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  A salvo of M-21 rockets slammed into the RS-64’s already battered glacis. Explosions tore through the heart of Assassin’s Blade, and Katya felt her linkage slipping.…

  Katya found herself blinking at the smooth, gray metal of a link module’s overhead. Numb with the aftereffects of battle lust, it took her a moment to remember where she was… what she was doing.

  Today’s engagement had been a full-realism sim managed by an entire orchestra of AIs to allow thousands of striderjacks and technicians to experience the joint virtual reality of a full-scale war. Katya’s new unit, the 1st Confederation Rangers, had been up against warstriders jacked by the Confederation’s staff command and naval contingent.

  She’d not really expected the exchange to become so… personal.

  “Colonel?”

  Turning her head, she saw Allen’s face peering into the module’s opening at her. Ryan Green stood just behind him. “Hi, Kurt, Ryan. I guess we lost, huh?”

  “Something like that,” Allen said. “You okay?”

  Deftly, she unplugged herself from the three feeds jacked into her temporal and cervical sockets. Her hair, short on the sides and neck to keep it clear of her hardware, was longer on top and in front and had plastered itself across her head. She ran her fingers through it, dragging it off her face.

  “Not bad, considering I just took a hundred megs through my belly.” Unstrapping herself from the link module, she swung long legs off the padded couch, stooped to get through the opening, and stood up on the gleaming white deck outside. Dozens of other link modules surrounded her, some occupied, most empty.

  “Colonel Alessandro?”

  Turning, she saw the gray-uniformed figure of one of the games monitors, standing behind her with a compad in her hand. “That’s me.”

  “You’re dead, Colonel. You and both of your crew members.”

  “So I gathered.” Her eyes narrowed. “Do you have an active link with the Rogue? How about my opponent in that last exchange?”

  The technician glanced down at her pad, palming the interface to open a new feed. “According to the battlesim AI,” she said, reading the screen, “you inflicted sixty percent damage on the Battlewraith you attacked. One of its crew members was killed, one more badly hurt. The third was able to return fire. His missile barrage touched off your Warlord’s fusorpack.”

  “The one I killed. Who was he?”

  The technician checked her pad again. “The simulated casualty was General Sinclair himself. But you must have known that, Colonel. Your initial shot was quite accurate.”

  “Hey, if we’re dead, when’s the funeral service?” Ryan wanted to know. “I’d like to attend.”

  “That may depend on my court-martial,” Katya said. She meant it as a joke, but she couldn’t help wondering what was going to come of her actions this morning. She’d broken several regulations in today’s full-combat simulation, as well as showing some rather impetuous recklessness. There was bound to be some fallout.

  Katya didn’t care. It had been worth it, damn it. Worth it and then some.

  She felt lots better now, having killed Travis Sinclair.

  Chapter 5

  Most of the worlds of the Shichiju have at least one sky-el, a space elevator that makes travel between the planet’s surface and synchronous orbit cheap and simple, if considerably slower than ascraft passage. Grown from synchorbit by enormous factories that nanotechnically transform carbonaceous chondrite asteroids into duralloy, sky-els have proven vital in the terraforming of prebiotic worlds, an inexpensive conduit from space to ground for the nanofactories and equipment necessary to rework a planetary atmosphere.

  In the two and a half centuries since the first sky-el was demonstrated on Sol IV, there have been remarkably few system failures, even including those, like the one on Herakles, that were the result of deliberate action.

  —Man and the Stars: A History of Technology

  Ieyasu Sutsumi

  C.E. 2531

  The hell of it was, Katya had once damn near idolized the man. General Travis Sinclair was more than the leader of the Confederation in its rebellion against Hegemony and Empire. A member of the Confederation Congress from New America, he’d been appointed commander of the rebel army at a time when a unified army as such didn’t even exist. Single-handedly, he’d begun building that army… and a navy as well, recruiting key people like Katya and Dev Cameron and turning them loose with money, personnel, and equipment raised from God knew where.

