Max Sterling thought of all those times he and the rest of White Flight had spent hours on combat standby. Hours sitting buttoned up in the cockpits of their Valkyries, parked at the ready on the Prometheus's bow cats, ready to be hurled into action at a moment's notice if the need should arise. Sometimes the need did arise, and the rest of the day was very hectic indeed. Other times, nothing happened, and after long, tedious hours the fighters returned to their hangars deep within the megacarrier's hull, the pilots to climb out and return to quarters, exhausted from having spent a day doing nothing at all.

Of course, there was none of the uncertainty here. Max knew he was going to get his chance to fly today; he just had to wait for Kozue Kaoru and her Viper Mark X to return to the field, and then Evaluation Control would call and tell him to get his ass in the air. It'd be his turn to show the evaluators what his ride could do. And Kaoru was on her way back now. Max was listening to the traffic on the various base frequencies with one ear while he killed time by playing Thexder on his center multifunction display. He'd heard Eval Control give her the vector back to the field.

He was going over his flight plan in his head, as he almost always did before a sortie—going over the moves in his head, envisioning how the whole thing was going to go down. This was a simple enough mission, a basic capabilities flight not unlike a thousand regular tests he'd flown before. It wasn't going to require much, either of him or of the Valkyrie.

He'd just reached the ninth level of Thexder and the gunnery range portion of his mental flight exercise when a voice detached itself from the faint murmur of the comm channels in his ear and drew his attention, despite the fact that it spoke calmly and clearly, just with the words it spoke:

"Control, I have a little problem here."

Max paused his game, sat back in his seat, closed his eyes, and very gently adjusted the gain knob on his commset. An outside observer wouldn't have thought he was doing anything but putting the game up and relaxing a bit, anticipating the call to launch.

Sounds like Kaoru's got a glitch, he thought, fine-tuning the frequency a little more, filtering out the background noise. Let's see how she handles it.

He listened, unmoving, as the Colonial pilot described a complete loss of flight control response to Eval Control and her own ground support team. Within a few seconds, it became apparent that something was gravely wrong with her Viper's fly-by-wire system. Max had had such things happen in his career; they were alarming, but often recoverable. As the seconds ticked past, though, and the tension built in Kaoru's voice, Max felt cool dread creeping slowly up his spine.

"X-Ray One, you may have a flight computer overrun," said the voice of one of the Colonial ground crew. "Recommend you try SCE to AUX."

Excellent, Max thought. That's a sharp tech. Most people, even most pilots, don't know that starfighter system control energizers have an auxiliary mode.

He knew for certain that Kozue Kaoru was in bad trouble when he heard her reply, "Nothing. The button doesn't even light... ohh, here we go!"

Max didn't break into the channel to offer his own sage advice; he could hear that the Colonial team was doing everything doable. They didn't need him butting in on the radio... but unless he was very much mistaken, they were going to need him in the air.

Suddenly springing into action, he sat up straight, tugged his seat straps tight, lowered the tinted visor of his helmet, and started flicking switches, running through the Valkyrie's startup routine with such polished, easy grace he would've made most of the WDF's instructor pilots look like fumbling amateurs by comparison.

In seconds the air around the hardstand filled with the keening whine of the fighter's two axial fusion turbines spinning up to 7,500 RPM, followed by the near-synchronous CLUNKs of the startup capacitors dumping their charges into the fusion coils. Without a cough or sputter, the contained snarl of a heavily baffled thermonuclear reaction overlaid the turbines' whine, then blended into the higher-pitched sound to form a single unified roar of power.

The Valkyrie's rudders twitched this way and that, its ailerons flexed, its thrust-vectoring nozzles tilted up and down and side to side, as Max ran through the final preflight checks. Then he released the brakes and started rolling. In his ear, he could hear Kozue's breathing getting more labored, her voice getting more guttural, as the G-forces pounding her around her falling Viper's cockpit mounted.

"I have her in sight," came the voice of the pilot flying the Zukowsky FTC overwatch bird, an EB-17F Astrofortress space bomber retrofitted with surveillance and monitoring gear instead of weapons. Orbiting the test area at 250,000 feet, Sky-Eye One was used to get a clear overhead picture of all the activity on the range—and to provide a god's eye view of whatever accidents might befall test aircraft, for later use in the crash investigations.

"She's in a tumbling spin," Sky-Eye One reported. "I don't think it's recoverable. Velocity's near-terminal."

Max glanced at the comm panel, confirming his suspicion. Zukowsky Tower and Eval Control could hear the Fort's transmissions, but the Colonial ground crew couldn't, and neither could Kaoru unless she'd fiddled with her gear. He put it out of his head. There was nothing Sky-Eye could do but observe and record, anyway. They were too high up and had no rescue gear of any kind.

The VF-1 was not rated for vertical takeoff in fighter mode, one capability it gave up to more compact designs like the VF-6 Alpha Legios. On paper, a pilot wanting to launch a Valkyrie vertically needed to have had the foresight to land in GERWALK or battroid mode. However, the very best (or the very craziest) Valkyrie pilots knew a trick.

Max powered up the fighter's reaction control system, not normally used in fighter mode in an atmosphere, and jacked its operating pressure all the way to the top of the scale. He waited three seconds for the system pressure to reach maximum, then fired all the ventral RCS thrusters. The sudden explosion of released gas made the fully loaded Valkyrie, all 40 tons of it, jump straight up in the air like a startled cat. It couldn't go very high—but just high enough for a very skillful pilot to make it into GERWALK mode before gravity exerted its awful will again.

Max's blue Valkyrie changed modes in an eyeblink, main engines swinging down to form legs, vector nozzles opening wide into feet—and in the same instant, he threw on full power and punched the afterburners. With a sudden explosive BOOM and a flash of blue-white fire, the Valkyrie was not just airborne but ballistic, carried aloft on pure brute thrust.

This maneuver, done right, is known in the trade as the Ritchie Bounce after its inventor, the great Dave Ritchie. (Done wrong, it makes a hell of a noise, does about 30 million credits' worth of damage to the fighter and its surroundings, accomplishes nothing useful, and is known as the Haywire Flop.)

Max pulled the nose up and switched the VF-1 back into fighter mode, drawing the vector nozzles to their minimum diameters again. His sensors lit up, reaching out across the desert, finding Victor X-Ray One within a quarter second. Behind him, he left shattered windows, a few stunned ground crewmen, a smoking black crater in the apron, and a very confused tower controller. Fortunately, he had been parked well away from the crowded show flightline.

He felt the Valkyrie shift subtly under his hands as its wings pulled back to full sweep, 72 degrees. As he broke Mach 2, he could see that X-Ray One was falling through 15,000 feet, and just as he noted that he heard her voice, crushed by heavy Gs but just as calm as anything:

"Victor X-Ray One is declaring an emergency."

Max adjusted his forward sensors. Within a moment he'd locked onto X-Ray One with his Valkyrie's all-condition camera, which was looking out through the "visor" in the Valkyrie's "head", currently slung under the fuselage a bit aft of the cockpit. He zoomed in, dropping an enhanced picture-in-picture frame into the corner of his holographic HUD. The range to target ticked down in the lower right of the frame, the camera automatically pulling back as he approached so that the tumbling, twisting fighter didn't overflow the frame. The Viper was clearly unrecoverable, totally out of control. As Max watched with horror, the starboard wing sheared off and fluttered away, torn off by the mounting aerodynamic forces.

"Eject," Max murmured, audible only to himself. "Come on. You can't save it, don't die with it."

"X-Ray One," he heard Kozue grunt. "X-Ray One. Ejecting!"

"Yes," Max said. "Good. Smart."

