Star Wars_ X-Wing 05_ Wraith Squadron - Aaron Allston [31]
“I think so.”
“All right. I’d appreciate it if you’d dig us up a squadron quartermaster sometime today. I’ll be with the new snubfighters and then with our guest if you need me.”
Tyria seemed to be in a state of shock as they left the briefing room. Kell asked, “What’s wrong?”
“I was the last one he named,” she said. “I’m last again. The worst pilot in the squadron.”
“No. You’re tenth out of forty-three.”
She glared at him. “The washouts don’t count, Kell.”
“Well, let me put it to you this way. You’re the lowest-rated pilot in a squadron assembled by Wedge Antilles. You’re the worst of this group of elites. Elites, Tyria. And tomorrow, you could be ninth, and the day after, you could be eighth.”
Her expression softened. “Well … maybe. But let me ask you something, Kell. Have you ever been the worst at something?”
He thought about it. “No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
· · ·
The X-wing hangar, so-called because there was only one X-wing squadron on Folor Base and the hangar was given over to its sole use, was cavernously empty. It could have held three full squadrons of fighters, but now was occupied only by nine vehicles.
The largest was the Narra, the Lambda-class shuttle assigned to Gray Squadron. It had been captured not from the Empire but from a rogue Imperial captain who had turned smuggler. This accounted for the way it had been retrofitted, with a hidden, electronically enhanced smuggler’s compartment worthy of Han Solo.
The other eight vehicles were all X-wings. Four had seen combat, the ones belonging to Wedge, Janson, Donos, and Face. Now alongside them were four spotless new fighters. Kell smiled, cheered by the gleaming surfaces, the un-scratched paint and canopies, the sentinel-like quality of the sleeping R2 and R5 units tucked in behind the cockpits, the overall appearance of invincibility.
The man beside him said, “How I hate these things.”
Kell looked at him. Cubber Daine, the squadron’s chief mechanic, was a bit under average height and over average weight, straining a little at the seams of the jumpsuit that might have begun life an orange color but was now so stained with lubricants that it was impossible to be sure. He had intelligent eyes deeply sunk in a face that looked as though it had been sculpted out of chopped meat and hastily decorated with hair.
“You hate X-wings?”
“No, no, no. I hate factory new X-wings. They look so sweet. But then you get in under the panels, and what do you have? Factory defects just waiting to blow up in your face. Assembly mistakes no one noticed. And worst of all, they’re always making improvements at Incom, slipping in these so-called technological upgrades without documenting them, without fully testing them—”
“And without getting your explicit permission.”
Cubber’s face broke out in a broad grin. “You do understand! All right, kid. Let’s pop these things open and see what they’ve done wrong.”
Within a few minutes, Kell decided that Cubber was correct. The rails on which the pilots’ chairs were mounted, so that they could be adjusted forward or back to account for the pilot’s height, seemed to be a glossy black ceramic instead of the stainless metal he was used to; he had no idea how the things would hold up under hard wear. He resolved to make sure there were some of the old-fashioned rails in the replacement parts inventory. The canopy seal on one of the snubfighters was faulty. The inertial compensators, the anti-gravity projectors that kept the pilot from suffering ill effects from acceleration, deceleration, and maneuvering, were smaller than he was used to and lacked the external kinetic rod array that was supposed to supply their internal computers with data about current inertial conditions. One of the four X-wings had a small, rectangular equipment module mounted on its exterior aft of the cargo compartment, but Kell couldn’t find any wiring or other connectors from it into the fighter’s interior.
So when Wedge arrived and asked, “How do they look?” Kell pulled himself out of one engine and said,