  Sinclair’s genius had, at the very least, avoided a crushing defeat by the overwhelmingly powerful forces arrayed against them. More important than that, he’d been the principal author of the Declaration of Reason, a document that, like another Declaration penned over seven centuries earlier, outlined the philosophy of the revolt. By condemning the evils of the centralized state and its attempts to unite disparate worlds and cultures, it had become the focus of the entire Rebellion. In many ways Travis Sinclair was the Rebellion.

  Somehow, though, Katya’s hero worship of the man had gradually been transformed… not into hatred, precisely, but into a distance as cold, she thought, as the cold, political calculation that had led Sinclair a few months ago to abandon her beloved New America to the Empire. Oh, she knew the reasons, the rationale for the Confederation’s retreat from her homeworld. What hurt, though, were the friends, the comrades at arms left behind while a scant, chosen few had fled here, to Herakles. She’d just begun assembling and training the 1st Confederation Rangers on New America when Sinclair had issued the order to abandon the place for a secret base on this empty world. He’d brought with him a select handful of people, including Katya and Dev and a few others with experience or key skills, but the majority, of necessity, had been left behind.

  How many, she wondered, were still alive, after months of guerrilla warfare against Imperial warstriders? While she was here playing war games!

  Katya had met Sinclair on New America, where he’d recruited her to the cause. Her experience leading a Hegemony strider company had come to his attention, and he’d suggested that her talents might be best employed helping to create a Confederation armored unit that could replace the wide-scattered and poorly trained militias that were currently carrying the brunt of the fighting against the Empire. Local militias had won impressive victories early in the war, on Eridu, on Eostre, and on Liberty, but those victories had proven temporary. Eridu was again in Imperial hands after a brief period of self-rule; at New America, Imperial Marines now maintained a harsh and bloody peace while battle squadrons kept watch from orbit.

  She thought about Dev, raiding the Imperial supply lines on the outskirts of the New American system.

  No. Best not to think of that. Or of him.…

  The hell of it was, moving the rebel government to Herakles hadn’t purchased much time. The Imperials had figured out where they were and sent a battle squadron in, coming that close to annihilating the Confederation Congress and the Rebellion in one swift strike. All that had stopped them was Dev’s bizarre union with the Naga lurking in the depths of Herakles’s planetary crust. Three months had passed since then, with no sign of the Imperials, but everyone on Herakles knew their return was only a matter of time.

  The sacrifice of New America had been wasted… wasted.

  Now, scant hours after the end of the simulated battle, Katya was aboard an air/spacecraft outbound from New Argosport. The hotbox booster engines had fallen silent, and the arrowhead shape of the ascraft fell through the night above Herakles, anticollision strobes pulsing with metronomic precision at dorsal ridge, wingtips, and belly. She’d received the message from Rogue only moments after her own simulated death, a summons to join Travis Sinclair in orbit. She’d barely had time to return to her quarters and pack, arriving at the port just fifteen minutes before the scheduled launch.

  Sinclair had told her nothing during their brief conversation, but she was under no illusions about why she’d been summoned so precipitously to orbit. Vic
had been right. Regimental commanders don’t join squad-level deployments, and they don’t mix it up in strider-to-strider combat. Having logged orders to ignore the enemy strider force and concentrate fire on the artillery, they don’t then disregard those orders to chase after the enemy commander’s Battlewraith.

  And they certainly don’t turn a training simulation into a personal vendetta.

  Linked, Katya tried to concentrate on the panorama spreading out around her. Astern, Herakles was a smear of oceanic blue-violet and the white gleam of clouds and ice, a vast sphere half-illuminated by the brassy, subgiant’s glare of Mu Herculis A. To the right, Mu Herculis B and C were a tightly paired, ruby-gleaming doublet. Left and below, the star Vega, only a few light-years distant from the Mu Herculis system, was a dazzling gleam in the blackness, so bright it washed other stars from the sky and touched the clouds on the nightside of Herakles with ghost-pale silver.