The cockpit canopy blew off the Viper and disappeared, twinkling, like a glass leaf in a hurricane wind. An instant later the sharp-cornered bulk of the ejection seat followed. Max waited to see whether the seat would stabilize like it was supposed to and then cut Kaoru loose. It didn't; instead, its RCS went berserk, throwing the unfortunate Colonial pilot all over the sky, undoubtedly giving her an even rougher ride than the dying Viper had.

Max switched his target lock from the fighter to the pilot, making the camera follow her instead, and throttled back, dropping down to subsonic speed so that he didn't just flash uselessly past. Before he could take any other action, Kaoru had taken matters into her own hands. In the magnified image frame, he could see her reach up and smack the quick release on her chest and then tuck and arch, pushing free of the furiously tumbling ejection seat. Her arms opened out into a swan dive, stabilizing her fall, and he saw her head come up, checking the horizon.

He had just started to relax, thinking that she was going to be able to deploy her emergency chute and make it down on her own after all, when the ejection seat, its RCS still spewing at random, abruptly pinwheeled in the other direction. The corner of the seat smashed into the back of Kaoru's helmet. Max was so close by now, his following camera so tightly focused, that he could see sparkling motes of debris fly out at the point of impact. Her head snapped forward, her body going instantly limp.

"Damn!" Max spat—an extreme display of emotion for a man once dubbed the coolest pilot in the galaxy. With his left index finger he switched his comm system entirely off. The next few seconds would require every ounce of his concentration. He could afford absolutely no distractions.

He was a few hundred feet below Kaoru's altitude at this point, coming up behind her as she tumbled limply through the air. He couldn't just go rocketing up and catch her, like Superman in a movie. The combined closing velocities of her fall and the Valkyrie's climb would make getting hold of her with one of the Valkyrie's steel hands something like trying to catch a snowball with a rake.

Instead, he thumbed the Valkyrie into GERWALK mode, feeling its flight profile twitch and stabilize as the arms deployed and the wings went to full spread. He kept the legs back in full-aft thrust, throttling up and feathering the afterburner button to maintain acceleration against the fighter's radically different new aerodynamic profile. Pulling the nose up, he went into a zoom climb, overshooting Kaoru's altitude by several hundred feet.

The follow camera kept watching the falling pilot as she disappeared below the cockpit rim and out of Max's own line of sight. Watching the closing rate carefully, Max counted off seconds to himself—

—then shoved the Valkyrie's nose down, driving his heels into the floorboards as he firewalled the back-mounted thruster package and vectored the main engines forward, then chopped power and fired the dorsal RCS thrusters. His seat harness bit into his shoulders and the corners of his vision fogged pink with incipient red-out as he rammed the Valkyrie through a negative-G pushover, swooping downward. With his right hand, he worked the pressure controls built into the flight stick, swinging the Valkyrie's right hand out and opening it.

With the delicate touch of a surgeon, he "fell" past Kozue at an effective passing speed of about five knots, matched her falling speed with the Valkyrie's hand, and gently closed the giant metal fingers around her.

("Christ, he caught her!" Sky-Eye One reported to base control. "He caught her! But—oh Jesus—he's too low!")

"Now for the hard part," Max told himself—because now, with power cut to the mains, the Valkyrie was falling toward the desert floor itself, and he'd had to use up so much sky matching Kozue's fall that he didn't have a lot of room. In fact, at his current sink rate, he didn't have time to get the legs down and break his fall with the mains. He'd sink right into the hardpan, the legs would be torn off, and then the whole thing would plow into the ground. He might survive such a crash, but Kozue certainly wouldn't.

So instead he topped his previous performance and did the most amazing thing Sky-Eye One's crew had ever seen. Instead of trying to put the legs down, he yanked them back, clear back to fighter-mode position—

Pulled the nose up—

Vectored the nozzles down—

Screwed on full power and trusted in the Valkyrie's thrust-to-weight ratio.

The VF-1S, arms forward and tucked in close, fell nose high, engines bellowing. Blue shock diamonds from the mains hurled up a huge cloud of dust as the GERWALK wallowed within a whisper of slamming into the desert. Only a dry creek bed, a mere few feet of extra clearance, saved Kozue, the Valkyrie, and probably Max. With consummate skill and situational awareness, Max had dropped his ship into the one spot in all this desert where what he was trying to do could work.

For an endless, agonizing instant, the Valkyrie hung there, balanced on the razor's edge of its engines' performance envelope, thrust, drag, gravity, and lift all warring for supremacy. Lunging forward, barely under control, still nose-high, the fighter mushed toward the ground. It seemed as if it couldn't help but smash down flat and be ripped to pieces by the scrub desert and scattered rocks, or tip sideways, drop a wingtip, and tear a great curving scar in the hardpan as it rolled and tumbled and shredded to bits.

Instead, it hesitated—wobbled ever so slightly...

("Mother of God!" Sky-Eye One blurted. "He's in ground effect!")

... and then accelerated out, wings biting at the desert air, fusion exhaust hot enough to melt titanium carving glassy furrows in the creek bed. Within a few seconds the crisis was over, the Valkyrie back on its wings and climbing out, and Max had to throttle back to keep from going supersonic. Kozue's flightsuit, designed to keep its wearer alive in the vacuum of space, could probably protect her from that, even partly exposed as she was in the Valkyrie's hand, but Max saw no reason to push her luck, or his own, further than they already had.

Letting out the breath he'd been holding, he switched his comm array back on.

"Valkyrie One to Zukowsky Control," he said. "I have an injured pilot in hand. Request emergency medical team meet me on the apron in front of the Stonewell Bellcom hangar. ETA three minutes."

"Roger, Valkyrie One," the controller replied, her voice crisp and professional. "They'll be waiting. Also," she went on in a completely straight voice, "permission to launch is granted."

Max didn't chuckle; he kept his own voice just as cool and professional as he replied, "Thank you, Zukowsky Control. I have the field in sight. Request permission for GERWALK landing in front of Hangar 12."

"Granted, Valkyrie One," the controller replied calmly. "Welcome back."

"Good to be back, Control," Max replied. "Valkyrie One, out."

A little less than five feet tall and skinny as a rail, Major General Cheryl Zukowsky was not a physically imposing woman. All the same, the crew-cut young captain in her outer office snapped to as if pursued when she came out and started snapping commands.

"Ohlendorffer."

"Ma'am!" said her adjutant.

"Lock down the base. No one enters, no one leaves, except the wreck recovery team. I want whatever's left of that Viper under guard in Hangar 11 by 1800. Get the project leads and the other pilots up here."

"Ma'am, yes ma'am!" Ohlendorffer replied. As the general went back into her office and Ohlendorffer picked up the phone to start issuing her orders, he thought to himself,

Hangar 11? We could put what's left of that Viper in your top left drawer, General.

Within five minutes, the recovery team was on its way across the desert, making for the plume of black smoke that marked X-Ray One's crash site, and Zukowsky had a small crowd in her office.

Without preamble, she told them all, "I'm suspending the competition until we find out what happened to X-Ray One."

Gerry Markham, chief engineer for General Galaxy's YF-21 project, protested. "General, be reasonable. This program is costing millions of credits a day whether we fly or not." He flipped a hand. "Anyway, Kaoru's accident was clearly pilot error. She's practically a rookie pilot and has next to no AFR experience. She tried to fly like she was in space and the Viper made her pay for it. Simple as that."

But beside him, YF-21 test pilot Guld Goa Bowman shook his head. "No."

Zukowsky looked surprised. It was no secret around WDF Fighter Command that Bowman didn't think much of Kozue Kaoru. He'd washed her out of the WDF's own fighter training program, in fact, which was how she'd come to be a Colonial Forces pilot in the first place.

