From a Certain Point of View

by Seth Dickinson

  —

  One shift ends. Sleepwell pills; supposed to pack a whole night’s rest into a quick nap, but all they ever give me is bad dreams. Shower. Two precious hours in the rack. Next shift begins. Alarm goes off, pop a stim, the motion of opening the bottle so automatic I could do it in total darkness. Feel my heart slam against my ribs, limbs shaky with nervous, chemical energy. Roll out of bed half naked, climb straight into my flight suit. One of the cloudflies stares like he’s never seen a girl before I zip up. Maybe he hasn’t. Lot of weird planets in the Outer Rim.

  This shift’s assignment glows red on a wall screen, but I don’t bother reading it. It’s the same as the shift before, and the shift before that. Patrol the edge of the asteroid field by half flights, make sure nothing gets out.

  Down the gangway, slide down a ladder, moving by feel and memory, the Star Destroyer Avenger’s blueprints now a part of my blood and bones. Grab my helmet from the rack in the ready room, round the corner to the hangar, swing myself into the nearest docking tube.

  A cockpit so tight the only way in is to hang from the hatch rail and lower yourself into the seat. Foam cradles me as I settle in, my hands moving in more automatic reflexes—air hose slots into the back of my suit, restraint straps click in beside it. My fingers flick switches, powering up comms, navigation, flight control, glowing lights rippling around me in cascades of red and green. Displays come to life with a rising hum.

  The TIE/ln. Home, sweet home.

  * * *

  —

  Rule number two: Don’t be a hero.

  When you join up, you get a speech about how we are the true defenders of the Empire, the real front line, where durasteel meets vacuum, and that means upholding the proud traditions of blah blah blah. A lot of cloudflies take this speech very seriously, I guess. Or else they’re just so happy to be off whatever dirtball gave birth to them that the sheer exuberance drives them to push the limits, cut the corners, and end up a thin carbonized smear on some tumbling rock.

  You know what the leading cause of exploding cloudflies is? Definitely not rebel blasters. It’s running into things, or else running into one another. It makes sense, when you think about it. There aren’t that many rebels, but there’s a whole galaxy full of stuff to smash into.

  They must tell them this in basic training. They certainly told me. But there are always some who think they’re going to make that turn, beat that blast door closed, dodge that rock, and then, well. Crunch, boom, plastoid medal, the Emperor thanks you for your sacrifice, citizen.

  Don’t fly slow. That just gets you a different kind of dead. But fly careful. And never be the one in front.

  * * *

  —

  “Attention Theta Squadron.” Lieutenant Obrax’s voice in my ear. “Prepare to receive a message from Captain Needa.”

  A tiny holo appears above my controls, blue and flickering. I’ve never met the captain of the Avenger in person, but he’s familiar from a hundred announcements like this one. Arch and aristocratic, like so many of the Empire’s elite. He glares like he’s disappointed with me in particular.

  “Lord Vader has impressed on me that this mission continues to be one of the utmost importance to the Empire,” he says. “It demands constant vigilance and attention to duty. If I discover any pilots returning after failing to complete their assigned patrol, I will personally escort them out the nearest air lock. I hope that’s sufficiently clear.”

  The holo cuts out. Motivational speaking, Imperial Navy style.

  My comm lights up with a private channel from Howl.

  “And then I will personally piss into the air lock,” she intones, mocking Needa’s Core accent. “And then I will personally fly the ship into a sun before pushing you out, because that’s just how angry I will be. Do I make myself clear?”

  I make sure I’m not on the general channel before snickering, another old instinct.

  “You should put together a show,” I tell her. “We could sell tickets.”

  “Wait till you hear my Vader.” She mimes heavy, raspy breathing.

  Lieutenant Obrax comes on again. “You heard the captain,” he says. “No excuses. Lock down and prep for launch.”

  I put my helmet on, hear the click of the latch and the hiss as ozone-scented air fills my nose. Flip another few switches and my machine rumbles to life, twin ion engines projecting a familiar buzz I can feel in my teeth. Test the controls, stick, foot pedals, exterior thrusters twisting in response. I glance at the diagnostics, see green lights. Flip on the comm.

