Centre of Gravity. Ian Douglas

No.”

      Learning his place within the culture in which he’d suddenly found himself, learning to fit in, had taken up a lot of Gray’s attention and energy over these past five years.

      Life in the Periphery, scrabbling for survival within the half-flooded ruins scattered around the margins of the North American Union, tended to be hard and it tended to be short. It had also been forced to adapt. Two-adult-person family units loosely allied with other two-adult units had proven to be the most successful when it came to the necessities of hunter-gatherer lifestyles. With larger communities pooling food and other scarce resources, there were always shortages—and shortages either led to brutal and usually fatal fights to determine who went without, or else everyone in the group suffered when the little that was available was shared with all. Smaller units tended to be more flexible … and they isolated groups exposed to the Blood Death virus or other pathogens.

      For the full citizens of the Union and the larger Confederation, larger, extended families had been the norm for centuries. With nanoassemblers literally building food and other necessities from dirt and garbage, there was more than enough to go around. Children were best raised in crèche-schools where they learned to socialize with others as they received their electronic educational downloads. And the Blood Death and other diseases were, for the most part, non-existent, or at the least well controlled by modern nanomedical science.

      For the citizens of the Union, the Prims of the Periphery were old-fashioned, stubborn, ignorant, and dirty—much like the inhabitants of Appalachia who still lacked electricity or indoor plumbing back in the twentieth century. There was even a memory of that in one of the names civilized New Yorkers had for the Manhattan Ruins: “Newyorkentucky.” For the inhabitants of the Periphery, full citizens of the Union were selfish, self-centered, and shallow, far too preoccupied with social fads and electronic toys, superficial at best, decadent and perverted at worst. Spoiled, in other words.

      The divide between the two had become far wider and deeper over the past couple of centuries, to the point that there seemed to be no way of bridging the gap.

      Somewhat to his surprise, Gray did have friends in the Dragonfires. Ben Donovan was one. And Commander Allyn wasn’t a friend, exactly—you weren’t friends with your commanding officer—but at least she seemed to be on his side. Most of that, though, he was pretty sure, had to do with his combat skills. He’d held up his end of things during the Defense of Earth, and they thought of him as a fellow Starhawk pilot, not as a Prim or as an outsider.

      The problems were people like Kirkpatrick—bigoted and conceited—and Collins, who still seemed to blame him for the unpardonable sin of surviving two months ago when her partner, Howie Spaas, had been killed.

      “I still want to talk, Trev,” Angela was saying. “I don’t want us to be … enemies.”

      He gave her a cold look. “The enemies are out there,” he told her. “The Turusch. The Sh’daar. You’re just … someone I used to know.”

      “Trevor—”

      “Attention, everyone,” a new voice said, booming from somewhere in the auroral radiance shifting overhead and cutting across the crowd noise and conversations of the eudaimonium. “We apologize for the interruption, but all military personnel will return to their duty stations now. Special shuttles are being deployed to the Giuliani Spaceport for those who came down the Quito Elevator.”

      As the message went out over the concourse speakers, another message was winking inside Gray’s head: recall.

      “Trevor? What is it?”

      “I’ve got to get back to my ship,” he told her. “Something’s happening.”

      “Happening? What?” She looked around wildly, as guests at the party wearing military uniforms began gathering into groups and moving off.

      And when she turned to look at Gray again, he was already gone.

       H’rulka Warship 434

       Cis-Lunar Space, Sol System

       1446 hours, TFT

      The H’rulka vessel decelerated hard, approaching the sources of the heaviest radio traffic in the alien star system designated as System 784,857. Ahead—though they didn’t think of them as planets—were two large planetary bodies, a double planet, in fact. The smaller one was typical sub-planetary rubble, airless and cratered; the other possessed a trace of poisonous atmosphere and vast regions of liquid dihydrogen oxide. This last was important. The H’rulka lived at an altitude within their homeworld’s atmosphere where that compound was liquid, which suggested the possibility of life despite near-vacuum conditions and the deadly presence of free oxygen.

      Thousands of points of radiant energy clustered around the double worldlet marked hives of the creatures—bases, cities, and industrial facilities, some in orbit around the planet, some deep within its atmosphere … or, though it was hard to imagine such a thing, on the surface itself.

      And ships. So many ships … all as tiny and as insubstantial as the worlds among which they traveled.

      This, then, was the star system to which the fragmented intruder probe had traveled. It was impossible to tell, of course, precisely where the probe fragment had gone in this teeming sea of energy and space-borne craft. The heavy concentration of energy-radiating points on and near the sub-planet directly ahead, however, the one with the poisonous atmosphere and liquid surface, appeared to be the heart of this system’s activity.

      Ordered Ascent called up Warship 434’s encounter records, and swiftly found a match there with some of the alien ship energy patterns ahead. The H’rulka had drifted into this species just once before, some ten-twelfths of a gnyii, one rotation of the homeworld about its sun, ago. Evidently, they called themselves humanity, a burst of low-frequency sound without meaning. The Sh’daar masters called them Nah-voh-grah-nu-greh Trafhyedrefschladreh, a complex collection of sonic phonemes that meant something like “20,415-carbon-oxygen-water.” Humanity was very nearly the twelve to the fourth intelligent species encountered so far by the Masters that was carbon-based, breathed oxygen, and used liquid dihydrogen oxide as a solvent and transport medium.

      Repulsive vermin. No floater sac, no feeder nets or filter sieves, no manipulators—unless the two jointed appendages sprouting from near the top of the creature were used for that purpose. Only two tiny photoreceptors, instead of broad photoreceptor patches of integument. Surface crawlers. Poison breathers. The images in the H’rulka records had been made of creatures captured in that one encounter, but none of the specimens had survived long enough for their captors to learn how or what they metabolized, how they got around, how they reproduced, or how they managed to viiidyig without having a colony component designed for it.

      And somehow the disgusting creatures had managed to build starships and enter the Great Void. Ordered Ascent never ceased to be amazed at the inventiveness of the natural order.

      “Some of the vermin ships have taken notice of us,” High Drifting reported. “They are accelerating away from the larger of the two sub-planets ahead. We will soon be under attack.”

      Ordered Ascent considered this. They’d pursued the probe they’d detected in System 783,451 in order to determine where it had come from. When the fleeing probe had divided into four independent sections, the H’rulka ship had split as well.

      It was imperative that Warship 434 return to an Imperial base and report. The vermin occupying Star System 784,857 were not as technologically advanced as the H’rulka, obviously, but they were close enough in terms of ship and weapons technology to be of concern. The Sh’daar needed to be informed.

      “Set navigational coordinates for System 644,998,” Ordered Ascent directed. It hesitated, then added, “and prepare for Divergence.”

      This last was an uncomfortable order to give, and more uncomfortable to obey. The H’rulka, long ago in their pre-technological Eden, had evolved as herd-dwellers, drifting in vast