"Excuse me, Major Bowman?" she said.

"I said no," Guld repeated. "Kaoru wouldn't lie about her aircraft's condition. If she told her ground team something went wrong with her flight controls, I believe her. Besides—on the ground, she's an unprofessional waste of time, but she's too good a pilot to screw up like that."

Wedge Antilles, commander of Rogue Squadron, chuckled darkly. "I appreciate your candor, Major," he said. "I know it can't have been easy for you to pay Lt. Kaoru a compliment."

"I call things as I see them," Guld replied stiffly.

"How is the lieutenant doing?" asked Jan Neumann, chief engineer for Shinsei Industries' YF-19.

"Medical says she's going to be all right," Zukowsky told him. "Bump on the head, some bruises. They'll keep her overnight, but she should be back on flight status in the morning."

"Well, that's good."

"Yeah, good thing General Sterling was here," YF-19 test pilot Isamu Dyson said. "I hear it was quite a rescue." He grinned. "Like something I would've done."

Guld made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a cough. Zukowsky ignored them both and told the room, "Until we get this sorted out, you should all consider yourselves confined to your own teams' hangars and the base common areas. Nobody goes near anybody else's gear until we know what happened to the VX." She stood up and leaned forward, spreading her hands on the top of her desk. "And if I find out that somebody on my base tampered with that aircraft? There will be hell to pay." She looked from person to person, her gaze flinty, then sat down again. "That's all, gentlemen. Dismissed."

When Kozue Kaoru was ten years old, she once spent a solid week in bed. Not out of laziness, you understand, but because she had been laid low by a vicious case of some childhood illness or another, she could never remember which one. It hadn't been life-threatening, not quite, but it had been most unpleasant, marked by a high fever, chills, sweats, and a sense of freakish disconnection from general reality. She remembered little of the ordeal afterward—just disconnected images, flashes of light in the murk, fleeting moments when she had achieved some semblance of lucidity before slipping back into delirious lassitude.

What she really remembered about it, even years later, was waking up the morning after the fever finally broke and realizing, with a sudden shock, that she understood who and what she was again. It was a startling sensation, almost a disturbing one. She was lying in her bed, the one closer to the window, with the covers drawn up to her chin. A beam of sunlight was pouring in through the half-opened drapes, lying across the bed like a faithful dog and spilling off the edge to sprawl on the floor.

Sitting in a chair next to the bed was her twin brother Miki. He was asleep, his hair and clothes unkempt, his face drawn. She knew without being told that he had spent the last however many days it had been—she had no idea, but sensed it had been several—looking after her, neglecting himself in the process. He did this even though she routinely treated him like dirt and claimed no longer to love him. He did it without question, without hesitation, without complaint. How could he not? He was her brother.

It occurred to Kozue that this had all happened to her before. That didn't make sense, but then, she wasn't entirely conscious yet, and in the context of the swirling dream of chaotic images and brightly colored nonsense in which she'd spent the last little while, it didn't seem as wrong as it should have. Somehow Kozue simply knew it was so. She had been ten before. She had been sick before. She had awakened to find Miki, used up and burned out, asleep in a chair beside her before.

She remembered realizing in that moment how much she loved him, whatever she pretended to want to believe. She remembered wanting so much to wake him up and tell him that; but before she could do it, her bullheaded pride, which had been slower to wake than her heart, rose up at the worst moment and stopped her from doing it.

Well, not this time. This time was going to be different.

"Hey," she said.

Miki stirred and opened his eyes, reaching up as he did so to pull earphones from his ears. All right, he hadn't been asleep, but just listening to music. Whichever, he was here and she had something important to tell him. She wasn't going to blow it this time.

"Oh, good," he said. "You're awake. How do you feel?"

"I want you to know that I love you," Kozue said, quickly, before she could stop herself again. "I love you more than anything. I don't know why it's so hard for me to admit, but it's true." She reached out from under the covers and grabbed his hand, squeezing it hard. "Promise me you'll always remember that, no matter what I do."

Miki gave her a look of absolute bafflement, then said the weirdest thing she'd ever heard him say:

"Uh... well, I'm... glad you feel that way, Lieutenant Kaoru."

Lieutenant?! What the hell?

... Since when did Miki wear glasses?

Reality rushed into Kozue's head like water into a sinking car. This wasn't her bedroom back at Stately Kaoru Manor. She wasn't ten years old.

And she wasn't talking to her twin brother at all.

Blushing so fiercely she was surprised not to smell her eyebrows singeing, she released Maximilian Sterling's hand and recoiled to the far side of her infirmary bed.

"Ohmygod," she blurted. "General, General Sterling. I'm... uh, I'm sorry, I... I thought you were someone else."

Sterling smiled gently. "Not too surprising, really," he said. "That was quite a knock on the head you took."

Kozue's hand went to the back of her head, but found no sign of injury. Beginning to piece together the events of the last day or so in her mind, she asked, "What hit me? I remember... I think I remember ejecting from my Viper..."

Max nodded. "Your ejection seat's RCS was completely out of whack. You used your manual strap release, but as you were falling clear, the seat took a bad jag and clipped you in the back of the head. Your helmet saved you from the worst of it, but it still put you out like a light."

She looked puzzled. "Then how did I—" she began, but just then the door opened and Starbuck barged in with Boomer on her heels.

"Two, you are making me some serious ka-ching today," said Starbuck with a smirk.

Kozue eyed her. "What the hell are you talking about, Starbuck?"

"We're charging a quarter a pop to view the video clip Helo put together of your rescue," Starbuck replied, her expression inviting Kozue to be impressed. "A dime for me, a dime for him, a nickel for Boomer—"

"'Cause Helo's edit booth is my damn Viper," Boomer put in.

"We've already made like ten grand so far. You should crash a Viper every day." The blonde pilot grinned even wider as an idea came to her. "Hell, we should get a bunch of decommissioned Mark VIIs and take the show on the road. What do you say, General? Want to give up your day job and come barnstorming with us?" Starbuck held up her hands as if framing a poster. "'Max Genius and Cannonball Kaoru, Stunt Fliers Extraordinaire!'" She gestured at Boomer. "You can warm up the crowd with, I dunno, Boomer wing-walking."

Boomer raised a hand. "Not it!" she declared.

Kozue was looking at Max. "Rescue?"

"Oh, frack, you should'a seen it," Starbuck said. "And you will! I'll even give you a discount. You got whacked in the head by your ejection seat, totally out of it—express train to Flat City, next stop terminal V, you know what I'm saying?—and THIS," (she clapped a hand down on Sterling's shoulder,) "This magnificent piece of precision man-engineering here, swoops down out of the sky and snatches your frail form out of the very jaws of certain doom!"

Kozue regarded Starbuck with a raised eyebrow, then turned the look to Boomer, who gave an apologetic shrug.

"Pancho's giving away free beers," she said. "To celebrate."

"I see," Kozue said dubiously. She looked at Max again. He shrugged.

"I just did what I figured I had to do," he said.

Kozue held her eyes on his for a moment, recognized that there was an awful lot left unsaid that couldn't stay that way, and filed it away for later. It certainly wasn't anything she could try and articulate with a drunken Starbuck in the room.

Instead, she said, "So, uh, does anyone know what the hell happened to my Viper?"

"The crew's looking at the telemetry now," Boomer said.

"Unsurprisingly, there wasn't enough left of the actual ship to mail back to Admiral Gramps in a tube," Starbuck said. "He's hella fracked off, by the way. He sent Wedge an SMS saying he wants all our asses back on the Aurora by 1930."

"That was half an hour ago," Kozue pointed out after a glance at the wall clock.

"Wedge is pretending he dropped his phone in the head," Boomer explained.

