trans_9 | Tyger, Tyger, burning bright [OPEN]

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Tyger, Tyger, burning bright [OPEN]

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.

The pod cavern should have prepared her for how huge the ship was, but when Trudy finally came to the hangar, with its assortment of craft in all shapes and sizes, she was thoroughly impressed with the vastness of her new home. The amount of ships here was staggering, and Trudy wandered through them with a grin plastered to her face. Man, I'd love to get inside some of these babies and see how they handle - or how they work...

A flash of blue and orange caught her eye and she turned, seeing her Samson sitting there. The grin on her face faltered a little as she crossed to it. The painted tiger on the door was stitched with bulled holes, and the copter as a whole was scorched almost black with soot. "Hey baby," she said, running her hand lovingly across the nose. "Looks like you came out of this a lot worse than I did. Pobrecita,"

She opened the door and hoisted herself up into the cockpit. The lever that would have popped the hood produced nothing but a tortured squeal. Apparently the mechanism had been damaged in the explosion. Trudy made a face and began digging through the cockpit for her tools.

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He frowned. "What kind of rebellion?"

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."

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

"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.

"And where were the armed forces?"

"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."

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."

"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.

"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."

"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."

"It's not fiction or magic or anything like that," he said. "We just don't understand how the ship does it yet."

"I'll leave the figuring out to people who know more about science than I do," Trudy said. "At least I have something here I can do to make myself useful. The General says he's short on pilots, and I'm a pilot. No-brainer, as far as I'm concerned."

"It could take a while to get used to it," he said dubiously. "From rotary propulsion to thrusters and projectiles to proton torpedoes?"

"So I'll spend extra time in the sims outside of training," Trudy said with a shrug. "It'll be a steep learning curve, but I'll manage." She grinned. "I always land on my feet, chico, you'll see."

Ben laughed. "At least you've got a solid commanding officer."

Trudy laughed, too. "No kidding. Anyone would have been better than Quaritch - an angry mountain banshee would be better than Quaritch, and probably more friendly - but I seem to have lucked out this time."

"Was he with the armed forces or the private team?"

"Quaritch was with SecOps - the private security forces. He was the one who made the call, and the one I told to go to hell." She looked around the chopper with a face that said if she ever got ahold of him she was going to kill him. "He's also the one that shot up bebe here."

"Ouch." He made a mental note never to tell her that he'd got a Star Destroyer to set fire to half a planet of dense forests as part of an attempt to assassinate his cousin. Somehow, it seemed like that wouldn't go over well. "But you don't remember how it ended?"

Trudy shook her head. "The last thing I remember was the missile coming my way, and then I ended up here. I think Stacy must have grabbed us just before we blew up - because it was a direct hit, and I saw it."

She sat down in one of the seats in the cargo area, smoothing her hand over the leather. "So without the ship, I would probably be dead right about now. That's one mark in her favor."

That didn't make Ben less suspicious of the ship, but it did make him hate it a little less for being a kidnapping hulk without real food. "So you're hopping a new fighter and going out again?"

"What else would I do, sit around with my thumb up my ass? Hope we landed on a planet so I could do some good in an atmosphere craft?" Trudy shook her head. "No, if I'm still alive, I'm still a pilot. And once a Marine, always a Marine as the saying goes - I get back out there. I can't not." She said it all very matter-of-factly, but there was definitely a note of fierce pride in her voice.

The few and the proud, after all.

He shrugged. Sure, he knew plenty of life-long servicemen and women, but as his mother had stopped being an assassin and started fighting the forces of evil, he was pretty sure she could have gone into boutique cupcake making if she really wanted. "Did General Antilles say how often the squad sorties?"

"I think most of the pilots are still in sim training," Trudy said. "He mentioned that we had a couple of pilots who'd never even been in a cockpit before - if I was him I wouldn't let them in the real thing yet either." She shrugged. "And besides - I don't want to chance flying out in that stuff."

"Yeah," he frowned, "but there's at least half a squad of pilots from our galaxy here. I wonder how often they fly out."

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright [OPEN]

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