He looked over the shoulders of his officers and could see most of their screens, which plastered the inside of the half-sphere with glowing displays. Despite all efforts to the contrary, the crew had taken to calling the CCC “the bridge” as if they were on an old-fashioned oceangoing ship conning by eyeball – or perhaps the set of a TV space show. The ship’s Master Helmsman, an experienced astronaut with implanted cyberware, sat in the center of the bridge in a pit in the floor, surrounded by a permeable sphere of displays. Sweat showed between the electrical contacts set into his shaven skull. Absen knew that this specially trained and augmented pilot and his five compatriots were the only people really able to fly the ten-million-ton monster he commanded, and so he matched the man sweat for sweat. Once in space, others could maneuver Orion clumsily from the standard helm board if they had to. Several of the bridge crew cross-trained in its use, a more complex version of submarine controls, with massive computer augmentation.
