Centre of Gravity. Ian Douglas

said over the unit’s tactical channel. “They want a nice show down there. Cut back to fifteen hundred kph and descend to twelve hundred. Tighten it up, people.”

      Commander Marissa Allyn was the CO of VFA–44, the “Dragonfires,” and flying the lead Starhawk, hull number 101. Until recently, she’d been the CAG of America’s Space Wing, though she’d never been confirmed and, just days ago, a new CAG had been brought on board. America’s fighter wing was still reorganizing, still licking its wounds after the terrible casualties suffered during the Defense of Earth.

      In three groups of four flying wingtip to wingtip, the Starhawks dropped closer to the blur of blue-gray water beneath their keels.

      “And … descending to eight hundred meters,” Allyn continued.

      To port, Gray was aware of a smear of movement, the coastline of the old state of New Jersey, a stretch of ground until recently given over to swampland and mangrove but now swept clean, barren and forbidding. Still descending, they rocketed past the sweeping, broken curve of the Verrazano Narrows Dam, one of the megastructures raised in the twenty-first century in what had proven to be an expensive but unsuccessful bid to save the city ahead.

      Still slowing, still descending, the squadron passed over what was left of New York City.

      Forests of steel superstructure marking the largest building, the crumbling façade of the TriBeCa Tower, all rose above dirty, surging water. Vine-shrouded structures slowly eroding into the sea. Where once there had been a square-grid network of city streets, there were now narrow canals, canyons filled with water and the dark pockets of the coming night.

      New York City had first been submerged three centuries before, when Hurricane Cynthia had smashed a half-kilometer gap through the Verrazano Narrows Dam and the sea—now twelve meters higher than the southern tip of Manhattan—had poured in. The vibrant metropolis had been smashed, then drowned; the shattered buildings still standing had rapidly crumbled into decayed ruins or been overgrown by green masses of porcelain-berry, kudzu, and other creeping vines, giving them the look of sheer-sided green islands rising with a curiously geometric orderliness from the sea.

      Even so, the Ruins of Manhattan had been … home.

      Gray had been a Prim, one of some thousands of people living in the Ruins outside the all-encompassing embrace of modern technology. For him, until five years ago, home had been the shattered shell of the old TriBeCa Tower Arcology, a torn and battered mountain passing now to port.

      The scene, spread out around and below him now, however, illuminated by the pale glow of twilight, seemed alien now. The place was changed, shockingly so. During the Defense of Earth two months earlier, a Turusch high-velocity impactor had generated a tidal wave that had smashed north through the Narrows. Hundreds of the remaining buildings sticking up out of the water had been toppled, and a vast forest of tangled debris was now strewn across Morningside Heights, Yonkers, and the swamps of Harlem. Most of the building-islands, once covered by lush vegetation, were naked now, stripped of all life by the passing wave two months before.

      Thousands of people—Prims and squatties, like Gray in his former life—had lived within the ruins, comprising a modern-day hunter-gatherer society largely ignored by the civilized folk inland.

      Gray wondered how many had survived the tidal wave … how many of the people he’d once called family and friends survived.

      And the civilized communities here had suffered as well. The tidal wave had swept across Morningside Heights, bringing down the kilometer-high tower of the Columbia Arcology. An instant after crossing the shoreline between the Manhat Ruins and Morningside Heights, Gray saw the mountain of rubble that was all that was left of Columbia.

      Angela. …

      She hadn’t been there when the tower had fallen. At least, he didn’t think so.

      But he hadn’t heard, not for sure.

      He forced his thoughts from that pain, focusing instead on his flying. At just above the speed of sound, the twelve spacecraft thundered across the Hudson River and past the Palisades Eudaimonium precisely on schedule.

      The eudaimonium—the name came from the ancient Greek philosophical concept of perfect and complete happiness—was part of the Greater New New York complex north of Manhattan. Protected from the impactor tidal wave two months before by the towering walls of the Palisades overlooking the Hudson, it was the heart of the New City, a cluster of arcology towers, arches and skyways, domes, slabs, and floater habs housing 5 million people. Tonight, the local population had increased by at least a third. As the Starhawks roared past, Gray could see the lights and thronging crowds below, an ocean of people celebrating what had been rather grandiloquently billed as the “Yule of the Millennium.” The central Eudaimon Plaza appeared to be packed with celebrants; lasers arced across the sky amid the flicker and pop of fireworks. Tens of thousands of decorative lights created the impression of a galaxy picked out in reds, greens, and golds.

      “Landing lights, people!” Allyn commanded, and the squadron lit up, twelve dazzling stars streaking across the darkening sky at five hundred meters. The sonic boom of the squadron’s passing must have rattled walls and transplas windows ten kilometers away.

      The squadron over-flight had been timed to rattle those windows at seventeen precisely, kicking off the festivities at the arcology complex. Confederation Senate President Regis DuPont was down there, somewhere, as were the presidents of the North American Union, America del Sur, and Europe; a dozen Confederation senators; a host of VIPs from the military, from the Union capital at Columbus, Ohio; and even a handful of governors from extrasolar colony worlds—from Chiron, from Thoth, and even from Bifrost.

      The party tonight was a very big affair.

      Mission accomplished, the squadron banked and decelerated, making for the Giuliani Spaceport northwest of the city. A flotilla of civilian pubtran fliers was waiting for them there; the Dragonfires, too, had also been invited, though they’d be arriving at the party a few minutes late.

      As he peeled off for final approach, morphing his Starhawk into landing configuration, Gray could only think about the person he’d left behind …

      … About Angela.

       ONI Special Research Division

       Crisium, Luna

       1201 hours, TFT

      “What the hell do we know about the H’rulka?” Dr. Kane demanded.

      “Not enough,” Wilkerson replied. “Not enough by about fifteen hundred parsecs.”

      “Maybe your pets can shed some more light on the subject.”

      “They are not,” Wilkerson replied evenly, “my pets.”

      Until two months before, Dr. Phillip Wilkerson had been the head of the neuropsytherapy department on board the Confederation Star Carrier America. After the return from Eta Boötis, however, he’d been summarily transferred to the Office of Naval Intelligence—specifically to the xenosophontological research department, headquartered beneath the Mare Crisium on Earth’s moon. He’d brought with him eighteen Turusch POWs, and almost two thousand more had arrived shortly after—survivors of one of the big enemy asteroid-battleships disabled in the Defense of Earth.

      The Turusch community now comprised a de facto alien colony occupying a former warehouse excavation two kilometers beneath the main Crisium dome, sealed off by airlocks and pumped full of a high-pressure atmosphere composed of CO₂, sulfur dioxide, carbonyl sulfide, water vapor, sulfuric acid droplets, and a mist of sulfur. The mist constantly cycled between its liquid and solid phases at temperatures close to the boiling point of water. The Turusch home planet was hypothesized to be, as Wilkerson himself had once suggested, a less extreme version of the planet Venus, with a thinner atmosphere bathed in heavy ultraviolet radiation from its parent star. For almost two months, Wilkerson had been working with the colony, leading a small army of xenosophontologists, linguists, and ETC AIs, trying to learn how the Turusch thought.