  “Theta Four, go for launch.” Among ourselves, we go by our chosen nicknames—mine is “Shadow”—but only elite hotshots can get away with using them when command is listening.

  “Theta Seven, go for launch.” That’s Howl, only moments behind me.

  The other four pilots in my half flight are cloudflies. Fresh recruits. The best of them has only been with us four months. The worst came in a week ago, just before we deployed to Hoth. Hell of a time to start your tour.

  “Theta Eleven, go for launch.”

  “Theta Thirteen, go for launch.”

  “Theta Eighteen, go for launch.”

  “Theta Twenty-Two, go for launch.”

  Clipper and Dawn, Flameskull and Shockwave. The latter are good examples of why you shouldn’t let recruits pick their own nicknames.

  “Theta Squadron, launch,” Obrax says. “Glory to the Empire!”

  The docking clamp extends out into the cargo bay with a whine of hydraulics, then lets go. My TIE drops through the insubstantial blue of the atmo shield and out into the black.

  * * *

  —

  Rule number three: Don’t go at them head-on.

  I know, it’s not what the tactics manual says. Listen, though.

  If you manage to keep from crashing into things for long enough, eventually you’re going to find yourself going up against an actual enemy starfighter. It’s what we’re here for, after all. For the last few years, that’s usually meant rebels.

  The tactics manual says that a TIE squadron, twenty-four ships strong, should endeavor to go directly at enemy starfighters, maximizing the number of guns on target. The Academy geniuses who wrote this calculate thusly: maximum firepower, maximum casualties on both sides. Some of ours go down, some of theirs go down. We have more pilots and fighters than they do, because we’re the Empire, so we win. Glory to the Empire!

  As a bonus, recommending this approach means you don’t need to spend that much time prepping your pilots, because any half-trained womp rat can fly straight at the bad guys and hold down the FIRE button until he gets blown into flaming dust, right?

  Right. So. A couple of things.

  It’s easy to feel invincible in a TIE, if you haven’t taken one into battle before. It seems big and solid, and the practice targets blow in a satisfying way when you hit them with the rapid-fire lasers.

  It’s easy to forget that the rebels fly X-wings, A-wings, B-wings, Y-wings. They seem to have a lot of credits and not a lot of pilots (easier to find people willing to support the Cause with a few credits than actually jump in the cockpit and die for it, I guess), so they fly ships with little amenities like “shields” and “armor” and “hyperdrives” and “repair astromechs.” The ship that we fly, on the other hand, was meticulously designed by the brains at Sienar Fleet Systems to be the absolute cheapest platform that can carry a laser cannon a few thousand kilometers.

  So you go in head-on. Pew pew pew! And the X-wing’s shields barely flicker, and it starts to fire back, and you realize very briefly that it has twice your firepower plus a rack of proton torpedoes, and then, you know. Thank you for your service, et cetera.

  Thank you very much for the tactics manual, Academy geniuses. It’s all well and good saying that we can trade two for one with the enemy and come out ahead, but
I’m not volunteering to be part of the two, and neither should you, if you can help it.

  * * *

  —

  We skirt the edge of the asteroid field, engines building up to their endless shriek as we head to our patrol zone.

  That sound, like a cross between an angry beast and a groundcar skidding on wet asphalt. They say it drives some pilots crazy, but I love it. It’s ugly and angry, perfect for the TIE. When we swoop in on the enemy it’s like the machines themselves are screaming with rage.

  Not that there’s any enemy here, of course. Just space, lots of empty space, a three-dimensional zone encompassing one side of the asteroid field where we fly the prescribed search pattern, an ever-expanding spiral. What we’re in for, probably, is four hours of hot nothing, then back to the ship for a recharge and out again for four more. It’s fine with me. In my book, it’s a good day when nobody’s shooting at you.

