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  “Gok, no!” Kara said. “This one’s my baby! If anybody’s going into the Kasei Net, it’s going to be me!”

  And Katya had been certain that Kara would say exactly that.

  Every world inhabited by Man had its own computer Net, a meshing of all of the computer systems running all of the business, finances, data storage, and communications of an entire planet. Technically, each world’s Net was linked to the other worlds, space stations, even ships in that system, though the time lag engendered by the speed of light could drastically slow the exchange of data over interplanetary distances. And across interstellar distances, of course, communication from Net to Net could only be through the physical transfer of data, by storage devices transported aboard starships. With typical interstellar travel times limited to about a light year per day, New America, for instance, was almost fifty days’ travel time from Earth, and a single exchange in a conversation, there and back, took over three months.

  For any given world, the local planetary Net was of supreme importance for everything from keeping track of trade balances to coordinating local defense forces. Usually, the system’s principal military node was located at synchorbit, where it could tie directly into the traffic control systems that monitored and directed ship traffic arriving at and departing from orbit.

  “Ops was assuming you’d want to go,” Vic was telling Kara. “I must say, you were… eloquent.”

  “Your sim results on Operation Sandstorm were even more eloquent,” Katya added. “Enough said?”

  Kara grimaced. “If there’s a way to pull Sandstorm off without sending in more striders… or without the Skymaster option, I sure as hell can’t see it. We’ve tried, gok… every combination I can think of. And I’ve been beaten, killed, and sent running with my tail between my legs more times in the past month than I care to remember.”

  “We’ve already looked hard at sending in more than three squadrons and the leggers,” Katya told her. “What we’ve got is the most we can pack into a Nighthawk. And we can’t send in more than one.”

  Everything about Operation Sandstorm depended on getting the assault team to the surface more or less unnoticed. A single ascraft, it was believed, could make the orbit-to-surface insertion without attracting unwanted attention from the Imperial tracking systems; a fleet of air/space craft would set off every AI-monitored threat-tracking network from Mars to Tau Ceti. The mission’s planners had secured an old Model IV Artemis Nighthawk, a great, black, vaguely streamlined shape with a variable geometry to give it greater flexibility in atmospheric approaches and maneuvering and a mass of nearly eight thousand tons. Its cargo bay had been adapted from its original civilian configuration to haul three full warstrider squadrons, plus four neatly folded Gyrfalcons and a pair of assault/infantry transports. There were no heavy transports that could carry a larger load, and there was no way to squeeze anything more into the Nighthawk’s bays. The only way to send more warstriders to Mars would be to send in more than one ascraft, and the computer sims they’d been running endlessly since Sandstorm’s conception the previous month indicated that trying that would almost certainly alert the AIs monitoring near-Mars space for just such an attempt.

  “Our preliminary sims,” Vic continued, “suggest that Sandstorm has an eighty percent-plus chance of success if we jigger things at Aresynch.”

  Katya could sense her daughter’s elation at the news. Ever since Operation Sandstorm had been suggested, Kara had been insisting that three squadrons of warstriders—a total of forty-eight machines—would not be able to crack the defenses of the objective, not when there were plenty of Imperial bases within easy reach from which reinforcements could be summoned. Kara had argued that only a ground assault coupled with a covert mission at Aresynch had any real chance of success.

  Reluctantly, Katya agreed with her. Some missions were simply impossible, and hitting MilTech’s Kasei complex without the added security of Skymaster was one of them.

  “Let’s see Mars and the sky-el,” Vic said. “I’d like to look over the approach vectors again.”

  “They haven’t changed, Vic,” Katya told him.

  “Maybe not. But the timing on this thing is going to be goking tight.”

