Free Center of Gravity by Ian Douglas Page A

deet?”
    “None’ve… your fuckin’ squattie business, squat-face,” Kirkpatrick managed to say. Was it alcohol, Gray wondered, or a recreational drug? Either way, he rather hoped that the man’s corder was picking this up. It meant nonjudicial punishment at the very least, a court-martial at worst… and that simply couldn’t happen to a more wonderful guy… .
    Collins seemed to be her usual coldly mocking and cruel self. She was too smart to get herself wasted like that. Unfortunately.
    “I don’t recall inviting either of you into this alcove,” Gray told them. “You want to make fun of me, fine, but have the decency to leave this person out of it.”
    “That’s great!” Kirkpatrick said. “A… a monogie talkin’ ’bout decent !”
    “Come on, Kirkpatrick,” Collins said. “We know when we’re not wanted!”
    “Damned monogies…”
    “How much did you have?” Collins asked him as she led the unsteady Kirkpatrick away.
    “Friends,” Gray said thoughtfully as they moved out of earshot. “Got to find myself some.”
    “Those were… friends?”
    “No. They’re in my squadron, but friends? No.”
    Learning his place within the culture in which he’d suddenly found himself, learning to fit in , had taken up a lot of Gray’s attention and energy over these past five years.
    Life in the Periphery, scrabbling for survival within the half-flooded ruins scattered around the margins of the North American Union, tended to be hard and it tended to be short. It had also been forced to adapt. Two-adult-person family units loosely allied with other two-adult units had proven to be the most successful when it came to the necessities of hunter-gatherer lifestyles. With larger communities pooling food and other scarce resources, there were always shortages—and shortages either led to brutal and usually fatal fights to determine who went without, or else everyone in the group suffered when the little that was available was shared with all. Smaller units tended to be more flexible… and they isolated groups exposed to the Blood Death virus or other pathogens.
    For the full citizens of the Union and the larger Confederation, larger, extended families had been the norm for centuries. With nanoassemblers literally building food and other necessities from dirt and garbage, there was more than enough to go around. Children were best raised in crèche-schools where they learned to socialize with others as they received their electronic educational downloads. And the Blood Death and other diseases were, for the most part, non-existent, or at the least well controlled by modern nanomedical science.
    For the citizens of the Union, the Prims of the Periphery were old-fashioned, stubborn, ignorant, and dirty—much like the inhabitants of Appalachia who still lacked electricity or indoor plumbing back in the twentieth century. There was even a memory of that in one of the names civilized New Yorkers had for the Manhattan Ruins: “Newyorkentucky.” For the inhabitants of the Periphery, full citizens of the Union were selfish, self-centered, and shallow, far too preoccupied with social fads and electronic toys, superficial at best, decadent and perverted at worst. Spoiled , in other words.
    The divide between the two had become far wider and deeper over the past couple of centuries, to the point that there seemed to be no way of bridging the gap.
    Somewhat to his surprise, Gray did have friends in the Dragonfires. Ben Donovan was one. And Commander Allyn wasn’t a friend , exactly—you weren’t friends with your commanding officer—but at least she seemed to be on his side. Most of that, though, he was pretty sure, had to do with his combat skills. He’d held up his end of things during the Defense of Earth, and they thought of him as a fellow Starhawk pilot, not as a Prim or as an outsider.
    The problems were people like Kirkpatrick—bigoted and conceited—and Collins, who still seemed to blame him for the