He pushes himself. With a little work, he can see Earth, lit by the glow of billions of minds. But he needs to go much, much farther than that, to a pattern that looks like the ships glowing in the simulator, to... almost, almost, he's almost got it, just a little farther, if he could just reach...

A sparkle of golden light by the side of his neck, and then there's a housefly zipping into the lights of the simulator, dancing from ship to ship. Sue flips the perspective of his display, rotating through the formation twice, then slides out to an expanded view that shows all of them. He feels like he's there, all of a sudden, like he is literally, physically present among the fleet.

He finds commanders and taps his mind across theirs like a child dragging a stick along a fence.