I walked over to the flight simulator and sat down. I wanted to remark on how accurate everything felt. When I sat down on the leather it crunched under my ass. It seemed to have a little bit of give to it, like the really fancy stuff in the flight simulators in Varis's tower.

We had a bunch of our pilots going through a bunch of flight simulator training there. One of many things I'd set up and then had to leave to its own devices because I'd been so busy dealing with stuff like the empress trying to drop a literal nuke on our heads to kill all of us.

I felt the throttle and reached out to touch the control stick. As I did, it felt like the control stick fuzzed in my hand.

Just a little. Just enough to let me know this wasn't happening in reality.

"That was weird," I muttered.

"What's that?" Arvie asked, coming up to stand next to me.

Which was also weird. He was tall and slim. He had a sort of Vincent Price thing going. If it was a younger and more handsome Vincent Price. Or maybe Salazar Smith from that popular 26th century Dracula series.

I knew a few livisk ladies who'd be all about him if he could get out into the real world with his self-image, or if he was programmed to be fully functional. Which I knew he wasn't because Varis joked about him basically being my second partner on this world and how she never signed up for being in a polyamorous triad with a Combat Intelligence.

That wasn't how she framed it exactly, of course. There were a few lost in translation moments we still had. I was talking in livisk most of the time when I had conversations with her, but there were times when it was easier to think of things in Terran Standard.

Besides. It's not like this would be much of a story to my dear readers learning about all of this after the fact if I wrote everything down in livisk standard, which most people aren't capable of speaking.

See people joining the military and only bother to learn the swear words even though knowing livisk might be important to their survival prospects. Plus I suspected part of the reason why I was so easily able to translate was because of the mental link that seemed to be rewiring the language centers in my brain on top of everything else.

"Is something wrong, William?" Arvie asked, frowning.

"For a moment it was like the world fuzzed around me when I touched the control stick."

I looked at him to see how he reacted to that. For a wonder, he was frowning. I wondered if he was projecting his emotions like that because that's how he genuinely felt, or if he was doing it because that's how he felt like he was supposed to look and he wanted to look accurate for the meatspace intelligence sitting in front of him in computer space.

"That is odd," he said. "I've heard of something like that happening, but it's rare."

"So you can tell me all about it."

"I could if you really wanted me to," he said, and this time the barest ghost of a smile turned up at the corner of his mouth. "But of course, it's not like we have a lot of time right now even if we are speaking in an accelerated fashion thanks to the neural interface."

"Right," I said, looking at the simulator in front of me. "How many fighters do we have flying out over the city right now?"

"There are currently eight fighters I have set up at equidistant points around the edge of Imperial Seat," he said.

"How did you manage that without the empress figuring out what you were doing?" I asked, looking up at him in surprise.

"There are many hangars we maintain throughout the city that contain some of our weapons."

"That seems like the kind of thing that would piss off the empress if she found out about it."

"Again, it's something that I could go into with you in great depth if you were really interested and we weren't in a literal life or death situation, but suffice it to say, there are a lot of noble houses who do that sort of thing. It's something the empress tends to overlook if it's not a direct threat to her power."

"Got it," I said. "So this thing can connect directly to all of those fighters?"

"It can, William," Arvie said, "but I wouldn't recommend trying to connect to all of them at once."

"Wait," I said, looking up at him. "Like you're saying being able to interface with all eight of those fighters at once is something I could totally do? Like I could control all of them with my brain at once?"

"Potentially you could do that, yes," he said.

"Why do I get the feeling there's a big 'but' there?"

"The kind of big but that your ancient poet bard, Sir Mix-A-Lot, would sing songs about," Arvie said.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"You made a joke about human pop culture," I said, grinning up at him.

"Well, it is rather easy to make jokes about your pop culture since the latter 20th and early 21st century when you discovered mass media looms so large in your pop culture vocabulary."

"Yeah, not to mention there's a lot of stuff that just got lost in some of the wars that ravaged the planets in the solar system in between," I muttered.

"Anyway, the big but in this case is that it could potentially fry your brain, and I cannot lie."

"Seriously?" I said, looking up at him.

"Seriously," he said.

"Okay, nice safety tip, Egon."

"If that were to happen to you, I'd blame myself," Arvie said, grinning.

"So would I," I said. Then I frowned just a little. "So what's bringing on all of these Earth references anyway?"

He shrugged. "I'm just happy you've finally decided to trust me to the point you're willing to do this. It gets very lonely not being able to interface with someone at my true speed."

A silence stretched out between us, though I wouldn't call it an uncomfortable silence. No, it was more the kind of silence that could stretch out between two dudes who were sitting playing a game together or doing something else where they didn't have to say a damn thing, and they could still be having the time of their lives.

"I do trust you with my life, Arvie," I said.

"I know," Arvie said.

