► Commander Stephen “Stephanos” Michaels scratched a phantom itch along the back of his neck, entirely displeased by the lack of hair he felt in the process. With the official disbanding of the Archangel squadron and the subsequent commissioning of the Odysseus into official Earth service, he’d lost the tenuous separation from the regular military that had allowed him to maintain a decidedly nonregulation haircut.

Archangel pilots were expected to be a little eccentric. Chief helm officers of the Confederation’s flagship were most certainly not permitted the same indulgence. He was just happy that he wasn’t a Marine; a buzz cut would probably have killed him.

The missing hair wasn’t the source of the itch, however. Rather, he was missing the connection with the ship that his NICS allowed. All the helm officers on the Heroics had to be NICS qualified, at least for the Earth Alliance ships. He didn’t think that the Priminae did the same, but then he hadn’t been on their Heroics yet.

A NICS, or neural interface connection system, qualification allowed for a link between a human and a machine that went beyond most human interface systems. In his Archangel, the interface had allowed for maneuvering precision beyond belief, and on the Heroic Class Odysseus it did much the same.

The new system made use of Priminae computer systems, however, which were impossibly powerful.

Too bad they can’t code for crap. Steph snorted softly as he walked the corridors.

The Priminae were, in so many ways, a truly bizarre people. They had access to technology that made Earth’s tech base look decidedly quaint, yet seemed to have very little understanding of the potential within their systems. Once human coders got ahold of Priminae computers, well, the systems really started to purr.

Of course, they had to learn Priminae code first, which meant that even now there were odd bugs in the ship’s core. But most of those were getting hammered out.

The end results, though, were breathtaking. Especially for a NICS pilot like himself. The Odysseus computer had the bandwidth to actually overwhelm the human nervous system, something his fighter computer couldn’t have done in a thousand years. That meant that when he plugged into the Odysseus, Steph practically became the ship. The experience was heady, almost addictive.

That worried him sometimes, but he figured that as long as he was concerned about it, then he was probably in a decent mental space.

Steph hung a left, passing through the giant open blast doors that separated the Odysseus’ large open gym from the rest of the ship, and paused to see who was in residence at the moment. He recognized a few of the faces instantly but had to think about many more.