I felt as if I weighed a thousand kilograms. Of course, when you’re shot out of a mass driver at ten gees, one feels ten times one’s weight at Earth-grav.

A severed hand hit me in the arm. Thankfully, it hit me there. If it had hit my helmet, either the vacuum of space or blunt force trauma would have been the end of me.

War in space—it’s an interesting thing. With the technologies we used to have, it was like the game of chess—one’s adversary just went out and met one, made a series of calculated moves, and either won or lost the exchange. Many exchanges then ultimately decided the game.

That was then. This is now.

Screw chess. We play go. A brutal, life-or-death, cosmic form of go. One can attack from anywhere now—from behind a planet or a moon, from an obvious orbital installation, even from a wormhole that erupts in the middle of the combat zone.

The computer announced dryly that we were ten kilometers away from the target.

But I couldn’t help but wonder—what exactly were we fighting for?