Centre of Gravity. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ “Why do you think that?”

      “Because the vertical circulation of atmospheric cells in a gas giant atmosphere would drag any life form in the relatively benign higher levels down into the depths in short order,” Kane replied. “They would be destroyed by crushing pressures and searing high temperatures. There’d be no way to preserve culture … or develop it, for that matter. No way to preserve historical records … art … music … learning. And, as you just said, they wouldn’t get far without being able to smelt metals or build a technology from the ground up.” He smirked. “No ground.”

      “But we do have lots of examples of Jovian life,” Wilkerson said.

      “None of it intelligent,” Kane replied. “It can’t survive long enough.”

      “Maybe.” Wilkerson moved his hand, and the columns of writing on the virtual window were replaced by the image received by the ONI a few hours before … a transmission from a burned-out interstellar probe that had dropped into the outskirts of the Sol System and beamed its treasure trove of data in-system that morning.

      An alert with raw-data footage had been passed on to a number of government offices and military commands a few hours ago; the fact that the H’rulka were at Arcturus was big news. It meant, potentially, disaster. …

      “Whether they’re gas bags from a Jovian atmosphere, or something more substantial,” Wilkerson observed, “they mean trouble. We’ve only met them once, but that was enough.”

      The ongoing exchange of hostilities known as the First Interstellar War had been proceeding off and on for the past thirty-six years. It had begun in 2368 at the Battle of Beta Pictoris, with a single Terran ship surviving out of a squadron of eight. In the years since, defeat had followed defeat as the Turusch and their mysterious Sh’daar masters had taken world upon human-colonized world, as the area controlled by the Terran Confederation had steadily dwindled.

      Most of those defeats were suffered by Earth’s navies at the hands the Turusch va Sh’daar, a species that appeared to be the equivalent of the Sh’daar empire’s military arm. Once, however, a dozen years ago, a Confederation fleet approaching a gas giant within the unexplored system of 9 Ceti, some 67 light years from Sol, had been wiped out by a single enormous vessel rising from the giant’s cloud layers. A single message pod had been launched toward the nearby human colony of Anan, just seventeen light years away, at 37 Ceti.

      The Agletsch, the spidery sentients who’d been Humankind’s first contact with other minds among the stars, had looked at images from that pod and identified the lone attacking ship as H’rulka. The name was an Agletsch word meaning, roughly, “floaters.” They’d claimed that the aliens were huge living balloons that had evolved within the upper atmosphere of a distant gas giant like Sol’s Jupiter. The term H’rulka va Sh’daar suggested that the H’rulka, like the Turusch and like the Agletsch, were part of the galaxy-spanning empire of the Sh’daar.

      No one knew what the H’rulka called themselves, what they looked like, or anything at all about them. Many human researchers, like Kane, were convinced that even the information about a gas giant homeworld was either mistaken or deliberate misinformation.

      What was known was that a few weeks after the fleet at 9 Ceti was lost, all contact with Anan was lost as well.

      If the H’rulka were at Arcturus, apparently working with the Turusch, it suggested that the Sh’daar had just upped the ante, bringing up some big-gun support for their Turusch allies.

      “We could start talking to our Turusch about whether they’ve worked with the H’rulka before,” Wilkerson suggested. “It might give us some insight into how they fit in with the Sh’daar hierarchy.”

      Three millennia earlier, Sun Tse had pointed out that a man who knew both himself and his enemy would be victorious in all of his battles. That might have worked for the ancient Chinese, but complete knowledge simply wasn’t possible—certainly not of beings as completely alien as the Sh’daar, the H’rulka, or the Turusch.

      “Do you think that’s important?” Kane asked.

      Wilkerson shrugged. “At this point, every datum is important. We’re not even sure why they’re attacking us.”

      “I thought it was because the Sh’daar wanted to limit our technological growth.”

      “So the Agletsch told us. But how accurate is that? And if it is, why? We call the Sh’daar polity an empire … but is it? Do the Sh’daar really control all of their client species, tell them what to do, who to trade with, who to attack? Or are the Turusch, and now the H’rulka, attacking us on their own? We don’t know.”

      “The term empire serves well enough,” Kane said. “We may not need to know the details.”

      “Maybe not … but we won’t know what we need to know until we winkle it out, translate it, and analyze it.”

      “Well, let’s see what the slugs have to say,” Kane agreed.

      “You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”

      “Enthusiastic? No. Those big gastropods give me the creeps. I keep wanting to reach for the salt shaker … a very large salt shaker. …”

       Chapter Two

       21 December 2404

       Palisades Eudaimonium

       New York State, Earth

       1725 hours, EST

      The spaceport’s pubtran flier touched down lightly on the landing platform, a broad concourse suspended several hundred meters above the ground in front of the Grand Concourse. Trevor Gray stepped out of the flier and stopped, momentarily transfixed by the spectacle below, a dazzling constellation of lights stretching from horizon to horizon. Near at hand, concentric circles of lights, illuminated buildings, glowing red and green holiday decorations and animations, and the shifting displays of adwalls all combined to create a bewildering tangle of moving light. In the distance, toward the southeast, lay an ominous swath of darkness punctuated by the light—Columbia, Manhattan, and on the horizon, the ocean.

      Someone thumped his shoulder hard from behind.

      “Move it, Prim,” Lieutenant Jen Collins snapped. “You’re blocking progress.”

      Gray turned sharply, fists clenched, but then stepped aside as the others filed out of the flier. Lieutenant Commander Allyn was coming off the flier last, and was watching him. “Uniform, Lieutenant,” she reminded him. “This is a formal affair.”

      “Ah, you should have let the Prim wear his jackies,” Collins said with a bitter laugh.

      “Yeah,” Lieutenant Kirkpatrick added, grinning. “The dumb-ass doesn’t know any better. It’ll be fun watching him try to mix with our kind.”

      “Hey, back off,” Lieutenant Ben Donovan said. “We’re all a bit nervous tonight.”

      Gray looked down at his uniform, СКАЧАТЬ