“Not exactly. Every credit I put into my education fund, he matched with four. But I had to earn. That’s the Antilles way: no easy path.” Oriented on a course to intercept Blue Diver’s orbit, she switched control over to the black-and-yellow R2 astromech situated in the well between and behind the pilot and gunner’s seats. “By the way, thanks.”
“For?”
“Not making a deal of my being Corellian. Or being a famous general’s daughter.”
Zueb waved her remarks away. “I’m taking long view. You’re not Corellian daughter of famous general. He’s father of famous Twee test pilot. Just wait.”
Syal grinned. “I like your attitude.”
Test pilot. Her father had done some of that, too, over the years, but probably hadn’t done so in a vehicle like the Aleph. By comparison with the X-wings that her father so loved, the Aleph-class starfighters were flying tanks. Heavily armored two-crew craft with overbuilt generators, the Alephs had been designed in the last months of the Yuuzhan Vong war, more than a decade before, as a one-to-one match for the Yuuzhan Vong coralskipper, a massive single-pilot organic starfighter protected by thick shells and by voids, mobile singularities that could slide in front of incoming lasers or missiles and swallow them completely.
The Alephs didn’t have any defenses that esoteric. Instead, they relied on their thick hulls and on shields powered by those overbuilt generators. Weapons included two turrets, one on either side of the ball-shaped cockpit, each equipped with quad-linked lasers-lasers that could be unlinked, permitting an unpredictable spray fire pattern, an option to confound those coralskipper voids. Forward were the explosives tubes, one for concussion missiles and one for proton torpedoes. All in all, the Alephs packed a heavy punch-heavy being the operative word for much of the vehicle’s performance.
But-and Syal winced-it was a shame the Alephs looked so blasted stupid. With their ball-shaped cockpits, reminiscent of TIE cockpits but larger, and the circular transparisteel viewports before both the pilot’s and gunner’s seats, with the smooth ball cockpit lines graduating to two trailing thruster pods narrowing the farther they were from the cockpit, and with the turrets to either side of the cockpit, the Aleph looked like nothing so much as the head of a gigantic Twi’lek, trailing its head-tails behind and wearing clumsy earmuffs. It was no wonder the Aleph test pilots and just about everyone else who saw them referred to the craft as Twees.
Still, flying them was better than flying garbage scows, rescue shuttles, or tugs.
Test pilot. Syal considered that. Much as she’d come to dislike the Twees in the few days she’d been flying them, she realized that it wouldn’t be fair to this class of starfighters if she didn’t demonstrate every one of their positive traits for their GA evaluators. It also wouldn’t be fair to the Antilles family name. Now that she’d reclaimed her name, she owed it to her family to put a bit more polish on it. She needed to be able to run this craft through maneuvers so exacting that onlooking pilots would have no idea how she did it.
She switched her comm board back on to broadcast. “Gray One, this is Four. Over.”
“Go ahead, Four. Over.”
“Would it be all right if I dropped down into Tralus’s atmosphere before I return to the Diver? I’d like to run this unit through some paces. Atmospheric speed and heat tests, some aerobatics. Over.”
“That’s showing some initiative, Four. You’re authorized. Over.”
“Thanks, and out.” Syal returned the comm board to its previous status.
Zueb gave her a sorrowful look. “Going to fly me dizzy, aren’t you?”
Syal nodded, her expression sympathetic. “Only till you throw up.”
“All right.”
LORRD CITY, LORRD
Ben returned to Dr. Rotham’s offices just as the elderly scholar was commencing her initial evaluation. He walked in, seeing the real tassels set out on the main table and a hologram of them floating above, each tassel labeled.
Rotham was speaking: “-top to bottom, as that seems, from internal evidence, to be the order in which they’re to be read. Hello, Ben.”
“Hello.” Ben moved forward to stand behind Jacen’s chair. He stared up at the hologram.
“So,” Dr. Rotham continued, “number one, at the top, is from Firrere, a dead world, its population scattered; the knotting technique was originally for recording and, in some superstitious cultures, magically influencing names. Its message, ‘He will remake himself’-or perhaps ‘rename himself,’ the two concepts being identical in this context.