Two days after the war game, my fireteam was watching a basketball game in the evening, our battalion against a British Army team, us enjoying hot dogs and popcorn, when an Army lieutenant still wearing a flight suit sat down next to us in the bleachers. "Hey, you're a pilot, sir?" I asked, stupidly.

"Uh huh," he said over a bite of hot dog, "used to fly an Apache, now I fly a Chicken."

"How'd you do in the war game?" I asked eagerly. I'd heard a lot from ground pounders, but nothing from our Airedales so far. In my enthusiasm, I didn't consider the guy might have just finished a long flight, and wanted to relax and watch a ball game instead of telling me the same story he'd already told a hundred times. There wasn't need to worry, because a pilot never got tired of talking about flying.

"Did all right," he said while watching the game, "shot down a Dodo and a Vulture."

"Damn, sir, you Da Man!" I offered him a high five, and I was thrilled when he slapped my hand.

"Thanks, soldier. Course, I got popped by a missile from a Ruhar cruiser two minutes later. Felt good anyway, I lived longer than I expected."

"You shot down a Vulture?" Ski asked. "That's a gunship?"

"Yeah, it is. The Dodo had landed troops, a formation of six Dodos with Vulture escorts, they were headed back to orbit when we attacked from two directions, came in fast and low, right on the deck. It was a massive dogfight, a real furball, we got all the Dodos, simulated, of course, and we lost half our aircraft. That last Vulture, I had to chase the stinking thing up above seventy thousand feet, that's the max altitude for a Chicken, we're not rated to operate out of the atmosphere, I was on internal reaction mass and was barely able to control the ship with the secondary thrusters. The Vulture was way above me, it was pushing two gees and climbing away, while I was about to lose control and go into a flat spin. I ripple fired my last four missiles and my gunner hit the Vulture with the particle beam, the beam is defensive only, but it tied up the Vulture's defenses enough for one missile to get through." He turned back to watch the game. "Their active stealth doesn't work as well out of an atmosphere, they didn't tell us that, I figured it out." He took another handful of popcorn out of the paper bag and ate it slowly, thoughtfully. "You know, the sky up at that altitude isn't bright blue, it's almost black, and you can see the planet stretched out below you is round. That Ruhar cruiser that got me? I could see it. Not as a ghost on the headup display for the war game, this was a real ship, right there, hanging in the sky, it was spooky.  The image on my HUD showed a Ruhar ship superimposed over the real Kristang ship for the game, when I clicked the HUD off, I could see the real ship. A real star ship, hanging in low orbit above me. It was awesome, for a moment, until it hit my starboard nacelle with the edge of a laser, I flew right through it. Put me into a spin, I was busy trying to hold the ship together when their missile crawled up my ass. Simulated, it felt real enough. I wouldn't have been able to recover, either, the autopilot took over and guided me down to angels thirty, that's, uh, thirty thousand feet."