Read Center of Gravity for Free Online Page A

them things he actually recognized. America had a decent mess deck and good food-processing software, but nothing as fancy as this. Some of the items actually looked as though they’d started out as vegetation growing in the ground or an aerophonics module rather than a collection of CHON turned appetizing by a molecular assembler.
    He tried something green and crunchy with an orange paste spread across the top. Interesting…
    “You are being pinged again by the same person,” his PA told him. His internal direction sense said, That way , toward an outside veranda. “Range: thirty-one meters and approaching.”
    “Let her,” Gray said.
    He kept eating.
    H’rulka Warship 434
    Saturn Space, Sol System
    1242 hours, TFT
     
    The H’rulka didn’t name their starships. A name suggested an individual personality, and the concept of the individual was one only barely grasped by H’rulka psychology. The H’rulka were, in fact, colony organisms; a very rough terrestrial analogue would have been the Portuguese Man of War… though the H’rulka were not marine creatures, and each was composed of several hundred types of communal polyps, rather than just four. Even their name for themselves—which came across in a hydrogen atmosphere as a shrill, high-pitched thunder generated by gas bags beneath the primary flotation sac—meant something like “All of Us,” and could refer either to a single colony, in the first person, or to the race as a whole.
    Individual H’rulka colonies took on temporary names, however, as dictated by their responsibilities within the community. Ordered Ascent was the commander of Warship 434, itself until recently a part of a larger vessel, Warship 432. The species didn’t have a government as humans would have understood the term, and even the captain of a starship was more of a principal decision maker than a leader.
    Ordered Ascent was linked in with 434’s external sensors, and was studying the planet just ahead. The alien solar system comprised a single star and four planets, plus the usual scattering of rubble and debris. The planet some eighty thousand shu ahead was almost achingly familiar in size and mass and gently banded color, a near twin to the homeworld so many shishu away, right down to the sweeping rings of minute, reflective particles circling it.
    “It looks like home,” the aggregate being called Swift Pouncer whispered over the private radio link. H’rulka possessed two entirely separate means of speech, two separate languages—one by means of vibrations in the atmosphere, the other by means of biologically generated radio bursts. Their natural radio transceivers, located just beneath the doughnut-shaped cluster of polyps forming their brains, allowed them to interface directly with their machines.
    “Similar,” Ordered Ascent replied. “It appears to be inhabited.”
    “We are receiving speech from one of the debris-chunks orbiting the world,” Swift Pouncer replied. “It may be a vermin-nest. And… we are receiving speech from numerous sources much closer to the local star.”
    Ordered Ascent tuned in to the broadband scanners and saw the other signals.
    Those members of Ordered Ascent capable of rational thought chided themselves. No matter how long they served within the far-flung fleets of the Sh’daar, it was difficult to remember that vermin-nests frequently occurred, not within the atmospheres of true planets, but on the inhospitable solid surfaces of debris.
    It was an unsettling thought. For just a moment, Ordered Ascent allowed themselves to pull back from the instrumentation feeds, to find steadiness and reassurance in the sight of the Collective Globe.
    The interior of the H’rulka warship was immense by human standards, but cramped to the point of stark claustrophobia for the species called All of Us. The area that served as the equivalent of the bridge on a human starship was well over two kilometers across, a vast spherical space filled by twelve