Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force, #5)

by Craig Alanson

But sometimes I wanted to see the ship, see the old-fashioned way with photons bouncing off the hull and being picked up by my eyes. Because portholes were a weak point in the ship’s structure, there weren’t many of them on the Flying Dutchman. One place that had portholes was the rear of the forward hull; the portholes there were intended for emergency use when ships were attaching to the hardpoint docking platforms. Even the proudly and stubbornly cyborg Thuranin, who liked to control the entire ship through cybernetic brain implants rather than physically touching buttons, levers and switches, understood the need for a backup control system that could not be hacked or interrupted. When starships were attaching to or detaching from a star carrier’s hardpoint docking platforms, some unlucky Thuranin was required to unplug from the ship’s network, and use his or her eyeballs to assure some idiot navigator didn’t crash into another ship or worse, the star carrier itself.