Tyger, Tyger, burning bright [OPEN]

[we_deliver]

It hadn't taken Trudy very long to find out that aircraft and spacecraft were sometimes recovered with their pilots - and when she found that out, she had immediately gone in search of the hangar. She had her rifle and her dog tags - if she had her Samson, she would have everything she needed out of life

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[sithhavecooties]

He'd spent most of his time exploring the ship just to observe, but here, in the sprawling hangar chamber, he had a more personal goal: to find the Jade Shadow tucked away behind a yacht or gunboat. He passed at least a squadron's worth of X-Wings, the familiar disc of the Millenium Falcon, and ships he didn't recognize at all, even after years of watching the Coruscant skyline.

But the Shadow was nowhere to be seen.

That made sense, he thought, with a passing twinge of bitterness. The Shadow wasn't his ship, after all. Legally, it was his father's, and, even years after her death, the heart and soul of the ship was still his mother's, from the engine to the most insignificant switch on the control board. And if Mara Jade were too young to get along with his father here, there was no way she'd fly anything that had been a gift from her future husband

[we_deliver]

"I don't know about you, but those weren't stars I saw outside the windows earlier," Trudy said. She was staring at the tiger on the door of her Samson, a frown pulling at her face. "If the ship travels through dimensions like she says - which so far seems to be true, since people get pulled from different times in the same place - I'm not so sure we wouldn't get ripped to pieces the minute we tried to launch outside."

She shook her head. "For now I'd suggest we keep our heads down and see what happens. That work for you, kid?"

[sithhavecooties]

He rolled his eyes. "Great. Waiting."

[we_deliver]

Trudy reached out to ruffle the kid's hair absently. He reminded her of some of the younger kids that had been in her squadron, the green ones just out of basic. "Lighten up, kiddo, patience is a virtue. Besides, I don't know about you but I could use a little bit of down time."

[sithhavecooties]

Ben grimaced at the gesture and shook his head to undo the damage to his painstakingly-maintained messiness. "What, you're tired after all that hibernating?"

[we_deliver]

"Cold sleep makes me wish I had some real sleep," Trudy said. "And even that aside, I got nabbed from the end of a stress-inducing rebellion where I almost got my fool ass killed. PT and pilot training are all the excitement I want to look forward to for a long while."

She smiled a little as he smoothed his hair back down. That was a very 'teenage' gesture.

[sithhavecooties]

He frowned. "What kind of rebellion?"

[we_deliver]

Trudy opened the door to the cargo space, slinging it wide and climbing up into it to have a look around. The cargo area didn't look as badly damaged as the rest of the craft - looked like the cockpit had taken the brunt of the damage.

"The natives on Pandora were sitting right on top of some kind of valuable mineral the company I did security for wanted. My CO decided it wasn't worth convincing them to move, and started blowing them all up." She paused in her search, bending down to pick up the photograph of the Pandoran sunset she'd kept in her cockpit. It must have gotten sucked out here when the thing depressurized. "I told him to go to hell."

[sithhavecooties]

His eyebrows shot up. "Xenocide by private security corps?"

[we_deliver]

"Pretty much," Trudy said. She scowled down at the picture, remembering. "Apparently it wasn't 'cost effective' to just drill elsewhere. It had to be under Hometree. There's a day I would rather forget," she muttered, smoothing her hand over the picture.

[sithhavecooties]

"And where were the armed forces?"

[we_deliver]

"You mean like the actual army?" Trudy shook her head. "Lightyears and a five-year spaceflight away. SecOps was way more technologically advanced than the Na'vi, and by the time the news got back to Earth it would have already been done." She sat down in one of the chairs in the cargo area. "I hope the Na'vi ended up winning it, but it didn't look like it was going to good from where I was flying."

[sithhavecooties]

A five-year trip for a couple lightyears? "You're new to spaceflight!" he said, a little surprised. "That's why you're still using atmosphere craft."

[we_deliver]

"New relatively speaking," Trudy said. "Our world has had spaceflight capabilities since the 1970's by our calendar. Quick jaunts to our moon and back, exploratory government missions. Twenty years after that we were mounting unmanned missions within the solar system, but nobody saw a real need for space travel. We'd never found other hospitable worlds, never had contact with alien life..." Trudy shrugged. "Most people said it was a waste to sink money into the spaceflight program."

"That's when we started to seriously find out how bad we'd screwed up our own planet. Time to move - there was a big push to develop inter-system flight through the 2080s, about a hundred years after the first missions. It took us a while to perfect it - 2154, and the best we've got is still slower-than-light with the aid of cryogenics." She shook her head.

[sithhavecooties]

"Woah." Casual faster-than-light travel had always been present in Ben's life -- from the Star Destroyer he'd been born on to the yacht he and his father had called home since the start of his father's exile. There were groups that chose to stay planetside, like many of the Dathomiri clans, but no mobile sentients without hyperdrive access. "Our galaxy -- and even some other galaxies out in the universe -- has had hyperspace travel for thousands of years. See the fighters out there?" He gestured at the X-Wings. "They've all got hyperdrives. Unless you're traveling to the edge of the galaxy, most trips take a few days."

[we_deliver]

"Yeah, that's what General Antilles said. Guess I'm going to have to learn how to work it if I'm going to fly in them, huh?" She looked at the photograph for a second longer and then tucked it in one of the pockets of her plantsuit. Pandora was gone now and there was no reason to keep brooding over it. "Faster-than-light travel. It's like something out of science fiction."

Trudy laughed a little at herself. "What am I saying, I'm on an interdimensional spaceship that's alive. My whole life is science fiction now."