Star Wars_ X-Wing 05_ Wraith Squadron - Aaron Allston [80]
She pulled some of her flowing hair from over her eye and stared at him. Then she looked up at Kell. “You, too?”
He winced. “Whatever you like. I really wasn’t assigned to this unit to make you feel worse.”
She managed a low chuckle. Then she rolled up on her side, her back to the cabin wall, and looked them over frankly. “Look, you two. I’ll tell you this, but if it gets out, it’s the end of my career. Literally and without recourse.”
“I understand,” Kell said. Phanan nodded.
“All right. I got into the New Republic Academy pretty much for one reason: because I demonstrated I had a little control over the Force.”
Phanan said, “They were hoping you’d train up to be a new Luke Skywalker.”
“That’s right. But in my early simulator work I flew more like a drunken dinko. I was on the verge of washing out when I was transferred to a squadron for, well, remedial pilots in training.
“The unit commander, Colonel Repness, seemed to be a pretty good instructor. My scores came up into the acceptable range. Then, just before final examinations, he came to me and said, ‘Would you like to make sure your final examination and average scores don’t just earn your wings, but also bump you out of the bottom quarter of this class?’ ”
Kell grimaced. “I can see where this is going.”
“Well, maybe not. He wanted me to take a training run in an X-wing and simulate equipment failure. A very sophisticated simulation, backed by transmissions from my astromech. I’d ditch in the ocean and the rescue crews would pick me up … but the X-wing would have sunk thousands of meters to the bottom, where no one could recover it.”
Phanan nodded. “Except Repness would actually have been waiting for you at the ditch site and would make off with the X-wing. Which he could put on the black market.”
“That’s right.”
Kell whistled. “What did you do?”
“I said no. And I said that I was going to turn him in. He seemed shocked. He started begging. He said, please wait, give him a day to tell his wife and set his affairs in order.” She took a deep breath and released it slowly. “Like an idiot, I told him I would. I was actually naive enough to think that I was the first one who’d ever refused him, that I was in charge of the situation.”
Phanan grimaced. “So naturally he took the extra time to cover his tracks and set you up.”
“Basically, yes. I reported for duty the next morning and found out that he had put me on report for gross insubordination. He claimed that I had made advances toward him—talk about unchecked ego—and had also made horrible disparaging remarks about his wife. With a blot like that on my record, I’d have to score very high on my final examinations and keep my record clean for a long time afterward to stay in the service.
“So I went to him and told him to take that off my record. And he said, ‘You can either turn me in and see your career go straight into the incinerator, or leave the record as it is and go on to a career as the mediocre pilot you’re destined to be.’ I didn’t understand what he meant until he showed me. He’d been falsifying my records all along, since the day I transferred to his unit, recording my scores as higher than they were—I’d actually have washed out weeks before. If the truth about his offer to trade my services in stealing an X-wing for grades went on the record, so would my true scores.” She looked very, very tired.
“So you kept quiet,” Kell said.
“Yes, I did. I shut my mouth and accepted the reprimand and graduated at the very bottom of my class. And immediately the offer to try out for this squadron came in—and I later learned that it was just because of my Ranger experience. I’ve tried so hard to improve … and now Grinder comes up to me with this same suggestion—”
Phanan’s voice was gentle. “I truly doubt that he was offering to raise your scores for profit, Tyria. He was just being a code-slicer.”
“Maybe. I didn’t think about that. I wasn’t capable of thinking. I just wanted