Starbuck made a dismissive gesture. "He didn't mean it anyway. You know how he is. Something goes wrong, he has to be all WAAUP WAUP WAUP WAAAAUP for a few minutes," she said, making appropriate angry-man gestures. "Like when we stole the VXes. Remember that? That was awesome."

Boomer rolled her eyes. "God. And Tigh is probably all 'What the hell are they doing down there?! This was a mistake. I bet Starbuck did it, whatever it is. Grump grump grump. I'm old and never get laid.'"

Starbuck disintegrated into helpless laughter, slumping onto the empty bed next to Kozue's.

"Oh man," she gasped when she could talk again. Wiping at the tears in her eyes, she said, "Sharon, you gotta warn me before you do your Tigh impression."

Scrunching up her face, Boomer intoned, "'Waagh. Damn kids. That's not how we did it on Caprica.'"

"Stop," Starbuck pleaded, thumping the mattress helplessly with a fist.

"Well," said a voice from the doorway. "Everybody here seems to be having a good time." Wedge entered the room, grinning. "You OK, Kozue? You had us all worried for a little while there."

"I'm fine, sir," Kozue said. "I've been trying to get some answers out of these two clowns," she said, gesturing to her wingmates (Starbuck waved weakly, still giggling, and Boomer tried and failed to look indignantly innocent), "about what happened to my fighter."

"Cally, Chief Tyrol, and the guys from Incom have been looking into that," Wedge said. "They think they've narrowed it down to something going wrong in the flight dynamics computer, but beyond that..." He shrugged. "There's nothing left of the FDC now, so we may never know."

Kozue blinked. "Well, there's one thing," she said.

"What?"

"When I was trying to unjam things, I flopped the primary and tertiary isocards in the FDC," she told him. "Then I tried to put them back, but by then the spin was getting pretty intense. I almost dropped the primary, and then I stuck it in the top pocket of my flightsuit." She looked around. "Where is my flightsuit?"

"Down the hall in receiving, what's left of it," Max said. "The medics cut it off you when they brought you in, rather than try to pull the neck seal over your head."

"I'll go get it," Starbuck volunteered, dragging herself off the vacant bed. "Need a little walk to clear my head," she added, shooting a look at Boomer.

She left the room and turned left, her normally loose-jointed pilot's saunter even more pronounced thanks to the lubrication in her system. When she got to the end of the hall and took another left, though, she saw something that brought her up short and cleared her head in a hurry.

Someone was in the receiving area, rummaging in the bin where the medics had tossed everything they'd taken off Kozue when she'd arrived in the infirmary's trauma room—someone who wasn't supposed to be doing that. It was a woman, tallish, wearing a business suit and a lab coat. Starbuck didn't recognize her from this angle.

"HEY!" she yelled. The woman looked up, made eye contact, and Starbuck's eyes went wide. Vyrna Wills! The control systems engineer from the General Galaxy team! What the frack was she doing trying to steal the remains of Kozue's—

Wills whirled and dashed toward the trauma room's crash doors. Starbuck shook her head to clear away the last of the alcohol cobwebs, then sprinted after her, head down, arms pumping. Wills was tall and long-legged, but her shoes weren't built for running, and Starbuck was much more athletic. Yelling incoherently, the Colonial pilot launched herself in a flying tackle, catching the engineer around the waist and carrying them both crashing to the floor.

To Starbuck's surprise, Wills let out a sort of wildcat screech and tried to fight her off, kicking and clawing. Starbuck, who had never been much for girly fighting, was completely taken aback by the engineer's approach for a few moments and did nothing other than try to protect her face from Wills's fingernails.

"What the frack are you—" she said, then seemed to realize what was going on, hauled off, and slugged the furious engineer. By this time, she could hear running footsteps behind her.

"Boomer!" she snapped. "If this bitch tries to claw my face again, shoot her!"

Boomer pounded to a halt at Starbuck's side, her blaster out and leveled. "You got it," she said.

That seemed to take the fight out of Wills. She sagged, defeated, and let her hands fall.

Wedge stood in the hallway outside Kozue's room, turning the glowing blue isocard over in his fingers. Then he tucked it into his sleeve pocket and turned to Wills, who stood handcuffed, flanked by a pair of beefy WDF MPs.

"We will find out what you wanted this for," he told her. "And why you were eavesdropping outside Lt. Kaoru's room in the first place. It'll be better for you if you just tell us what you know now."

"Go to hell," Wills replied.

Wedge shrugged. "Have it your way," he said; then, to the ranking MP, "Get her out of here."

"Sir," said the MP. "All right, let's go."

"I... I don't understand it," Gerry Markham said haltingly. He took out a handkerchief and mopped his perspiring brow. "You're accusing us of tampering with one of your fighters? Trying to murder one of your pilots? That's... that's ridiculous."

"And yet we have some pretty compelling evidence that it's the case," Wedge said. He held up the isocard. "Crewman Specialist Cally Henderson found a time stamp on this module, recording the last time an update was made to the flight dynamics software aboard VX tail number Nebula two niner zero seven Constellation—the one Lt. Kaoru was flying today, exhibition call sign Victor X-Ray One. It shows that the software was updated this morning at 0217."

Wedge put the card away again and gave Markham a hard look, his normally jovial face hard and uncompromising. "I can assure you, Dr. Markham, that Specialist Henderson wasn't patching any Viper's operating system at 0217 this morning. The watch officer at the VOQ logged her in her bunk and lights-out at 0103." Folding his arms, he went on, "And now I find that one of your engineers—a control systems engineer, no less—eavesdropped on Lt. Kaoru and her wingmates discussing the incident, then was caught red-handed trying to take this memory card from Lt. Kaoru's flightsuit, where Kaoru had just told her wingmates she'd put it."

Placing one hand on each of Markham's chair arms, Wedge leaned over and spoke quietly into the man's face. "Under the circumstances, I hope you'll excuse me, Doctor, if I find that god. Damned. Peculiar."

"No more peculiar than I do, Colonel Antilles," Markham insisted. "Vyrna Wills is a peaceful woman. A good employee. She's worked for General Galaxy for sixteen years! She's no killer, she's an engineer, a computer scientist. She has a Ph.D. from NAIS, for pity's sake!"

"So do I," Cheryl Zukowsky put in from behind her desk, "but I've been known to kill a few people in my time. You have to admit, Dr. Markham, it doesn't look good for your team. As commander of this facility, I'd be within my rights to cancel this competition, or at least disqualify General Galaxy's entry and send you home."

Markham opened his mouth to protest, but before he could, Zukowsky added, "But I'm not going to do that. I don't believe that a company as well-established as General Galaxy would seriously mount some kind of crazy conspiracy to destroy another manufacturer's fighter and kill their test pilot—especially since the Viper Mark X isn't competing for the contract in the first place. The fly-off will resume in the morning—but my MPs are watching. I get wind of even a hint that any of the competitors are stepping out of line again and this whole party is off."

Markham bowed his head. "I understand." Then, raising his eyes to hers, he said, "Thank you, General. I... I don't know what made Vyrna do what she seems to have done, if indeed it's proven that she did it. But I swear to you, I had no knowledge of it. General Galaxy is not in the business of sabotage or murder. We only want to prove to you that our fighter is the best on the market."

Zukowsky nodded. "I believe you... for now. The investigation into Lt. Kaoru's crash will remain a joint WDF-Colonial matter until final disposition. That's all."

Markham got up, nodded to both officers, and left. As soon as he was gone, Zukowsky turned to Wedge. "You believe him?"

Wedge blew out a sigh. "I think so," he said. "He seems genuinely shaken... and Wills pretty obviously has a screw loose somewhere." He shook his head. "It doesn't make sense. Kozue's never even met the woman."

