand-new world.

In the foreground, between
America
’s camera and Elpheia, several of the new ships from Earth drifted in orbit with the carrier.

“Hey, Trev,” Shay Ryan said at his back. “You okay?”

He turned, gave her a thin smile. “Yeah. I’m not sure why.” He noticed her mood, bright and positive.
Perky
. It wasn’t like her. “Why are
you
so happy?”

“Why not? We made it! Not bad for a couple of damned misplaced Prims!”

“Not all of us made it… .”

At the moment, VFA–44 consisted of just three people—Gray, Ben Donovan, and Collins, though Collins was in the sick bay with a dozen broken bones, a punctured lung, and numerous other internal injuries. She’d been all but crushed when she whipped around that Turusch dust ball, and hadn’t yet regained consciousness.

But Gray had brought her back. It had taken hours of maneuvering, slipping in close to her spacecraft, connecting to it with his nano-tipped grapples, pulling her in tight, then
gently
putting out a maneuvering singularity to alter course by a few degrees. Eventually, he’d altered her course enough that she was no longer dropping toward the suns. A SAR tug rendezvoused with them a dozen hours later.

The tugs had been busy for the past two days. They’d brought back the streaker Rattler pilot, Alma Rafferty. They’d even recovered Lieutenant Schiere, alive and well, adrift a billion kilometers from the wrecked alien factory.

They hadn’t yet found the skipper, though. Commander Allyn was still out there somewhere. The SAR tugs were tracking her. Maybe…

The fleet, meanwhile, had taken up orbit around Elpheia, avoiding the bombed-out mess of Al–01 which was now highly radioactive. The Turusch fleet-building complex in the Alphekkan system had been rendered utterly useless. Perhaps over the course of the next few million years, it would begin accreting rock, dust, and gas from the protoplanetary belt and become the core of another new, infant world.

“They say they’re going to rebuild all four squadrons,” Ryan told him. “We’ll be the old hands, y’know? Maybe we can start over, you and me, trying to fit in.”

“Maybe. I’m more interested in knowing what happens now with the battlegroup. Operation Crown Arrow is complete… a success.”

“Scuttlebutt says we’re going to wait a month or two and find out if the pressure’s been taken off of Earth,” Ryan said.

Gray managed a grin. “Do you really think Koenig is going to sit on his ass that long?”

“No, I guess not. But… he’s not in command anymore, is he? That Pan-Europe admiral…”

“Giraurd.”

“Yeah, Giraurd. He outranks Koenig. Grand admiral trumps rear admiral, y’know? I heard he’s going to take over the fleet.”

And
that
, Gray decided, helped define his own sense of loss… and empty letdown. So many people had died, and for what? To drive the enemy out of a system that had very little in the way of advantages for Earth—no habitable worlds, no new allies. They said that crushing and scattering the enemy fleet here would keep the enemy from attacking Sol again… but would it? At worst, the Turusch and their Sh’daar masters had been dealt a setback.

And if the Confederation government decided now to bring the fleet back to Earth, to abandon what had been won here and at Arcturus… then what the hell was the point?

Gray was unhappy with what seemed to be very limited options, and he knew that a number of other pilots in the fleet felt the same way.

A pair of ships drifted into the panorama… the hulk of the
Reasoner
within the oddly insectlike embrace of an SKR–7 Scrounger off the
Lewis
. Several hundred crewmen had been rescued from the frigate, and the Scrounger was now devouring the frigate’s corpse, breaking down hull and control systems and structure, creating stocks of materials that would be used to build new ships, fighters, missiles, and parts for fabrication and repair on board the ships of the fleet. The rebuilding would not be on the same scale, perhaps, as with the destroyed Al–01 factory, but repairs and reconstruction would take place.

If they could train the pilots, the wrecked fighter squadrons might be replaced as well.

“You know,” Gray said slowly, “Koenig’s got to have something else up his sleeve. I can’t imagine him handing over command to Giraurd and meekly going home.”

“They say the Senate wants him to be president.”

“Yeah, they wanted that before and he turned them down cold. I wonder what the son of a bitch has in mind?”

