Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [34]
These had been nightmares.
Thankfully, he’d forgotten the details almost immediately after waking up, save for one night. That had stayed with him. One of the flash-frozen corpses, drifting through the void about ten meters away from the cockpit of his fighter. Its head and body had been ravaged by shrapnel to such an extent that Vil couldn’t tell if it had been male or female. He’d watched, fascinated, as the lacerated body rotated slowly, bringing its face into view. He’d noticed that, by some miracle of chance, the eyes had been untouched by the sleetstorm of metal …
And then the eyes opened.
Vil suppressed a shudder. That had been the worst. He told himself that it wasn’t unusual, that it was part of the job. That he’d get used to it.
It helped. A little.
As Vil approached the hangar, he saw the assistant to the command officer on deck waving the pilots in.
“Move like you’ve got a purpose, people! A pregnant Pa’lowick could run faster! Let’s go!”
“ADO,” Vil said as he approached. “What’s flyin’?”
“You and your squad, among nine others,” the ADO said. He kept waving at the still-approaching pilots, down now to only a handful. “VIP escort for the Imperial-class Destroyer Devastator.”
Vil blinked. “We got a rainbow-jacket admiral? A Moff?”
“Not exactly. The guy running this ship is more of a monotone,” said the ADO. Noting Vil’s blank look, he added, “All black.”
Vil got it then. “Darth Vader.”
“Friend of yours?”
Vil laughed. They were side by side on the stairs, almost to the flight deck. Vil said, “Never met the man—or whatever he is. Saw him fly once. TIE school, out of Imperial City Naval Base. Against Barvel.”
There was no need to specify that he was talking about Colonel Vindoo “The Shooter” Barvel, one of the most decorated TIE pilots ever. During the Clone Wars, Barvel had taken out more than thirty confirmed enemy craft in ship-to-ship combat, twice that many more probables, and nobody knew how many he hadn’t even bothered to report. Vil knew he himself was a good pilot, a hot-hand even in training, but Barvel, who had been cycled out of combat by jittery brass to make sure the Empire had a live hero to parade around as a recruiter, was the best. Even though he was only a captain at the time, he’d been put in charge of the pilot school at ICNB. Barvel could power-dive the wings off any other craft and hit a target the size of a pleeky on the way down at top speed, port or starboard cannon, you pick which gun. In training missions he’d flown with the man, Vil had felt like a small child who could barely walk trying to keep up with a champion distance runner.
During maneuvers for the about-to-graduate pilots, Darth Vader had shown up. He didn’t have any military rank per se, but he was the Emperor’s wrist-hawk and everybody knew it. If it came from Vader’s augmented voxbox, it might as well have come from Palpatine’s lips, and you argued with it at your peril, no matter how high your rank.
Vader had watched for a time, then asked for a TIE fighter. He had climbed in, taken off, and joined the mock battle. Within seconds, his electronic guns had painted half a dozen ships, and it had come down to Vader versus Barvel. Vil, whose ship had been hit in a three-on-one early in the pretend fight, had been in a holding pattern waiting for the engagement to finish, and he’d watched it all.
Vader hadn’t exactly flown circles around Barvel, but every time The Shooter jigged or jinked, Vader was half a second ahead of him. Barvel was doing things Vil didn’t think were possible in a TIE, and Vader not only matched him, move for move, he just plain outflew him. It was—no other word for it—astounding. Vil quickly realized that Vader could have taken the flight school commander out at any time—he was only playing with him.
That had been as spooky in its own way as Vil’s nightmare. He’d never seen a human pilot move like that. Damned few