Free Netlink by William H Keith

was simming with—she was Ann Gallsworth, an assistant xenogeneticist with the university staff. The shell wouldn’t hold up under a close scrutiny, but there was no reason yet to think that they were under suspicion.
    Daren detested the politics that made secrecy necessary. For himself, he would have contracted with Taki in an instant, broadcast their relationship on the planetary net, hell, made love to her on the front steps of the Sony Building… but for the unfortunate fact that his mother was a Confederation senator and his sister was a warjacker with a class Blue-one security rating. He didn’t care what people thought of him, but he was well aware of how much trouble he could cause for the rest of his family, trouble that would not be appreciated.
    He drew his lips back from hers. “Damn, I wish we didn’t have to sneak around like this,” he told her.
    She shook her head. “It won’t be forever, lover.”
    “No? Seems like it, sometimes.”
    “After we get our own survey, nobody’ll care what we do together!”
    “Maybe.” He gnawed his lip. “Though the chances of that aren’t looking so good now.”
    She drew back a little, her eyes dark, questioning. “You heard something? Your last proposal?”
    He nodded. “Sanders downloaded a reply this morning. All deep space plans are on hold right now. ‘The possibility of imminent hostilities,’ ” he said. He snorted, disgusted. “Staticjack! The whole goking Confederation is going nullhead!”
    “Iceworld, Daren,” Taki said. “Don’t burn out your feeds. If there’s a war, there’s a war, and there’s nothing we can do about it. When it’s over, we’ll have our survey.”
    “I hope so, Taki. I hope so. I worry about you a lot, though.”
    She grinned. “Don’t stress-test to destruct, round-eyes. I can take care of myself!”
    At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Western powers, obsessed with social and economic problems, had abandoned space… this despite the fact that the old United States had been first to reach Earth’s moon. The Japanese had never lost sight of their ultimate goal, however, and their domination of the Shichiju for the next six centuries was due almost entirely to the fact that they’d managed to secure the high ground of space, pioneering the technologies that had opened the stars to Man: nanotechnology, the quantum power tap, the cephlink, the K-T drive. As a result, the Terran Hegemony was little more than a puppet for Japan’s Imperium, and sizable Nihonjin populations lived on most of the worlds of the Shichiju, whether they had anything to do directly with the Imperium or not.
    During the revolution, large numbers of Nihonjin had fled the rebellious worlds of the frontier, seeking refuge among the safe worlds of the Shichiju’s core. Those who stayed did so because they considered themselves New Americans—or Liberties, or Eriduans, or humans —first, and Japanese only by accident of birth and genome. Taki’s traditionalist parents had fled New America during the war, returning several years after the Imperium’s recognition of Confederation independence to work with Mitsubishi-Newamie Industries. They’d left once more two years ago, as tensions between the Imperium and the breakaways had continued to increase; Taki, however, had refused to go. She had her tenure at U of J to consider, for one thing… and for another, she, like Daren, was hoping for a chance at a slot on a survey expedition, and such chances were rare on Earth.
    Galactic Survey, deep exploration, alien contact— that was where the future of mankind lay, so far as Daren was concerned. In the ten years since he’d begun high-level downloads, training to be a xenosophontologist, the need for new surveys into the dark beyond Man’s handful of worlds in known space had become something of a crusade for him. For Taki, too; that was what had drawn them together in the first place. Both were convinced that Man’s future,