"Well... I'll have my people keep digging into it. And for now, anyway, Wills is in the stockade, so she can't do any more harm."

Wedge nodded. "That's something."

"This is bullshit, Wedge."

Wedge nodded. "I know. But it's Admiral Adama's bullshit, so we're stuck with it."

Kozue pulled her grey uniform tunic over her head, tucked it into the waistband of her trousers, and fastened her belt, all with quick, angry motions.

"I joined this outfit for this chance, if you remember," she said tartly. "It was the capper to your sales pitch. 'Join Rogue Squadron and I'll make sure you go head-to-head with Guld at the fly-off. You can get even by outflying him with the VX in front of everybody who matters. It'll be great. It's a moral imperative.' Remember?"

The Corellian pilot nodded again, his normally cheery face wearing a hang-dog expression. "I know," he repeated. "I'm sorry. I really wanted to make it happen for you—but the admiral's insistent. He won't risk another of the Mark Tens just for bragging rights. You know they're not in full production yet. The ten we brought here were all we had, and now we're down to nine." Then, sobering a little, he folded his arms and went on, "Besides, I'd like to think you've found a little more meaning in Rogue Squadron than just the chance to show up Guld Bowman at an air show."

Kozue finished pulling on her boots, then looked at Wedge and sighed, abandoning her combative attitude.

"I have," she admitted. "I just... I was looking forward to it so much."

"Yeah," Wedge said. "We all were. But that's the way these things go sometimes. I'll find a way to make it up to you somehow." He glanced at his wrist chron. "I have to get moving. Admiral wants the remaining VXes back aboard by midday. I'll send Boomer back for you."

Kozue nodded glumly, shrugging into her blue suede pilot's jacket. "Guess I'm bumming rides for a while."

She followed Wedge down to the flightline and watched as her squadron saddled up and took off without her, leaving the field with considerably less flash than they'd arrived. She knew it wasn't exactly the case, but it felt uncomfortably like they were leaving with their tails between their legs. It was embarrassing. It was... depressing.

She stood looking off in the direction they'd gone for a few moments, then turned to go back and hang out with Tyrol and the crew until Boomer came back for her. She supposed she could've ridden back to the Aurora with the crew aboard their transport shuttle, and she did plan to help them load it, but Wedge had made the gesture with Boomer to preserve at least some of Kozue's dignity as a Warrior.

She made it two steps toward Hangar 5 before pulling up short. Guld Bowman was making for her across the tarmac, his stride purposeful.

Grinding her teeth, Kozue forced herself to square up and salute him properly. He returned the salute impatiently, as if in a hurry.

"Something I can do for you, Major Bowman?" she asked, forcing herself to be cordial.

"No," Guld replied. "Something I have to say to you."

Kozue raised an eyebrow.

"I... didn't want the competition to turn out like this," Guld said. "You deserved a fair shot. I wanted to take you on, head-to-head. I'd have crushed you, of course," he said with perfect earnestness, "but you've earned the right to be crushed like a real pilot. This... " He looked disgusted. "there's no honor in this. That's all. I just wanted you to know I don't consider it a victory."

Kozue stared at him for a second, then gave him a half-hearted smirk. "Well... thanks, Guld... that's kind of touching, in a... space caveman kind of way."

Guld snorted derisively. "I'm not trying to be your buddy, so don't kid yourself, Kaoru." He stepped closer and looked like he wanted to poke her in the chest with a forefinger, except he knew if he did she'd lay him out again. "You're an embarrassment to any uniform you wear. I'm just disappointed I didn't get the chance to demonstrate that to everyone here."

Kozue's smirk was a little less half-hearted this time. "Good. I'd hate to think you were getting sentimental." Then, with an offhanded wave, she walked past him and headed for the hangar. "See you around, space caveman. Maybe some other time."

She entered the hangar that had been the Colonial team's temporary home base, only to find that it was already deserted except for Cally. The technician looked vaguely silly sitting at a table in the corner of an otherwise empty hangar, working on a laptop computer. She looked up as Kozue entered and smiled.

"Hey, Lieutenant," she said. "Good to see you're all in one piece."

"Good to be in one," Kozue assured her. "I understand you're the one who fingered my would-be killer."

Cally looked a little abashed. "Well, kind of," she said. "If you hadn't salvaged that isocard, I don't know if we'd ever have figured out what happened. There wasn't enough of poor 07C to sweep up." She sighed. "That was my favorite one."

Kozue dragged a folding chair out of a pile by the door and sat down opposite Cally. "Yeah," she said, "mine too. But we'll get another one."

Cally nodded. "Anyway, I'm just going through the data again. Colonel Antilles got permission to leave me here and help with the investigation, at least until the Aurora has to leave the system. I don't know that there's much more to tell, but I'll keep looking until they pull me off the case. Oh, by the way—this came for you." She pulled a narrow yellow envelope from the top of her crewman's coverall and slid it across to Kozue.

Puzzled, Kozue picked it up and slit it open. Inside was a standard Colonial printout flimsy, a sheet of thin, crackly paper with the corners trimmed off to make an elongated octagon. She had always vaguely wondered why the Colonials did that. Even their books were like that.

Kozue frowned at this baffling missive for a moment, then looked across the table. "Cally, wha—?"

Cally shrugged, but her eyes were twinkling as she said, "Beats me, Lieutenant. I just work here."

Kozue stuffed the orders into her inside jacket pocket and looked at her watch. "0940," she said. "Guess I'd better go see what this is all about."

Sterling wasn't at the Stonewell Bellcom flightline booth—and neither, Kozue was slightly surprised to see, was the blue VF-1. One of the Stonewell PR flacks manning the booth told her they could both be found in Hangar 12, the company's regular shop hangar. She went down the line, accepting congratulations on her survival from various techs and pilots, thanking well-wishers, and the like.

She entered the Stonewell Bellcom hangar and saw the blue Valkyrie parked in fighter mode at the back with company technicians all around it. A couple were working on the engines; one was up on a rolling staircase doing something in the cockpit. WDF armorers, distinctive in their red jumpsuits and helmets, were fitting missiles to the underwing pylons. Off to one side, a GU-11 gunpod sat in a rolling sling like a giant rifle while another team of armorers loaded belts of 55mm explosive shells into its helical magazine.

Kozue went into the hangar's cool, echoing interior, noting the universal flight-deck scents of lube oil, hot metal, and ozone. She walked between two of the VF-2 chase fighters, pausing for a moment to take a closer look. She had never seen a Victory in person before. They'd been withdrawn from service with some pretty bad teething problems not long after the Second Battle of Zeta Cygni—a few years before she was born, and a long, long way from where she'd grown up. She decided it was a good-looking aircraft, and wondered if the fact that Stonewell was using them as in-house chase planes meant that they still had a team working on the design.

With that distraction out of her system, she went on toward the Valkyrie. As she approached, the door to the small office shack off to one side opened and Max Sterling emerged, wearing a grease-smudged technician's coverall, carrying a large binder, and looking pleased with himself about something. His grin widened when he saw Kozue, and he trotted across the floor to intercept her.

Kozue felt a momentary stab of lingering embarrassment at the sight of him, remembering what she'd said to him while wading back to consciousness. And something else, too... something potentially inconvenient.

Try to concentrate, Kozue, she told herself. You're a professional. Act like one.

Be an idiot on your own time.

"General," she said, saluting as crisply as she knew how. "Lieutenant Kozue Kaoru, reporting as ordered."

Max's smile was gentle and his eyes were... just slightly sad?... as he returned the salute.

"Thank you, Lieutenant," he said. "Are you feeling all right? Fully recovered?"

