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  Repairs had only just begun, however, when her strider lurched hard, rolling to the side, and Kara clutched at the edge of her couch, staring with alarm at the padded inner curve of her life-support pod centimeters above her head. Had that been a near-miss, an explosion close beside her strider, or was one of the Tsurugis investigating her damaged machine? Damn, if she only had windows.…

  Another lurch, a jolt that nearly tipped her over, but then the pod dropped back, rocking heavily before coming to rest, tilted nose-high. The insulation qualities of layered diacarb and ceramplast were superb, but she still could hear the faint rumble of thunder, the shriek of PAC bolts. It sounded like a pitched battle being waged, close by the ravine where Dolan’s and her war-striders had fallen.

  Who, she wondered, was going to win? Not just this battle, but this ongoing war between Confederation and Empire. The chi-war, the New American news medes were calling it, from chiisai, the Nihongo word for little. Little war it might have been, minor raids for the most part, with the occasional ship seizure or act of sabotage; certainly, though, it was large enough for the men and women it killed. This raid—Operation Sandstorm, some wit had dubbed it—was supposed to be of supreme importance, though no one had told Kara yet the why of the thing. This world was not exactly an easy mark; the Imperials called it Kasei, but most people on the Frontier knew it by its Anglic name.

  Mars.

  A Confederation raid against an Imperial research complex on old Mars, right next door to Earth itself, was bound to escalate the chi-war to something larger. She just hoped to hell that whatever the Phantoms were supposed to grab here was worth the cost.

  And the risk.

  The political situation was so damned confused just now. The Confederation had won its short, sharp war of independence with the Empire twenty-five years ago, but victory had not brought security. Confederation, Periphery, Frontier… names giving substance to a lie. A quarter of a century ago, perhaps, the Confederation had been unified, an alliance of frontier worlds fighting against the Shichiju, but even in victory that alliance had already been crumbling.

  Theoretically—at least according to the history ViRsims—New America, Rainbow, Liberty, and a handful of other worlds had forged a new government, one based on Libertarian ideals now virtually extinct among the crowded dependencies and nation states and Fukushi protectorate arcologies of old Earth. Under the leadership of Travis Sinclair and a few other visionaries, freedom had been wrested from the Empire by sheer grit, determination, and a will to be free of Earth and its heavy-handed Hegemonic bureaucracy.

  Though raised and download-educated on New America, Kara knew that there was a certain amount of self-deceptive propaganda behind that version of history. To begin with, no handful of colonial worlds could have hoped to fight it out with Japan’s military might or with the Japanese-backed government of the Terran Hegemony and long survive. Shichiju, the Nihongo word for Man’s interstellar realm, meant “Seventy,” and in fact, the Hegemony had ruled more than seventy worlds at its height. Only about twenty of those worlds—all thinly populated, possessing limited resources and few ships, and located far from the Shichiju’s heart—had openly broken with Earth and joined the Confederation rebellion. Japan had held a ruthless monopoly over K-T drive technology and the techniques necessary for building large starships for too long for the newcomer upstarts of the Frontier to be able to challenge them in open war. For the most part, the Confederation’s strategy had been to make Japan’s inevitable victory too expensive to pursue. At that, luck had more to do with their independence than military prowess—luck… and their communication with two separate alien species, still the only nonhuman cultures known to Man.

  The DalRiss had first been contacted by a Hegemony survey fleet in 2540, just before the Rebellion. Their technology had taken an odd turning down the path of biology; they grew cities and starships rather than building them. Humans had for much longer known of the Naga, entities stranger than the DalRiss by far. In an attempt to attach human motives to nonhuman perceptions and actions, they’d originally called them Xenophobes. Immense fluid or plastic creatures inhabiting the crusts of several worlds scattered across those reaches of the Shichiju toward the constellations Ophiuchus, Serpens, Aquila, and Hercules, they possessed dizzyingly alien modes of thought and perception… and a control of their own internal chemistries far more precise and powerful than the crude nanotechnology of human science.

  The Naga inhabiting the now-deserted world called Herakles, Mu Herculis III, had been instrumental in the defeat of an Imperial warfleet. Massing as much as a small moon and drawing its energy from the heat of a planet’s core, it could wield incredible powers; while linked with the rebel commander Devis Cameron, it had manipulated powerful magnetic fields in such a way as to propel one-ton chunks of ferrous material at velocities approaching ten percent of the speed of light. The largest and most powerful of the Empire’s dreadnoughts had crumpled and flared like moths in a blowtorch when subjected to the Naga’s accurate and deadly fire.

  Kara sighed. Devis Cameron. Now there was a name. She’d never known the man personally, of course, since he’d died during the Second Battle of Herakles almost three years before she’d been born. Still, Kara felt as though she had known him. He’d been the lover of her mother, Katya Alessandro, for a number of years during the war… and he’d fathered her half brother, Daren. A year after Cameron’s death, Kara’s mother had established a long-term contract with another rebel officer, Vic Hagan—like Katya, a New American.

  Devis Cameron had been from Earth.

