He reached up to his medusa, slotting retractable plugs into the interface sockets in his skull. Soon he resembled the mechanism’s namesake, his ebony shaven pate a nest of snakelike wires.

  Initiating the link opened his mind to a whole new universe. Godlike, he flew in the center of nothingness, perceiving the cosmos in all directions. He smelled the interstellar winds, tasted hydrogen atoms as the magnetic scoops swept them into fuel collectors, heard the radio sirens of pulsars and quasars and stars of every kind – Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

  Magee’s High Flight stood enshrined in the heart of every helmsman, every pilot.

  His sense of touch remained deliberately unaltered, essential for grounding a linked helmsman in the real world. Hands resting on the complex suite of manual controls, he brushed them lightly like a pianist, and though his nerves now transmitted impulses with the speed of fiber optics, nothing had ever really improved on the sensitivity of those ten digits.

  Short of direct computer control, of course. Okuda had that option; he could turn any and all functions over to one of Conquest’s supercomputers, and he sometimes did, but ultimately, piloting had to come down to one helmsman.

  Or woman. He thought of his wife Celia, Master Helmsman of the assault carrier Temasek, and the few days they would have together before Conquest initiated separation into its component ships. When it did, the massive mothership would spawn a fleet, and opportunities for visits would be rare. No doubt all those with lovers and spouses aboard – an unusually high percentage, since procreative ability was one criterion for the mission – were thinking the same thing: what will sex be like after forty years in stasis?

  Thirty-seven minutes after his watch ended, Okuda found out it was still almost as good as piloting a starship.

  * * *

  Admiral Absen’s address still echoed across the crowded flight deck as she announced, “I am Sergeant Major Repeth.” Her amplified voice reached the whole formation as she stood in front of Second Marine Battalion, over one thousand enlisted troops. They were arrayed on the largest available open space of the assault carrier Temasek, which still clung like a remora to Conquest. Major ben Tauros and the other officers would arrive soon, she knew.

  “Those of you who have served with me know I like to be called by my first name. Swede,” she asked, turning to her rawboned Alpha Company First Sergeant, “tell these diggers what my first name is.”

  “Last time I heard,” First Sergeant Gunderson drawled, “it was SERGEANT MAJOR.” This elicited a few muffled chuckles from the newest Marines and groans from the oldest.

  “How right you are.” She walked down the line, glorying in the precise ranks of well trained troops. “Now some of you may have heard of some stunts I pulled in my younger days. I’m an old and crotchety woman now,” she said, drawing some laughter, as the Eden Plague kept everyone fit and youthful in body, “and I have no interest in showing you how tough I am. Back in the day, a woman had to prove herself to a bunch of stupid macho boys. Any more, I just let my record speak for itself. I’ve killed more squids and blobbos than you greenies got boogers in your noses, and I still ain’t got my fill.”

  “Besides,” she smiled nastily, “I know the lot of you young studs and studettes have the latest upgrades, just like me. You have laminated bones, cybernetic nerves and muscles, nanite speed and strength and the Eden Plague to heal you up after you break yourselves. This task force was given the best of Earth’s limited resources, so I’m not going to let you waste it on stupid schoolyard games. I will say this once and once only.” She swept the ranks with machine-gun eyes. “Do not test me. I would rather cull this herd of troublemakers now than let one stinking shitbird among you besmirch Second Battalion’s good name.” She scanned up and down the ranks, searching for any smirks, any hint of attitude or challenge, determined to make her example right away, as she always did.

  A man stepped out of the ranks and swaggered up to her. He was big, and young, a corporal with a permanent anger on his face. A mutter went through the ranks.

  There’s always one, Reaper thought with resignation. She wondered how the man had made it past the psych evals that were supposed to detect problem personalities. Best to get it over with quick.

  “Finner,” she read off his name tag. “You sure you want to do this, Corporal? Even if you win, you lose.”