  Mars materialized above Vic’s desk, an ocher red ball smeared with patches of blue, green, and white. Oldest of the terraformed worlds, Mars had an Earth-like atmosphere and climate, albeit still a bit on the cold, dry side. Kasei might be the Japanese name for the place, but most New Americans still called it Mars, even though it was a much different, more hospitable world than it had been just a few centuries before. The Boreal Sea covered much of the northern latitudes, with the North Polar ice cap centered in a swirl of clouds. The Marineris Sea edged south of the equator, then ran due west for better than five thousand kilometers, stopping at Labyrinthus Bay against the rise of the Tharsis Shield, just a few hundred kilometers short of the Pavonis Mons sky-el.

  At this scale in real life, a sky elevator would have been invisible, but the projection displayed it as a thread of white light, extending out from the Martian equator at Pavonis Mons into space. Synchorbit for Mars was just over seventeen thousand kilometers out, about two and a half planetary diameters, a point on the model marked by a spray of tiny lights. The thread of the sky-el continued outward beyond synchorbit and terminated at Deimos.

  The Pavonis Mons sky-el was the first of all such structures raised—hung, rather—by Man. Its construction had begun at the end of the twenty-first century, shortly after the beginnings of the Mars terraforming project. Pavonis Mons was an extinct volcano, middle of the row-of-three volcanic peaks stretched across a thousand kilometers of the Martian surface southeast of towering Mons Olympus; by chance, it lay squarely on the Martian equator, making it an ideal anchor point. Phobos, Mars’s old inner moon, had been sacrificed for the building materials, mostly carbon nanotechnically grown into pure, long-chain molecular diacarb woven into the sky-el’s main cable. The tiny outer moon, Deimos, speeded up in its orbit, now served as the space-side anchor holding the entire structure rigid as it spun with Mars’s twenty-four-hour rotation, a whirling rock on the end of a string.

  Most populated worlds had sky-els, providing cheap and easy access to orbit via pods accelerating up the sky-el cable on precessing magnetic fields. New America was one of the few worlds lacking one, because of the disruptive tidal effects of Columbia and because the planet’s rotational period was so long that synchorbit was impossibly distant.

  “As you’ve been telling us all along, Kara,” Vic was saying, “Aresynch is going to be the key to a successful ground op.

  As Vic discussed the mission with Kara, Katya’s attention wandered to a smaller holographic projection floating in space beneath the larger image of Mars, a detail of the orbital facility at Aresynch.

  Because it had been in existence longer than any other synchorbital, Aresynch was huge and tangled, a steadily growing accretion of shipyards and docks, military base, civilian transport nexus, marketplace, storehouse, and computer center. Kara’s target would be in that area… highlighted in blue.

  Operation Sandstorm, according to the plan worked out by ConMilCom Ops, would now be a two-pronged mission. As originally planned, one Artemis Nighthawk, carrying forty-eight Confed warstriders and several hundred ground troops would land next to the bay at Noctis Labyrinthus, deploying to capture the MilTech facility. At the same time, a team of covert operatives would slip into Aresynch, enter Kasei Net’s military node, and disrupt communications long enough for the ground forces to complete their operation.

  Katya watched her daughter detailing the parameters of Skymaster, the covert Aresynch insertion. She seemed so self-assured, so confident. It was impossible for Katya to look at Kara and not feel a faint, uneasy echo of disappointment in Daren, her son. Close behind that thought came one closely related: would Daren have been different—less self-absorbed, less petulant—if Dev hadn’t been changed, if he’d stayed with her instead of vanishing wit
h the DalRiss among the stars? The question had no meaningful answer and she dismissed it. Still…

  Dev always knew how to handle things, how to get things done, she thought Things happened around him. I wish—

  She stopped and glanced once again at Vic, feeling guilty. He returned her glance, his lips quirking back in a sad, I-love-you, it’ll-be-okay smile. The man always had damn near been able to read her mind.…

  As proud as she was of Kara, she couldn’t help but fear what this change in orders meant. The Imperials were not known for the gentleness of their interrogation download techniques. It had been bad enough when Kara had been assigned to the assault team at Noctis Labyrinthus, where failure in all probability meant death. Now Kara would be going into the Aresynch military node, engaged in virtual combat rather than actual. Discovery in that environment meant, not death, but something to Katya’s way of thinking much worse, the gradual and dehumanizing peeling of memory and mind and personality by the interrogators of the infamous Teikokuno Johokyoku, the Imperial Intelligence Bureau.

