The military worked with NASA to dispatch the armaments necessary for the battle—launching mobile cannons, satellites, and support drones to the site months in advance of a planned engagement. All the plans for strikes in the outer solar system in the next six months to a year were stored in the Vault on the Mezzanine floor of the Spire. The Combatants themselves, like the Middles flying along with them, woke up with the battle plans from the Vault downloaded in their processors the day they were due to attack. Though formal battle plans never survived contact with the enemy in traditional warfare, attacks in the Reaches were often so swift and destructive, the enemy had little chance to engage.

Soon, a handful of other Middles lucky enough to have their fly-alongs today trickled in. Wyatt was one of them. She looked sallow and grumpy, and didn’t return Tom’s excited greeting. Her scowl deepened when Heather sashayed over to collect Tom and lead him down the corridor.

Heather looped her arm through his. “Ready?”

“Ready,” Tom assured her.

“We’ll be using a limited thought interface for this fly-along. You’ll hear me, but you won’t hear the other CamCos.” They stopped outside the door to the Helix Command Center, a winding corridor connecting the ninth and tenth floors where the CamCos hooked into ships in space during battle. “If you have any questions, you can think them out and I may think back an answer to you. I’ll probably be too busy.”

“Got it,” Tom said.

Middles weren’t yet authorized for entrance into the Helix, but there were a series of cots that rolled right out of the wall on the ninth floor, outside the entrance, where they could interface for the purpose of the fly-alongs. The Middles were supposed to lie down on them while hooked into the system, sharing their CamCo’s sensory perceptions during the space battle.

Tom sprawled onto his cot, and Heather began typing authorization codes into her forearm keyboard so he could share her senses.

Tom’s stomach gave an excited flutter. “Good luck.”

She shook her head. “Luck’s not a part of it. If we lose a battle in the outer solar system, it’ll be because someone with logistics miscalculated half a year ago and didn’t plot the right course for the drones and weapons to reach the site of battle in time. Or because something’s gone wrong with the satellites and we can’t get real-time communication. Sometimes, it’s because NASA missed a pocket of dust, so the energy beams from the Promethean Arrays don’t reach us.”