Centre of Gravity. Ian Douglas

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      “Negative,” he said. He couldn’t imagine this crowd having anything pleasant to say to him.

      He’d tried to get out of coming tonight. Lieutenant Commander Allyn had told him yesterday, in the squadron ready room on board America, that he’d been volunteered for the fly-by show, with attendance at the Yule Festival afterward.

      “Why me?” he’d asked. “I’ve got nothing to do with Earthies anymore.”

      “Oh, I don’t know,” the Dragonfires’ skipper had replied. “Maybe because you had something to do with saving all of their asses?”

      That again. “Fuck that, sir,” he said, using the Navy’s preferred gender-neutral honorific, though ma’am would have done as well. “I was doing my job.”

      “And maybe your job includes being a visible symbol of the Confederation Navy,” she’d told him. “Don’t give me grief, Gray. You’re on the flight roster, like it or not.”

      And here he was.

      In a nearby temporary alcove, Donovan was holding a young woman very closely indeed. She was wearing a sheath of golden, rippling light, and appeared to have extended the field to include Ben in her embrace. Gray looked away, embarrassed, and found himself looking into another alcove, this one with two men and a woman on a round sofa bed, engaged in some extremely passionate foreplay.

      Angry, he turned his head again and strode forward, determined to find something to eat. He felt so damned out of place here. …

      Within the Periphery, the necessities of survival tended to draw people into close, monogamous couples. Elsewhere, at least through much of North America, family groupings tended to be larger and extended, polyamorous, and impermanent. Throughout much of the background culture of the Confederation, the half-barbaric denizens of the Periphery were seen as amusingly quaint, or worse: as narrow-minded or even sexually perverted. They were commonly called “Prims,” which was short for “primitives,” of course, but the epithet held the double meaning of someone who was self-righteously prudish or closed sexually. “Monogies” was another derogative term for Prims who preferred a monogamous lifestyle; why would anyone want to restrict their life and their love to a single person?

      Gray was neither prudish nor self-righteous. He knew other communities did things differently when it came to sex and marriage, and had no problem with the fact. Extended social group marriages and sexcircles simply weren’t for him. The thought of casually coupling with a woman he didn’t know—and couldn’t trust—left him vaguely uneasy.

      A table extruded from the floor beneath an enormous transparency overlooking the Hudson was covered by dishes of various kinds, all of them pretty, few of them things he actually recognized. America had a decent mess deck and good food-processing software, but nothing as fancy as this. Some of the items actually looked as though they’d started out as vegetation growing in the ground or an aerophonics module rather than a collection of CHON turned appetizing by a molecular assembler.

      He tried something green and crunchy with an orange paste spread across the top. Interesting …

      “You are being pinged again by the same person,” his PA told him. His internal direction sense said, That way, toward an outside veranda. “Range: thirty-one meters and approaching.”

      “Let her,” Gray said.

      He kept eating.

       H’rulka Warship 434

       Saturn Space, Sol System

       1242 hours, TFT

      The H’rulka didn’t name their starships. A name suggested an individual personality, and the concept of the individual was one only barely grasped by H’rulka psychology. The H’rulka were, in fact, colony organisms; a very rough terrestrial analogue would have been the Portuguese Man of War … though the H’rulka were not marine creatures, and each was composed of several hundred types of communal polyps, rather than just four. Even their name for themselves—which came across in a hydrogen atmosphere as a shrill, high-pitched thunder generated by gas bags beneath the primary flotation sac—meant something like “All of Us,” and could refer either to a single colony, in the first person, or to the race as a whole.

      Individual H’rulka colonies took on temporary names, however, as dictated by their responsibilities within the community. Ordered Ascent was the commander of Warship 434, itself until recently a part of a larger vessel, Warship 432. The species didn’t have a government as humans would have understood the term, and even the captain of a starship was more of a principal decision maker than a leader.

      Ordered Ascent was linked in with 434’s external sensors, and was studying the planet just ahead. The alien solar system comprised a single star and four planets, plus the usual scattering of rubble and debris. The planet some eighty thousand shu ahead was almost achingly familiar in size and mass and gently banded color, a near twin to the homeworld so many shishu away, right down to the sweeping rings of minute, reflective particles circling it.

      “It looks like home,” the aggregate being called Swift Pouncer whispered over the private radio link. H’rulka possessed two entirely separate means of speech, two separate languages—one by means of vibrations in the atmosphere, the other by means of biologically generated radio bursts. Their natural radio transceivers, located just beneath the doughnut-shaped cluster of polyps forming their brains, allowed them to interface directly with their machines.

      “Similar,” Ordered Ascent replied. “It appears to be inhabited.”

      “We are receiving speech from one of the debris-chunks orbiting the world,” Swift Pouncer replied. “It may be a vermin-nest. And … we are receiving speech from numerous sources much closer to the local star.”

      Ordered Ascent tuned in to the broadband scanners and saw the other signals.

      Those members of Ordered Ascent capable of rational thought chided themselves. No matter how long they served within the far-flung fleets of the Sh’daar, it was difficult to remember that vermin-nests frequently occurred, not within the atmospheres of true planets, but on the inhospitable solid surfaces of debris.

      It was an unsettling thought. For just a moment, Ordered Ascent allowed themselves to pull back from the instrumentation feeds, to find steadiness and reassurance in the sight of the Collective Globe.

      The interior of the H’rulka warship was immense by human standards, but cramped to the point of stark claustrophobia for the species called All of Us. The area that served as the equivalent of the bridge on a human starship was well over two kilometers across, a vast spherical space filled by twelve free-floating H’rulka colonies in a dodecahedral array. Connected by radio to their ship, they used radio commands to direct and maneuver the huge vessel, fire the weapons, and observe their surroundings.

      They lived in the high-pressure atmosphere of gas giants, breathing hydrogen and metabolizing methane, ammonia, and drifting organic tidbits analogous to the plankton of Terran oceans. Until one of the Sh’daar’s client species had shown them how to use solid materials to build spacecraft that defied both gravity and hard vacuum, they’d never known the interior of anything, never known what it was like to be enclosed, to be trapped inside. The interior of Warship 434 was large enough—just—to avoid triggering a serious claustrophobic-panic reflex in All of Us aggregates. Sometimes, they needed СКАЧАТЬ