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building them. Humans had for much longer known of the Naga, entities stranger than the DalRiss by far. In an attempt to attach human motives to nonhuman perceptions and actions, they’d originally called them Xenophobes. Immense fluid or plastic creatures inhabiting the crusts of several worlds scattered across those reaches of the Shichiju toward the constellations Ophiuchus, Serpens, Aquila, and Hercules, they possessed dizzyingly alien modes of thought and perception… and a control of their own internal chemistries far more precise and powerful than the crude nanotechnology of human science.
    The Naga inhabiting the now-deserted world called Herakles, Mu Herculis III, had been instrumental in the defeat of an Imperial warfleet. Massing as much as a small moon and drawing its energy from the heat of a planet’s core, it could wield incredible powers; while linked with the rebel commander Devis Cameron, it had manipulated powerful magnetic fields in such a way as to propel one-ton chunks of ferrous material at velocities approaching ten percent of the speed of light. The largest and most powerful of the Empire’s dreadnoughts had crumpled and flared like moths in a blowtorch when subjected to the Naga’s accurate and deadly fire.
    Kara sighed. Devis Cameron. Now there was a name. She’d never known the man personally, of course, since he’d died during the Second Battle of Herakles almost three years before she’d been born. Still, Kara felt as though she had known him. He’d been the lover of her mother, Katya Alessandro, for a number of years during the war… and he’d fathered her half brother, Daren. A year after Cameron’s death, Kara’s mother had established a long-term contract with another rebel officer, Vic Hagan—like Katya, a New American.
    Devis Cameron had been from Earth.
    Kara knew her mother as well as anyone alive; she still didn’t understand what the woman had seen in that man. For one thing, as an Earther, he’d started out owing his allegiance to the Terran Hegemony, which, of course, was little more than the Empire’s puppet. The word was that he’d been loyal to the Empire for quite a while, that he’d even won the coveted Tei-kokuno Hoshi, the Star of the Empire, for his part in contacting the Naga at Alya A-VI. Later, while operating against rebels on Eridu, he’d been given an order he hadn’t liked… and had joined the rebellion.
    That told Kara quite a lot, that Cameron hadn’t had much in the way of personal convictions, that he’d let himself be buffeted back and forth rather than setting a course and sticking to it. From what she’d heard, both from her mother and from the official accounts uploaded onto the New American net, his personal contacts with the alien Naga had made him something of an alien himself, a being capable of melding with Naga and DalRiss alike in a symbiosis that no one in human space really understood even yet. He’d been linked with both during the battle when he’d been killed.
    It was quiet again outside her warstrider. Her emergency repairs were nearly done. Maybe she could get out of this fix yet.…
    “Lieutenant Hagan,” a new voice said inside her head. “We are terminating the simulation.”
    She blinked. “Wait a minute!” she said. “I’m not dead, am I?”
    The voice chuckled. “Not quite. Our AI out here gives you a sixty percent-plus chance of completing your repairs. But I’m afraid the mission completion probability’s only about twenty-eight percent.”
    Gok. “We should still play out the simulation.”
    “We will. But we’re declaring you dead. A message just came through for you. They want you up in Ops Planning.”
    Kara stifled a groan. Normally, important messages would have been handled by her Companion, which either would have routed them through to her immediately or dealt with them according to program. Her messages were being handled now, however, by the AI running this simulation; apparently it had