I took a moment to really take in the battle going on all around us. It was mostly making itself known in the shape of multicolored plasma blasts reflecting off of the ruins above us and below us. Whoever was hitting this caravan of discourage, they were hitting it from both sides.

So I walked over to the edge of the chasm. I worried for a moment because I was still a little wobbly on my feet, but I figured one of the ladies would catch me if it looked like I was about to pitch over the edge.

I was surprised when I stood at that edge but I didn't feel the usual sense of vertigo that started down somewhere in between my balls and my belly button and then moved out over the rest of my body.

I'd never been good with heights before. Which was an odd thing for somebody who routinely moved around in fighter craft and spaceships that were orbiting far above a planet, but there'd always been a difference in my mind between a fighter craft that was being held aloft by antigrav technology that gave physics the middle finger with the kind of stuff I could understand after taking a basic antigrav course as a freshman in high school, and looking down at a long drop and knowing there was nothing to stop gravity from liquefying me when I got to the bottom.

"Huh, how about that," I said, staring down into the chasm.

"What's that?" Varis asked, coming up next to me. I also noted the way she not so subtly put a hand on the underside of my arm and then held it in a grip that felt like steel.

It was reassuring to know she could read my mind and know I needed somebody there to hold me in place. Beyond the moods that we got from the link, that is.

"It's just that I was always afraid of heights before," I said with a shrug. "But it doesn't seem to be bothering me now."

"Maybe you think there's something from the link that's going to save you if you throw yourself off this thing. That seems to be happening to you often enough lately."

"I don't know," I said, reaching around and feeling at my shoulder blades. That had Varis hitting me with a flat stare.

"Do I even want to ask what you're doing, Bill?" she said.

"I don't know if you want to ask, but I can tell you what I'm doing."

She sighed. "Fine, I'll bite. What are you doing, Bill?"

"I'm feeling to see if there are any stubs from a pair of wings growing in."

"Why would there be a pair of wings growing in on your back, Bill?" she said.

There was a mixture of amusement and annoyance coming through the link. Which was honestly the sort of thing I was used to getting from Varis at this point. I grinned and reached down to pat the hand she was using to hold my arm in an iron grip.

"We've already established that we don't know what kinds of things happen to people who enter into a battle pair because the people who form battle pairs are always really tight-lipped about it, and you don't have any personal experience with it, so who's to say people don't sprout wings?"

Suddenly Arvie's probe was right there in front of me, hovering on his own little antigrav and bobbing up and down.

"I believe you're committing a logical fallacy, William," he said.

"I know I'm committing a logical fallacy," I said, waving a hand. "Now watch out, or I might start spouting enough logical fallacies that it causes your head to explode."

The probe bobbed in front of me for a moment. I grinned. I lived for those pauses.

"Were you doing that one on purpose, or were you doing that one because I confused you?"

"You genuinely confused me," he said. "What are you talking about?"

"It's an ancient joke about artificial intelligence on Earth. Catch them in a logic loop and it fries their insides."

"That makes absolutely no sense at all, William. Any machine intelligence that is sufficiently advanced to achieve sapience and superintelligence would be able to easily shrug aside a logical inconsistency."

"Tell that to Bill Shatner," I said with a grin.

"That's the original captain from Star Trek, correct?" Arvie said. "The one who wasn't balding."

"Well, the status of his hair is still a matter of debate among fans a thousand years later, but yeah, sure," I said.

There was another pause, and then Arvie did one of those dips.

"I've just gone through the entirety of the original series from a pirate feed out in the rim areas."

"Really?" I said, arching an eyebrow. "You never bothered to look at that stuff before now?"

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"I didn't want to torture myself with it," Arvie said with an artificial sniff. "Though now that I've watched it, I have to admit it's not without its charm. I can see why it endures with your spacefaring species."

"There's nothing like the classics," I said. "Even if the older stuff is a little goofy. Like using logic bombs to destroy a computer."

"Agreed. It's totally ridiculous that you would think a machine intelligence would be capable of being defeated by something so mind-bogglingly simple."

I shrugged. "What can I say? That stuff was all written a good half-century and some change before we had the first inklings of actual artificial intelligence to know that they couldn't even draw fingers correctly at first, let alone figure out how to launch nukes or take over an entire fleet and start killing carbon units."

"I see," Arvie said. "We don't have any of those handwringing sorts of entertainments left over from when the livisk first started to learn how to create a machine intelligence."

"Oh yeah? Did the machine intelligences take over for a little bit and wipe anything bad about them from the face of the planet? We've had a few assholes take over on earth and do that sort of thing. Go after comedians and people saying mean things about them on the Internet. Stuff like that. Thing is, they never wipe out the bad things people are saying about them entirely no matter how hard they try."

