Марта Уэллс - From a Certain Point of View

Some days, you can tell things are junked right from the start. We didn’t have anything like the numbers we needed—maybe sixty TIEs against two dozen rebels, and most of ours were cloudflies going into their first engagement. Our lieutenant tried to keep our squad together, blazing away as five X-wings came right down our throat, which worked as well as it usually does. I clipped one of the rebels, sending it spinning off into the black, but the lieutenant went boom along with four others, and the cloudflies panicked and scattered. Then it was down to a mess of little dogfights, which tends to favor the side with ships that don’t explode at the drop of a hat.

I did what I could, sliding in behind a flight of three A-wings smooth as you could ask for, raking one with fire until its shields flared out and the ship broke apart. The remaining two split up, one of them punching in full thrust while the other threw itself into a tight turn to get on my tail. Apparently nobody taught the pilot not to get into an ass-kicking contest with a Maxilian megapede, though, because a TIE/ln will out-turn any starfighter ever built. I twisted the stick, jammed the pedals, and screamed through an arc so tight that the force coming past the inertial compensator was enough to squeeze my eyeballs. It worked, though, and the A-wing lost me completely. Soon as it evened out, I was on it, and I watched the starfighter spin into the side of the station and go up in a fireball.

That bought me time to take a leisurely turn and look out at the battle. We were losing, bad. Someone screamed over the comm. Sounded like Drake, which would be a pain. She owed me thirty credits.

Rule number one, right?

“Theta Four!” Howl’s voice in my ear. “I’m on the leader! Could use some help!”

I found her on my scopes, twisting and dodging with a red-painted X-wing. The rebel was good, a veteran for sure, lasers spitting just aft of Howl’s gyrating ship. I could dive in, take a pass at him, but X-wings are sturdier than A-wings and it would probably just make him mad. Any minute now we were going to get the order to pull out—

I snarled a word that would have drawn a rebuke from the lieutenant, if he weren’t a red mist already. “I’ll try to tag him, get ready to break—”

“Just come in bearing three-twenty-six by ten and go into a left skid,” Howl said. “I’ll handle the rest.”

“But—”

“Trust me!”

I shouldn’t have. But, well. You know.

My TIE screamed as it sliced downward, not directly at the rebel but above and to one side of him. On Howl’s mark, I tweaked the thrusters, sending the fighter into a hard spin to the left, not a great idea if you want to see where you’re going—

But it gave me a front-row seat as Howl put her machine through some kind of mutant upside-down Koiogran, crossed with a twist I don’t even have a name for. The rebel hotshot tried to follow her through it, but the X-wing wasn’t made for that kind of tight maneuver, and he lost control and ended up sliding after her, right in front of my guns. I barely even had to aim, just held down the trigger until their shield flared and the ship went up, stupid little astromech’s head popping off like a pull-tab on a can.

Howl had known. Where she would go, how he would follow, where I would need to be to make the shot. I’d never seen anything like it. Still haven’t. Vader himself couldn’t have pulled that move.

“Thanks!” she said, cheerful and unfazed, as though she hadn’t just given me a divine-level master class in combat flying.

“N…no problem.” My voice shook only a little.

Five minutes later, we got the recall order. Fifteen minutes after that, I plugged my TIE into the docking clamp and lifted myself out of it with shaking hands. Five minutes after that, I was in the shower with Howl, kissing her as frantically as I’ve ever kissed anyone, and finding to my shocked delight that she was kissing me back just as thoroughly.

—

I blink, and swear. Daydreaming. Don’t daydream while flying, no matter how pleasant the memory. Maybe that should be a rule.

“I’ve got something on my scope,” says Clipper. “Down in the rocks.”

“That’s not in our brief,” I tell him. “We’re on watch in case they make a run for it.”

“It’s right there,” he says. “Just on the edge.”

“I see it, too,” Dawn says. “Grid two fourteen by forty-five.”

I poke my scanners. There’s…something. A lump of metal. Could be a ship, could be a rock with an ore deposit. No way to know from here.

“Stay on course, follow orders,” I tell them.

“Lord Vader himself wants this freighter,” Clipper says. “If we’re the ones who bring it in, do you have any idea what he’ll give us?”

“I have a pretty good idea what he’ll do to you if you mess up your patrol route,” Howl says. “Theta Four is right. Stay on course.”

“The Empire’s glory isn’t achieved without risk,” Clipper says. It sounds like some dumb slogan they teach at the Academy. I consider telling him about the rules, but I doubt he’d be interested. “I’m going to check it out.”

“Theta Four has seniority here,” Howl says, “so that’s her call, not yours—”

Clipper’s TIE is already veering off. Scum-sucking Academy boys. Not surprisingly, Flameskull and Shockwave go after him. After a moment, Dawn turns off as well. I thought she had better sense.

That leaves Howl and me, flying our patrol pattern.

“The lieutenant is going to love this,” I mutter.

“Assuming anyone tells him,” Howl says. Which is fair, because I certainly won’t. Getting one up on a cloudfly like Clipper isn’t worth getting tagged with a rep for ratting people out to the officers.

“Let’s just hope the rebels don’t come blasting out anytime soon,” I say, “because you and I probably aren’t going to be able to stop a YT-1300 on our own.”

“Speak for yourself,” Howl says, teasing. “Did I ever tell you about the time—”

Someone screams over the comms. Dawn.

“Theta Seven,” I say, warningly. “Don’t.”

“They’re not far in.”

“ Howl. They broke formation!”

“There’s something there. Scan won’t resolve. But—”

“Howl!”

Her fighter veers off, heading into the asteroid field.

I thumb the comm off and turn the cockpit air blue with every bad word I can think of.

Rule number one. Cloudflies are cloudflies. Chat with them, sleep with them, but don’t get attached…

Kissing Howl in the shower, skin slick and water scalding.

Rule number two. Don’t be a hero. Never be a hero, heroes end up dead.

That smile. Like she’s got one up on the universe, and she knows it.

The rules—

I keep up the barrage of profanity as I jam the stick hard over and lean on the pedals, torquing the TIE into a hard turn, diving among the rocks.

It doesn’t take me long to find Dawn and the others, or to figure out what the problem is. The problem is a hundred-meter worm that emerged from a burrow in one of the larger asteroids, maw gaping, studded with teeth the size of our fighters.

The asteroids are dense, like flying through a moving mountain range. Clipper and Flameskull are circling one of the spinning boulders. No sign of Shockwave. And Dawn’s fighter is in a hundred tiny pieces, but she’s still screaming into my ear, so she must have ejected.

Speaking of—

—

Rule number five: Never eject.

I mean, if you’re in an atmosphere or something, fine, go nuts. But out in deep space, in the middle of a battle? You’re almost guaranteed to be safer in your TIE than out of it, until it actually explodes. Thing is, while the TIE/ln doesn’t have much armor, it’s still a lot more than your flight suit. A battle tends to produce a lot of debris, which means a lot of little fragments pinging around that will bounce right off your canopy but would happily zip through your suit and your guts and come out the other side. Not to mention the hard radiation from weapons fire and ships going up. Three guesses how much rad protection is built into our flight suits.