Center of Gravity

by Ian Douglas

  To that end, the ONI research and development team was working on AI software that might be able to duplicate Turusch speech patterns. Take two AIs paired together, have them speak separate lines together with the resonant frequencies generating a third level of meaning . . . simple.

  Except for the fact that you really needed to think like a Turusch pair to use their mode of communication, and that was something that might well forever be beyond the reach of human minds, or even of the minds of AIs programmed by humans.

  He broke his connection with the Noter, as non-terrestrial environmental robots were known in the human research community, and found himself back at his workstation. The Turusch, with their hot and poisonous atmosphere, the intense ultraviolet, the steaming mist of sulfuric acid and sulfur droplets—all were gone. Caryl Daystrom was there, had come to him in person rather than calling him over the link.

  “An Alpha message?” he asked her.

  “A-comm, from Admiral Koenig, on the carrier America,” she replied. “I thought it might be urgent.”

  She was being humorously sarcastic. An Alpha-flagged message was by definition urgent.

  “Thank you,” he told her as she turned and left. He palmed a contact on his desk, opening an avatar comm channel. The room’s electronics projected the image of Admiral Koenig into the space where Caryl had stood a moment before. It appeared to be wearing Confederation naval blacks, with the gold filigree of a flag officer down the left side.

  It was, of course, an avatar only, an electronic image generated by a message AI, and not live.

  “Dr. Wilkerson,” the image said, “I don’t know if you’ve been looking out your window lately, but we’ve got visitors out here.”

  A data display plane opened next to the Admiral’s AI-generated electronic double, showing empty, star-scattered space behind a roughly spherical, deep black object, grainy with the high magnification used to capture the image. As he watched, the object appeared to unfold itself, then split suddenly into twelve separate sections, like segments of an orange.

  “We think it’s H’rulka,” Koenig’s voice went on, “and we think it followed a recon probe we’d deployed to Arcturus for a look-see. It destroyed seven of our warships, then began boosting out-system with an obscene acceleration.”

  On the display, the image shifted to show one of the ship sections, evidently several moments later, to judge by the running time stamp in the lower left corner. It had started out looking like one segment of an orange, but it rapidly collapsed in upon itself, forming a flattened sphere. Three dazzlingly bright and utterly silent flashes engulfed the tiny, distant object, blotting out for several seconds everything on the display.

  “We managed to stop two of the things,” Koenig continued. “Whether the crews are alive or not, we don’t know . . . but we’re about to try to open those hulks up and see what’s inside. I’d like you to shuttle out to America ASAP, for first contact. I’ve put in a request, through ONI channels.”

  The display pane winked out. The admiral’s projected image continued to stand there, smiling.

  “How many H’rulka are on board that ship, Admiral?” he asked.

  “Unknown,” was the reply. Koenig himself, of course, was some light seconds away, or further. The avatar AI, programmed with key aspects of Koenig’s knowledge—at least what he knew about this situation at the time when the A-comm had been transmitted—was answering for him. “So far as we know, no human has ever met one. The ship, though, is huge—over twenty kilometers across for the first, single vessel. The smaller ones each were about ten kilometers across, more or less. They can apparently morph to a far greater degree than can our fighters.”

  “I’ll be out there as quickly as I can manage it,” Wilkerson said.

  “Thank you, Doctor. It’ll be good to see you again.”

  “One question?”

  “Certainly. If I can answer it.” The AI would be sharply limited by the narrowness of its personal database.

  “Okay. Why me?”

  “It occurred to me that your Turusch friends there might be able to enlighten us about the H’rulka.” Koenig’s image told him. “In any case, I thought you’d want in on this, Doctor. If any of them survived over there, it means a whole new alien mindset to play with!”

  “Thank you.”

  “See you aboard soon.” The image winked off.

  And Wilkerson began thinking about how he could phrase a question that would get a meaningful reply from the Turusch before he left.

  Black Recon One

  Approaching H’rulka Ship

  Sol System

  2243 hours, TFT

  Chief Robert Garrison lay within the close embrace of the VBSS boarding pod and counted off the remaining seconds to the target. This op, he decided, was going to be damned hairy.

  But, then, that was what SEALS were for.

  The original Navy SEALs had been born during the mid–twentieth century, their name an acronym of the elements within which they moved and fought: Sea, Air, and Land. In the late twenty-first century they added Space to the list, and officially became the SEALS, though a single Navy special warfare operator continued to call himself a SEAL, in the singular. Attached now to the Confederation Armed Forces, the USNA SEALS retained the elite warrior traditions, training, and sense of duty of their predecessors.

  But their technological underpinnings had come a long way from submarines, rubber boats, and rebreathers. The VBT–80 boarding pod within which he and five other SEALS were closely enclosed was a gleaming black cigar twenty meters long and five wide, with an outer shell almost completely composed of programmed disassemblers. Launched from a Navy assault craft, in this case the light gunboat Ramage, the pod slid toward the objective at ten kilometers per second, its surface selectively absorbing or scattering any incoming radiation that might have revealed the pod’s presence.