"Yes, sir," she replied. "All systems go. Thanks to you." She smiled, reddening a little. "I never did thank you properly for that. I owe you my life. Starbuck showed me the video this morning. That was a hell of a piece of flying you did."

"It was, wasn't it?" Max replied—not arrogantly, but with the uncluttered pride of a craftsman. "To be honest with you, I didn't know if that stall recovery was going to work. It wouldn't have in any other Valkyrie." He proffered the book he was carrying. Kozue took it and looked at the cover, which was emblazoned with a WDF logo and two words.

"SERAPH BLUE?" Kozue wondered.

"That's the codename for the Dash-82 development project, and now that it's complete, the prototype. We've been working on it for nearly four years." Max smiled ruefully. "It was kind of a rude surprise when both Shinsei and General Galaxy announced that they were working on replacements for the Thunderbolt. We'd been looking forward to pulling all the usual suspects together once the prototype was ready and letting the galaxy know that the Valkyrie was back on top. Now we have to fight for it." He shrugged philosophically. "But that's probably for the best. Like my wife's people say, 'The universe overflows with conflict, and one finds life in war.'"

"Interesting viewpoint," Kozue said. She opened the binder. The first page contained general technical specifications and a diagram of the VF-1-82. She closed it again and went to offer it back to Sterling, but he'd turned and started walking toward the Valkyrie, so she tucked the binder under her arm and followed.

"Hey, Joe!" Sterling called. "You about done up there?"

The technician up on the rolling stairs turned and gave the general a grinning thumbs-up. "All set, boss! It's dry!"

Max returned the thumbs-up, then turned to Kozue. "Lieutenant," he said, "I asked Admiral Adama to lend you to me for a couple of days because I need your help with a little project."

Kozue stared at him. "Are you saying what I think you're saying?" she asked.

Sterling turned to the tech on the scaffold again. "Well, Joe? Let's see it!"

Joe beamed. "My best work, sir! You'll like it!" he promised. Then he stepped aside, grabbed the corner of the masking mat stuck to the side of the Valkyrie's cockpit, and tore it off with a flourish, revealing the meticulously printed lettering beneath.

Kozue was absolutely speechless, so stunned she dropped the binder to the floor. She just stared at the Valkyrie for a second, then turned to Sterling and stared at him instead.

"Well?" Max asked. "What do you think? Interested?"

It took a few seconds for the full importance of what was happening here to sink into Kozue's mind. Not only was she being given another shot—not only did Sterling's move keep her in the mix, as it were—it put her straight into the middle of the game. SERAPH BLUE was a contender. If she flew it in the rest of the evaluation, she would be directly affecting the outcome of the contest, not just showing off a piece of hardware the WDF couldn't buy anyway.

She looked at the Valkyrie again, then back at Sterling, and finally found her voice:

"I... General, I... Why?"

Max smiled a warmer, more personal smile, put a hand on her shoulder, and started leading her away from the fighter and the techs, toward the back of the hangar, where they could talk privately.

"It's probably quaint of me," he said with a self-deprecating air. "I'm sure most members of your generation would think so... but I believe in justice."

Kozue went a little pale as the flip side of her previous realization hit her. "But... if I can't... if I fail... "

"I've seen you fly. You won't fail. With you in the cockpit, SERAPH BLUE's going to win this thing."

He said it calmly, casually, like he said everything, even in the heat of battle—but Kozue was looking him in the eye as he spoke, and she saw there that he not only meant what he said, he was absolutely convinced of it. For his part, Max saw that she believed him, or at least that he believed, but she wasn't sure she believed herself.

She's young, she's still a little rattled, he told himself. She'll come around.

When they reached the back corner of the hangar, he took his hand off her shoulder and instead picked up both of her hands. She blinked, startled out of her reverie, and gave him a curious look.

"When I was about your age," he said, "they told me I had magic hands. I could handle a Valkyrie better than anybody else in my class at the WDF Academy. I'm not bragging, I'm just telling you—I was the best there was. For a while, anytime I did anything, people would say, 'Careful, Max. Don't want to hurt those magic hands.' I'm still not sure how that didn't end up being my callsign." He smiled and dropped her hands as suddenly as he'd taken them.

"But the magic isn't in my hands, or in yours," he said. "It's in here." He tapped her gently in the middle of her forehead. "Last night I watched some holos of your work. Not just yesterday's test before your Viper went crazy, but your first combat engagement, too, and some of your training flights, both with the Colonials and before Guld washed you out of AVT. And you know something?"

Kozue shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.

"You're as good as me," Max said.

"... No way," Kozue blurted.

"I'm not saying you're as good as I am now," Max clarified with a wry grin. "I've got thousands of times your experience. But the Max Sterling who was a buck pilot officer with less than 100 hours of non-simulator time? Hell, yeah, you're as good as that kid. Look, I've been around for a long time and I've probably seen millions of pilots. In all that time, I've seen maybe a dozen who have what I have. It's a gift, the same way some people can read minds, or cook really good food, or make a crowd at a concert get up and yell. I've got it, and so have you. And that's what Guld can't stand about you."

"Come again?"

"He started really working you over after your first training flight. Am I right?"

Kozue nodded. Now that she thought about it, it was true.

"Exactly. He took one look at the way you fly and he knew. He knew that you'd be a better stick-and-rudder man than he is even without any training. Not that training isn't important—there's a lot more to being a combat pilot than just the ability to make the airplane do what you want. But that gift gives you such a head start... " He shrugged. "Some people resent that."

Kozue said nothing; she was remembering something Corwin Ravenhair had said to her years before.

"Listen, don't let this go to your head, all right," Corwin had told her, "but you know how you keep saying that Miki's the prodigy in your family? I think maybe you just hadn't found the vector for your own genius yet."

"Anyway," Max went on, "you don't have to do it if you don't want to. I thought you'd be pleased. Maybe it was a little sudden, but," (he smiled just a little archly,) "I've been known to be impulsive sometimes."

"Oh—oh, I am pleased," Kozue hastened to assure him. "I just... had to kind of... get my head around it. It's..." She pulled herself together and looked him in the eye, saluting again. "It's a great honor. I'll do the very best I can." Then, relaxing her posture, she picked the binder back up and added wryly, "Even if I haven't flown a Valkyrie in months..."

Max grinned. "That's all right, Lieutenant," he said, leading her back toward the prototype. "You've never flown a Valkyrie like SERAPH BLUE." Then, glancing at his watch, he said, "Perfect. We've got just enough time before the pilots' meeting."

"For what?"

"To get you a flightsuit," he said. "The medics ruined your old one, and you can't fly a Valkyrie in that getup."

A slightly battered VR-038L Bartley Cyclone sped across the desert, and a hovertruck followed. The truck's lift fans kicked up a roostertail of dust that could be seen from the Zukowsky FTC control tower as the little convoy made its way south.

Crewman Specialist Callista Henderson, lead flight electronics technician for Blue Group, Rogue Squadron (VX-1), brought her borrowed Cyclone to a halt and checked the pinging device strapped to her wrist, then made a slight course correction and set off again.

Pretty sweet ride, she thought. I ought to get one of these to take back to the Aurora. It'd sure make the trip to Ship's Stores D and back for reflux valves quicker.

Presently her quarry came into view. Out here in the endless desert, there were no hills or ridges or even dunes to hide it; just the horizon and the glare of the sun, and the polarized visor of her goggles took care of most of the latter. Cally stopped her Cyclone again, climbed off, and signaled for the truck to pull alongside.

"OK, fellas," she told the WDF techs manning the hovertruck's cargo bay and crane. "Let's get this thing back to base and see what it can tell us."