  In her darker moments, Katya sometimes told herself that she would rather Kara died cleanly, in combat, than face the nanoprobes and ego uploads of the TJK.

  Still, she’d kept her feelings to herself—had tried to, at any rate, knowing that Kara would be less than appreciative of any attempt by either Vic or herself to protect her or make things easier for her. In some ways, it had been harder on Vic than on Katya. Katya was just a Confederation senator and member of the military committee. Vic was squarely in the chain of command that passed orders down to Kara directly, and his decisions could mean her survival or her death.

  “I still wish you would reconsider going on the Skymaster part of this op,” Vic told Kara. Again, it was though he’d been following Katya’s thoughts.

  Kara shook her head. “Negative, father-dear. I worked it out. Nobody else knows the background I’ve downloaded on this as well as I do. Besides, I’m not sending people into a virtual environment that I’m not willing to face myself.”

  “We understand that,” Vic said. “But it’s not as though you’re the only qualified person. That’s why God invented download technology, after all. What you’ve learned, someone else can download through a comlink in a few seconds. Right?”

  “Not right. I am the senior officer available on this.” She began ticking off names on her fingers. “Lieutenants Herlehy, Ferris, and Markov,” she said, listing the Second, Third, and Fourth Squadron Commanders. “They’re all junior. Colonel Hastings… well, you know as well as I do that regimental commanders don’t go on field ops.”

  “There’s the Phantoms’ First Company Commander,” Vic pointed out.

  “Captain Ogden is a biopurist,” Katya reminded Vic. Biopurists disliked the notion of incorporating alien life forms—meaning Companions—into the human body. Ogden wasn’t a fanatic about it, believing—unlike most Biopurists—that the choice was up to the individual, but he would not accept a Companion and probably wouldn’t link directly with anyone who did.

  “That’s right,” Kara said. “And without a Companion, he’d never even make it into Aresynch. So you see? I’m the only candidate left for the job.”

  “There’s still time to find and train a special agent,” Vic said.

  Kara grinned. “I don’t see what the big deal is. You and Mums were in the revolution together. You didn’t try to keep her safe, did you?”

  Hagan frowned. “Truth is, I couldn’t. She was my commanding officer.”

  “I still am,” Katya said. “Senators outrank generals.”

  They laughed. The joke helped break the uncomfortable tension.

  “The worst part about being Skymaster,” Kara said thoughtfully, “will be not being able to go in with my people on the ground.”

  “Only three strider squadrons can go in anyway,” Katya said. “If you’re Skymaster, we’ll pull First Squadron out. Three can go in with Two and Four instead. We’ll draw your security element from volunteers from One.”

  Kara’s brow furrowed for a second, a tiny, brief shadow. Then she nodded. “Right. That makes sense.”

  “Problem?” Katya could tell Kara was concerned about something.

  “No. It’ll work. It would be nice if I knew what it was we’re supposed to grab. In our training sims, we’ve just called it ‘the package,’ and I’ve been assured that it won’t be larger than a warstrider could carry out. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to tell us just what it is we’re going to Mars to steal.”

  It was Katya’s turn to grimace. “The Senate Military Committee hasn’t decided when to release that information,” she said. “I haven’t even been able to tell Vic yet.” Security was extraordinarily tight on this op. It had to be. Sometimes it seemed as though the medes—the various online and ViRnews reporting services—could be as efficient at ferreting out information as TJK interrogators. It was not impossible that this room was bugged, and the nature of Sandstorm’s objective was such that even a hint released over the New American Net could reveal to the Imperials that the Confederation was aware of o-denwa. They couldn’t afford that risk. When Vic and Kara were brought fully into the picture, it would be at the last possible moment.

  “Whatever this thing is,” Vic said, “it had better be damned important.”

