“Perfect,” Freddik said, the upper portion of his face in shadow as he smiled, his eyes narrowed like ice-blue daggers at the two laughing young people a few stories below.
#
“Did you really?” Medea said, her eyes wide as she smiled again. It was getting a little tedious chatting up this boy, but at least he was handsome. Even better, out of the corner of her eye she could easily see Jada, standing about thirty feet behind Eccles’ back, staring at the both of them. Stage one of primary objective accomplished, she thought, using the phraseology she’d heard her military-careered father and his friends use often when they beat one another at cards or other games. I’ve made that little redheaded sandflea jealous of me.
#
That little...that little, black haired witch! Jada thought. She turned away and kept walking. She’d accepted Eccles’ little gravball lesson politely, but after a few minutes she decided he wasn’t her type.
Until she heard Medea laugh.
There are a number of aspects of the human psyche that centuries of anthropological, biological and neurological studies have never quite been able to understand completely. One of them is how even something completely un-interesting to a person can suddenly seem very, very interesting indeed, if the right person is also interested in it.
Thus, young men may hate art, literature, music or a recreational activity one day, but love it the next to the point of defending it passionately to the death, if the right pretty girl is interested in it.
And a girl may utterly loathe the attentions of a young man whom she considers beneath her, until she sees someone else interested in him.
Jada turned. Seeing Medea suddenly chatting up and giggling with Eccles made her...
Angry.
Very, very angry.
Who did Medea think she was?
Worst of all, in mid giggle at some stupid joke Dav made, Medea caught Jada’s eye for just a second and...she had the nerve to look away! Not even the dirty looks, rolled eyes or other facial gestures she’d been giving Jada ever since that accident on the track!
The witch!
Jada turned and walked away. Suddenly, Dav Eccles looked like a much better prospect that he had a minute ago. The pampered councilman’s son now had become in Jada’s mind someone else. Now, she saw him as a good, kind fellow who’d flirted with her by showing her how to play gravball. And he’d done that rather than belching, whooping, shooting desert rats or other crude displays of machismo like boys did on Tatooine.
She’d lost him. And she’d lost him to Medea! Of all people!
#
The next period came and went. Slak was late for sim practice, but the doctor had already sent a message, and he avoided punishment.
In place of his right eye, a cybernetic plate, shaped to the contours of his face, covered his eye socket. A slit in the metal glowed a gentle red in the place where his eyeball would have been. A number of his flightmates tried to look more closely at him, but the instructor began speaking again. No one wanted to be caught unawares and get pushups for the whole flight.
“Ladies and gentlemen of Four Flight,” the instructor began, a compact looking fellow named Captain Doff, “today we enter a new phase in your training. We can field quite a few pilots, but a T.I.E. fighter is a piece of equipment we’d prefer not to lose, if possible.
“You have been learning how to fly these ships on the sims, and you’ve been learning how to act cohesively as a team. Now, you are going to learn to compete. With the other flights.”
A groan went up from thirty voices inside thirty slick, curved booths with holograms floating in front of their faces. Everybody had already figured out that the best cadets went to One Flight and stayed there.
“Hut...tut! Tut! Tut!” said the instructor, waving his pointer in the air. “I’ve been doing this a while, now. I’ve seen Four Flight beat One Flight before, so before anyone gives up, let me assure you, it can be done.
“Now, as to how you...who’s already flying?”
No one answered. Slak was in the seat, his goggles on, seeing only the virtual path of space and asteroids as the simulator projected its pretend environment through to Slak’s goggles.
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“Alright, Cadet...oh, that’s Cadet Daggart!”
“Yes, sir! Can I fly now...whoah! Can I fly now, sir?” Slak said, as he moved his body. The sim was that good- he seriously thought he was seeing an asteroid!
“Stop your sim, Daggart,” the instructor said, barely suppressing a smile, “before I get Lieutenant Solo in here to give you another personalized workout.”
Slak whipped the goggles off his face and sat at attention. Jada giggled, and when Slak turned to look at her she winked at him.
This day’s getting better and better, Slak thought with a smile. He didn’t even notice Dav Eccles glowering at him from the seat behind and to Slak’s left.
The instructor did smile, though, as he saw the whole episode play out silently for him at his podium. “All right, people, listen up. To you, the sim may be just a game. But here’s the truth: next to the tech you’ll find in the actual, real T.I.E. fighters, these sims hold the best technology you will ever find anywhere in any Imperial academy. Who can tell me why they make it this way?”
