OOM: escaping Ossus
When she returns to Ossus, it is once more under the cover of night. She takes the same paths she did before, but this time she does not try to avoid the holocams.
She doesn't need to worry about getting back to the Milliways door this time-- it's a one-way trip, from the comm room to the hanger. Let them see her-- they won't figure out what she's doing in time to stop her. Perhaps if she looks casual enough, they won't even notice one lone trainee walking the halls at odd hours.
-------
This is what it is like to fly an X-Wing:
The cockpit is tiny, almost like a coffin except you're bent at the knees and waist rather than being laid out flat and the ceiling is transparisteel, all the better to watch the stars wheel around you as you dodge incoming fire. You can only see out of the top, can't tell what's below you unless you check the sensors with their swirl of Identify Friend/Foe designation lights. Alarms that shriek when you're hit, different tones for different emergencies and flashing sigils when systems fail.
Inertial compensators let you choose how much motion to feel, keep you from blacking out during more difficult maneuvers. There's the infrasonic rumble of sublight engines, fading to empty stillness in hyperspace.
It's cramped in an X-wing's cockpit, all rigid alloys and buckles and helmets and shoes. You can't stretch, you can't relax, you can't do anything but look out at the cold stars you're separated from by the thinnest transparent shell.
There's the smell of oil and electronics and sometimes sparks and smoke and death, making you choke on the already thin canned atmosphere. Oxygen is what causes those pretty fireballs when your wingmates die around you.
There's the targeting computer whistling insistently for attention, one more distraction in a riotous sea of noise and color.
This is what it is like to fly a coralcraft:
The cockpit is still tiny, yes, but it's not crushing and rigid and claustrophobic-- here you are wrapped in the loving embrace of the cognition hood, arms sunk to the elbow in control gloves. It's warmer too... not the cold impersonality of a machine, but the comfortable bloodheat of a friend, a partner.
And oh, the cognition hood-- the ship is no longer your tool, to be directed with cold logic. You are the ship. The sensors are your eyes, the yorik coral hull your flesh and the dovin basal your own beating heart. When a laser passes too closely you feel the bubbling path it leaves behind, your stomach drops as the dizzying turns pull you out of harm's way and give you the sense that you really are flying. You feel the frozen starlight on your skin and the cold doesn't touch you.
Alarms come not in shrieking howls but the adrenaline rushed scents of fear and danger and the musky odor of victory when the last of your enemies have been eliminated. What lights there are pulse like a cloud of firegnats in summer.
The bond between ship and pilot reminds Tahiri of the one between Ghorfa and Bantha, and that is comforting in more ways than she can name.
-------
Sekot's ships are somewhere between Alliance and Yuuzhan Vong, walking the thin edge of compatibility with both. The one Tahiri and Tekli took when they answered UnuThul's call is still parked in the hanger on Ossus. It is sick, dying-- Tahiri sees it and cannot help but think of her poor robeskin, neglected so far from home. How it sickened and died because she did not care for it enough.
These ships need Zonama Sekot as much as she does. She hopes that it will be strong enough to get her back to the living planet, because it is the only ship that will be able to find its way. As long as the Bothan Ar'kai continues, Zonama Sekot will stay hidden in the Unknown Regions, away from the rest of the galaxy. The half-living vessel is Tahiri's only connection, her only chance to find the sentient planet.
She wakes the small vessel with a light hand on the controls, a brush with the Force as though kissing its forehead, asking it to warm the engines as quietly as possible. Flight Control is bored and swapping gossip with the trainees coming in from their planetary patrol shift-- Tahiri had counted on this. Make a break for it while the doors are still open... though the Sekotan ship is parked farther back than she likes, she thinks they can make it.
Then the main engines come online and the comm crackles, asking why the ship is powering up. Tahiri bites her lip, gives a poodoo answer about taking the ship up with the next XJ-Wing shift that FC doesn't believe, but the repulsors kick in and she guns the engines anyway, hoping that being exposed to so many pilots has rubbed off enough to get the two of them off the planet in one piece.
