AMARA KEL’S RULES FOR TIE PILOT SURVIVAL (PROBABLY)
Django Wexler
Please note I said probably. Nothing is guaranteed in this galaxy except taxes and the navy post losing your mail.
Rule number one: Don’t get attached.
Not to anything, not to anyone.
Don’t get attached to your fighter. I know some pilots get cute, tuning the tolerances and controls. Then they get killed when their precious machine is in maintenance during a combat scramble, and they’re not used to stock. TIEs are meant to be mass-produced, disposable.
Like us.
Don’t get attached to your officers. All the good ones will move on as soon as they possibly can. The bad ones will stick around killing people with their stupidity. High turnover among officers is a good thing.
Don’t get attached to your squadmates. Eat with them, drink with them, play sabacc with them, sleep with them if it suits your fancy. But don’t get attached, because then one day they’ll do something stupid, and then you’ll do something stupid, and then it’s a couple of fireballs and some Imperial morale officer sending your family a plastoid medal and a heartfelt note. And it probably gets lost in the mail.
You want to be the one still sitting on your bunk when they bring in the next round of new recruits. Those of us who’ve made it past one tour call them “cloudflies,” the kind that only live for a day. It helps us remember rule number one.
Until proven otherwise, you’re a cloudfly.
One shift ends. Sleepwell pills; supposed to pack a whole night’s rest into a quick nap, but all they ever give me is bad dreams. Shower. Two precious hours in the rack. Next shift begins. Alarm goes off, pop a stim, the motion of opening the bottle so automatic I could do it in total darkness. Feel my heart slam against my ribs, limbs shaky with nervous, chemical energy. Roll out of bed half naked, climb straight into my flight suit. One of the cloudflies stares like he’s never seen a girl before I zip up. Maybe he hasn’t. Lot of weird planets in the Outer Rim.
This shift’s assignment glows red on a wall screen, but I don’t bother reading it. It’s the same as the shift before, and the shift before that. Patrol the edge of the asteroid field by half flights, make sure nothing gets out.
Down the gangway, slide down a ladder, moving by feel and memory, the Star Destroyer Avenger’s blueprints now a part of my blood and bones. Grab my helmet from the rack in the ready room, round the corner to the hangar, swing myself into the nearest docking tube.
A cockpit so tight the only way in is to hang from the hatch rail and lower yourself into the seat. Foam cradles me as I settle in, my hands moving in more automatic reflexes—air hose slots into the back of my suit, restraint straps click in beside it. My fingers flick switches, powering up comms, navigation, flight control, glowing lights rippling around me in cascades of red and green. Displays come to life with a rising hum.
The TIE/ln. Home, sweet home.
Rule number two: Don’t be a hero.
When you join up, you get a speech about how we are the true defenders of the Empire, the real front line, where durasteel meets vacuum, and that means upholding the proud traditions of blah blah blah. A lot of cloudflies take this speech very seriously, I guess. Or else they’re just so happy to be off whatever dirtball gave birth to them that the sheer exuberance drives them to push the limits, cut the corners, and end up a thin carbonized smear on some tumbling rock.
You know what the leading cause of exploding cloudflies is? Definitely not rebel blasters. It’s running into things, or else running into one another. It makes sense, when you think about it. There aren’t that many rebels, but there’s a whole galaxy full of stuff to smash into.
They must tell them this in basic training. They certainly told me. But there are always some who think they’re going to make that turn, beat that blast door closed, dodge that rock, and then, well. Crunch, boom, plastoid medal, the Emperor thanks you for your sacrifice, citizen.
Don’t fly slow. That just gets you a different kind of dead. But fly careful. And never be the one in front.
“Attention Theta Squadron.” Lieutenant Obrax’s voice in my ear. “Prepare to receive a message from Captain Needa.”
A tiny holo appears above my controls, blue and flickering. I’ve never met the captain of the Avenger in person, but he’s familiar from a hundred announcements like this one. Arch and aristocratic, like so many of the Empire’s elite. He glares like he’s disappointed with me in particular.
“Lord Vader has impressed on me that this mission continues to be one of the utmost importance to the Empire,” he says. “It demands constant vigilance and attention to duty. If I discover any pilots returning after failing to complete their assigned patrol, I will personally escort them out the nearest air lock. I hope that’s sufficiently clear.”
The holo cuts out. Motivational speaking, Imperial Navy style.
My comm lights up with a private channel from Howl.
“And then I will personally piss into the air lock,” she intones, mocking Needa’s Core accent. “And then I will personally fly the ship into a sun before pushing you out, because that’s just how angry I will be. Do I make myself clear?”
I make sure I’m not on the general channel before snickering, another old instinct.
“You should put together a show,” I tell her. “We could sell tickets.”
“Wait till you hear my Vader.” She mimes heavy, raspy breathing.