  Katya’s attention was held, however, by a tight-stretched thread of silver suspended directly ahead against blackness and the glare of Herc A. Razor’s-edge crisp and straight, the line seemed unmoving, though ladar returns indicated it possessed a speed of several kilometers per second and was rotating end over end. As Katya continued to watch, a subtle shift in perspective and in the silver-gilt terminator between light and shadow demonstrated movement, and a rapidly closing range.

  Herakles, Mu Herculis A-III, was unique among the worlds of the Shichiju, for its sky-el was no longer attached to the planet’s equator. Instead, the structure fell around Herakles in an eccentric orbit that brought one end within two hundred kilometers of the surface each week, though most of the time its center of mass was located well beyond synchorbit. Some thirty thousand kilometers long now and only meters thick, it was held taut by centrifugal force as it spun.

  Katya was jacked into the ascraft’s command link. Technically, she was a passenger aboard the ground-to-orbit shuttle, but Captain Chalmer, the ship’s pilot, had invited her to link in from her module aft shortly after launch from the New Argos port complex. She could see the rogue sky-el ahead with the crisply detailed, unimpeded clarity of sensor feeds direct from the ascraft’s visual scanners. Numbers flickering past the right side of her awareness gave range and target vectors, angle of approach, and closing velocity. The ascraft was closing with the lower arm with a relative velocity of only fifty meters per second.

  “So what brings you up to synchorbit?” Chalmer asked, his voice sounding close beside her in the dark. “We don’t often get to see you infantry types here on the whirligig.”

  “They’ve been keeping me pretty busy,” Katya replied, distracted. “Building an army from nothing is a job for magicians, not a brain-burned striderjack like me.”

  “Brain-burned?You? Nah, the way I heard it, Captain Cameron’s the one who’s brain-burned if anyone is.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Aw, no disrespect meant, Colonel. It’s just that some of the stories… Hey, is the who-was about him the straight hont? That he was really linked in with the Xeno down there?”

  “Yes. It’s true.”

  “And it didn’t hurt him?”

  Katya had been hearing who-was—uwasa or rumors—about Dev for months, often enough that Chalmer’s question didn’t hurt… at least not as much as it might have once. She turned the query aside with a mental shrug. “He was fine, last time I saw him.”

  “I just can’t get over the idea of… of touching one of those things. Touching a Xeno.”

  “Why not? That’s how we communicate with them.”

  “Yeah, you’ve done it too, haven’t you, Colonel? On Eridu? I’d forgotten that.”

  Her reply had been less than completely honest. It was true that humans could communicate with the Naga now if they wore one of the strange DalRiss cornels, but Dev’s experience with the Heraklean Naga a few months ago had been… unique, and far more intimate than any communication Katya had ever experienced with Nagas. As far as any of the medtechs and psych people who’d examined him could tell, Dev had come out of his symbiosis with the Heraklean Naga with no ill effects, physical or mental.

  Still, it was impossible not to wonder… and worry. Dev had always shown a propensity for a brooding moodiness ever since she’d met him as a warstrider recruit on Loki over three years ago. Since his encounter with the Heraklean Naga, though, he’d seemed… darker, somehow. As though the black organism that had briefly linked itself to his body and his mind had also touched his soul.

  She didn’t like thinking about that.

  Why hasn’t Dev returned? she asked herself. What’s keeping him? Checking her internal RAM’s calendar for the third time that day, she noted once again that he was at least a week overdue already. Given the vagaries of mission, of K-T space passages, of loiter times in other systems, there was no reason to worry yet; the due date was simply Eagle’s earliest possible ETA.

  Still…

  The cast-off sky-el was closer now, its silvery length glittering in the sunlight. A number of ships, visible at this distance only as starlike gleams of reflected light, were clustered about the thread’s center of spin, but the ascraft was closing on a point some distance out from the center. As the minutes passed, the sky-el’s hab center became visible, first as a shadowed thickening in the thread, then as a long, cylindrical structure attached to the el’s main body catching sunlight along one edge in a dazzle of white fire. Lights winked in syncopated rhythm with the ascraft’s anticollision strobes. A docking collar was illuminated by a circle of harsh spotlights.

