Star Wars_ X-Wing 05_ Wraith Squadron - Aaron Allston [12]
“We have pilots today?” Wedge asked.
“We have pilots, possibly the last group, if some late arrivals make it in.”
“Let’s get started. Who’s first?” Since the first day of evaluations, Wedge had followed a simple interview pattern: Janson kept the data on the pilots, allowing Wedge to meet each one without any foreknowledge. It gave him a better opportunity to consult his gut with respect to each candidate.
Janson consulted his datapad. “His name is Kettch, and he’s an Ewok.”
Wedge came upright. “No.”
“Oh, yes. Determined to fight. You should hear him say, ‘Yub, yub.’ He makes it a battle cry.”
“Wes, assuming he could be educated up to Alliance fighter-pilot standards, an Ewok couldn’t even reach an X-wing’s controls.”
“He wears arm and leg extensions, prosthetics built for him by a sympathetic medical droid. And he’s anxious to go, Commander.”
Wedge slumped and covered his eyes with one hand. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”
“Of course I’m kidding. Pilot-candidate number one is a human female, from Tatooine, Falynn Sandskimmer.”
“I’m going to get you, Janson.”
“Yub, yub, Commander.”
“Show her in.”
Late in the day, Wedge looked over the list of candidates processed so far.
A Tatooine woman with excellent flying marks, already an ace, but a career in the incinerator because of what was listed as “chronic insolence.” An inability to keep scorn out of her voice when dealing with superior officers she didn’t respect. Failure to maintain military discipline. Wedge wondered how badly this would have affected her record a few years ago, when the New Republic was the Rebel Alliance and the military was a looser, rougher organization where rugged individualism was the norm rather than a common exception.
He wondered, too, whether Falynn Sandskimmer’s attitude toward a certain Hero of the New Republic had contributed to the two demotions that had canceled her two promotions. Asked about Luke Skywalker, she’d said, “Can you imagine being compared to him all your adult life just because you’re another pilot from Tatooine? No, I’ve never met Luke Skywalker. In fact, I wish I’d never heard of him.” It was an attitude that would not endear her to many of Luke’s friends. Wedge, who was among those friends, simply shrugged it off. Her worth was in her performance, not her lack of appreciation of one good man.
The second pilot, a human male from Etti IV, was facing a court-martial for theft. He expressed confidence that he would be cleared and asked for a chance to prove himself to Commander Antilles. A minute after he’d gone, Wedge noticed that the framed holo of his long-dead parents was missing from the tabletop. He sent Janson after the compulsive thief and scrubbed him from the candidate roster.
The third pilot was a Talz, one of the white-furred humanoid inhabitants of Alzoc III. A former Imperial slave, he’d learned to pilot freighters for the Rebel Alliance and had transferred to fighters when the deadly pilot attrition of the year before the Emperor’s death had put a premium on good fliers. But his record showed a history of psychosomatic illnesses and the possibility of mental breakdown increasing in the last several years. His mental evaluations suggested that these problems resulted from conflict between the Talz’s basically gentle nature and the fighter’s mission of destroying enemy targets.
Wedge and Janson put him through a simulator recreation of the fleet action at the battle of Endor—a target-rich environment where the best fighter pilots racked up impressive kill scores. The Talz did well, but Wedge and Janson watched his biomedical readings climb into the red danger zone—a clear sign that even in