She doesn't need to worry about getting back to the Milliways door this time-- it's a one-way trip, from the comm room to the hanger. Let them see her-- they won't figure out what she's doing in time to stop her. Perhaps if she looks casual enough, they won't even notice one lone trainee walking the halls at odd hours.
-------
This is what it is like to fly an X-Wing:
The cockpit is tiny, almost like a coffin except you're bent at the knees and waist rather than being laid out flat and the ceiling is transparisteel, all the better to watch the stars wheel around you as you dodge incoming fire. You can only see out of the top, can't tell what's below you unless you check the sensors with their swirl of Identify Friend/Foe designation lights. Alarms that shriek when you're hit, different tones for different emergencies and flashing sigils when systems fail.
Inertial compensators let you choose how much motion to feel, keep you from blacking out during more difficult maneuvers. There's the infrasonic rumble of sublight engines, fading to empty stillness in hyperspace.
It's cramped in an X-wing's cockpit, all rigid alloys and buckles and helmets and shoes. You can't stretch, you can't relax, you can't do anything but look out at the cold stars you're separated from by the thinnest transparent shell.
There's the smell of oil and electronics and sometimes sparks and smoke and death, making you choke on the already thin canned atmosphere. Oxygen is what causes those pretty fireballs when your wingmates die around you.
There's the targeting computer whistling insistently for attention, one more distraction in a riotous sea of noise and color.
This is what it is like to fly a coralcraft:
The cockpit is still tiny, yes, but it's not crushing and rigid and claustrophobic-- here you are wrapped in the loving embrace of the cognition hood, arms sunk to the elbow in control gloves. It's warmer too... not the cold impersonality of a machine, but the comfortable bloodheat of a friend, a partner.
And oh, the cognition hood-- the ship is no longer your tool, to be directed with cold logic. You are the ship. The sensors are your eyes, the yorik coral hull your flesh and the dovin basal your own beating heart. When a laser passes too closely you feel the bubbling path it leaves behind, your stomach drops as the dizzying turns pull you out of harm's way and give you the sense that you really are flying. You feel the frozen starlight on your skin and the cold doesn't touch you.
Alarms come not in shrieking howls but the adrenaline rushed scents of fear and danger and the musky odor of victory when the last of your enemies have been eliminated. What lights there are pulse like a cloud of firegnats in summer.
The bond between ship and pilot reminds Tahiri of the one between Ghorfa and Bantha, and that is comforting in more ways than she can name.
-------
Sekot's ships are somewhere between Alliance and Yuuzhan Vong, walking the thin edge of compatibility with both. The one Tahiri and Tekli took when they answered UnuThul's call is still parked in the hanger on Ossus. It is sick, dying-- Tahiri sees it and cannot help but think of her poor robeskin, neglected so far from home. How it sickened and died because she did not care for it enough.
These ships need Zonama Sekot as much as she does. She hopes that it will be strong enough to get her back to the living planet, because it is the only ship that will be able to find its way. As long as the Bothan Ar'kai continues, Zonama Sekot will stay hidden in the Unknown Regions, away from the rest of the galaxy. The half-living vessel is Tahiri's only connection, her only chance to find the sentient planet.
She wakes the small vessel with a light hand on the controls, a brush with the Force as though kissing its forehead, asking it to warm the engines as quietly as possible. Flight Control is bored and swapping gossip with the trainees coming in from their planetary patrol shift-- Tahiri had counted on this. Make a break for it while the doors are still open... though the Sekotan ship is parked farther back than she likes, she thinks they can make it.
Then the main engines come online and the comm crackles, asking why the ship is powering up. Tahiri bites her lip, gives a poodoo answer about taking the ship up with the next XJ-Wing shift that FC doesn't believe, but the repulsors kick in and she guns the engines anyway, hoping that being exposed to so many pilots has rubbed off enough to get the two of them off the planet in one piece.