  Kara knew her mother as well as anyone alive; she still didn’t understand what the woman had seen in that man. For one thing, as an Earther, he’d started out owing his allegiance to the Terran Hegemony, which, of course, was little more than the Empire’s puppet. The word was that he’d been loyal to the Empire for quite a while, that he’d even won the coveted Tei-kokuno Hoshi, the Star of the Empire, for his part in contacting the Naga at Alya A-VI. Later, while operating against rebels on Eridu, he’d been given an order he hadn’t liked… and had joined the rebellion.

  That told Kara quite a lot, that Cameron hadn’t had much in the way of personal convictions, that he’d let himself be buffeted back and forth rather than setting a course and sticking to it. From what she’d heard, both from her mother and from the official accounts uploaded onto the New American net, his personal contacts with the alien Naga had made him something of an alien himself, a being capable of melding with Naga and DalRiss alike in a symbiosis that no one in human space really understood even yet. He’d been linked with both during the battle when he’d been killed.

  It was quiet again outside her warstrider. Her emergency repairs were nearly done. Maybe she could get out of this fix yet.…

  “Lieutenant Hagan,” a new voice said inside her head. “We are terminating the simulation.”

  She blinked. “Wait a minute!” she said. “I’m not dead, am I?”

  The voice chuckled. “Not quite. Our AI out here gives you a sixty percent-plus chance of completing your repairs. But I’m afraid the mission completion probability’s only about twenty-eight percent.”

  Gok. “We should still play out the simulation.”

  “We will. But we’re declaring you dead. A message just came through for you. They want you up in Ops Planning.”

  Kara stifled a groan. Normally, important messages would have been handled by her Companion, which either would have routed them through to her immediately or dealt with them according to program. Her messages were being handled now, however, by the AI running this simulation; apparently it had decided that this one was important enough to have her declared dead for the rest of this scenario.

  “Who’s it from?” she asked the voice.

  “Double ID,” was the reply. “General Hagan and Senator Alessandro. And it was coded urgent.”

  “Okay, okay,” Kara said, closing her eyes. “I’m on my way.”

  Once aga
in—and this time for real—she woke up, this time in the couch of a ViRcomm module in the Ops center of ConMilCom HQ. Warstrider Lindsey Smeth—“killed” moments before in the fighting on Mars—was there to help her unstrap. “Tough luck, Lieutenant,” she said. “We almost had ’em that time.”

  “Almost doesn’t cut it,” Kara replied, standing up and stretching stiff, sore muscles. Even ViRsimmed war could be rough on the body, when the body believed that what was happening to it was real. “That’s what, fifteen tries against that base so far?”

  “Sixteen,” Smeth said. “But who’s counting? I’d rather ViRdie than buy it for real.”

  Kara grinned. “Just so you stay in one piece when the show goes down. And, speaking of staying in one piece, I’d better go see what my brass-crested parents want.”

  “Good luck, Lieutenant.”

  “Thanks. I have a feeling I’m going to need it.”

  Chapter 3

  Bella detestata matribus. (Wars are the dread of mothers.)

  —Odes, i

  HORACE

  B.C.E. 20

  Senator Katya Alessandro stood before the viewall in her husband’s office, watching the city. Though his office was on the fifty-third level, his viewall was using a ground-floor pickup, set to show a realtime view of the building’s transplas atrium and the broad, green expanse of Franklin Park beyond. It was just past Second Eclipse, and Columbia hung suspended in the west, filling nearly an octant of the sky, a pale, immense, crater-blotched crescent bowed away from the golden glare of 26 Draconis A.

  Opposite, on the far side of the park just a kilometer away and rising eighty stories over Jefferson’s government district, was the one-time headquarters for one of the larger Imperial corporations doing business on New America; even yet the locals called it the Sony Building. The holographic lettering above that gleaming facade, however, now read PEOPLE’S CONFEDERATION CONGRESS, marking it as home to the Confederation Free Senate and what passed for government on New America these days.

  Government? Katya grimaced. Anarchy was closer to the mark.

  Why, she wondered, had she ever left the Confederation military? She’d thought she would be able to make a difference by running for office. During the time she’d been a senator, though, she’d seen little evidence that she was doing much of anything worthwhile. Lately, most of her time was spent mindlooping—what an earlier age had called “paper shuffling,” though that term was as dated now as “typewriter” or “videotape.”

  She glanced sideways at Vic, who was leaning back at his desk with the distracted, glazed-over look of someone tapping his internal RAM for a piece of squirreled-away data. He’d made the right choice, clearly. He was a general now, one of the senior officers in ConMilCom’s Operations Center.

  Katya Alessandro loved Vic Hagan dearly, though, as she sometimes tried to make herself forget, he’d been her second love. When Dev Cameron had… changed, his body destroyed at Second Herakles as his mind somehow became part of the group mind of the Naga-DalRiss fleet, any chance of a common physical ground between her and Dev had been wiped away. A year after Dev had left human space with the alien fleet-mind, she’d palmed an extended cohab contract with Vic. Daren—Dev’s son—had already been born by then, and she’d needed… somebody. A year and a half later, Kara had been born, her daughter by Vic.

