Star Wars_ X-Wing 06_ Iron Fist - Aaron Allston [29]
“It’s not as though you’ll be washing out. It’s just a transfer. And you’ll be a real asset to the Alliance there.”
“No, sir. I’m going to be a pilot.”
His face hardened. “Then I have one piece of advice for you.”
“Yes, sir?”
“You think about Candidate Lussatte and anyone else you might have made friends with. You think about how you’re going to feel if you get them killed for real. Trust me, the kind of pilot you’re shaping into, it’s going to happen. And that’s not the worst thing that could happen to you. The worst thing would be for you to survive a bad decision that kills everybody you care about.” He turned away and followed the last departing pilot candidates from the room.
Lara sagged into the simulator seat. Only part of her dejection was simulated. It felt bad to be considered such a screwup when she was capable of doing so much better.
She shouldn’t even care what these Rebels thought; they were her enemies. But her fellow candidates had such naive enthusiasm, such a light of life within them, that it was growing increasingly hard not to like them.
She felt a little tickle at the back of her neck. She turned to look through the simulator’s rear viewport.
At the back of the classroom, a man in an Alliance uniform was turning away, heading toward the room’s rear exit. From his height and build, she recognized him as Colonel Repness.
When had he come into the classroom? Had he been watching her in the moments after her exchange with Captain Sormic? She watched until he was gone, until she was alone in the room.
She checked her chrono. There were no classes scheduled in this room for an hour. She pulled up the instrument panel before her and did a little bit of deft rewiring, a bit of electronic trickery at which she was becoming quite adept. Then she clicked the panel back into place and manually pulled the canopy back down.
When she hit the button that, on a real X-wing, would initiate an emergency restart, the simulator came back online. But now it would not transmit its results and recordings to the training facility’s central computers. Whatever she accomplished here would remain her secret.
The world with the ruined city came into view again, and once more she was surrounded by a squadron of X-wings.
5
Shalla tried to interpret every sway, every course change taken by the skimmer in whose enclosed bed she rode. Eventually the vehicle had to return to a motor pool or other vehicle hangar. Eventually she’d be able to begin her portion of the mission … a portion she had to accomplish alone.
The vehicle went through a protracted right turn, then slowed and settled to the ground with an unmusical metallic clang. Shalla raised her blaster rifle to cover the door. Some stormtroopers were thorough and efficient enough to police their vehicles; others weren’t.
Hers apparently fell in the latter category. The door remained resolutely closed. Then the lights went out.
She heard, from outside the skimmer, a man’s laughter. She tensed. But the laughter was the type that came in response to a joke, not malicious laughter directed at a trapped enemy. When she heard the heavy footsteps of stormtrooper composite armor falling on duracrete, she relaxed.
She gave it another minute. She wanted the stormtroopers to be well away from the skimmer, but couldn’t afford them too much time to realize that something was wrong. Then she rose, used her glow rod to find the door switch, and pressed the switch.
Nothing, not even a beep. It had been deactivated with the rest of the power to the skimmer’s enclosure. She swore to herself, but it was only a minor inconvenience.
She switched off her helmet comlink. She took off her stormtrooper helmet and spent a couple of minutes carefully extracting the comm gear inside it, then detached the miniature power pack from the gear. It took another couple of minutes to remove the door-switch cover and wire the power pack into it. Then she put the now comm-free helmet on again and took up her rifle.
This time, the door opened smartly. Outside