The chubby fellow, Porkins, put his hand up. “Because they want us to know what it’s really like out there, sir?”
“Exactly. This sim can tell you, though, only so much. It cannot tell you, for example, what claustrophobia feels like when you cannot just step out of the booth and stretch your legs. It can’t tell you the fear when your instruments record a leak and loss of cabin pressure, as you fumble with a mini repair kit trying to find and fix the hole before your head explodes. It can’t tell you what it’s like when your best friend suddenly stops talking to you over the commlink in the middle of a pitched battle, and the blip with his name on it disappears off the radar screen.
“Still, despite that, your time spent in these chairs is vital. Time and again, we’ve logged a near direct correlation between the number of hours in these chairs and the longevity of the pilots in the air. Or, as one of the boys from Three Flight put it a few years ago: hours in the chair, alive in the air. Catchy, isn’t it? That came from Cadet Mosron, just two weeks before he died in a rebel ambush. Too bad he didn’t take his own advice.”
Just about everyone gulped a bit. Everyone except Norrin Mek.
Norrin looked around the interior of the sim booth and was moved nearly to tears. Since the first day of boot camp, he’d felt inadequate and foolish. Men screaming at him, the occasional woman in authority insulting him, while the peers in his squad being worse even than his so-called superiors. Barely able to pass the physical training requirements, he was saved time and again by the aspects of the job that required hand-eye coordination. At boot camp, he seemed to be the only one in his squad who could hold up one of the surprisingly heavy blasters and actually hit a target, or at least come close to it. Even so, his inability to throw a ball, land a punch or run fast enough to keep up made him the object of ridicule again and again before coming to the Adeptus. It had been better (somewhat) here at pilot school, but still, were it not for Bondo’s patience and assistance, he could have been in the same cruiser he’d always been stuck in- the one marked ‘losers sit here.’
Now, he felt, now was his time to shine. When so many of his peers had been playing sports during his formative years, Norrin had been in the safe enclosure of his room, fenced in by the secure confines of tablet books and hologames.
Many, many hologames, in fact. Now, the training would be all hologames! The one area he knew he’d be able to dominate not only the rest of Four Flight, but the other three flights in the squadron besides!
The interior of the sim booth was modeled to be as like the insides of an actual T.I.E. Fighter as possible. The screen glowed, then took on the green, wire-framed image of the interior of the docking bay they’d seen earlier when they’d been given their first tour of the star destroyer Adeptus.
“Alright, people, we told you how to ease your fighters out of the docking ba-“
A loud siren went off right above Norrin’s head. The red words ‘PILOT ERROR’ began flashing on his screen, along with red lights flashing on top of his booth.
Very quickly, half and then all the sim booths started flashing the same way.
Norrin got angry. It shouldn’t go this way! There should at least be some kind of tutorial procedure, some kind of simplified version of the start of the mission to ease you into...
“RIGHT!” yelled the instruction, clearly annoyed, “Everybody stay in your seats. If this were the real thing, you’d have done what not even the Jedi could accomplish: Wipe out an entire flight of T.I.E. fighters in under ten seconds! You’d all be dead before your ships were even released from the flight grips! Now, stay in your seats while the whole thing resets. You don’t go to lunch, class, free time, anything, until every single one of you gets your sim ship out of the docking bay, safely! Understand?”
“YES, SIR!” shouted all thirty cadets, their voices muffled by the closed doors in their sim booths.
The entire flight failed again in the first ten seconds of the exercise.
And again, though this time it took fifteen seconds for everyone to fail.
“Sir?” said Gaab after the twenty-fifth failure, “could you tell us the procedure again to get out of the...”
“Negative, cadet Gaab! I told you all in the first five minutes after you got in here, but just about all of you would rather make your goo-goo-eyes at Cadet Sanddancer. I’m slated to be here until lights out, so it’s all on you. Next time, listen when I talk to you! Do it again, people! Let’s go!”
Lunch came and went.
They missed their class with Captain Ozzel. No one complained.
Two hours after they’d started, they’d gotten far enough to where cadets Gaab and Porkins had managed to get out of the docking bay without hitting anything else.
It was at the start of the third hour that Bondo lost his composure.
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TO BE CONTINUED....