Master Pilot Marx preferred the safety of the Navy. At his age, being on the battlefield had lost its thrill. Now Marx controlled his craft from shipside, hundreds of kilometers away from the action. He reclined in the comfort of a smartgel seat like some fighter pilot of yore, bathed in synesthetic images that allowed him three levels of sight, the parts of his brain normally dedicated to hearing, smell, and tactile sensations all given over to vision. Marx experienced his ship’s environment as a true pilot should, as if he himself had been shrunk to the size of a human cell.

He loved the microscopic scale of his new assignment. In his darkened cabin on sleepless nights, Marx burned incense and watched the smoke rise through the bright, pencil-width shaft of an emergency flashlight. He noted how air currents curled, how ghostly snakes could be spun with the movement of a finger, a puff of breath. With an inhumanly steady hand he moved a remote microscope carefully through the air, projecting its images onto the cabin wall, watching and learning the behavior of microscopic particles aloft.

Sometimes during these dark and silent vigils, Jocim Marx allowed himself to think that he was the best microcraft pilot in the fleet.

He was right.

Captain

Captain Laurent Zai stared down into the central airscreen of his battle bridge, searching for a solution in its tangle of crisp, needle-thin lines. The airscreen was filled with a wireframe of the imperial palace on Legis XV, a structure that stretched across ten square kilometers in a sinuous, organiform sprawl. The real palace was currently two hundred seventeen klicks directly below the Lynx.

Zai could feel imminent defeat down there. It writhed beneath the soles of his boots, as if he were standing at the edge of some quickly eroding sand dune.

Of course, this slipping sensation likely resulted from the Lynx’s efforts to remain geostationary above the palace. The ship was under constant acceleration to match the planet’s rotation; a proper geosynchronous orbit would be too high to effect the rescue. So a stomach-churning combination of forces pulled on Zai’s tall frame. At this altitude, the ship was deep within Legis XV’s gravity well, which pulled him substantially sternward. The Lynx’s acceleration nudged Zai to one side with a slow, twisting motion. The thin but boiling thermosphere of the planet added an occasional pocket of turbulence. And overlaying it all were the throes of the ship’s artificial gravity—always shaky this close to a planet—as it attempted to create the uniform effect of a single standard gee.

It felt to Zai’s delicate sense of balance as if the Lynx’s bridge were swirling clockwise down some gigantic drain.