Center of Gravity Read Free Page B

immense to be visible at this range, many kilometers across. And it was rising above the highest cloud layers, now, so it must be a ship… or possibly an aircraft.
    A side window opened, showing schematics of a H’rulka ship, something encountered by humans only once so far.
    Turusch and H’rulka ships together at Arcturus, just 37 light years from Sol.
    The afternoon, suddenly, had become a lot more interesting.
    VFA–44 Dragonfire Squadron
    Approaching Columbia Arcology
    United States, Earth
    1655 hours, EST
     
    Lieutenant Trevor Gray descended above the ocean, dropping toward the ruin of Old New York.
    Linked in with the AI computer of his SG–92 Starhawk, his cerebral implants were receiving optical feeds from sensors grown temporarily all over the craft’s fuselage. From his point of view, his fighter was invisible—in fact, he was the fighter, hurtling through the early evening sky off the eastern seaboard of the United States. The winter sun had set twenty-five minutes before; the sky was still a crisp and brilliant blue, the twilight illuminating the dark rolling waves below.
    Around him, in the crystalline sky, eleven other Starhawks traveled with him in close formation, each jet-black ship now morphed into atmospheric flight mode—broad delta shapes with down-curving wingtips carving through thin air at a sedate four times the speed of sound. They’d departed from the military spaceport at Oceana just five minutes earlier, swinging far out over the ocean to avoid disturbing coastal communities with their sonic boom. The Manhat Ruins now lay only a few kilometers ahead.
    “Look smart,” the squadron leader 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