[Black Fleet Crisis] - 02(97)

He shrugged. “And sometimes ships just break.”

“My engineering instructor liked to say that stopping isn’t hard, stopping gently is—and anytime you leave the ground, you’d better check twice to make sure all the nuts are tightened, because gravity flunks all the incompletes.”

“It sounds like your instructor knew his business.”

“Yes,” Mallar said. “Bowman York did know his business. I miss him.”

A fat-bodied military transport rose from the field beyond and roared overhead on its way to space. Wearing a wistful expression, Plat Mallar turned his head to watch it until it vanished from sight.

“So effortless—so much power, under such precise control.” He looked back to Ackbar. “That’s all I cared about before the Yevetha came, you know. Not the bombs and the laser cannon. Just flying. Just the ships, so graceful, dropping out of the clouds, disappearing into the sky. They came and went every day when I was very young. Mom said I’d sit at my window for hours and watch for them, and call out to the whole house when I saw one.”

Ackbar inclined his head toward the trainer.

“Would you like to go up?”

“I’ve been trying to convince myself that it would only make me feel worse, just in case you asked,” Mallar said.

“How did you do?”

“Failed miserably. Yes, I’d really like to. Can we, sometime?”

As his answer, Ackbar climbed up the boarding ladder, reached inside the open cockpit, and tossed a flight helmet down to a surprised Plat Mallar.

“Now?”

“Why not?”

“Don’t I need something more than this?”

“You need a mentor pilot,” said Ackbar, reaching into the cockpit again and retrieving another flight helmet.

“That’s me.”

“I meant—wait, we’re just going for a ride, aren’t we?”

Ackbar clambered down the ladder with his helmet under his arm. “You meant like a flight suit?”

“Well—yes.”

“In the cargo area of the speeder,” Ackbar said, nodding toward it.

“Why don’t you get them?”

Mallar hurried off to the speeder, returning quickly with an armful of folded brown fabric. “Which one’s mine?”

“On top,” Ackbar said. “The one with your name on it.”

For a moment Mallar stared blankly, uncom-prehending.

Then Ackbar’s bundled flight suit fell to the ground as Mallar shook his out and pawed over it with shaking hands, searching for the namestrip above the right pocket. When he found it, he looked up at Ackbar wonderingly.

“On your own merit,” Ackbar said firmly. “On the merit you showed the day the Yevetha came to Polneye—the kind that counts more than any test score or transcript.

And I mean to teach you the way I was taught, with an eye to what you already know, and a light hand on the stick. In the worst days of the Rebellion, we were putting pilots in combat on ten hours of simulator time, because we were at war. Well, Polneye is at war with N’zoth.

And if it’s still important to you, and there’s any way it can be done, I will have you ready to go back to Koornacht before that war is over.”

“Yes,” Mallar said with a quiet fierceness. “Yes, I want it.”

Ackbar nodded. “There is a corridor in pilot country-you will see it later—lined with small metal plaques, one for each pilot who’s died flying out of this base. The walls and the ceiling of that corridor are nearly covered in metal.

And if we were to hang a plaque for every pilot who came through here as a trainee and died somewhere out there, under enemy guns or in a ship that just broke, we’d have to cover the entire face of the tower.”

“I understand,” Mallar said.

“You only think you do-like everyone your age,” Ackbar said, shaking his head. “Just listen to me for a moment. When old people start wars, young people die.

And every hero every war has ever made went out that morning with comrades who were every bit as brave, but not quite as lucky. You’ve used up a lot of luck already getting here, Plat Mallar. And no one, no one anywhere, would ever say a word to you if you were to choose not to put on that flight suit, and chose instead to make a life here. You stole that life back from those marauders. You need not offer it up again.”

“I know,” said Plat Mallar, standing as tall as his frame would allow.

“And I thank you for reminding me that there is a choice. But my choice is to wear this, and hope for a chance to do something that makes a difference—to me, if not to anyone else.”

“Very well,” Ackbar said. “Then let us begin. You have a great deal to learn.”