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it, Kar,” he said, using a private channel now. “What is it? You’re feeling guilty about the nuke?”
    “Negative,” she snapped. She knew she was lying, and she knew Ran heard the lie in her voice. “Take over. Hold until relieved.”
    False bravado, that. And useless. Wasteful. But she was out of answers and she had to do something… something besides wait for the enemy to overwhelm the last of the warstriders huddled together on Core D9837 and bring me operation to its final and inevitable conclusion. She pushed past Ran without another word, making her way toward the distant, towering pyramid.
    She was afraid.
    She had liked it better fighting the Empire… not that those days were over, by any means.
    Since the dawn of Man’s emergence as a spacefaring species—since the end of the twentieth century, in fact, when the old United States and the Russian Commonwealth had turned their backs on the high ground of space—Mankind’s destiny, both on Old Earth and off, had been directed by Dai Nihon, the empire of Greater Japan. Through control of orbital industrial facilities and, ultimately, the secrets of faster-than-light travel and the quantum power tap, they’d spread that empire to the stars, building the Shichiju, an empire of over eighty colonized worlds and hundreds of research, mining, and military outposts scattered across a sphere of space over a hundred light years across.
    Thirty years earlier, an unlikely union of diverse worlds and states scattered along the Shichiju’s periphery had declared independence and, after a short, bitter war, united as the Confederation, with its capital at New America. The peace that followed had been fragile and uncertain. Imperial Japan and its Hegemony far outnumbered the newly independent worlds, and no one was betting mat they would keep their newfound independence for long.
    The immediate threat of renewed war had ended, though, when Dev Cameron—or his downloaded personality, at any rate—had returned unexpectedly to human space after a twenty-five-year absence with a portion of the DalRiss exploratory fleet, bringing warning of the strange civilization that appeared to be energetically transforming the Core of the Galaxy.
    The Web. For the first time, it was clear that Man was at risk… not just some one faction or political group. For survival, Confederation and Empire had allied with one another, joining their fleets and their efforts in an imperfect military union. A battle had been fought at Nova Aquila as the Web came through the Stargate from the Core; victory had been won, though not so much by the efforts of the Unified Fleet as by the intervention of the Overmind, a still poorly understood phenomenon arising out of the combined interaction of billions of interlinked minds working through the human computer network. Since that battle, Confederation and Imperium had maintained their uneasy truce, studying the Web and preparing for its next emergence.
    For two years, now, the Unified Fleet had maintained its watch at Nova Aquila. A science team aboard the Carl Friedrich Gauss continued to study what little data had been gleaned thus far, both about the Web and the Nova Aquila Stargate. Teleoperated probes were sent through, both for information garnering and as a part of Shell Game, the attempt to plant disinformation about the human worlds for the Web to pick up.
    And there’d been raids like this one, both Confederation and Imperial.
    She looked again at her warning discretes. Her strider would never make it into space again anyway; any attempt by her to get off this barren world would be doomed to failure.
    So she might as well make the sacrifice of her strider count for something.
    Her progress across the open ground had been slow. Her magnetics were generating scarcely enough lift against the faltering local magfields to hold her aloft, much less to propel her forward. She was compelled to drag herself along with her manipulators, and that made