him go.”
“Part of my job is to spot which of you kids will best help out down here, instead of getting yourselves killed up there.” He shoved me lightly toward the room. “His won’t be the only empty seat when this flight graduates. Go.”
I walked back into the room and settled into my mockpit as the implication of those words sank in. Cobb almost seemed happy to send one of us away. How many students had he watched get shot down?
“All right,” Cobb said. “Let’s see what you remember from yesterday. Strap in, put on your helmets, and power on the holographic projectors. Get your flight into the air, flightleader, and prove to me it hasn’t all bled out your ears into your pillows. Then maybe I can teach you how to really start flying.”
“And weapons?” Bim asked, eager.
“Scud, no,” Cobb said. “You’ll just shoot each other down by accident. Fundamentals first.”
“And if we get caught in the air again, fighting?” Arturo asked. I still had no idea how to say his callsign. Amphibious? Something like that?
“Then,” Cobb said, “you’ll have to hope that Quirk will shoot them down for you, boy. Enough lip! I gave you cadets an order!”
I strapped in and engaged the device—but took one last look at Rig’s empty seat as the hologram went up around me.
We spent the morning practicing how to turn in unison.
Flying a starfighter wasn’t like piloting some old airplane, like a few of the outer clans used. Our ships not only had acclivity rings to keep us in the air—no matter our speed or lack thereof—starfighters had powerful devices called atmospheric scoops, which left us much less at the whims of wind resistance.
Our wings still had their uses, and the presence of atmosphere could be handy for many reasons. We could perform a standard bank, turning our ship to the side and swinging around like a bird. But we could also perform some starship-style maneuvers, like just rotating our ship the direction we wanted to go, then boosting that direction.
I got to know the difference intimately as we performed both maneuvers over and over and over, until I was almost tired of flying.
Bim kept asking about weapons. The blue-haired boy had an enthusiastic, genuine way about him, which I liked. But I didn’t agree with his eagerness to shoot guns—if I was going to outfly Jerkface someday, I had to learn the fundamentals. Sloppy turns were exactly what had slowed me down in the skirmish yesterday. So if Cobb wanted me to turn, I’d turn. I’d turn until my fingers bled—until I rubbed the flesh from my hands and withered away to a skeleton.
A skeleton who could turn really, really well.
I followed the formation to the left, then jerked downward by reflex as Hurl turned too far on her axis and swooped too far in my direction. She smashed right into FM, whose invisible shield deflected the hit. But FM wasn’t good enough to compensate for the shove, and she went spinning out of control the other direction.
Both went down, smashing into the rock surface in a pair of twin explosions.
“Scud,” FM said. She was a prim one, with her golden boot latches and her stylish haircut.
Hurl, however, merely laughed. She did that a lot, enjoying herself perhaps too much. “Wow!” she said. “Now that was an explosion. How many points do I get for that performance, Cobb?”
“Points? You think this is a game, cadet?”
“Life is a game,” Hurl said.
“Yes, well, you just lost all your points and died,” Cobb said. “If you fall into an uncontrolled spin like that, eject.”
“Um . . . how do I do that, again?” Nedd asked.
“Seriously, Nedd?” Arturo asked. “We went over this yesterday. Look at the lever between your legs. See the big E on it? What do you think that stands for?”
“I figured it meant emergency.”
“And what do you do when there’s an emergency? In a fighter? You . . .”
“Call you,” Nedd said. “And say, ‘Hey Arturo. Where’s the scudding eject lever?’ ”
Arturo sighed. I grinned, looking out my window toward the next ship in formation—I could barely see the girl inside. Morningtide, her tattoo visible even with her helmet on. She glanced away sharply. Not even a smile.
Fine.
“Fly back in,” Cobb said to us. “It’s nearly time for lunch.”
“Fly back in?” Bim complained. “Can’t we just turn off the holograms and go grab some grub?”
“Sure. Turn it off, get something to eat, then keep walking on back to where you came