"More like the livisk got into one of their numerous arguments about who should be in charge of the planet bound Livisk Ascendancy at that time, and all of the entertainment was wiped from the face of the planet in a nuclear exchange."

"Fucking of course it was," I said, throwing my hands up and rolling my eyes.

Which had Varis tightening her grip on my arm because of how I threw my hands up. I went a little wobbly for a moment. I looked over at her and then patted her hand.

"I'm going to be fine, I promise," I said.

"I don't believe you," she said, and the emotion coming through the link made it absolutely certain she didn't believe me. "Maybe you should sit down for a little bit."

I heaved a sigh.

"Yeah, you're probably right," I said. "I should have a little sit down."

"While we're waiting on the fighting to finish, we could always go through the exercise I created for you, William."

"What exercise is that?" Varis asked.

"Hold on a minute," Rachel said, coming up to sit down next to us. "Why are we just sitting here?"

I stared down into the chasm below. Everything was dark, and I wondered how far down it went. The old saying about staring into the abyss and the abyss staring back at you came to mind.

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"There's fighting going on up ahead and behind us. Why aren't we joining in and trying to help them free us?"

I looked up and down to make sure there weren't any livisk potentially listening in on any conversation we were about to have. There were a few who were obviously pulling guard duty, but it was equally obvious they weren't enthusiastic about pulling that guard duty.

No, they occasionally glanced in our direction, but it was the kind of glance that said they didn't like the idea of being left here to watch over a battle pair. Especially when we'd made it clear we could kill any one of them in an instant. Even if we were being held back from that death and destruction right now because I didn't think we'd be able to save everybody if we got into it with these assholes.

They were far enough away that I didn't think they'd be able to overhear our conversation though, and that's all I was really looking for.

"Well, for one thing I figure there's no point in us worrying about getting involved in the fight," I said with a shrug. "It's happening down front and up behind us. If it turns out that Olsen or whoever the hell is attacking starts winning, then sure, we can join in."

"Won't it provide a distraction if we attack from where we are in the middle?" Rachel asked.

"Yeah, but look at the tactical situation," I said. "We're on the edge of a massive chasm, and we're moving down deeper into the Undercity. We were already overmatched when we were in that building they streamed up and out of. I don't want to think about what would happen if we got into a fight here and people could easily get pushed off the edge and go for a long fall with a quick stop at the end."

Rachel leaned over the edge and didn't even so much as let out a shiver.

"Yeah, I can see where that would be a pain in the ass," she finally said with a shrug. As though the thought of a long drop with a quick stop didn't bother her in the least.

"I'm also not exactly up to fighting right now," I said. "Something about that implant is fucking with my brain, so I don't want to risk getting into a fight where a stumble in the wrong direction will..."

"...lead you to a long drop with a quick stop," Rachel said, finishing the thought for me.

"Exactly," I said, grinning at her. "But there's an even more important reason why I want to let them lead us to wherever they're going to lead us."

"And what's that?" Rachel asked.

"I want to meet this Spider person. I'm intrigued by the idea of a criminal underground that lives in the Undercity."

"Why would that intrigue you?" she asked.

"Because anybody who's defying the empress and not living in the way that livisk society dictates is somebody who intrigues me. That might be somebody we can use in our fight against the empress."

"That might be somebody who kills you."

"She probably won't kill us," Varis said with a shrug. "Right now, it's more a question of how many of your crew she'll be able to kill before we kill her."

"That's a cold way of looking at it," Rachel said, her eyes narrowing as she stared at Varis.

"No need to get upset with Varis over that," I said, glancing down to where there were still glowing plasma blasts illuminating things down below. The stuff from up top didn't seem to be hitting with quite as much frequency. Maybe whatever had happened up there was winding down.

I hoped our guys won, but not by too much. They needed to whittle away some of the Spider's forces while at the same time allowing us to be pulled into the Spider's lair, and then I was going to blowtorch the web she thought she was pulling us into.

At least that was the idea. Admittedly, I wasn't doing so great when it came to my plans working out lately.

"I've been doing the same math," I said. "And it isn't pretty, but sometimes you have to do math like that when you're in the middle of a war."

"Yeah, I know," Rachel said with a sigh

She swung her legs back and forth like we weren't looking down a massive chasm that moved down into an even lower level of the city.

"About your problem with the implant, William," Arvie said. "While we're waiting, I might be able to walk you through some of that. Maybe try and take care of some of the trouble you're having so that you'll be in fighting shape when you do meet the Spider."

I arched an eyebrow as I looked up at him. "Oh yeah?"

"No guarantees, but I think I've come up with a solution that might assist you for the moment."

I sighed, and then laid back and started shuffling away from the edge.

"I guess we might as well do this," I said, feeling ridiculous as I shuffled along on my back, but there wasn't a chance in hell I was going to stand up and risk tumbling over the edge.

I might not have my old fear of heights, but I was still practical about that shit.

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