Star Wars: The Sith War - Fiction: Micki Shen-Jon and the Solo Shirt

[Micki Shen-Jon]

Like a dagger, Davith Wessiri's starfighter sliced through the thin upper atmosphere of Kakarfoon, following an invisible pathway through the broken clouds toward the starport far below. In the front seat of the two-seat fighter, Micki Shen-Jon monitored the many instruments and the sky around her in a practiced sequence of rapid eye momements called "the scan."

"Keep the scan up," said Davith Wessiri from the back seat. He held his voice level and calm, and almost bored-sounding. In the fraternity of fighter pilots, there were two great transgressions: abandoning your wingman, and losing your cool. "Tell me what you see, and stay on that nav path." His starfighter had two sets of controls, but today his hands were in his lap. His student was flying the ship.

"Corellian freighter, crossing left to right," Micki replied automatically in a voice equally devoid of emphasis. "We'll pass well aft of him." She added the freighter to her mental scan list, and on each pass across the instruments and sky she also spared a glance at the freighter, tracking its progress.

"Good," Davith replied, sparing a single word of praise. He continued to test his student, forcing her to deal with his questions while she flew. Good pilots learn to multi-task, and he would be damned before he let a poor pilot fly his ship. "Don't fixate on it. Call mid-point. What will you do?"

"Turn to approach, pre-landing checklist, signal port control," Micki replied automatically, without thinking about the answer. Pilots, she had learned, do things the exact same way every time so that there are no mistakes. Also, she had discovered, by doing so she could spare her attention to other matters related to flying. In this case, the Corellian freighter and her instructor's stream of questions. The graveyard was filled with pilots who had become overly-fixated on one problem or another, and simply flown right into the ground through sheer inattentiveness.

"Mid-point," she announced, smoothly nudging the sensitive collective control into a left-hand turn and easing the throttle back with light pressure from her fingertips. The sleek fighter's plunge moderated slightly as the pitch of the whining ion engines lowered slightly, but they still fell through the sky with purpose. Micki added rate of descent and pitch instruments to her scan until the turn was complete. As she turned, her right hand flicked across a number of switches, touching some to verify their position, and setting others to the desired state. Her eyes never strayed from the scan as she worked by touch. Clouds still obscured the spaceport below, but she trusted that the electronic path drawn by the landing software would get them down safely. As she turned and scanned, she keyed the microphone in her headset and spoke in clipped jargon. "Kakarfoon port control, Kestrel five-five, mid-point Eh-Gee-Ess approach bay two-two."

"Kestrel five five, Kakarfoon port control," replied a female voice over the radio. In the background the indistinct chatter of dozens of other controllers could be heard. "Cleared to dock bay two-two, ceiling five-zero-zero."

"Five hundred," Micki said under her breath. She would have preferred a larger gap between the ground and the base of the clouds. At that height, the spaceport would appear with only seconds to spare before the landing maneuver.

"Stay on path," Davith said from the back, reassuringly.

"Doing fine," Micki answered coolly. She'd done approaches into lower cloud decks, so she spared two words to reassure her instructor that she was in control. "Altitude one thousand, final beacon." The starfighter plunged ahead. At the predicted altitude, they burst from the base of the clouds, and the docking bay loomed ahead of them. Micki disregarded the instruments now and flew with her head "outside the cockpit," guiding them to the ferrocrete landing pad by the seat of her pants. At the last moment she flared the fighter to a near-hover over the pad, then settled it gently into place with all three landing pads touching down as one.

"Don't shut down," Davith told Micki, as he reached for the canopy release.

"One more approach?" she asked.

"That's right," Davith replied as the canopy swivelled up and away. "You're doing this one solo. Bring it back in one piece and shut down. I'll be waiting in the pilot's lounge." He vaulted from the cockpit to the pavement below and walked away from his fighter, intentionally turning his back on his student and not looking back. His body language was meant to convey to Micki that she was all alone, and that nobody was watching over her now. It had its desired effect. Micki watched him walk away until he'd cleared the docking bay landing pad, then she thumbed the canopy release, settling it back into place.