  “I watched recordings of your little demonstrations,” the man responded with a sneer. “It took you whole minutes to barely beat better Marines than you, only because you had fancier cyberware. Now we all have the same, and I say your reputation is bullshit.”

  The whole assembly watched and waited in silence for her response.

  Reaper’s answering smile did not reach her eyes. Prominent eyeteeth enhanced her wolfish expression. “Take your best shot then, Private.”

  His shot was a good one. Had she not been ready, it might have connected. A low, vicious kick at her knee, at least it showed the kid had some combat skills and street savvy.

  It didn’t matter.

  Reaper kept her claws in. To use them would be to prove her challenger right, since those were a modification available only to covert operatives and Stewards. Instead, she simply demonstrated a lifetime of personal combat experience and training.

  She slid her leg back just enough to avoid the strike, then snapped it forward to plant her heel in the patella of his weight-bearing leg. It bowed unnaturally backward at the knee with a sickening crunch. Before he could fall, she stepped forward to seize the other leg, still in the air. Her elbow came down on that knee to destroy it as well.

  Finner’s crybernetics had already shut down the pain, fooling his body into thinking it still had a chance, so even as he collapsed, his fists were striking out with surprising power.

  Reaper turned her thigh into the blows, accepting a few bruises before driving the knife-edge of her foot through his guard and into his jaw, knocking him down, half-conscious. She then stamped both of his elbows to ruin.

  It was over in three seconds. Finner lay broken on the deck, with knees and elbows smashed and inoperable. Absent those joints, all the implants and augmentation in the world couldn’t get him on his feet again.

  Reaper hadn’t cracked a sweat. Her voice rang out. “This man’s squad leader, front and center.”

  A stocky female sergeant double-timed forward to report, looking justifiably concerned. “Sorry, Sergeant M-“

  “Shut it,” Reaper cut her off. She reached down to strip the fallen man’s rank tabs from his uniform, placing them in the other woman’s hand. Then she ripped the squad leader’s sergeant’s tabs off and put them in her own pocket.

  “You should have handled his attitude yourself before this, Corporal. Take him directly to the brig. Tell them to disable his cybernetics before they treat him. Get moving.” She deliberately turned her back on the newly demoted noncom, waiting until she and her squad had carried the miscreant off.

  Raising her voice to address the battalion again, she said, “I hope this lesson is not lost on everyone here. Not the lesson that I can take any one of you, because military discipline is not based on who’s the best brawler. The lesson I hope you learn is that this never should have happened. That shithead should have been dealt with long ago by his squad leader and his platoon sergeant and his first sergeant – who will all report to me after this formation concludes. We’re gonna be in a fight to the death in just a few days. There’s no room in this battalion for weak links like that.”

  She looked around, searching for further problems, or challengers. This time she found nothing. This time, she thought, they know it’s as real as it gets. Fear of death doth wonderfully concentrate the mind.

  Reaper’s smile became genuine, almost warm, lighting up her bony triathlete’s face. “But for those of you who give me one hundred percent, I will back you to the hilt, and so will your NCOs. If you have a problem, you bring it to them and they will bring it to me. You do not bring your problems to officers, unless you mistakenly think the problem is me, which is proof positive you are hallucinating, at which time you will be sent to BioMed for psych-eval. Am I clear?”

  A thousand throats roared as one. “Clear, Sergeant Major!”

  “We have nine days to get ready before we climb into the sleds. The training schedule is posted and I expect nothing less than your best. The only easy day was yesterday.” She saw Gunderson motion with his eyes off to her right and she turned to see Bull, his company commanders and a gaggle of lieutenants watching the drama from a discreet distance.

  “Battalion: tench-hut!” She marched precisely to the center front of the formation and turned it over to Major ben Tauros with a perfect salute that nevertheless managed to convey that certain worldly confidence common to all senior noncommissioned officers. The fact that her commander overtopped her by a full head and eighty kilos somehow did nothing to diminish her presence as she marched to her position to listen to Bull’s first pep talk.

