Free Symbionts by William H Keith

matter of time.
    The sacrifice of New America had been wasted… wasted.
    Now, scant hours after the end of the simulated battle, Katya was aboard an air/spacecraft outbound from New Argosport. The hotbox booster engines had fallen silent, and the arrowhead shape of the ascraft fell through the night above Herakles, anticollision strobes pulsing with metronomic precision at dorsal ridge, wingtips, and belly. She’d received the message from Rogue only moments after her own simulated death, a summons to join Travis Sinclair in orbit. She’d barely had time to return to her quarters and pack, arriving at the port just fifteen minutes before the scheduled launch.
    Sinclair had told her nothing during their brief conversation, but she was under no illusions about why she’d been summoned so precipitously to orbit. Vic had been right. Regimental commanders don’t join squad-level deployments, and they don’t mix it up in strider-to-strider combat. Having logged orders to ignore the enemy strider force and concentrate fire on the artillery, they don’t then disregard those orders to chase after the enemy commander’s Battlewraith.
    And they certainly don’t turn a training simulation into a personal vendetta.
    Linked, Katya tried to concentrate on the panorama spreading out around her. Astern, Herakles was a smear of oceanic blue-violet and the white gleam of clouds and ice, a vast sphere half-illuminated by the brassy, subgiant’s glare of Mu Herculis A. To the right, Mu Herculis B and C were a tightly paired, ruby-gleaming doublet. Left and below, the star Vega, only a few light-years distant from the Mu Herculis system, was a dazzling gleam in the blackness, so bright it washed other stars from the sky and touched the clouds on the nightside of Herakles with ghost-pale silver.
    Katya’s attention was held, however, by a tight-stretched thread of silver suspended directly ahead against blackness and the glare of Herc A. Razor’s-edge crisp and straight, the line seemed unmoving, though ladar returns indicated it possessed a speed of several kilometers per second and was rotating end over end. As Katya continued to watch, a subtle shift in perspective and in the silver-gilt terminator between light and shadow demonstrated movement, and a rapidly closing range.
    Herakles, Mu Herculis A-III, was unique among the worlds of the Shichiju, for its sky-el was no longer attached to the planet’s equator. Instead, the structure fell around Herakles in an eccentric orbit that brought one end within two hundred kilometers of the surface each week, though most of the time its center of mass was located well beyond synchorbit. Some thirty thousand kilometers long now and only meters thick, it was held taut by centrifugal force as it spun.
    Katya was jacked into the ascraft’s command link. Technically, she was a passenger aboard the ground-to-orbit shuttle, but Captain Chalmer, the ship’s pilot, had invited her to link in from her module aft shortly after launch from the New Argos port complex. She could see the rogue sky-el ahead with the crisply detailed, unimpeded clarity of sensor feeds direct from the ascraft’s visual scanners. Numbers flickering past the right side of her awareness gave range and target vectors, angle of approach, and closing velocity. The ascraft was closing with the lower arm with a relative velocity of only fifty meters per second.
    “So what brings you up to synchorbit?” Chalmer asked, his voice sounding close beside her in the dark. “We don’t often get to see you infantry types here on the whirligig.”
    “They’ve been keeping me pretty busy,” Katya replied, distracted. “Building an army from nothing is a job for magicians, not a brain-burned striderjack like me.”
    “Brain-burned?You? Nah, the way I heard it, Captain Cameron’s the one who’s brain-burned if anyone is.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “Aw, no disrespect meant, Colonel. It’s just that some of the stories… Hey,