“Ellici and Tilliana are only two thirds of a team,” Xante said.

“Great Saints, rest this! It’s been years.”

“And she’s not coming back. I get it. But we need someone to replace her. Yirella wouldn’t have let us get caught with our asses hanging out like this. Fucking Saints, I thought I was going to die back there!”

“It’s a sim.”

“Yeah, like you were all relaxed and calm. We were a fucking shambles in there, all of us.”

“Overcommitted,” Dellian muttered. “They warned us about that. The sims are so fucking real, you cooperate in suspending belief.”

“Well, you’d better ask them for training to get over that, or therapy—or something.” He shook his head. “I’m actually nervous about going back in there tomorrow. And that’s ridiculous.”

“I know.”

—

After a shower and a change of clothes, Dellian took a portal over to Kabronski Station, orbiting 80,000 kilometers above Juloss. The heart of the old skyfort formation was a rectangular grid, twenty kilometers long, with weapon systems arranged in neat rows on the outer side, all powered up and vigilant for the enemy’s arrival. In the middle of the side that faced Juloss, a gravity anchor pylon extended for fifty kilometers down toward the planet, keeping the whole structure aligned. The pylon ended at a small metal asteroid, where a two-kilometer toroid housed the military crew and construction managers for the battleships being fitted out in the attendant cluster of industrial stations that floated in the grid’s shadow. There were also some other, more specialist, teams resident in the toroid.

Yirella was waiting for him in the garden section, a chunk of toroid three hundred meters long, with a geodesic roof of thick transparent hexagons. The vegetation was tropical and after two hundred years getting quite overgrown despite the best efforts of the horticultural remotes to trim and prune.

As always, she bent down and greeted him with a platonic kiss. After that unthinking greeting, she stopped and studied his face. “What happened?”

“Saints! That obvious?”

Her smile grew taunting. “Ah, the asteroid base with biowall tunnels.”

“You know about it?”

“The sim team has been preparing that for weeks. They’ve been giggling like nine-year-olds telling fart jokes over how you’d all react.”

“It wasn’t funny, Yi.”

“I know.” She put her arm through his and walked with him down a path. “That contraction thing freaked me out.”

“You’ve been in it?” he asked in astonishment, not knowing if he should be angry or impressed with her.

“Yeah. They needed volunteers for the test runs. I made a few suggestions to improve the effect. The threat of the suit seals failing and drowning you under pressure, that was me.” She sounded proud.

“You helped make it worse?”

Now her grin was mischievous. “I know you boys best. The sim crew values my input.”

“Bloody hell!”

“The enemy isn’t going to go easy on us.”

“I know, but…you!” He shook his head in mock bewilderment. “Such betrayal.”