  The objective loomed ahead, enormous and sheathed in as deep a light-drinking black as the VBSS pod. The alien continued to drift out-system at some 62,000 kilometers per second, ignoring all attempts to contact it. Numerous ships had matched velocities and approached it during the past tense hours; the alien had shown no response whatsoever.

  The thing appeared to be dead.

  “Whadaya think, Chief?” Gunner’s Mate First Class Archie Lamb asked. “Is he playing possum?”

  “We’ll know in a minute, Arch. You all set back there?”

  “Ready to kick alien ass, Chief.”

  “Assuming we can figure out which part of their anatomy that might be. Okay . . . ninety seconds. Final load-out check.”

  The naval commandos checked out one another’s gear, looking for anything loose or potentially noisy. The alien, ten kilometers across, blotted out the stars of half of the sky.

  VBSS stood for Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure, a military term from the late twentieth century utilized by Marine and Navy personnel faced with boarding a potentially hostile vessel at sea. The problems associated with this sort of operation had become far more complex and deadly when the venue had changed from sea to space, to an unforgiving environment where a breached hull could replace atmosphere explosively with hard vacuum, killing anyone not protected by an environmental suit. If the members of the H’rulka crew of that thing were still alive, their capture might provide an intelligence treasure trove for ONI and Confederation Intelligence.

  He watched the alien vessel closely as they made the final approach. It hadn’t fired on any of the other Confederation craft that had matched vectors and moved in close, but that was no guarantee for the SEALS boarding team. There might be point-defense weapons or even automated close-in defenses. Worse, the ability of this craft to remold itself into a new hull configuration after separating from the larger vessel suggested nanotechnology, and a fairly advanced understanding of the science at that. An outer hull nanodisassembler la
yer would make what they were about to try impossible . . . and fatal.

  He checked his internal com link. Some thousands of members of the Confederation military brass and a fair percentage of the government would be literally looking through his eyes right now, and those of his men. All of those links were passive—meaning they could watch but not speak—save one. Admiral Koenig, the CO of CBG–18, could speak to him, though he’d promised not to micromanage. Garrison appreciated that. This job was tough enough without backseat piloting by gold-braid REMFs.

  Koenig, in turn, was linked in with some XS-types, xenosophontologists working for Naval Intelligence, and he’d been told that a particularly sophisticated translation AI was live on the open Net.

  Good. Garrison would take any help in that department that he could. He was keenly aware that no human—none who’d lived to tell about it, at any rate—had ever seen a H’rulka. The best guess as to their appearance, based on accounts by the Agletsch, was that they must be animated balloons or dirigibles, organic gas bags evolved to live in the atmosphere of a gas giant.

  But that, he knew, was only theory. He and his men were about to learn the truth.

  CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

  Earth Synchorbit, Sol System

  2243 hours, TFT

  Admiral Koenig watched through the Navy SEALS’ eyes.

  This was a particularly sophisticated neural-graft hookup. Navy SpecOps personnel, the field operators, at any rate, had been given a number of special enhancements. Their nano-chelated cerebral implants allowed multiple observers to look over their shoulders, in effect, while they were engaged in a mission, and gave them useful tools for cracking computer security codes or engaging enemy software systems.

  Breaking alien computer languages, though, was not a consideration on this mission. Whatever the H’rulka used for computer software would be utterly alien, completely unrelated to anything ever designed and used by humans.

  But the technology allowed Koenig to ride along inside Chief Garrison’s head, in effect, as though the SEALS were an NTE robot. He couldn’t hear the man’s thoughts, of course, unless they were deliberately sub-vocalized and captured through nanosensors grown alongside his larynx. If Koenig spoke aloud, Garrison would hear him through his audio circuitry.

  Not that Koenig would intrude on the man’s thoughts now.

  The hull of the alien was less than one hundred meters ahead now, a vast, death-black cliff blotting out the stars as the VBSS probe slowed sharply to avoid a lethal impact. Koenig searched that cliff face for signs of damage from the three nuclear blasts that had engulfed it, but saw none. The surface appeared smooth, not pitted or worn or burned at all, with numerous ribs or folds running across it in a seemingly random pattern.

  Sixty meters. A through-hull docking collar began deploying on the cigar-shaped pod’s nose.

  “Here we go, ladies,” the voice of Chief Garrison said over Koenig’s link. “Forty meters. Brace for impact.”

  Seconds later, the docking collar struck alien metal. The contact surface of the collar was composed of a thick layer of nanoreassemblers, molecule-sized machines that began latching on to the individual molecules of the alien metal surface, analyzing them, breaking them apart into their component atoms, and then putting them back together in an orderly and carefully calculated way.

  The vacuum seals between the flight and hangar decks of a star carrier worked on the same principle. Solid metal could be reconfigured into an artificial allotrope with markedly different properties . . . in this case turning solid composite metal into a viscous liquid that maintained the atmospheric seal, but allowed the cigar-shaped probe to slide into and through the hull, rather than breaking or burning open a hole. The black liquid, looking much like molten tar, closed around the boarding capsule’s hull and swallowed it, closing up behind it as it moved forward.