  Shockwave disagrees. (However stupid the nickname, it’s easier than memorizing a new cloudfly’s designator every time one dies.) “If I have to fly past these scum-sucking rocks one more time…”

  “It’s a different zone than yesterday,” Howl says. “So these are new and unfamiliar rocks.”

  “Could be worse,” Flameskull says. “The bomber squadrons actually have to go into the mess. They’ve been blasting, trying to spook the bastards into moving.”

  “What, exactly, are we supposed to be tracking down out here?” Dawn’s the longest-lived of our cloudflies. She seems nice enough. But. Rule number one.

  “A modified YT-1300 light freighter.” This from Clipper. Clipper is an Academy boy. That means he chose to be here, unlike the rest of us, who just tested high in the right categories on the conscript intake exams. Academy boys all want to get promoted out of the TIE/ln squadrons as soon as they can, get themselves at least an interceptor, start climbing the ranks, maybe shoot for the Imperial Guards. Never trust Academy boys. Maybe I should make that a rule.

  “Yeah, I read the mission brief,” Dawn says. “But why have we got half the fleet chasing after one busted old freighter?”

  It’s a reasonable question. But this is the Imperial Navy, we don’t do reasonable questions.

  “Ask Lord Vader,” Howl says. “But be ready for a real short conversation.”

  The spiral expands outward. The rocks tumble and wheel in the light of the distant sun. My mind goes blank, as though my fighter is disappearing around me, and I’m the one flying through hard vacuum. The smallest twitch of my fingers pulses the thrusters, sends me into a gentle turn, easy as thought.

  * * *

  —

  Rule number four: Learn to love your machine.

  This one might surprise you, given that I spent the last rule crapping all over the TIE/ln. But. But.

  They built this thing, this ugly piece-of-junk made-by-the-lowest-bidder mass-production death trap, and somehow—presumably by accident—they made something beautiful. It turns out, when you take away the shields and the armor and the hyperdrive and all the rest, when you strip a starfighter down to the absolute bare minimum, what you’re left with flies like a damn dream.

  There’s no excess weight on it anywhere, because excess weight might cost money. It has power to spare, and it twists and curves like an exotic dancer. You can pull moves that, if Joe Rebel tried it in his X-wing, he’d find it coming apart around him. Only the A-wing comes close, but the A-wing is a creature of straight lines and raw force, all thrust and no finesse.

  TIEs are all about finesse. Fly it long enough, and you learn when to tickle the thrusters with a light touch, when to jam the throttle in and push the stick hard over, how to spin and roll and come out right behind some meathead, guns blazing.

  I knew a guy who got the promotion every TIE pilot dreams of, up to driving a Lambda shuttle. A nice, safe bus with plenty of shields to protect the brass. After a month, he gave it up, transferred back to the line squadrons. He said he missed the rush.

  At the time, I didn’t understand it. It wasn’t until I saw Howl fly that I really grasped how you could fall in love with this machine.

  * * *

  —

  Howl transferred to the Avenger about six months before Hoth. Two years since Yavin and things were still hot, rebel cells flaring up and Imperial command determined to crack down, show that the loss of the Death Star had only been a minor setback. We were way understrength, and basic training could barely crank out cloudflies fast enough.

  But Howl wasn’t a cloudfly. She’d been flying nearly as long as I had, already on her third tour. That she was still in a line squadron after so long told me that she either had no ambition (like me) or was a terminal screwup (also like me, depending on who you ask). So I was interested enough to look up when she reported to the squad in the middle of mess, and I had to admit I liked what I saw. Hair dark as space, just a little longer than regulation, lips the color of a fresh bruise quirked with a hint of sarcastic smile. Not everyone can pull off the Imperial dress uniform—I look like a ten-year-old boy—but she managed.

  In a mess full of teenage cloudflies, I wasn’t the only one looking, of course. I think five boys and two girls offered to bunk with her that first night, and she sent them all down in flames. Canny operator that I am, I held back for a while.