Lieutenant Obrax comes on again. “You heard the captain,” he says. “No excuses. Lock down and prep for launch.”
I put my helmet on, hear the click of the latch and the hiss as ozone-scented air fills my nose. Flip another few switches and my machine rumbles to life, twin ion engines projecting a familiar buzz I can feel in my teeth. Test the controls, stick, foot pedals, exterior thrusters twisting in response. I glance at the diagnostics, see green lights. Flip on the comm.
“Theta Four, go for launch.” Among ourselves, we go by our chosen nicknames—mine is “Shadow”—but only elite hotshots can get away with using them when command is listening.
“Theta Seven, go for launch.” That’s Howl, only moments behind me.
The other four pilots in my half flight are cloudflies. Fresh recruits. The best of them has only been with us four months. The worst came in a week ago, just before we deployed to Hoth. Hell of a time to start your tour.
“Theta Eleven, go for launch.”
“Theta Thirteen, go for launch.”
“Theta Eighteen, go for launch.”
“Theta Twenty-Two, go for launch.”
Clipper and Dawn, Flameskull and Shockwave. The latter are good examples of why you shouldn’t let recruits pick their own nicknames.
“Theta Squadron, launch,” Obrax says. “Glory to the Empire!”
The docking clamp extends out into the cargo bay with a whine of hydraulics, then lets go. My TIE drops through the insubstantial blue of the atmo shield and out into the black.
Rule number three: Don’t go at them head-on.
I know, it’s not what the tactics manual says. Listen, though.
If you manage to keep from crashing into things for long enough, eventually you’re going to find yourself going up against an actual enemy starfighter. It’s what we’re here for, after all. For the last few years, that’s usually meant rebels.
The tactics manual says that a TIE squadron, twenty-four ships strong, should endeavor to go directly at enemy starfighters, maximizing the number of guns on target. The Academy geniuses who wrote this calculate thusly: maximum firepower, maximum casualties on both sides. Some of ours go down, some of theirs go down. We have more pilots and fighters than they do, because we’re the Empire, so we win. Glory to the Empire!
As a bonus, recommending this approach means you don’t need to spend that much time prepping your pilots, because any half-trained womp rat can fly straight at the bad guys and hold down the FIRE button until he gets blown into flaming dust, right?
Right. So. A couple of things.
It’s easy to feel invincible in a TIE, if you haven’t taken one into battle before. It seems big and solid, and the practice targets blow in a satisfying way when you hit them with the rapid-fire lasers.
It’s easy to forget that the rebels fly X-wings, A-wings, B-wings, Y-wings. They seem to have a lot of credits and not a lot of pilots (easier to find people willing to support the Cause with a few credits than actually jump in the cockpit and die for it, I guess), so they fly ships with little amenities like “shields” and “armor” and “hyperdrives” and “repair astromechs.” The ship that we fly, on the other hand, was meticulously designed by the brains at Sienar Fleet Systems to be the absolute cheapest platform that can carry a laser cannon a few thousand kilometers.
So you go in head-on. Pew pew pew! And the X-wing’s shields barely flicker, and it starts to fire back, and you realize very briefly that it has twice your firepower plus a rack of proton torpedoes, and then, you know. Thank you for your service, et cetera.
Thank you very much for the tactics manual, Academy geniuses. It’s all well and good saying that we can trade two for one with the enemy and come out ahead, but I’m not volunteering to be part of the two, and neither should you, if you can help it.
We skirt the edge of the asteroid field, engines building up to their endless shriek as we head to our patrol zone.
That sound, like a cross between an angry beast and a groundcar skidding on wet asphalt. They say it drives some pilots crazy, but I love it. It’s ugly and angry, perfect for the TIE. When we swoop in on the enemy it’s like the machines themselves are screaming with rage.
Not that there’s any enemy here, of course. Just space, lots of empty space, a three-dimensional zone encompassing one side of the asteroid field where we fly the prescribed search pattern, an ever-expanding spiral. What we’re in for, probably, is four hours of hot nothing, then back to the ship for a recharge and out again for four more. It’s fine with me. In my book, it’s a good day when nobody’s shooting at you.
Shockwave disagrees. (However stupid the nickname, it’s easier than memorizing a new cloudfly’s designator every time one dies.) “If I have to fly past these scum-sucking rocks one more time…”
“It’s a different zone than yesterday,” Howl says. “So these are new and unfamiliar rocks.”
“Could be worse,” Flameskull says. “The bomber squadrons actually have to go into the mess. They’ve been blasting, trying to spook the bastards into moving.”
“What, exactly, are we supposed to be tracking down out here?” Dawn’s the longest-lived of our cloudflies. She seems nice enough. But. Rule number one.