"All-righty then," she said to herself, alone in the cockpit for the first time in her life. She put her excitement into a small box to be opened later, and focused on flying the starfighter.

Twenty minutes later:

Micki completed the solo flight without incident, and flew the entire loop as if Davith had been there watching over her shoulder the entire time, without as much as a barrel roll to celebrate her first solo flight. There were, Davith had told her, old spacers and bold spacers, but very few old bold spacers. Micki had taken that axiom for her own, having no desire to be identified by DNA analysis after being scraped from a smoldering hole in the ground.

As Micki clambered from the cockpit she was surprised that Davith was not waiting there in the docking bay. She'd expected a congratulatory reception, despite his instructions to meet him in the pilot's lounge afterwards. With a sigh, she unsnapped her flight helmet and tucked it under her arm and walked through the sheltered doorway which lead into the spaceport proper, and followed the corridors to the pilot's lounge. The ground always felt strange under her feet after she'd been flying; moving in two dimensions with gravity holding her to the floor felt quite limiting after experiencing the freedom of flight.

Micki waved her hand over the sensor panel which activated the sliding door into the pilot's lounge. Davith was sprawled on a battered sofa, and his helmet sat on the low table in front of the sofa. He waved cheerfully. Old video displays hung from the corners of the rooms, showing imagery of the atmospheric conditions, news, and observations from near space. The rest of the lounge was strangely deserted for mid-day. She'd expected to see Old Hap in his customary spot at his desk, spacers around the gaming table, other students being debriefed by their instructors-- but Davith was alone.

Micki did not notice that a few chairs had been pulled away from the foyer, creating a large open space in the room's near side.

"Welcome back kiddo," Davith said with a broad smile as he rose and stepped around the low table. "You know what happens now, don't you?"

Micki stopped, and looked around uncertainly.

"No?" she said slowly, drawing out the O sound.

"This happens!" shouted Old Hap as he sprang from beneath the gaming table and pounced on Micki, smothering her with a flying bear hug. Signalled by Old Hap's outburst, the other pilots emerged from their hiding spaces in the cramped lounge and joined the celebration. Micki held her feet--almost--and crumpled in a heap underneath the enthusiastic dogpile. In just a moment's time, Davith was the only one not yet collapsed in a heap in the foyer. At the bottom of the pile Micki giggled and laughed.

"C'mon Davith," said his friend and fellow pilot Jan Delancer, waving encouragingly from the top of the pile. "You're the last one!"

"Get ready Micki!" Davith shouted, and he leapt atop the pile, spreading his arms and legs wide.

"Eegah!" she squeaked at the sudden increase in pressure, but her eyes stayed in her head and she couldn't feel any broken bones. "Can I get up now?"

Laughing, the pilots disentangled themselves, and Jan extended a hand to Micki, jerking her suddenly to her feet with enough strength to loft her into the air.

"Boop!" Micki giggled, disoriented.

"Shirt! Shirt!" shouted Dak Renger, producing a fat-tipped marker pen from a pocket in his sleeve.

"Take off your shirt," Davith explained to Micki. "We'll all sign it. It's your solo shirt. All new pilots get one."

"I--" Micki began. "Hang on!" She turned her back to the men and unzipped her flight suit partway. Instead of a tee-shirt, she'd worn a sporting bra underneath. She shrugged out of it without exposing herself, then zipped back up. Turning around and flashing a wicked grin, she held up the white stretchy undergarment in her outstretched hands. "Here ya go!"

"I guess that'll work," Jan mused, stifling a chortle. He held the bra uncertainly, then signed his name and passed the marker to his right. One by one the pilots all signed her "solo shirt" and pumped her hand in congratulations.

"That's it, you're a pilot now, as far as I'm concerned," Davith said as he applied his own signature. He capped the pen. "From here on there's nothing new to learn; we'll keep practicing until you're ready for your flight test."

That night Micki slept in her autographed sports bra, and dreamed of flying among the stars.