Read Center of Gravity for Free Online Page B

free-floating H’rulka colonies in a dodecahedral array. Connected by radio to their ship, they used radio commands to direct and maneuver the huge vessel, fire the weapons, and observe their surroundings.
    They lived in the high-pressure atmosphere of gas giants, breathing hydrogen and metabolizing methane, ammonia, and drifting organic tidbits analogous to the plankton of Terran oceans. Until one of the Sh’daar’s client species had shown them how to use solid materials to build spacecraft that defied both gravity and hard vacuum, they’d never known the interior of anything , never known what it was like to be enclosed, to be trapped inside . The interior of Warship 434 was large enough—just—to avoid triggering a serious claustrophobic-panic reflex in All of Us aggregates. Sometimes, they needed to see other aggregates adrift in the sky simply in order to feel safe.
    Feeling steadier, Ordered Ascent relinked with the ship and their fellow H’rulka. “Can we be sure that this is the system to which the alien probe fled?” they asked.
    “Yes, with a probability of eighty-six percent plus,” one of the others replied. “The shard that we followed almost certainly came here.”
    Warship 432 had pursued the probe that had passed through System 783,451. The probe abruptly had split onto four pieces, four shards each independently powered, each traveling in a different direction.
    The H’rulka ship had split into four sections as well in response. Warship 434 had followed one fragment, a difficult feat in the weirdly distorted continuum of faster-than-light travel, but possible given the power of certain Sh’daar instrumentation. The selected shard had dropped out of faster-than-light drive after some periods of travel, changed heading, and accelerated once more. The new path had brought it, and the pursuing All of Us, here .
    “The system is known to the Sh’daar,” Pouncer reported. “They list it as System 784,857.”
    Data streamed down the radio link through Directed Ascent’s consciousness. The inhabitants of this system were indeed native to the system debris.
    Vermin…
    The All of Us race was unaccustomed to dealing with other sentient species. One of the primary reasons for this was, simply, their size; by almost any standards, the H’rulka were giants.
    An adult H’rulka consisted of a floatation gas bag measuring anywhere from two to three hundred meters across, with brain, locomotion and feeding organs, sensory apparatus and manipulators clustered at the bottom. Most other sentient species with which they’d had direct experience possessed roughly the same size and mass ratio to a H’rulka as an ant compared to a human.
    When the H’rulka thought of other life forms as “vermin,” the thought was less insult than it was a statement of fact, at least as they perceived it. Within the complex biosphere of the H’rulka homeworld, there were parasites living on each All of Us colony that were some meters across. H’rulka simply found it difficult to imagine creatures as intelligent that were almost literally beneath their notice in terms of scale.
    “Commence acceleration,” Ordered Ascent directed. “We will move into the region of heavy radio transmission, and destroy targets of opportunity as they present themselves.”
    The H’rulka warship, more than twenty kilometers across, began falling toward Sol, the inner system, and Earth.
    Palisades Eudaimonium
    New York State, Earth
    1750 hours, EST
     
    Admiral Koenig looked out over the sea of people filling the Grand Concourse of the eudaimonium and wondered, again, just what he was supposed to be doing here.
    He’d been the center of attention for a number of politicians and Confederation military leaders ever since arriving here an hour before, but there seemed to be no particular point to it, other than allowing wealthy or important civilians to get a sense of their own importance by being close to the Man Who Saved Earth.
    What