Center of Gravity Read Free

the sooner I’m back on America ’s flag deck the better, so far as I’m concerned.”
    “Harsh words from the man who saved Earth.”
    He winced a bit at that. He’d saved Earth, yes, in what was now being called the Defense of Earth, a rare and hard-won naval victory just two months ago. But there’d been losses… terrible losses. And one of them…
    “Let me see you, Karyn,” he said.
    The room’s electronics projected a holographic image into the suite’s sunken living area, a smiling woman Koenig’s age in the black-and-gray dress uniform of a Confederation Navy rear admiral. She looked… perfect, exactly as he remembered her.
    Exactly as she’d been before the high-velocity Turusch impactor had slashed through the military synchorbital base above Mars known as Phobia, wrecking Mars Fleet CIC, the fleet dockyard, and killing thousands of civilian, Marine, and Navy personnel… including Karyn Mendelson.
    He’d recovered her PA, her personal assistant. Copies had resided within his own communications implants, and in his office on board the Star Carrier America , and elsewhere. When she’d been alive, it had been able to project an AI simulacrum, an avatar, of Karyn indistinguishable from the living person over any communications or virtual net links. PAs could project the owner’s image to field the flood of routine requests and calls received every day. Such avatars were smart enough to hold conversations and even make routine decisions for the original.
    They weren’t the same, though, weren’t as responsive or as smart, and most important, they weren’t flesh and blood.
    God, he missed her.
    The image in front of him looked a little sad. “You really should see the psych department,” she told him. “You’re hanging on to the… memories, using them to keep yourself from having to grieve.”
    “Since when did you get reprogrammed as a psytech?” he asked the image. He tried to keep the words light and bantering, and knew he’d failed.
    “Karyn Mendelson had considerable psych experience,” the image told him. “She commanded the fleet at Arcturus Station last year, remember, before she was assigned to Admiral Harrison’s command staff.”
    “I know, damn it, I know. I just… I just don’t want to lose you.” Again . . . .
    “Alex, you have lost me. Lost her , rather. A PA simulacrum cannot substitute for a real human.”
    “Maybe not,” he replied, stubbornly sullen. “And maybe you’re how I can… get used to the idea that she’s gone.”
    “A psytherapy session would be better, Alex.”
    “Look, I don’t want to talk about it now, okay? I’m supposed to be at this damned reception tonight. The Eudaimonium Arcology.”
    “Yes, Alex.”
    And that, he thought glumly, perfectly summed up the difference between a PA avatar and the real person—ignoring the fact that you couldn’t touch an avatar. The real Karyn would never have let things rest there, would have kept arguing with him if she thought he was doing something stupid. Her PA’s holographic projection, directed by certain software protocols, simply agreed with whatever he told it to do.
    It didn’t help that the AI program, likely, was right. The Navy relied heavily on advanced psychiatric medicine these days, including the use of elaborate virtual psytherapeutic replays of traumatic events, to treat the casualties of modern warfare. He’d been through virtual simulations himself more than once. Nothing to it… .
    He just didn’t want to forget her.
    A comm signal chimed in his head. “Admiral?” It was his senior aide, Lieutenant Commander Nahan Cleary.
    “Yes, Mr. Cleary.”
    “It’s time to go ashore if you want to get there in plenty of time.”
    “I’ll be right there.” He checked his inner time readout. Just past nineteen, Fleet Time, which was GMT for Earth. SupraQuito was in the same planetary time zone as the Eudaimonium Arcology, a five-hour difference; it was now 1409 EST.
    Lieutenant