  For the time being, at least, that cylinder was the location of the Confederation’s capital. It seemed a strange place to house a multiworld government.

  The Heraklean sky-el’s elongated orbit, its end-over-end spin through space, had never been intended by its builders. Normally, a sky-el’s towerdown was secured to a suitable spot at the planet’s equator; the other end was anchored and held taut well beyond synchorbit by a suitably massive asteroid hauled into place by tugs. Passenger and cargo pods rode up and down the completed tower then on lines of magnetic flux, providing cheap and easy elevator service between ground and synchronous orbit. Only a few colonies did not have one, either because the world had such a slow rotation that synchorbit was impossibly far from the planet’s surface, or because—as with Katya’s own homeworld of New America—the tides raised by a large, close satellite made building one impractical.

  The sky-el tower on Mu Herculis A-III had been raised late in the twenty-fourth century, and terraforming had begun soon after. Within a century and a half, the hot and poisonous prebiotic atmosphere had been transformed to one breathable by humans; too, replacing the carbon dioxide with oxygen and nitrogen had caused the world’s mean temperature to plummet forty degrees. The colonial capital of Argos, still partly domed, spread out from the sky-el’s towerdown on the Augean Peninsula, a gleaming webwork of habitats, streets, and nanomanufactory farms.

  Then, in 2515, the Xeno had appeared.

  Seeking the pure metals and exotic materials it could sense from its kilometers-deep tunnels, the vast, amoebic organism had reacted identically to the Xenos of other colony worlds, dispatching pieces of itself to the surface, employing an alien nanotechnology to disassemble those materials—the buildings, domes, habs, and vehicles of a civilization of which the Xeno was completely unaware. After months of battle against the marauding Xeno scouts, the Heraklean population had escaped up the sky-el while Hegemony infantry held off the Xeno attackers for a critical two weeks in a vicious, rear-guard defense. Not long after the handful of surviving troops had been evacuated, and as Xenophobes smashed through the emptied city toward the sky-el’s base, a five-hundred-megaton fusion explosion had gouged a half-kilometer-deep crater where Argos had stood; the sky-el, its lower end burned off in the blast, had been catapulted into high orbit by its space-side anchor.

  The stress had fragmented much of the sky-el’s original length, whipcracking much of the ends, including the
anchoring planetoid, into space; what was left, some thirty thousand kilometers of gleaming duralloy weave over ten meters thick, continued to circle the planet in a six-day orbit that brushed the upper reaches of the atmosphere once on each pass. Within the next century or so, those repeated brushes would degrade its orbit enough that the artifact would impact on Herakles.

  In the meantime, though, and for the foreseeable future, the free sky-el offered a haven of sorts for the Confederation government. After the sky-el’s link with Herakles had been broken, the Hegemony had built a watchpost there to keep an electronic eye on the Heraklean Xeno, attaching a large, cylindrical habitat to the cable, positioning it far enough from the el’s center to generate a spin-gravity of roughly half a G. After the explosion that had destroyed Argos, however, the Naga had never reappeared on the surface, and the outpost was eventually abandoned. It had remained empty until the Confederation forces had arrived, just over four months ago.

  They called the free-orbiting facility Rogue.

  Nudged closer by bursts from maneuvering thrusters, the ascraft rotated smoothly ninety degrees as it matched velocity with the hab’s docking collar, then slipped into place with the metallic clangs and thumps of magnetic grapples locking home.

  “End of the ride,” Chalmer told her. “Hey, Colonel, are you going to be up here long? I mean, maybe we could get together for dinner or some duo simming or something.…”

  “Negative,” Katya said, the word curt. The pilot’s attempt at familiarity explained his earlier questions about Dev. Everyone knew that she and Dev were close; Chalmer was prospecting, wondering if she was available while Dev was out-system. Or maybe he was just probing to find out if she still had the same relationship with Dev that she’d had before his bonding with that… thing.