Centre of Gravity. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ the navy took care to distinguish acceleration—meaning gravitational acceleration—from real acceleration, which was imposed by maneuvering thrusters or dockyard tugs. The former might involve accelerations of hundreds of gravities, but were free-fall and therefore unfelt. The tugs were shoving America’s ponderous mass clear of the docking facility with an acceleration of only a couple of meters per second per second, but that translated as two-tenths of a gravity, and a perceived weight, for Buchanan, of nearly eighteen kilograms—disorienting, and potentially dangerous for members of the ship’s crew who still weren’t strapped in. Out in the rotating hab modules, where spin gravity created the illusion of a constant half G, it was worse, as “down” began to shift unpleasantly back and forth with the hab modules’ rotation.

      He drummed his fingers restlessly on a contact plate. Best safe vector meant slow, and without benefit of gravitics. A mistake here could wreck a substantial portion of Fleet Base. By the time the carrier warped clear of the dock, the enemy ship—no, ships, he corrected himself—would be long gone.

      He’d half expected Koenig to reverse the orders to take America out of dock. If the enemy left the solar system, there was no need to continue. On the other hand, Koenig might be preparing for a further enemy incursion … or for a sudden change in course by the fleeing H’rulka vessels. The safe bet was to get all warships clear and maneuvering freely and to keep them there until it was certain the enemy threat had passed.

      There’d been no additional orders from the Admiral in CIC, and so Buchanan had continued to follow the last set of orders he’d received. Take her out.

      On the tactical display, some of the missiles fired by the Symmons an instant before her immolation were slowly closing on one of the H’rulka ship sections. …

       H’rulka Warship 434

       Sol System

       1544 hours, TFT

      With divergence, the situation had become considerably more desperate.

      Ordered Ascent drifted in the center of a claustrophobically enclosed space less than three times the diameter of its own gas bag, with scarcely enough room for its own manipulators and feeder nets to drift without scraping the compartment’s interior walls. Images projected by the ship across the ship-pod’s interior surfaces created the comforting illusion of vast, panoramic vistas of cloud canyons, vertical cloudwalls, and atmospheric abysses, but the touch of a tentacle against the invisible solid wall shattered the comforting sense of openness, and could bring on the sharp madness of claustrophobia.

      Each of the other vessels—434 had retained its number, but the others, upon divergence, had received new identifiers—was accelerating now on a slightly different heading, somewhat more vulnerable now to enemy weapons, and certainly more dangerous for the crew emotionally.

      The tactic essentially reproduced a natural response among H’rulka colonies that had evolved half a million gnyii among the cloudscapes of the homeworld. Certain pack hunters that had shared those skies with the All of Us preyed on adult colonies by attaching themselves to under-bodies and slicing at them with razor-edged whip-tentacle limbs evolved to surgically sharp efficiency for the task. H’rulka survived by jettisoning their immense gas bags as the predators approached, allowing themselves to plummet into the Abyss; each colony-group separated naturally into twelve sub-colonies—divergence.

      Each sub-colony unfolded a new, much smaller gas bag, heating hydrogen through furiously pumping metabolic bellows to arrest the fall before the group dropped into the lethal temperatures and pressures of the Abyssal Deep, a descent of only a couple of thousand kilometers, and often less. In essence, the adult colony had reverted to a juvenile form, and much of the original colony’s intelligence and memory were lost. H’rulka civilization, in fact, had begun perhaps 12⁵ gnyii ago with the collection of communal records maintained as a kind of living, constantly recited encyclopedia broadcast endlessly over certain radio frequencies. Those records were a direct response to the effects of the predators on the cloud communities at large, and had led, ultimately, to the discoveries of science, of polylogue mathematics, and, eventually, technology.

      But divergence was still exceptionally traumatic for All of Us colonies, and some of the terror associated with the breakup and the precipitous fall continued to haunt them even when the divergence was strictly technological, a means of ensuring that one, at least, of the H’rulka colonies would make it back to base.

      Enemy weapons were pursuing several of the retreating pods. None were in close proximity to Warship 434, but Rapid Cloud in 440 and Swift Pouncer in 442 both were being closely pursued by what appeared to be intelligent, self-steering missiles. The devices were primitive technologically, compared with All of Us singularity projectors, but would possess nuclear warheads that might seriously damage even an intact H’rulka warship.

      Only a few vu more, and they would be able to slip into the safety of bent space.

      A trio of dazzlingly white flashes ignited close alongside Swift Pouncer, and another just behind Rapid Cloud. Ordered Ascent felt the electromagnetic pulse, felt the telemetry warning of systems failure …

      But then critical velocity was reached, and the retreating colony-pods began dropping into bent space.

       Chapter Six

       21 December 2404

      CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

       Earth Synchorbit, Sol System

       1532 hours, TFT

      Admiral Koenig sat in his workstation in America’s Combat Information Center, the large, circular compartment that served as the command nerve center for the entire carrier battlegroup. The surrounding bulkheads were currently set to show the view from the carrier’s external optical sensors, the input from dozens of cameras merged by computer into a seamless whole that edited out the sheer cliff of the shield cap forward, and the kilometer-long length of the spine aft. At the moment, they showed the docking facility receding slowly to port, and the much vaster sweep of the entire SupraQuito base beyond, partially blocking the slender, brilliant crescent forward that was Earth.

      Dozens of other ships filled the sky. Half of CBG–18 had been docked at the base, the other half on patrol as far out as the orbit of Luna. Koenig had given orders for all of the battlegroup’s ships to get clear of the port as quickly as possible, and to deploy in the general direction of the intruder.

      The precaution, it seemed, had been needless. The intruder was now accelerating rapidly out-system, pursued by a number of Confederation vessels. Moments before, it had lashed out at seven of the closest vessels and destroyed them, including the destroyers Kaufman and Symmons, and the frigate Milton, all members of CBG–18. Symmons had gotten off a spread of Mambas, however, and those were slowly closing on the enemy, which had just, unaccountably, divided into twelve smaller vessels.

      The enemy was now about one light minute distant, and moving so quickly—close to sixty thousand kilometers per second—that it was likely that, by now, those ships had already either gone into metaspace or been struck by Symmons’ salvo.

      The intruder’s behavior was puzzling, to say the least. H’rulka military technology was, at a guess, a century or two ahead of Earth-human СКАЧАТЬ