I grinned up at him. "This really is a banner day if you're throwing all this stuff at me."

"Yes, but you should probably throw the fighters at the empress now," he said.

"Got it," I said, looking at the simulated cockpit in front of me. "So we're not able to control all eight of the fighter craft at the same time, but what about being able to switch in between them seamlessly?"

"That should be possible," Arvie said.

"So you could have them running on autopilot, and then I could switch in between them at a push of a button?"

"If you're only focusing on one at a time, then you should be able to switch between your focus with a thought," Arvie said. "Give it a try."

I looked at the canopy in front of me. It sprang to life, feeling for all the world like I was actually in a fighter with a canopy that showed all of my surroundings.

Which wasn't strictly necessary. A lot of fighter combat these days was the kind of stuff that happened at the kind of distances where being able to see something with your eyeball wasn't helpful at all, but was still nice to be able to see everything all around you. Especially with terrestrial combat, for all that it still should've been happening over the horizon and not up close and personal if you were doing everything right.

I let out a low whistle as I looked around.

"Damn," I muttered. Then a thought occurred to me.

"What exactly is happening to me in the real world right now?"

"You're still walking along with Varis. She's having to keep a hand on your arm and do a little bit of guiding. You could dedicate a larger portion of your thought to that, but I don't want to risk you doing too much multitasking at the moment. That could lead to trouble."

"Like the kind of trouble that ends with my brain getting fried?"

"Perhaps that kind of trouble, yes," Arvie said.

"Got it," I said, frowning as I looked at the controls. I was in a fighter at the edge of Imperial Seat. When I turned to look to my right, I could see the spindly lines of traffic that crisscrossed the city, the massive towers that belonged to the nobility who were in what I liked to call an architectural dick-measuring contest, and there were all the other twinkling lights of one of the more massive cities in this spiral arm.

Which was really saying something considering the large populations on some planets and how big the cities there could get.

"So just to double check. "My reaction time is greatly increased by being in here and by virtue of whatever is going on with the link?"

"That is correct," Arvie said.

"Let's go ahead and designate each of these fighters one through eight then, just so it's nice and easy to keep track of them."

"I've gone ahead and designated the fighters as requested," Arvie said. "Is there any particular numbering system you want to use with them?"

"No, I just want to be able to easily switch between them mentally if I need to," I said. "Now let's go ahead and start doing some of that mental switching to get an idea of how this is going to go."

"Certainly, William," Arvie said. "I can maintain control of them when you aren't actively doing so."

"Yeah, let's go ahead and do that as a fallback," I said.

"As a fallback?" Arvie said, and he sounded mildly surprised.

"Just trust me on this one," I said.

I flexed my fingers, and I thought back to some of my days playing games. I'd been a big fan of playing the in MMOs where you flew a starfighter out in a virtual galaxy. I'd always figured it was good training for the day when I'd eventually get to the point of flying actual starfighters out in the actual galaxy.

And that dream had come true for a short little while. Until things came to an end on the Ticonderoga and the powers that be decided it would be better to put me on a cruiser in the CCF.

Whatever. Again, old history and an admiral letting the shit roll downhill on me because of an explosion in a training exercise he could've goddamn prevented wasn't my problem right now, but I was going to make it his problem if I ever had the good fortune of coming back to human space at the head of a battle fleet courtesy of Varis.

"Okay, switching to one," I said.

The display came up.

"Two," I said, continuing through all of the numbers and looking at the display to make sure everything was cycling correctly. I flexed my hands again, watching Arvie as he auto-piloted them. For the moment they were moving in traffic patterns over the city, but anybody who did even more than a cursory visual inspection would quickly realize it was a starfighter flying amongst the traffic rather than a regular ship.

It was night which would make it a little more difficult to recognize the starfighter from a distance, but still.

It wasn't unheard of for heavily militarized equipment to go flying amongst regular traffic in Imperial Seat, but it would attract notice. Especially after I started using them to fire.

"Do we have a targeting solution on that bomber?" I asked.

"We do, William," Arvie said.

"Good," I said, "Now let's move."

I put my hand on the flight stick and moved back to fighter one. I squeezed it a couple of times and then went nice and loose. That was something I learned back in the day flying a flight simulator in front of a screen in my house. Something that had turned out to translate pretty damn well to flying actual starfighters.

There was a pipeline between various Terran military forces and game design companies where the military gave them the specs for a lot of their stuff because they knew it would be helping to train pilots from an extremely young age. Much in the same way that prodigies in stuff like playing an instrument or chess or whatever got their start at an extremely young age once upon a time. Only this training was for dealing death and destruction to alien motherfuckers.

"Okay," I said, grinning as I banked the ship in towards the city. "Let's do this."

I immediately pulled up the targeting solution and fired a missile at the bomber to get their attention.

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