Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [33]
So far, so good …
He took another sip of his ale. The game was simple: You pointed your elbow like a gun sight and aimed in front of you, forearm held at a ninety-degree angle and parallel to the floor. With your open palm next to your ear and facing the ceiling, you snapped your hand down and tried to catch the coins balanced on your elbow before they fell. Anybody could do one. Most could do three or even four. Once you got past ten it was harder. Vil’s personal best was eighteen, so a dozen wasn’t that hard. It was a hand–eye coordination test, and if you were a pilot, you’d better have that in a goodly amount. The trick was to snap your cupped hand down fast enough so that you got to the coins while they were still stacked together. After a few centimeters’ free fall in normal gravity, they started to break from the stack, and once that happened you couldn’t pull it off. The movement had to be fast, but it also had to be smooth. The slightest off-angle jerk would torque the stack enough to separate the coins. You could manage most of them if that happened, but you’d miss some, guaranteed.
It wasn’t as though the honor of the squad or anything was riding on him, but Vil did have a reputation to keep up. His times on the pilot reaction drills were always in the top two or three, and that’s what this was, essentially. A test of reflexes. There were other species, like the Falleen, for example, who could catch twenty or more with no problem whatsoever. But few humans could manage even ten, other than acrobats, martial arts masters … and pilots.
“C’mon, Dance. You’re slower than a ronto in eight g’s.” That was Benjo.
“Yeah, while we’re young,” Raal added. “Well, some of us, anyway …”
Vil grinned, snapped his hand down, and grabbed the dozen tenths, no problem. “Easy money,” he said.
There was a moment of surprised silence among the squad, then:
“Five says he can’t do fourteen.”
“I’ll take that bet.”
“Ten says he can.”
“Odds?”
“Odds? What, do I look like a Toydarian bookie? Even!”
While the pilots argued, Vil collected two more coins from a stack on the table. Fourteen, eh? Still four less than his top number, though he didn’t see any real point in mentioning that right—
The scramble horn blared, a series of short, insistent hoots. The pilots dropped the chatter, along with whatever else they were holding except for their credits, which they stuffed into pockets as they ran toward the exit. Vil set his mug down on the table and followed. There had been only one swallow of ale left; it would haven taken all of two seconds to finish it, but when the horn howled, you stopped whatever you were doing right that instant and hauled butt for your station. First, it was the right thing to do; everybody knew that. Second, you never knew when an Imperial holocam might be watching you, and if you got caught dragging your feet during a call to station, instead of being a crack TIE pilot, you might find yourself transferred to a few months of “droid duty” scrubbing out garbage bins and latrine holding tanks.
And third, Vil liked flying even more than he liked drinking.
“Gotta be a drill,” somebody said. “Not likely another prison break after that last batch we cooked.”
Vil didn’t speak to that. Somewhat to his surprise, he’d had a couple of uncomfortable nights after that experience. Yes, they had been criminal scum, and it was his job to stop said scum, and they had been shooting at him, but even so it hadn’t been a real contest. The Lambda hadn’t had a chance. He’d blown that ship out of vac and watched the remnants of the crew whirl through the coldness, freezing in clouds of their own bodily fluids. One tended to think about it as shooting blips, like in the holo sims, not people, but seeing the carnage that had resulted from his weapons had … Well, let’s be honest here, Vil told himself, since it’s all just between me. The truth was … he’d had a few dreams.
No, not