Alexander Koenig, Gray knew, thought in layers upon hidden layers. Since his return to the carrier, Gray had heard dozens of rumors, some of it wild scuttlebutt, but some things…

Yeah, he’d heard the rumors about Giraurd taking over, of course, and that the fleet would be going home. There were rumors that a peace deal was in the works with the Sh’daar, rumors that the Turusch had surrendered, rumors that the enemy was massing near Earth, preparing to invade.

Gray didn’t believe any of that.

But he’d also heard from Donovan and Carstairs that Marines had boarded the radioactive hulk of Al–01 and discovered working Turusch computers and data cells, with information about Turusch bases and facilities across this entire stretch of the Milky Way galaxy.

Might that be true?

Something quickened inside.

Gray felt little allegiance to Earth, less to the Confederation. With a start, he realized that his loyalty lay with the battlegroup, with the
America
, and with CBG–18’s commander, Alexander Koenig.

He didn’t think the old man would be turning around and heading back to Earth anytime soon.

He would be headed outbound, deeper into a hostile galaxy, seeking to end the threat to Earth and Humankind’s way of life once and for all.

And Gray felt a rising surge of excitement, knowing that when the Star Carrier
America
boosted for deep and enemy-held space,
he
would be with her too, headed outbound.

Admiral’s Office, TC/USNA CVS
America

Alphekka System

1450 hours, TFT

Admiral Koenig was not quite alone in his office. The electronic ghost of Karyn Mendelson was there as well. As always…

“It’s very pretty,” she said.

“It may be the single most important piece of intelligence we’ve gathered in this damned war,” Koenig replied. “We’ve been fighting blind until now.”

The projection glowed in the holo-display field above Koenig’s desk. It didn’t show the
entire
galaxy, but enough was there to show gleaming stardust from the ragged outer fringe of one spiral arm in to the densely packed core. A mental interface allowed him to single out stars and star groups and have them identified, to bring up regional and district capitals, to show the individual zones controlled by myriad alien star-faring species, to reveal their routes for trade and exploration.

It even showed the Sh’daar capital, a name shaped by Agletsch phonemes as Daar Sha’ng’lamyd.

It showed the Galactic Empire, or a part of it—a third, perhaps. The data had been recovered from the Turusch equivalent of a computer network on Al–01, converted to a format intelligible to human systems, and translated. The two Agletsch had earned their keep with that one; he still didn’t know if they were
knowingly
passing data on to the enemy, but they’d made up for it, big-time, by helping with the electronic conversion to something
America
’s AIs could work with.

“They’re calling it the
Encyclopedia Galactica
,” Koenig said. “After something in an old work of fiction about a galactic empire.”

“And how is this going to help us win a war?” Karyn asked. “For that matter, how is it going to keep Giraurd and the Senate off your back?”

“Knowledge is always power, Karyn.”

“Granted. And what this knowledge shows is just how many races and fleets and trillions of enemy soldiers there are out there, getting ready to bring us down. Alex…
how are you going to take them on?
. . .”

“It shows us, Karyn, where we’re going next.”

And the milky glow of the galaxy map illuminated his smile.

About the Author

IAN DOUGLAS is the author of the popular military SF series
The Heritage Trilogy
,
The Legacy Trilogy
, and
The Inheritance Trilogy
. A former naval corpsman, he lives in Pennsylvania.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

By Ian Douglas

Star Carrier

E
ARTH
S
TRIKE

C
ENTER
of G
RAVITY

And the Galactic Marines Series

The Inheritance Trilogy

S
TAR
S
TRIKE

G
ALACTIC
C
ORPS

S
EMPER
H
UMAN

The Legacy Trilogy

S
TAR
C
ORPS

B
ATTLESPACE

S
TAR
M
ARINES

The Heritage Trilogy

S
EMPER
Mars

L
UNA
M
ARINE

E
UROPA
S
TRIKE

Credits

Cover art by Gregory Bridges

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

CENTER OF GRAVITY
. Copyright © 2011 by William H. Keith, Jr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition March 2011 ISBN: 9780062064172

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