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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