“A modified YT-1300 light freighter.” This from Clipper. Clipper is an Academy boy. That means he chose to be here, unlike the rest of us, who just tested high in the right categories on the conscript intake exams. Academy boys all want to get promoted out of the TIE/ln squadrons as soon as they can, get themselves at least an interceptor, start climbing the ranks, maybe shoot for the Imperial Guards. Never trust Academy boys. Maybe I should make that a rule.
“Yeah, I read the mission brief,” Dawn says. “But why have we got half the fleet chasing after one busted old freighter?”
It’s a reasonable question. But this is the Imperial Navy, we don’t do reasonable questions.
“Ask Lord Vader,” Howl says. “But be ready for a real short conversation.”
The spiral expands outward. The rocks tumble and wheel in the light of the distant sun. My mind goes blank, as though my fighter is disappearing around me, and I’m the one flying through hard vacuum. The smallest twitch of my fingers pulses the thrusters, sends me into a gentle turn, easy as thought.
Rule number four: Learn to love your machine.
This one might surprise you, given that I spent the last rule crapping all over the TIE/ln. But. But.
They built this thing, this ugly piece-of-junk made-by-the-lowest-bidder mass-production death trap, and somehow—presumably by accident—they made something beautiful. It turns out, when you take away the shields and the armor and the hyperdrive and all the rest, when you strip a starfighter down to the absolute bare minimum, what you’re left with flies like a damn dream.
There’s no excess weight on it anywhere, because excess weight might cost money. It has power to spare, and it twists and curves like an exotic dancer. You can pull moves that, if Joe Rebel tried it in his X-wing, he’d find it coming apart around him. Only the A-wing comes close, but the A-wing is a creature of straight lines and raw force, all thrust and no finesse.
TIEs are all about finesse. Fly it long enough, and you learn when to tickle the thrusters with a light touch, when to jam the throttle in and push the stick hard over, how to spin and roll and come out right behind some meathead, guns blazing.
I knew a guy who got the promotion every TIE pilot dreams of, up to driving a Lambda shuttle. A nice, safe bus with plenty of shields to protect the brass. After a month, he gave it up, transferred back to the line squadrons. He said he missed the rush.
At the time, I didn’t understand it. It wasn’t until I saw Howl fly that I really grasped how you could fall in love with this machine.
Howl transferred to the Avenger about six months before Hoth. Two years since Yavin and things were still hot, rebel cells flaring up and Imperial command determined to crack down, show that the loss of the Death Star had only been a minor setback. We were way understrength, and basic training could barely crank out cloudflies fast enough.
But Howl wasn’t a cloudfly. She’d been flying nearly as long as I had, already on her third tour. That she was still in a line squadron after so long told me that she either had no ambition (like me) or was a terminal screwup (also like me, depending on who you ask). So I was interested enough to look up when she reported to the squad in the middle of mess, and I had to admit I liked what I saw. Hair dark as space, just a little longer than regulation, lips the color of a fresh bruise quirked with a hint of sarcastic smile. Not everyone can pull off the Imperial dress uniform—I look like a ten-year-old boy—but she managed.
In a mess full of teenage cloudflies, I wasn’t the only one looking, of course. I think five boys and two girls offered to bunk with her that first night, and she sent them all down in flames. Canny operator that I am, I held back for a while.
Okay, I was just chicken. I’m better in a cockpit than I am with people. “Amara Kel’s Rules for Getting Laid Aboard a Star Destroyer” would be a really short book.
As luck would have it, though, Howl and I got put on patrol together, so we had a lot of time to get to know each other out in the black. On one of our first shifts, I asked her what a Howlrunner was.
“It’s a canid native to Kamar,” she told me as our TIEs screamed through the big empty. “Massive, nasty-looking thing with a skull for a face. Hunts humans, if it gets the chance.”
“Is that where you’re from?” I asked. “Kamar?”
She laughed. “Kamar’s a desert full of talking bugs. I just saw a holo and thought it sounded cool. Plus everyone else in basic was picking names like ‘Stormsmasher’ and ‘Foe-Render’ so I didn’t want to get left out.”
I laughed out loud. What I’d learned on these patrols was that under her polished exterior, Howl was something of a goofball. The combination did warm squishy things to my insides, and I had to breathe and remind myself to remember rule number one.
“So why Shadow?” she said, a little while later. We were far enough out that command wasn’t going to be listening in.
“Dunno,” I mumbled. Nobody had ever asked me that before. “Nobody notices a shadow, right?”
About a week later, things got hot again, thanks to Imperial Intelligence. Now, any TIE pilot—any navy officer, really—can tell you all kinds of stories about Imperial Intelligence and the thrilling works of fiction they produce, safe behind their keypads. This was actually one of their better moments, considering. The rebel supply base was right where they said it would be, in a derelict Clone Wars–era deep-space installation. Only they’d missed the little detail that the rebels had been there awhile, so they’d repaired the defenses and upgunned the place into something closer to a battle station. When the Avenger dropped out of hyperspace at close range, it took only a few broadsides before Captain Needa decided he didn’t like the way things were going. He backed off and told the bombers to work the place over a bit to make it more digestible, and we went along as escort. The rebels had anticipated this, naturally, and some X-wings and A-wings came out to join the party.