  Yeah, it’s good to be a Marine.

  * * *

  Captain Vincent “Vango” Markis flipped the switch that powered up the training simulator. With his “wizzo” – Weapons Systems Officer – Helen already linked in, initiating the simulation flooded their minds with shared sensation. The universe expanded and crowded into his brain all at once before his implanted cyberware sorted it out.

  Opening his eyes changed nothing, as his optic nerves now shared their pathways with feeds from the virtual world. He could see the cockpit and the controls, which functioned just like in a real StormCrow fighter, as well as the complex overlay of the consoles only visible in his mind.

  “Link is up and one hundred percent,” Vango said, and Helen echoed his words in ritual confirmation. “I’ll set us up for Level One.”

  “Let’s just go right to Level Three, huh? The early ones are too easy,” Helen replied.

  “No, we run the checklist. Jumping to Level Three denies the simulator data on our performance that the wing needs for its analysis and optimization. Besides, you haven’t used that link in forty years. You want to overload it now?”

  “Better now than in combat. I ran the standard diagnostics; it’s fine.”

  Vango’s voice hardened. “We do it by the book.”

  Helen didn’t answer. He figured she heard he had fired wizzos before when they didn’t measure up. She was good and she knew it, so she got impatient.

  “Look, Helen, it’s one thing to take a shortcut now and again in combat, if you think it’s worth the risk. If you do it routinely here in the simulator, you get used to it and you end up forgetting things.”

  “Yes, boss.” Her voice sounded sulky.

  Why do they send the problem hotshots to me? I think I know – because I’m the best there is. I hammer them into shape or I get rid of them.

  “Okay, Level One.”

  A simple row of Meme ships appeared at long range and launched a light spread of rather anemic hypervelocity missiles. As they approached, Vango lined up his sights and pressed the firing stud. Capacitors dumped simulated megajoules of electricity into the microwave laser, the maser, which ran through the spine of his fifty-meter-long StormCrow fighter.

  The Crow had other weapons, but the maser was the biggest and hit the hardest. As it fired at full power, Vango saw his energy cells empty, and then start refilling as his fusion engine diverted some of its capacity to the closed-system generator. The invisible beam reached out toward the still slow-moving wave of enemy hypervelocity missiles, spearing one, cooking its living cells and causing it to veer and tumble. In the vastness of space and without guidance, that weapon was out.

  Quickly he lined up another, letting it get closer and firing at half-charge, causing enough damage to kill that one too. He knew they’d speed up pretty soon and get harder to hit.

  “Good shots,” Helen said from the back seat in a studiously bored voice; then again, she always seemed bored unless she was working her short-range systems, and the StormCrow squadron around them had killed all the inbound hypers of this wave at long to medium range.

  Focusing ahead, Vango saw the far-off enemy ships launch another group, this time with greater velocity and more evasive maneuvers. A little more difficult, but he still lined up and killed his missile, then let his maser recharge. He nailed another, but some looked likely to make it past the fighter screen before he’d have power again.

  “Helen, you are weapons free,” Vango said, rotating the Crow to give her a better solution on a cluster of three hypers flying past.

  “Finally,” she groused, and the small secondary lasers and mini-railguns on the X of the StormCrow’s four equally spaced wings spat their deadly beams and balls. Though not packing the punch of the big maser, the converging high-cyclic-rate rays and shots battered a passing living missile with enough hits to cause it to sputter, deflate and fold up dead.

  “Nice,” Vango praised. Helen was a cherry; she’d never flown a combat mission before Gliese 370. For her, this was all one big video game. She had never seen what a hyper could do if it really got going.

  With their fantastic acceleration, Meme hypers got more and more dangerous at longer ranges. Sometimes they achieved a fair bit of light speed before impact, enough energy to tear apart anything smaller than a heavy cruiser. StormCrow fighters represented just one element of EarthFleet’s multilayered defense systems.

