He soared back out of his body, seizing control of one automated weapon after another. One was a particle cannon, sparking with its last moments of existence. He burned a single thruster to insert it into the path of the Russo-Chinese Combatant he knew as Blinder. As soon as Blinder exploded, Medusa destroyed Tom’s cannon.

Tom zoomed back up into space, returning to the battle. Next, he seized a fully functional Indo-American weapon, and located Sturmovik, an annoying Russian Combatant who always charged straight forward, never maneuvering, never taking evasive action, firing at targets as they neared and trusting the other Russo-Chinese Combatants to do the work of protecting him. Tom found the lack of imagination aggravating whenever he saw feeds of the battles.

Now he parodied Sturmovik’s strategy by seizing control of a mobile artillery unit and mimicked Sturmovik with it—flying the mobile gun straight at Sturmovik’s ship. Sturmovik didn’t turn; it didn’t turn. They were on a collision course. At the last minute, Sturmovik seemed to realize no one was saving him here, and he tried to feint, but Tom’s weapon tore straight into his hull.

Medusa blasted him to pieces again, and this time before Tom could dive back into the system and return to the battle, his neural wire popped out and his eyes shot open. He found Heather standing over his cot.

“Normally I’d have several more drones up there, ready for me to interface with,” Heather said, as Tom squinted against the brightness. “But, as you know, I’ve had some reputation issues lately, and Wyndham Harks only footed the bill for one drone this time. Now . . .” She smiled coyly. “Check your chronometer, Tom.”

“Why . . .” Tom sat up blearily, then he went still when he saw the time on his internal chronometer. He began flipping from frame to frame of his memory, cross-referencing them with the time stamps, and realized from the moment Heather’s ship reached the site of battle, to the moment of his final obliteration, a mere thirty seconds had passed.

Tom gaped at the time in shock.

No wonder. No wonder Combatants needed neural processors. There wasn’t a human being on Earth who could keep up with that sort of speed.

“Wow,” Tom murmured. “We’re superhuman. We’re actually superhuman.”

Heather winked. “Puts it into perspective, right?”

Chapter Eleven

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE MALFUNCTIONS HAD spread outside the simulation chambers. A few high-ranking generals came for a status update with General Marsh, and the trainees they passed reacted as if to some terrible stench—clutching their hands over their noses and running away. As more trainees reacted to the high-ranking generals the same way, Marsh signaled Blackburn, who isolated the exotic computer virus before it spread through the entire system. Nevertheless, the generals were disgruntled over it, and it became a black eye for General Marsh—and for Blackburn himself, especially when he couldn’t find the source of the virus.