Centre of Gravity. Ian Douglas

      Yeah, you didn’t ask what had happened to me, did you? he thought. The last time he’d seen her had been just before he’d been forced into military service in order to pay her hospital bill. He’d tried to look her up on several occasions after, while he’d still been in a training squadron at Oceana, but his e-calls had always been blocked.

      “Are you still with Frank?”

      “Fred.”

      “Whatever.”

      “I’m part of an extended family up in Haworth, yes.”

      “Are you happy?”

      “Yes.”

      “Then that’s okay, then.” Damn, this felt awkward.

      “How about you?”

      “Me what?”

      “Are you happy?”

      He wondered how to reply. His life turned upside down, the woman he’d loved horribly changed and taken from him. He was forced to live and work with people who laughed at his old life and called him “Prim” and “squattie” and “monogie,” forced to leave the place that had been home since his birth. … Was he happy?

      “Sure, I’m happy. A laugh a minute, that’s my life.”

      She looked at him uncertainly, as if trying to decide if he was being sarcastic or bitter. He looked down at the palms of his hands, where slender gold, silver, and copper threads were woven in an uneven mesh imbedded in the skin, exactly like her implants. He’d had to get his when they inducted him into the Confederation Navy; all personnel had to have them in order to control everything from meal dispensers to the locks on their personal quarters to the cockpit instrumentation in an SG–92.

      But Angela had gotten hers as a part of the treatment after her stroke, class-three implants within the sulci of her brain. They’d also regrown sections of her organic nervous system. And it had changed her, changed her attitude, her feelings toward him.

      Of course, he still loved her, though she’d lost all affection for him.

      “So,” he said, wondering what to talk about. “You just happened to be here? You weren’t looking for me?”

      “No, Trev. I was just … here. Small world, huh?”

      A little too small. Gray found himself wishing he were back on the America. Life on board ship was so much simpler.

      But then, she had been pinging him. His PA confirmed that it had been her electronic signal seeking him out of the crowd. Maybe she was still interested in him after all.

      “I’ve got to go,” he said sharply. He turned and walked away, leaving her standing there by the food table.

      High Guard Destroyer Qianfang Fangyu

       Saturn Space, Sol System

       1325 hours, TFT

      “What the holy fuck is that?”

      Jordan Reeves floated in the main control room of the High Guard destroyer, staring into the holographic display showing the long-range scan of the intruder.

      Captain Liu Jintao glanced at the liaison officer with distaste, and then passed his hand across the display controls, increasing the magnification factor by another ten.

      “I would say,” Liu replied in his slow and halting English, “that it is a problem.”

      The target was some 20 million kilometers out from Saturn—and at just about the same distance from Titan at this point in the giant moon’s orbit. That actually placed the intruder well within the outskirts of Saturn’s far-flung system of moons, within the retrograde Norse group, in fact.

      And that made the intruder of supreme interest to the High Guard.

      Within the display, the intruder appeared as a gleaming point of light, attended by a flickering sidebar of data giving mass and diameter, velocity and heading. The ship—it had just dropped out of the space-twisting bubble of Alcubierre Drive so it had to be a ship—was huge, two kilometers across and massing tens of billions of tons. At optical wavelengths, the object appeared … odd, a flattened sphere with a shifting surface that defied analysis.

      “It’s highly reflective,” Liu said.

      “It’s black.”

      “Because it is reflecting the black of surrounding space. This data suggests that it is almost perfectly reflective … like a mirror, or a pool of liquid mercury.”

      “So who are they, and what are they doing in the Norse group?”

      The Norse group was the outer cloud of Saturnian moons, some dozens of bodies circling the planet retrograde and at high inclination. Phoebe, at 216 kilometers, was the biggest of these; the rest, named for figures from Norse mythology, were rubble, little more than drifting mountains. Ymir was just 18 kilometers wide.

      “Is he trying to rendezvous with any of those rocks?” Reeves asked.

      “Not yet,” Liu replied. “The nearest to the intruder’s position is S/2004 S 12 … at just over one hundred thousand kilometers. And the intruder is traveling prograde.”

      The Norse group moons were retrograde, circling Saturn east to west. The intruder was currently flying against the flow, as it were, meaning it was not attempting to match course and velocity with any of those hurtling mountains.

      Yet.

      Over two and a half centuries before, the Second Sino-Western War had been fought both on Earth and in space. Toward the very end of the conflict, a Chinese ship, the Xiang Yang Hong, had used nuclear warheads to nudge three two-kilometer asteroids into trajectories that would have landed them in the Atlantic Ocean, one right after the other; the resultant tidal waves would have devastated both the eastern seaboard of the United States and much of the European Union, as well as much of Africa and South America. Had the attempt succeeded, there was little doubt but that the Chinese Hegemony would have emerged, not merely victorious, but as the single most powerful nation on the planet.

      Beijing had claimed that Sun Xueju, the Xiang Yang Hong’s captain, had gone rogue, that he’d been operating independently of Beijing’s orders when he’d attempted what amounted to a global terror attack. The attempt had come uncomfortably close to success; a U.S.-European task force had destroyed the Xiang Yang Hong and two of the incoming asteroids … but the last, dubbed “Wormwood” by the media, had slammed into the sea between West Africa and Brazil, and half a billion people had died.

      The Chinese Hegemony had been shamed by Sun’s act, and had been paying for that event ever since, blocked from joining the Earth Confederation, savaged by trade and commerce laws imposed by foreign governments, regarded as second-class representatives of Humankind …

      … not to mention being forced, Liu thought bitterly, to accept foreign political observers on board Hegemony military vessels.

      The Earth Confederation had started off three centuries before as little more than a loose trade alliance, but immediately after the Second Chinese War it had become the planet’s de facto government. Under the Confederation’s guidance, the High Guard—originally an automated deep-space system designed to track asteroids that might one day pose a threat to Earth—had been expanded into a small, multinational navy.

      The High Guard was similar to the seagoing coast guards of earlier eras, but patrolled the outer solar system in search of asteroids that might threaten a populated world … or renegade ships like the Xiang Yang Hong attempting to change the orbit of an asteroid in order to create a planet killer. The High Guard paid special attention to possible sources of planet killers—the Kuiper Belt, the main asteroid belt, and the tiny, outermost moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

      “We should warn SupraQuito,” Reeves said.