  Katya sobered. “It is. It’s a device so important that some of us consider it a threat to the whole Confederation.

  “The Japanese Imperium is about to win its war against the Confederation once and for all. If they do, there will be no more independence movements. Not for us. Not for anyone.”

  Chapter 4

  Surprisingly, there proved to be numerous loopholes in the physics that stated that faster-than-light travel was a total impossibility. Perhaps most promising at the time were the “wormholes” that soon became the staple of romantic fiction. A special case of the wormhole was described by twentieth-century physicists who envisioned a super-dense cylinder many kilometers in length, rotating at relativistic speeds about its long axis. In theory, the space-time geometries created by these machineswould open vast numbers of pathways bridging light years… or even traversing time itself into past or future.

  Even after other means of traveling to the stars were found, however, such grand and large-scale solutions remained well beyond even the theoretical reach of human technology.

  —A History of Star Flight

  DR. CHASE RANDALL

  C.E. 2451

  It gleamed, a taut-stretched thread, a whisker of quicksilver set against the night, ruler-straight and so slender compared to its length that it seemed insubstantial, a scratch, perhaps, across the dark.

  »DEVCAMERON« checked again the numbers overlaying his perception of the universe. That whisker was just over two kilometers thick and well over a thousand long. There was no way to know, of course, what units the thing’s builders used, but it was interesting that the cylinder’s length was precisely 512 times its width, which suggested the use of binary arithmetic.

  In terms of sheer size, of course, »DEVCAMERON« had seen human-built structures outwardly much grander than this. The sky-els hanging from the skies of most of the Shichiju’s colonized worlds were the largest artificial structures known, cables tens to hundreds of meters thick and towering forty thousand kilometers or more all the way to the planet’s synchorbital. But the density of this artifact approached that of a neutron star, with the mass of a fair-sized world packed into that whisker’s long and narrow volume. Too, it was rotating, rolling about its long axis so fast that a point on its circumference was moving at relativistic velocities… better than seven tenths the speed of light.

  With a moderate amplification of his senses, »DEVCAMERON« could look into the surface of the cylinder, but the closest examination revealed nothing useful. Rotation wiped any detail into a mirror-silvered emptiness, too bright and perfect even to be called a blur. Though they could not sense it in such strangely distorted space, the watchers felt that some
sort of force field was in play; without one, centrifugal force would have ripped the cylinder apart. Human technology routinely manufactured electromagnetic screens—necessary to protect crew and equipment aboard vessels from charged particles at relativistic speeds—but a true “force field” in the classical sense of an invisible and impenetrable wall remained as much a physical impossibility as moving suns or communicating instantly across the Galaxy.

  No human technology—no DalRiss or Naga biotech, for that matter—could even approach the varied magics they were witnessing here. Even from a hundred thousand kilometers away, »DEVCAMERON« could sense the tug and twist of that thing as rotating gravitational mass reshaped the fabric of local space. According to theory, those reshapings opened paths, invisible slits in spacetime that led… elsewhere.

  »DEVCAMERON« had downloaded what history he possessed that might have a bearing on the thing. Centuries before, human theorists had speculated that such a construct might be used to open pathways across the light years, though there was no substance to such speculations, nor had the thing ever even been given a name. For »DEVCAMERON«, as for the DalRiss and Naga intelligences he was linked with, it was simply the Device.

  And it was hungry.

  It hung suspended in space at the gravitational balance point of the two shrunken suns of Nova Aquila. A stream of crimson flame spiraled out from the equator of each spinning star, arcing across millions of kilometers of intervening space, the feathered tips dwindling as they were compressed and reshaped by forces beyond comprehension, then vanishing into empty space just beyond the ends of the cylinder.

  They appeared to vanish into nothing, uncounted gigatons of star plasma whirling silently into emptiness each second. From a distance, the silvery thread appeared stretched tight between the tips of those fiery prominences. At closer ranges, it was clear the star stuff was being funneled away to someplace else, plunging into gateways opened outside of the normal dimensions of space and time.