The ejection seat from Kozue's late Viper was in surprisingly good condition, given that it had freefallen around 12,000 feet. The frame was bent and it looked like it would definitely be uncomfortable to sit in, but it was still recognizable as a Viper ejection seat. This put it well ahead of pretty much all the rest of N2907C, apart from the one wing that tore off before the fighter hit the ground and went up in a massive fireball of Tylium fuel.

The two NCOs working the truck were a well-practiced recovery team. They had the seat on the truck and tarped in minutes, and then dismounted to help Cally scout around for fragments, of which there were surprisingly few.

Cally wasn't really interested in structural fragments, anyway. They wouldn't be able to tell her anything except what she already knew—that the seat had run into a large, unyielding object of considerable mass, to wit: Muroc III. What she was after was buried deep inside the seat itself, where, shielded by the seat's armored casing and heavy acceleration padding, it might just have survived in good enough shape to provide her with some useful data.

I hope the hell it does, she told herself as she climbed back onto the Cyclone and pointed it at the base. I'll never forgive myself if that nutcase gets away with trying to kill Duelist. With MY computer.

A technical girl has her professional pride, after all.

Guld Bowman and Isamu Dyson looked at the clock, then each other. As was his habit, Guld glowered. Dyson just shrugged and went back to jotting in his notebook. For once, it wasn't his fault a pilots' meeting was starting late. He wondered what could be keeping General Sterling.

A moment later he had his answer. The door opened and in came Sterling—but not alone. Kozue Kaoru was with him. Dyson was doubly surprised: once because he'd heard that the Colonial pilots had all left, and once by what both of them were wearing. Sterling was dressed in a white technician's coverall with the Stonewell Bellcom logo on the chest pocket—and Kaoru was wearing a blue and white flightsuit, the snug-fitting kind worn by WDF Valkyrie pilots back in the old days. She had a helmet to match, one of the classic Bellcom Valkyrie helmets with the pointed brow and removable chin bar, tucked under her arm.

Cheryl Zukowsky raised an eyebrow. "Something we should know, Max?" she asked.

"I'm withdrawing from the contest as the VF-1 Dash-82's evaluation pilot," Max said.

"Withdrawing? What the hell for?" Dot-Z asked. She narrowed her eyes, trying to look suspicious but ending up just looking amused. "What are you up to, Sterling?"

Max just smiled and replied, "Well, General, it occurred to me this morning that I don't have a current combat rating. I know, sad but true. I let it lapse when I left active duty with the WDF and just never got around to renewing it."

Dyson snorted. So what if he didn't have a current combat badge? He was Maximilian Sterling, for Christ's sake. Nobody was going to tell him he couldn't go into battle if he decided he was going to.

"As such, I'm probably not the best guy to handle the combat evaluation of SERAPH BLUE," Max went on, ignoring the younger pilot's skeptical noise. "It'd be much fairer, and more relevant to real-world conditions, if that was done by an active-duty front-line combat pilot." Max smiled again and put a hand on Kozue's shoulder. "Lt. Kaoru has graciously agreed to take my place."

"She's not a qualified Valkyrie pilot," Zukowsky pointed out, but that just made Max's smile a little slyer.

"She will be," he said. "If it's not too much trouble, though, I wouldn't mind an extra day to bring her up to speed."

Dot-Z threw it to the floor. "Gentlemen? Any objections?"

"No, ma'am," Dyson said, leaning back in his seat with a casual smirk. "If Genius wants to back out, I figure that just makes my chances that much better."

Zukowsky turned a questioning look to Guld, but the Zentraedi pilot only folded his arms and nodded.

"Fine by me," he said.

Dot-Z raised both eyebrows, but let it go at at that and turned back to Max. "OK, you've got a day," she said. "The investigation team would probably appreciate the rest of the day to work without us booming around overhead anyway. I'll re-work the evaluation program tonight and we'll start with a pilots' meeting at 0800 tomorrow. Good?"

Sterling nodded. "Excellent," he said. "Thanks."

Zukowsky shrugged, putting her hands behind her head and her feet up on her desk. "It's your competition entry, Max," she said.

Max grinned. "You just wait and see," he said.

As they left the base admin building together, Max turned to Kozue and said, "Can you get through that flight ops manual and still get some sleep tonight?"

"Bah, I'm young," Kozue said. "I can sleep after we win."

Max chuckled. "I'd probably say the same thing," he said, "but try to get some sleep anyway. You'll need it." Becoming serious, he said, "Don't underestimate your opposition. I know you've seen some of what Guld can do, but be mindful of Dyson too. He's a clown, but he's a hell of a pilot."

Kozue nodded. "Believe me, sir, I don't plan on underestimating anybody... " She dropped her voice to a low mutter and added, "(Except maybe myself.)"

Max pretended he hadn't heard the last part. "I'll leave you to it, then," he said. "Once you've finished the control overview and the section on introductory flight mechanics, come see me. If the tech crew and I have the aircraft back together by then, we'll get you up for a checkride." He smiled. "We can't have you making your first flight in the Dash-82 with all the chips on the table, after all. Nobody deserves that kind of pressure."

Kozue nodded, mustering a slightly wan grin. "Thanks," she said. "I'll see you after lunch."

They parted in front of the VOQ. Kozue stood and watched Sterling walk away, then half-smiled self-mockingly and sighed, heading into the building.

One of these days, she thought wryly, I must remember to try falling for a guy I can actually have.

The morning passed. Kozue sat for hours at the small desk by the window of her borrowed room in the visiting officers' quarters, paging slowly through the SERAPH BLUE flight manual. The bright stripe of sunlight cast across the desk slowly moved from left to right as the day went on, but Kozue didn't notice.

Back at Ohtori Academy, a lot of people had assumed that her twin brother Miki was the only genius in the family—that Kozue had, poor girl, inherited little (if any) of the remarkable brainpower with which her brother was blessed. The truth was, Miki was smarter than she was, in terms of his ability to absorb information and make effective use of it later on, but Kozue had a measure of the same talent herself; she simply failed to apply herself to mastering it most of the time. What she lacked that Miki had was the love of knowledge for its own sake. Schoolwork bored her, and so she applied only as much of her ability as was necessary to scrape past.

Being a pilot did not bore her. It attracted and held her full attention. Thus engaged, she could and did use her full powers of concentration and retention. She sat at her desk for most of the day, packing her brain with every detail of the Dash-82 Valkyrie's construction and operation that could be found in the flight manual.

Around noon, Cally came in to change her shirt and found Kozue hard at it. After making the switch and tying the top of her coverall around her waist in hopes that it would dry out a little (being the only one she had right now), the technician left and returned a few minutes later with a sandwich, a bag of chips, and a can of Coke. Kozue thanked her absently and kept studying. Cally stayed long enough to make sure Kozue was (however mechanically) eating her lunch before heading, with a fond smile, back to Hangar 5.

Cally herself was not spending the day idly. Down in the hangar, she had the ejection seat all torn apart by noon, a job that had required the use of several impact wrenches and, at one point, a plasma cutter. The labor had left her tired and in need of a dry undershirt, but it had been worth it, for once she'd breached the mangled armor shell, she found the seat computer relatively intact.

The afternoon's work was thus of a less physical and more interesting nature. After wiring the computer module up to a portable power source and connecting it gingerly to the diagnostic mode port on her rugged flight-deck-issue laptop computer, she started digging into its photonic guts, teasing out jumbled strands of data and putting them in order, resolving the crashed operating image into something she could compare to a spec document and, hopefully, draw some conclusions from.