  A radio transceiver would have been deposited on the outer surface of the hull as the pod entered, and a connecting thread of fiber-optic cable, fantastically strong but no thicker than a human hair, played out behind it. That cable would be the means by which the SEALS could stay in touch with people outside, ensuring a secure two-way audio connection and one-way visuals.

  Despite this, for several long moments, all Koenig could see over his link was darkness, overlaid by the glowing schematics and windows of Garrison’s in-head display. If it hadn’t been for the IHD, Koenig would have assumed that the communications cable had been broken. There was very little room inside one of those boarding pods, with the men stretched out full-length inside tubes barely large enough to hold their heavily armored forms. Those tubes were not lit, and the men inside had only the sensor feeds from the pod’s external optics with which to see out of their prison.

  “Preliminary analyses of the hull metal suggests a sub-nano matrix,” the voice of one of the other SEALS said. “They use liquid-doorway technology, same as us.”

  “Thick hull,” Garrison’s voice said, though whether he was addressing his men, Koenig, or the universe at large was impossible to say. “This damned thing is mostly solid. Sonic readings show we’re almost through, though. . . .”

  And then the boarding pod’s nose emerged from the hull metal and into the alien craft’s interior. Koenig had a blurred and confused impression of light, and it took a moment for the light to coalesce and resolve into something intelligible, if not exactly comprehensible. From Koenig’s point of view, he appeared to be looking out across a dizzyingly vast gulf of sky and cloud. Gravitic readings showed that the pod had passed into an artificial gravity field of some sort, that it was emerging into a vast interior space from below and to one side. The interior walls were projecting a skyscape—an intensely deep, rich blue above, with cloud walls like the faces of multihued cliffs rising on all sides, with the illusory floor of the mammoth chamber growing darker and darker as though representing a bottomless well descending deep into the cloud layers.

  The cloud-cliffs showed impossibly fine and detailed structure, the fractally complex surfaces carved by wind and movement into entire landscapes of color—reds, browns, yellows, golds, silvers—in intricate patterns of mountain and valley, ridgeline and furrow. Directly overhead, a tiny but brilliant sun gleamed white within an encircling ring of light—diffraction, Koenig guessed, through ice crystals in the upper atmosphere.

  “Atmospheric readout coming through,” one of the SEALS reported. Koenig saw a window open in his mind, giving a breakdown of the ship’s interior atmosphere. The temperature, surprisingly, was twelve degrees Celsius, warmer, somehow, than Koenig had expected. The gas mix was mostly hydrogen—no surprise there—and helium, with methane, ammonia, water vapor, and other compounds in trace amounts. As expected, a typical gas-giant atmosphere, quite similar, in fact, to that of Saturn.

  The sheer scale of the scene was so alien that Garrison didn’t notice the aliens at first. When Lamb called his attention to them, however, he saw them clearly enough . . . a vast field of pale mushroom shapes in front of one of the cloud walls. It appeared to be a herd, some hundreds of individuals, adrift on alien winds. He studied them for a long moment before deciding that these, too, were a part of the background display. An illusion . . .

  A shadow moved across the cloudscape.

  Garrison looked up, and Koenig saw through his eyes the alien . . . if that was what it actually was. It was hard to make sense of what he was seeing—an immense island of pale and plastic-looking surfaces, a ring of growth encircling the base, like an upside-down forest of vines and branches.

  And it was descending—descending rapidly, directly toward the SEALS. . . .

  Chapter Seven

  21 December 2404

  Black Recon One

  H’rulka Ship, Sol System

  2248 hours, TFT

  Chief Garrison had only a second or two to make a decision—to pull back into the alien vessel’s bulkhead or pus
h the pod forward and into the interior. The H’rulka, an enormous ivory-colored balloon, was dropping toward the point at which the boarding pod was emerging. It would take time to unship the pod’s stern docking collar, too much time . . .

  He gave the mental command to squeeze the pod forward and into the open.

  A fringe covered tentacle as thick as a sequoia and twice as high swept past the pod, shaking it with the shock wave of its passage. The boarding pod darted forward, narrowly missed by the tentacle, which brushed across the portion of the bulkhead from which the pod had just emerged.

  Garrison’s first thought was that the giant alien had been trying to crush the pod, but once the SEALS were in the open, the monster took no notice of them at all. Instead, it appeared to be concerned about a patch of tarry black interrupting the cloudscape projected on the bulkhead. When the pod’s docking collar had melted its way out of the ship’s bulkhead, it appeared to have interfered with the cloud-display illusion, leaving a blank space perhaps twenty meters across. The alien—a mushroom-shaped gas bag fully 280 meters across at the top, with a forest of tentacles and fuzzy-looking appendages hanging from a narrow circle below—appeared agitated, and seemed to be feeling the damaged section with questing appendages.

  The pod had deposited a second radio transceiver there, connected by the fiber-optic thread with the one outside. Garrison held his breath, wondering if the creature was going to scrape the transceiver away, cutting off all communications with the outside world . . . but the device was flat and slightly inset within the black wall. His telemetry coming through his IHD showed that they were still in touch with the Star Carrier America outside.

  The pod shuddered, then started to fall.

  “We’re not going to be able to hold altitude, Chief,” EN1 Roykowski said. “These pods aren’t designed for this sort of thing.”