  “Next wave coming up.” With capacitors full, he decided to split his shots at half power, since it looked like that was enough to take down a hyper after all. His shot at the first missile missed, but his second attempt nailed it, and he was glad he'd modified his technique.

  Helen was already engaging at extreme secondary range, along with the dozens of Crows around them. They filled the space in front of them with coherent light and bullet-sized railgun rounds. Following one past in her crosshairs, Helen got another kill, and cheered herself. “Yes!”

  Vango spun the fighter around to fire a parting half-power shot at the bright fusion flare of a hyper that had gotten past. The microwaves it projected, concentrated by the enemy missile drive’s plenum nozzle, overloaded the amazingly tough living material’s ability to control the reaction, for they destabilized the hyper’s engine and it blew.

  “Getting tougher,” Helen said, concentration in her voice. “Who’s ahead on kills right now?”

  Accessing his datalink, Vango replied, “We’re neck and neck with Ironman and Spin from the Giessen.”

  “Good. Let’s beat those uppity bastards.”

  “I think you ought to focus on saving the ships behind us from damage,” Vango said seriously.

  “Same thing, isn’t it? Jeez, you’re such a damn straight arrow. It’s just a simulation!”

  Growling deep in his throat, Vango touched the manual abort and the virtual universe evaporated around them. Fuming in the simulator cockpit for a moment, he finally barked, “Get out.”

  “What?”

  “Get out of my bird, Helen.”

  “You bastard. You’d throw me out now? I’m the best wizzo in the squadron!”

  Vango jerked his link out and stood up in the simulator, stepping up on his seat and turning around to look into her realistic cockpit. “Your stats may be the best, but that’s not all it takes. If you keep thinking of this as a simulation, you’re going to lose track of reality and get us killed. On every mission, simulated or actual, always treat everything as real. With our high-end virtual overlays, there’s no way to tell. The only way to operate is at your best, and if you’re not one hundred percent, you can go fly with someone else. Got it?”

  Helen stared at Vango, her too-perfect face defiant. Finally she dropped her eyes. “I got it, boss,” she replied, and he glared at her for a moment more before dropping back into his own cockpit.

  “You’d better,” he growled. “I’m about this close to flagging your flight status.” Plugging his link back in, he said flatly, “I’m setting the attackers to Level Three. Get ready.”

  The hypers came at them again.

  Chapter 3

  Five days out, Absen thought as breakup time approached. Five days to live or die. His youthful appearance, product of the Eden Plague, belied his old soul. He had aged a hundred years when Kathleen and his children died in nuclear fire so long ago, and no amount of bodily rejuvenation could really make him young in spirit. He’d largely given up on hope of a relationship for the years he fought humanity’s war, and now he found himself again wondering if that had been a mistake.

  Plenty of time if we win here. It will take decades for the Meme to react, to shift forces to try to retake Gliese 370, and in that time we’ll be making babies. That prospect was so much easier with orders to back it up – when he had a reason, an objective: another generation of humans to replace losses and to carry on the fight, to go with the ready-made factories that would build more factories that would build ships and weapons to defend the new civilization.

  After that, on to another star system, and thence to conquer.

  If we win. That’s on my shoulders.

  “One minute until first-stage separation,” Master Helmsman Okuda said formally. He skimmed his screens, turning left and right to take in all of them, seeing nothing of concern except a few yellow lights in the later sequences.

  “Initiate on the T-zero mark, Chief. Don’t wait for my word.” Absen had long since passed a need for the melodrama of giving history-making orders.

  “Three, two, one, mark,” the computer’s voice said. Throughout Conquest the same voice spoke, synchronizing thought and action.

  Those deep inside the great sphere continued about their business, secure in the knowledge that their parts would begin hours from now. Those on Conquest’s skin hovered hands over control boards and monitored automated sequences over their links, preparing for the moment when the ship became a fleet.