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traditional Marine family lines going back, in some cases, two thousand years. Garroway’s great-grandfather had been Gunnery Sergeant Aiden Garroway, who’d taken part in the op that had broken the back of the ancient Xul menace at the Galactic Core in the twenty-ninth century. And there were records of Garroways going much, much further back. There’d been a remote ancestor—immortalized in Corps legend as “Sands of Mars Garroway”—back in the mid-twenty-first, even before the first voyages to other stars.
    He started to make a mental note to check and see if there were any Garroways around now. He’d had two kids, Ami and Jerret, before his first stint in cybe-hibe. Their mother had discouraged contact with him, damn her, and they’d been distant after the break-up. But maybe enough time had passed for their descendents….
    He shook off the thickening mood, electing instead tostare up at the impossibly blue and white curve of Eris and the tiny glare of Dysnomia, hanging in the sky above the mess deck.
    A new century. A new millennium.
    He was looking forward to that download.
    Upper Stratosphere, Dac IV
Star System 1727459
1820 hours, GMT
    The RS/A-91 strikepod plunged out of the upper haze deck into a calm and empty gulf, and Marine Lieutenant Marek Garwe shifted from tactical to optical. Salmon-pink cloud walls towered in all directions, like vast and fuzzy-looking cliffs with gently curved and wind-sculpted faces. The haze layer above was composed mostly of crystals of water ice, scattering the local star’s light, turning the sky a deep, royal blue, with a ghostly halo about the sun.
    Below, the cloud canyon yawned into darkness. The next cloud deck was over forty kilometers below, deeply shadowed in the depths beyond the slanting reach of the rays of a distant sun. Intermediate cloud layers indicated updrafts, including a vast spiral in the distance of a storm. Most astonishing was the sheer scale of the vista ahead and below; the opening in the cloud layer appeared to be dozens of kilometers wide and deep, but Garwe’s instrument feeds showed the empty gulf to be nearly four hundred kilometers across.
    Dac IV was a gas giant, a little smaller than Jupiter in the distant Sol system, but with the same wind-whipped cloud bands and rotating storm cells in an atmosphere that was 99 percent hydrogen and helium. The 1 percent or so left over was mostly methane and ammonia, plus the poisonous soup of chemical compounds constantly upwelling from the world’s interior that gave the planet’s clouds their spectacular range of color.
    Characteristic of most gas giants, Dac IV had no solidsurface, which meant that Garwe’s confused and constantly shifting altitude readings were irrelevant; below his hurtling RS/A-91 Starwraith’s hull, the atmosphere grew steadily denser and hotter until it was compressed into metallic hydrogen.
    â€œTighten up your formation, people,” a voice whispered in his mind. “Objective now reads as 150 kilometers ahead.” Captain Corolin Xander was the CO of Anchor Marine Strike Squadron 340, “The War Dogs,” currently operating as Blue Flight. Her Starwraith was somewhere ahead and off Garwe’s starboard sponson, invisible even to his amplified senses as the squadron plunged toward Hassetas floatreef.
    â€œI’m being painted,” Lieutenant Amendes, in Blue Two, reported. “Intense EM scans, all bands.”
    â€œThey can’t be sure of what they’re seeing,” Xander replied. “They may not even be getting anything back.”
    â€œOh, they see us, all right,” Lieutenant Bakewin said. “They see something . Scans are increasing in power.”
    Starwraiths were encased in the latest wrinkle in nanoflage, a layer of active nano designed to render the two-meter craft effectively invisible by bending all incoming electromagnetic radiation around the smoothly curved surfaces.