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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 with 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