  Okay, I was just chicken. I’m better in a cockpit than I am with people. “Amara Kel’s Rules for Getting Laid Aboard a Star Destroyer” would be a really short book.

  As luck would have it, though, Howl and I got put on patrol together, so we had a lot of time to get to know each other out in the black. On one of our first shifts, I asked her what a Howlrunner was.

  “It’s a canid native to Kamar,” she told me as our TIEs screamed through the big empty. “Massive, nasty-looking thing with a skull for a face. Hunts humans, if it gets the chance.”

  “Is that where you’re from?” I asked. “Kamar?”

  She laughed. “Kamar’s a desert full of talking bugs. I just saw a holo and thought it sounded cool. Plus everyone else in basic was picking names like ‘Stormsmasher’ and ‘Foe-Render’ so I didn’t want to get left out.”

  I laughed out loud. What I’d learned on these patrols was that under her polished exterior, Howl was something of a goofball. The combination did warm squishy things to my insides, and I had to breathe and remind myself to remember rule number one.

  “So why Shadow?” she said, a little while later. We were far enough out that command wasn’t going to be listening in.

  “Dunno,” I mumbled. Nobody had ever asked me that before. “Nobody notices a shadow, right?”

  About a week later, things got hot again, thanks to Imperial Intelligence. Now, any TIE pilot—any navy officer, really—can tell you all kinds of stories about Imperial Intelligence and the thrilling works of fiction they produce, safe behind their keypads. This was actually one of their better moments, considering. The rebel supply base was right where they said it would be, in a derelict Clone Wars–era deep-space installation. Only they’d missed the little detail that the rebels had been there awhile, so they’d repaired the defenses and upgunned the place into something closer to a battle station. When the Avenger dropped out of hyperspace at close range, it took only a few broadsides before Captain Needa decided he didn’t like the way things were going. He backed off and told the bombers to work the place over a bit to make it more digestible, and we went along as escort. The rebels had anticipated this, naturally, and some X-wings and A-wings came out to join the party.

  Some days, you can tell things are junked right from the start. We didn’t have anything like the numbers we needed—maybe sixty TIEs against two dozen rebels, and most of ours were cloudflies going into their first engagement. Our lieutenant tried to keep our squad together, blazing away as five X-wings came right down our throat, which worked as well as it usually does. I clipped one of the re
bels, sending it spinning off into the black, but the lieutenant went boom along with four others, and the cloudflies panicked and scattered. Then it was down to a mess of little dogfights, which tends to favor the side with ships that don’t explode at the drop of a hat.

  I did what I could, sliding in behind a flight of three A-wings smooth as you could ask for, raking one with fire until its shields flared out and the ship broke apart. The remaining two split up, one of them punching in full thrust while the other threw itself into a tight turn to get on my tail. Apparently nobody taught the pilot not to get into an ass-kicking contest with a Maxilian megapede, though, because a TIE/ln will out-turn any starfighter ever built. I twisted the stick, jammed the pedals, and screamed through an arc so tight that the force coming past the inertial compensator was enough to squeeze my eyeballs. It worked, though, and the A-wing lost me completely. Soon as it evened out, I was on it, and I watched the starfighter spin into the side of the station and go up in a fireball.

  That bought me time to take a leisurely turn and look out at the battle. We were losing, bad. Someone screamed over the comm. Sounded like Drake, which would be a pain. She owed me thirty credits.

  Rule number one, right?

  “Theta Four!” Howl’s voice in my ear. “I’m on the leader! Could use some help!”

  I found her on my scopes, twisting and dodging with a red-painted X-wing. The rebel was good, a veteran for sure, lasers spitting just aft of Howl’s gyrating ship. I could dive in, take a pass at him, but X-wings are sturdier than A-wings and it would probably just make him mad. Any minute now we were going to get the order to pull out—

  I snarled a word that would have drawn a rebuke from the lieutenant, if he weren’t a red mist already. “I’ll try to tag him, get ready to break—”

  “Just come in bearing three-twenty-six by ten and go into a left skid,” Howl said. “I’ll handle the rest.”