Chapter One Arturo #3
“Flight liaison,” Nedd said. “I’d be in charge of finding out what the pilots need to do their jobs better and relaying that to Command.”
Huh. In the past, the DDF was too consumed with ensuring the survival of humanity to care much about the needs of individual pilots.
Now that we’d leveled out into a consistent flight path, Nedd’s ship flew steady and smooth.
“You’d be good at that,” I said. Nedd had a way of putting people at ease.
He played dumb, always pretending to be too stupid to understand anything serious or painful.
In school, I was always the smart one. I’d sure thought I knew a lot as a cadet, and Nedd had fallen into step beside me, filling the role I left him. People took him at face value.
I used to feel bad about that. Then I realized Nedd played dumb to avoid responsibility, proving he was the smart one after all. “Did you take it?”
The platforms ticked by beneath us like tiles on a hallway floor. “Not yet. Do you think I should?”
“It’s a good opportunity.”
“Would you take it?” he asked.
And give up flying? “No,” I admitted. “Not if I had a choice.”
“You’d stay with the flight?” Nedd asked. “Even if you could only be a copilot?”
“I don’t think I could let the flight go on without me,” I said. “Stay back while my friends kept fighting? Watch the next time you all flew into danger?”
“Theoretically,” Nedd said, “the fighting and danger are past now. The Superiority’s gone. There’s no one left for us to fight.”
I should be happy about that. I was happy that we were free, that we could make our own destiny in the galaxy now, that we no longer had to fly into battle, losing more people we loved.
But it also meant that the kind of flying I loved—the rush of a well-executed turn, the thrill of the perfect destructor shot—was obsolete.
As pilots, we used to be the most revered members of our society’s finely tuned war machine, but what use were we in times of peace?
So many people I’d flown with had gone on to build things, discover things, lead our people into the future.
My skills used to be the most essential to humanity’s survival, but we now faced a future where they’d be essentially useless.
Nedd angled his ship upward, shooting out ahead of me. We climbed higher, toward the glittering masses of stars. I wondered how many of them had planets with people just like us, trying to figure out where they fit in the universe.
“I’d stay with the flight,” I said. “Even as a copilot. You can keep practicing, and eventually we’ll get you reinstated as a pilot.
” Maybe practice would be enough. If not, maybe we could eventually alter a ship to fly one-handed.
Maybe some planet in the galaxy had better prosthetic technology.
We knew a lot of things now we didn’t know before, and there was still more to discover.
“I’d keep flying as long as I could. What about you? Would you rather stay behind?”
Nedd fell silent, because I knew the answer.
Detritus grew smaller below us, the individual platforms fading into a sliding mass of debris. “If I do stay with the flight,” Nedd said, “you need to appoint a new assistant flightleader. I can’t lead if I can’t fly.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “There’s no regulation saying a copilot can’t outrank the pilot of his ship. It could be an asset, even. Having someone else do the flying will free you up to pay more attention to the battlefield.”
“Good point,” Nedd said. “Maybe you should fly copilot too.”
I shut my mouth. I’d walked into that one, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to ride side-seat if I could help it.
We continued to angle up into the black, the sun at our backs. The higher we went, the less anchored I felt—we were just two small dots in a great sea of nothing, while the world below went on without us.
“I’ll think about replacing you,” I said. “Until then, you’re staying on as assistant flightleader, copilot or not.”
“Okay,” Nedd said. “I’ll stay.”
I rocked my head back against the headrest. I hadn’t meant to push him into turning down the liaison job. “You sure?”
“Yeah,” Nedd said. “You’re right. Next time Jorgen finds something that needs to be shot at, I don’t want to stay home.”
He sounded confident that would happen, that our people couldn’t be at peace forever. That was the peril of growing up under constant barrage, knowing that the enemy could destroy your entire civilization at any minute. We were born with one eye to the sky, watching for danger.
“That’s the decision I’d make,” I said. “I hope it’s the right one.”
Nedd was silent for a moment. “Amphi?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think your mom would be any angrier if we flew a while longer?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t care. We can fly as long as you want.”
“Thanks.” Nedd shot off above the platforms, not following them too closely, but edging along the curvature of the planet.
We were running from the inevitable. We were entering a new era—one where, sooner or later, we’d both end up grounded.
So I would keep running as long as I could.