“Space combat sounds complicated.” I thought back to when I’d listened to the Chicken pilot talk about air combat after our first war game, on Camp Alpha.

“Uh huh. Then there’s the Skippy factor.”

Part of me wanted to avoid taking the bait. “The Skippy factor?”

“You know, my incredible awesomeness.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Not convinced? Specifically, I am referring to my ability to remotely take control of Kristang systems, using the Thuranin nanovirus embedded in their systems. To do that, I need to be within about a lightsecond of the enemy ship.”

“A lightsecond? That’s, uh-” Light travels, uh, hmm, I was trying to picture myself in a classroom-

“Let me put you out of your misery before you sprain your brain, monkey boy. A light second is roughly the distance from the Earth to your moon.”

“Oh.” I thought a moment. “I thought ships shouldn’t jump in that close to a planet?”

“Most ships can’t, the gravity well of a planet distorts the jump field at entry to make jump navigation unpredictable, and the field distortion can damage jump engines, even tear a ship apart. A ship with me controlling the jump engines compensates for the field distortion. Thus, the Skippy factor.”

“Impressive.” I had to admit.

“What? No snarky joke?”

“No, you may be an arrogant asshole, but your awesomeness is legit.”

“It ain’t bragging if it’s true.”

“Yeah, I heard that. Hey, is that why you jumped us in so close to that gas giant planet?”

There was an ever so short hesitation. “That may have been too close. I hadn’t finished tuning up this ship’s crappy jump engines. Won’t happen again. Hey, uh, good talk. You need to get some shut-eye, we can talk more later, huh?”

I laid back down on the bed, trying to conceal a smile. The monkey had made the AI uncomfortable. I needed to remember that.

The transition through the final wormhole was uneventful, any fears I had about us running into an outbound Thuranin ship were for nothing. Skippy couldn't detect any ships in the area. With the wormhole safely behind us, Skippy disrupted the wormhole's connection to the network, and it blinked out. Helpfully, Skippy had loaded a new app on my zPhone, on the home screen of all our zPhones, it was simple clock. A clock counting down until the wormhole reset. We all got the message, loud and clear.