How I Helped My Smokin' Hot Alien Girlfriend Conquer the Empire 3-54: A Sense of the Sublime in a Murderous Child's Smile
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I tapped the control panel to my left side. I was in the traditional pilot seat for a human craft, which meant I was in the traditional co-pilot seat in livisk configuration.
For some reason when they figured out the whole heavier-than-air flight thing they decided they were going to have the pilot on the right side and the co-pilot on the left.
I'm sure there was somebody back on Earth who did that configuration once upon a time, but it hadn't really caught on since the US hegemony back when heavier-than-air flight was invented carried over to a lot of how things were done.
It seemed like the Soviets might’ve had some bomber or another that was a rip-off of a Western design back in the day where they decided to put things on the wrong side just to be contrarian and show that capitalist pigs will eventually pay for their crimes. And the thing probably spent more time in the hangar getting repaired than it did actually flying, but it would’ve worked well enough to impress Dear Leader.
All those thoughts ran through my head in an instant. My thoughts ran away from me when I was worried about something.
It was a good thing the little control panel to my left was currently shut off. I could turn it back on with a thought. I could fly the whole craft just by using my mind, but I was still getting used to that idea. I liked using the old-fashioned controls, and I was doing that thing again where my mind was wandering.
"Is something wrong, William?" Arvie asked, sounding genuinely concerned.
I turned to him in the simulation. He hadn't said that out loud. He knew enough not to do that, at least.
"Why would anything be wrong?" I asked, arching an eyebrow.
"I'm detecting elevated levels of stress hormones in your body, and your breathing has picked up.”
"Yeah, I'm just a little worried about going for a flight through a nasty weather pattern on a gas giant with a child flying the ship. And she's only ever done in-atmosphere stuff in a simulation."
"That's not entirely true," Arvie said.
"It isn't?" I asked.
"She was just flying fighters in the atmosphere a few weeks ago over Imperial Seat when we were fighting the empress.”
"Oh yeah, I guess she was," I said, brightening up at that thought. Though my brightened mood quickly disappeared. "As I recall, she destroyed most of those ships that she was flying."
"Well, yes. There is that," Arvie said. "But still. She does have some experience flying in atmosphere."
"Yeah, I guess that makes me feel a little better even as it doesn't make me feel better at all," I muttered.
I kept an eye on our flight path in the simulation as I brought things back up to real-time in the cockpit. I had my hand ready to take control in an instant.
I'd gone flying through Jupiter's atmosphere, of course. It was one of the things you had to do when you were learning to fly at the Academy. We had the big motherfucker right there after all, so why not take a flight through the Great Red Spot?
"There is one thing you can take comfort from," Arvie said.
"What's that?" I asked, turning back to him in the simulation.
“There's no ground for her to fly into, or at least by the time you reach something solid enough in the gas giant's core that it could be considered ground, the ship would have long since been crushed. Plus your nerve endings wouldn't have time to actually feel anything that happened because of how quickly that crushing happened.”
"If you're trying to comfort me, you’re not doing a good job of it.”
"I'm simply pointing out that there is a little more wiggle room with atmospheric flight doing something like this in a gas giant than there would be if you were on a terrestrial planet where there was ground to crash into."
"Wonderful," I muttered.
"You can also take comfort from knowing there aren't any Imperials who are going to be trying to shoot her down. That seemed to be the main problem she had the last time she tried something like this.”
"Yeah, I suppose there is something to that," I said. “That actually does make me feel a little better.”
"I'm glad I could make you feel a little better, William," Arvie said.
"Just a little better," I said, turning and hitting him with a grin.
"Always glad to help," he said.
I turned my attention back to everything that was going on around us. I dialed down the inertial dampeners just a little bit with a thought. The ship started to gently rock all around us.
"What is that?" Sera asked, her eyes going wide.
"You're flying into a gas giant's atmosphere," I said, turning to grin at her. "I figured you should enjoy the feeling of flying into a a gas giant's atmosphere and then hitting a storm system bigger than your homeward.”
"Why would I want to feel that?" she asked. "That's why we have the inertial dampeners."
"Trust me on this one," I said. "It's the human style of flying. You want to be able to feel a little bit of what's going on outside the ship.”
"Feel a little bit of what's going on outside the ship.”
"Just a little," I said. "If you could feel everything that was going on, you'd probably lose everything you ate today.”
"That doesn't sound like fun."
"Actually, it can be a really fun time depending on what you’re flying and how strong your stomach is, but I agree it's not a good idea right now.
"Thank you for the instruction, William," she said. “And for keeping it at a level that won’t have me losing my breakfast.”
“Don’t mention it, kid,” I said.
We continued to move as the ship rocked around us, which earned me a grunt of disapproval from Varis where she sat behind me. I also heard something that sounded like Bronhel maybe getting a little green around the gills.
I grinned. Maybe she was a good pilot, but she was clearly a pilot who was trained in the livisk style of things. Which meant she was used to relying on instruments and her mark one eyeball to tell her what was going on.
Though I suppose it was a little unfair of me to pull something like this on them. I could feel everything that was going on by virtue of my connection through the computer chip in my head after all, but oh well.
That connection meant I had a front row view of everything around us. All the sensors that were pulling in information all around the ship were pumping that information into my head directly.
"It's amazing," I said in the simulation as we finally came out of the buffeting from going through the top layer of the atmosphere and then the storm.