  Eventually, she’d resigned her commission and gone into politics. As one of the heroes of the revolution, she still had good recognition on New America, and she’d won her seat in Congress with almost embarrassing ease.

  She was, by anyone’s standard, successful.

  Why then, did she feel like such a failure?

  The war, of course… She shook her head. She’d long ago decided that the politicians of human-explored space would get themselves into far fewer wars if more of them started off as warriors. Civilians, she’d found, were too likely to become caught up in the supposed glory of war. It took a soldier to remind people of why war was something to be avoided.

  Central Jefferson, she thought as she watched the viewall, was crowded. The capital had always been bustling, but the congestion had been getting worse lately. During the war, its location, almost forty-nine light years from Sol, and its industrial base, in a system rich in raw materials, had combined to make it a good candidate for the capital of the fledgling Confederation. The sign in front of the Sony Building back then had read FIRST PEOPLE’S CONFEDERATION CONGRESS, a nod both toward the old-Earth North American model upon which the government had been based and to the fact that, in those far-off, pioneering days, at least, it had been assumed that the Congress would meet only intermittently, in times of crisis.

  Like all governments, however, it had somehow put down roots and grown… though whether that growth had been more like that of a tree or a cancer, Katya hadn’t yet decided. And in the meantime, the mingled cultures of New America and the Confederation were transforming as swiftly as the technology. It was becoming harder and harder to maintain any kind of unity even among the cultures resident just on New America.

  And Katya was less and less sure that unity was something the government should—or could—impose. The Sinclair Doctrine applied here as well as to the scattered worlds of Confederation and Shichiju, didn’t it?

  She knew all of the arguments, of course. She’d invoked them plenty of times herself on the Senate floor. Unity was necessary now because the Imperials were pushing hard and would take advantage of any perceived weakness. Worse, things were changing so god-awfully fast. Technology was changing, the rate of change increasing at a pace that seemed totally out of control, and society itself was showing deep and troubling strains.

  It was almost impossible to keep up with the shifts and reworkings of Confederation culture anymore. As she looked through the viewall into Franklin Park, she could see some of the bizarre shapes strolling there.

  The Naga Revolution, it was called by some, especially by the younger generation, the kids born since 2550 or so. Most had personal Nagas, Companions, that fulfilled all of the functions of the old cephlinks and added a few more. It was curious, Katya thought, how a symbiosis that was changing the very way Man perceived himself was being manifested by New America’s younger citizens primarily as fashion statements. It seemed unbalanced, somehow, almost sacrilegious, if such a term had any meaning anymore, something akin to using a quantum power tap to light a match.

  There was a young couple riding a slidewalk just in front of her. The girl was nude, save for sandals and her Naga’s skin expressions—patterns of green and silver opalescence that rippled up and down her legs and torso, alternately revealing and concealing as it shifted. Her companion was sheer fantasy, human in shape but patterned in a hallucinatory montage of scales, feathers, and tawny predator’s hide, all fashioned through his Companion’s alterations to the cells of his skin. She assumed the person was male; the only clue to his sex was the outsized genitalia dangling between his legs, though even that in itself was no guarantee. Many people routinely changed their sex as casually as they changed clothes; others changed only the appearance, and there was no way to be sure which was which.

  The Naga Revolution had challenged old definitions not only of what sex you were, but of what it was to be human in the first place. There was an entire subculture given to experimenting with deliberately alien and outrageous body forms, humans in the guise of aliens born of fantasy. That sort of thing had long been common enough in ViReality links, where a person could assume any desired persona online. With Naga Companions as fashion accessories, however, the blurring of reality and fantasy had escaped the world of ViRcommunications and entered the real world.

  What, Katya wondered, was going to be next? It didn’t seem as though things could change much more, though she imagined that neolithic-hunter-gatherers must have felt the same way about cities, pottery, and agriculture.

  Change, she knew, was the one constant of humanity.

  A tone sounded and she turned from the viewa
ll, just as a door slid aside and Kara entered the office. Katya felt a thrill of pride; her daughter looked so erect and sharp in her Confederation grays. The pride, though, was darkened somewhat by fear. God, I don’t want to lose her.

  “Hi, Dad, Mums,” she said. “I got a flash you guys wanted to see me.”

  “Yes, Kara,” Vic said. “Come in and sit yourself.”

  “You ought to know,” Kara said as she took a seat, “that the simulation AI killed me in the last run-through just so I could check out and come up to see you. So I hope this is worth it!”

  Katya heard the banter in Kara’s voice but couldn’t feel much in the way of amusement. Her daughter had “died” in a number of these operation ViRsims lately. She could so easily die for real in the actual mission. Especially with this new mission rewrite.

  “Some new orders are coming through for you,” Vic said. “Direct from Confederation Military Command itself.”

  “What… new orders?” Kara leaned forward, obviously interested.

  “ConMilCom has accepted Skymaster. In full.”

  “Thank God! It took them long enough, didn’t it?”

  “There’s more,” Katya added. She felt curiously detached as she spoke the words, as though it were someone else entirely who was speaking. “They’re asking you to volunteer for the slot.”

  “Strictly volunteer,” Vic added. “And I for one wish you would turn it down cold.”