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.
Plus, the navy isn’t always scrupulous at picking everybody up after the action is over. There’s always somewhere else to be, some other rebellion to crush. Stay with your ship, eventually a salvage crew will come along. You may be asphyxiated by then, but at least someone will find your body! That’s something!
It’s not. But still. Never eject.
I’m not going to put too much blame on Dawn, though, given the state of her fighter, and the fact that giant space worms aren’t exactly in the handbook.
“What in the name of the Emperor is that?” Clipper said.
“Giant space worm,” I snap, “obviously. Now shut up and let me get a location fix.”
“It’s gonna eat me it’s gonna eat me it’s gonna eat me—” Dawn moans.
“What happened to Theta Twenty-Two?” Howl says.
“He turned the other way,” Flameskull says. “Lost track of him.”
Probably halfway home by now. Smart kid. My scanners finally pinpoint Dawn, floating in her ejector seat near the surface of the rock. Spectacular.
“Right,” I say, dropping protocol. “Howl, you and me will make a firing run, get its attention. Clipper, you and Flameskull go for Dawn, tag her with a utility line, get out of here. Got it?”
“Got it,” Clipper says, and the others echo it.
“On my mark—”
But Clipper is already powering in, so I just shout “Go!” and throttle up. The worm twists toward us and shifts ponderously in our direction. But it’s not agile enough to catch a TIE, not by half. Howl skates by above it, her stuttering laser cannons leaving a line of scorched craters across the thing’s skin. I go for the base, guns tracking a spray of shattered rock and space-worm hide. As it swings toward me, I cut to the left, ready to make my escape—
—and find Clipper coming right at me, about to commit an egregious violation of rule two, subsection one: Don’t run into each other.
In the quarter second before we pancake, I yank the stick the other way and stand on the thrusters. Acceleration shoves me sideways, the TIE slews, and I go into a spin, missing Clipper by the space of a fingernail. Unfortunately, that leaves me whirling the wrong way, and I fight the suddenly overloaded stick to get the spin under control.
Not fast enough. One panel tip slams right into the space worm with a crunch I can hear through the hull, shearing entirely away. The engine on that side screams, and I slam the control for a hard shutdown before feedback blows the reactor. And that leaves me dead in space, no weapons, drifting slowly in front of a giant space worm, which opens its jaws wide as a cavern.
Why? I wonder. How much of a mouthful could I make for it?
(The giant exogorth, it turns out, is a silicon-based life-form that tunnels through the asteroids eating ore. It doesn’t give a damn about squishy organics, but our fighters, dense with refined alloys and radioisotopes, must look like candy)
I close my eyes and try to draw an appropriate lesson.
Rule six. Don’t go chasing after your girlfriend no matter how much you like her.
Rule six. Asteroid fields are bad news.
Rule six. Don’t get eaten by a giant space worm.
Rule—
“Shadow! Hang tight!”
Howl’s fighter screams past me, into the worm’s gaping maw, cannons spitting green fire. The thing rears up as her lasers scorch its insides, and its mouth starts to close. Howl, halfway down its throat, spins her TIE in a neat pirouette and punches forward at full power. The ship is fast, but not that fast, nothing is, and the last I see of her is a glimpse between the interlocking teeth of the worm as its jaw closes—
“Howl!” No no no no no, not her. I taught her rule number one, not for me—
A stutter of green light. The worm’s tooth shatters, fragments blowing outward, and Howl’s TIE sneaks through the gap in the thing’s smile, the fit so tight it scrapes the paint on her side panels. Then she’s free, drive flaring, and the giant worm has had enough for one day, slipping back down into its tunnels.
There’s a clunk as a utility line hits my hull, magnetic grapple catching.
“You all right, Shadow?”
“I’m still here.” I gasp for breath, tears beading inside my helmet where I can’t wipe them away. “Palpatine’s withered nuts, Howl—”
“Let’s get you back to the Avenger.” The cable goes taut, and the rocks slide gently around us.
“You’re supposed to finish your route,” I say when I can trust my voice. “Otherwise Captain Needa might throw you out an air lock.”
“Let me worry about Captain Needa,” Howl says, and I can hear her grin.
Rule number six: If you are going to get attached to somebody, make sure it’s to a girl who flies like an ash angel hopped up on death sticks.
Clipper, I later learned, had grabbed Dawn, and Shockwave wandered in eventually. Even cloudflies sometimes get lucky.
And we didn’t even get in trouble! Turns out Vader had strangled Needa just before we finally got back. All’s well that end’s well, Imperial Navy style.