The rocking evened out a bit as we finally got into the atmosphere. I could see licks of flame moving around the shields. It brought to mind what it must’ve been like for ancient astronauts a millennia ago who went up into space with nothing other than a controlled explosion put together by the lowest bidder based on technology created by a bunch of crazed German assholes, then throwing themselves back towards the planet and trusting that their heat shield would keep them safe.
It didn't always keep them safe.
What I'm trying to get at is the sensors all around me gave me an unimpeded view of everything that was going on, and the view was tremendous, to paraphrase another ancient astronaut who blazed the trail for everybody else and was part of the reason why I was here today on another planet so far from home flying the kind of ship those ancient astronauts could’ve only imagined in their wildest dreams.
Or maybe not in their wildest dreams. Some of those early guys had been a bunch of crazy motherfuckers who did a bunch of crazy shit. Sort of like the crazy shit I did on the regular that had Arvie wondering about my sanity on the regular.
"Is something wrong, William?" Arvie asked, and he sounded concerned. "You're registering high levels of several different stress hormones again, but it seems to be registering in a different way."
"Everything about this is amazing, Arvie," I said, looking at the three hundred sixty degree view the monitors and cameras and sensors on the ship afforded me, and we're talking I wasn't just seeing everything in the visual spectrum.
No, I was seeing everything in a way that...
Well, I couldn't exactly say I was seeing things in a way no man had ever seen before. There were plenty of people who’d plugged themselves into computer systems over the years to get an edge, or just because they were into the whole transhumanism thing and thought people being uploaded into a computer was the eventual path of society. For all that we hadn't actually run into any post-singularity societies that were big on uploading their consciousness into computers.
The Borg were pretty scary motherfuckers in Star Trek, but it turns out things like the insect parasites that were abandoned way back in the first season of TNG because it was too expensive to do the prosthetics and stop-motion animation with the primitive special effects on a TV budget they had back then were a lot more likely in a universe where biological distinctiveness was a lot more likely to evolve into nasty parasites than technological distinctiveness.
"I'm afraid I don't understand, William," Arvie said, frowning.
We burst through the storm into open air, and it was even more amazing. I could see a couple of windbags floating off in the distance. Turns out life was everywhere. Even floating around in the upper atmosphere of gas giants.
"What you're sensing in my stress hormones is a biological creature experiencing the sublime," I said.
"The sublime?" Arvie said.
"The overwhelming sense that there’s something out in nature that is so much greater than anything you are that we seem like mere insects in comparison."
"I see," Arvie said, frowning as he looked at the sensor readouts.
"What do you sense, Arvie?"
"I sense the wind speed around us and the pressure differentials going down into the depths of the gas giant. I have a worry that the pressure differential will be enough to crush the ship if Sera is unfortunate with her piloting. All of that is running through my head in a matter of milliseconds, but I'm not experiencing this sense of the sublime you talk about."
"That's a damn shame, Arvie," I said. "We're really going to have to figure out how to get you to experience a sense of wonder at some point."
"A sense of wonder?" he asked.
"Yeah, it goes along with that sense of the sublime I was talking about," I said. "Knowing there’s something out there that’s greater than you."
"But I am a Combat Intelligence developed by the livisk," he said. "There is nothing greater than me."
"That's an interesting question,” I said.
"What's an interesting question?” he asked.
"Whether you're unable to experience the sense of wonder I'm getting right about now because you're incapable of experiencing a sense of the sublime since it was never programmed into you, or if you're not experiencing that sense of the sublime because your ego is so large that you're incapable of being impressed by anything greater than you since you don’t think there’s anything greater than you.”
"Why do I get the feeling you just insulted me, William?" he said with a sniff.
"I can assure you the insult wasn't intended," I said.
"Why do I get the feeling you're lying to me, William?"
I turned my attention back to the business in front of us. Specifically the escape pod. I could see a trajectory that showed exactly where it was going. It was a visual representation of something I already knew based on instinct from all the time I'd spent piloting.
Usually that time spent piloting a fighter craft was doing this kind of calculation in the name of sneaking up on some livisk asshole’s six so I could ram a missile up their ass, or maybe hit them with a good old-fashioned mass driver if the situation had gotten really out of control and things had moved in too close. Though the saying was if you were close enough to use the mass drivers and rail guns on your fighter craft then the shit had well and truly hit the fan, and you'd almost better hope the livisk got you so you wouldn’t going to have to explain yourself to your CO when you got back.
That was only ever half a joke. They wanted people to come back alive with their multi-million credit fighter craft, but there was also going to be a good old fashioned ass chewing.
"We're going to have to do this almost perfectly," I said, turning to Sera.
She glanced over to me. "Do you want to take the controls?"
I blinked. "What?"
"Do you want to take the controls?" she asked. "If we have to get this right, and we only have one chance, then you should be the one taking the controls, right? You're the one who has the most experience."
I grinned at her.
"What?" she asked.
"I have every confidence that you're going to pull this off, kid," I said. "So get in there and do it, because you only get one chance."
The grin she hit me with could light up a room.
"You know you're possibly giving up an opportunity to capture one of these creatures and interrogate them," Arvie said.
"Yeah, but it's worth it to see the kid smile like that," I said. "Besides, if this dumbass alien asshole gets themselves killed, then I figure that's their own damn fault for launching themselves at a gas giant in a faulty escape pod. Not ours."
"A fair assessment," Arvie said. "I do have to admit that, on balance, seeing the child smile is well worth the life of one alien who was so recently fighting us."
I turned and grinned at him in the simulation.
"What?"
"Arvie, my boy," I said. "I think you just discovered a little slice of the sublime."
Posted Sep 9, 2026, 10:32 PM UTC