Cally was the quietest member of Chief Tyrol's deck crew, lacking Tyrol's bulldog bark, Prosna's clownish exuberance, or the others' brisk hey-fellas-let's-get-it-done ebullience. She was a pretty but unprepossessing young woman who wore her dark hair in a simple short ponytail and had a round, harmless face. Most people from outside the Aurora's flight deck culture who encountered her found her likeable, but unremarkable, and rarely gave her a second thought. As a young girl she hadn't even liked technical matters very much. She'd wanted to be a dentist, and had planned to leave the Colonial Forces when her first hitch was up and use the money to go to dental school.

One thing had deflected her from that course. Two days before her enlistment was due to expire, she'd been working on the flight computer of Kozue Kaoru's Viper—the very same Viper that had crashed and burned out on the desert just now—when Kozue had come down the flightline, seen her up on the back of the ship working, and made the kind of offhandedly generous remark that was typical of Rogue pilots' attitude toward their deck crew.

The exam was scheduled for the Wednesday after the Veritech fly-off, and Cally had been studying for it in pretty much every waking moment that wasn't taken up with assigned duties. When Chief Tyrol found out she'd re-upped and applied for the exam, he'd even gone so far as to free up more of her time for the purpose. Prosna and the other techs had willingly shouldered extra duties to give Cally more study time, and she hadn't let their gesture go to waste.

That was all far from her mind right now, though, as she bent all her technical skills toward the goal of gathering as much evidence as possible regarding just who had tried to kill Lt. Kaoru and just how they'd done it. She worked with the same kind of focus Kozue had attacked the SERAPH BLUE manual with, tuning out the outside world, ignoring the comings and goings outside Hangar 5's open door as she dove deeper and deeper into the tangled skein of data that was all that remained of N2907C.

At around six in the afternoon, after pulling her head out of the SERAPH BLUE manual long enough to suck down a bowl of udon in the officers' mess, Kozue walked past Hangar 5 and saw Cally still hard at work. Smiling, she left the tech to her task and continued down the line. Entering Hangar 12, she saw that the blue Valkyrie was parked near the door rather than at the back, all its access panels back in place, looking all shiny and brand new. She paused to admire her name on the side for a few moments, then went to the test shack, rapped on the door, and stuck her head in.

Max Sterling was, to her momentary amusement, just finishing a Cup-o-Noodles. He gave her the "one moment please" hand signal, slurped down the last of the noodles, drank off the remaining broth, lobbed the cup into the wastebasket in the corner, and then stood up, smiling.

"Ready for your checkride?" he asked.

Kozue nodded. "As I'll ever be," she said.

"Great. The bird's all ready for you," he said. Picking up his flight helmet from the desk, he added, "The prototype is an S-model, so there's no second seat. I'll fly chase in one of the Victories."

One of the Stonewell techs looked on approvingly as Kozue used the Valkyrie's built-in boarding ladder to climb up to the cockpit, not waiting for the tech to roll the stairs over. Then he did move the stairs into position, climbed up, and made sure she was properly strapped in.

"The egress system in the VF-1 is a little different than you're used to, Lieutenant," he said. "Instead of a center ring, you've got one on either side of the seat. Pull either one and you're off, but we recommend pulling both if you can. That way both your arms are sure to be properly positioned."

Kozue nodded. "I've flown Dash-81 D-models," she said. "This looks to be set up pretty much the same."

"Yeah, it's close enough," the tech—FRAMPTON, according to the name tape on his coverall—agreed. "You'll find your sensors are more powerful and easier to control than the Dash-81's, but the control layout shouldn't have any surprises. Oh, and—I hate to come back to this, and hopefully you won't need it, but better safe than sorry—if you do have to punch out, remember that you've got a Cyclone on board this aircraft."

Kozue grinned. "Wish we had room for one of those in the VX," she said. "I could've used one yesterday."

"Jonsered and I were talking to the guys from Incom about that last night," Frampton said. "They left talking about how they might be able to use the stretched fuselage from the Pit Viper—that's what they call the ELINT model, right?—to provide a Cyclone bay for the single-seat model."

"Well, a girl can dream," Kozue said. "Anything else?"

"Nope, that should be everything," Frampton said. "Have a good flight!"

Kozue thanked him, then switched her comm system to the setting marked PB. "Check one, check one," she said. "Valkyrie One on what I hope is the Stonewell private band."

"Valkyrie One, your assumption is correct," came the slightly amused voice of Max Sterling. "Victory One receiving you five by five. Ready for you to crank up any time."

"Roger, starting now." The startup routine in the Valkyrie took only a moment to come back to her—it was the same in the Dash-82 as it had been in previous models—and the sound of the twin fusion turbines powering up, a little throatier and growlier than the Viper's shrill Tylium-fueled engines, brought an automatic smile to her lips. She had learned to love the VX, but there had been no learning curve to loving the VF-1. Just sitting in one again made her feel better about everything that had happened in the last few days.

She put her hand on the throttle and eased it forward, releasing the brakes, and the Valkyrie responded smartly, rolling out onto the apron. Kozue switched the comm system to the ATC band and called for clearance to taxi, which was promptly granted. As she rolled toward the taxiway, she saw Isamu Dyson standing next to a Meerkat utility vehicle, bottle of water in hand, chatting with a pretty blonde wearing a Shinsei Industries coverall. He looked up at the sound of the approaching Valkyrie, then grinned and called something to Kozue. Of course, between her helmet, the distance, and the whine and grumble of the engines behind her, she couldn't hear him at all.

Grinning, Kozue took her hands off the controls for a moment, made the OK sign against the brow ridge of her helmet with one hand, and poked the index finger of the other into the ring thus formed, then made the international thumb-and-pinky "telephone" sign next to her head. Dyson guffawed, slapping his thigh with his free hand. It was a classic piece of WDF pilot sign language:

"Fuckhead, use the radio."

Dyson leaned into the Meerkat, across the blonde, and emerged with a radio handset. Kozue flipped to the base general traffic channel and heard him say,

"—like you doing in a great big grown-up airplane like that?"

"I figured you might be less embarrassed if I'd at least had a checkride before I whipped your tail tomorrow," she replied.

"Ha!" Dyson said. "I like your style. Want to have dinner with me tonight?"

"Won't your girlfriend object?" Kozue replied innocently as she guided the Valkyrie toward the end of the runway.

"Oh, she's not my girlfriend," Dyson said. "Or, well, not my only girlfriend," he corrected himself. Just as the Meerkat passed out of her field of view, Kozue saw the blonde hit him in the leg with a clipboard.

"Well, all right," Kozue said, "but you have to have me back to the VOQ by 2030. I need my beauty sleep, you know."

"You got it," Dyson replied. "Try not to crash! I hate it when women fake injuries so they can stand me up."

"Trust me, Dyson," Kozue said, "if I decide to stand you up, I'll just tell you it's because I had a better offer. I'm honest like that."

Dyson laughed again. "See you when you get back."

Kozue switched back to ATC. "Valkyrie One is in position. Request permission to take off for familiarization flight."

"Permission granted, Valkyrie One. Clear skies!"

Kozue thanked the tower, double-checked her alignment and the wind sock, closed her canopy, then opened the throttles and started to roll.

The first thing she noticed was that SERAPH BLUE was much snappier than the VF-1D-81s she'd flown in primary training before Guld had washed her out of AVT. Throttle response was quicker, thrust came on even more suddenly, and the takeoff roll was short indeed. She pulled nearly vertical as soon as the wheels left the ground and climbed out, then dashed off a couple of aileron rolls—largely useless, but fun and decorative—before leveling off and turning toward the gunnery range.

A few moments later, one of the red-striped white VF-2s pulled into formation with her, close enough that she could see Max Sterling's smile below the tinted visor of his helmet. She switched over to the Stonewell private band.

"Did you actually intend to make a dinner date with Lieutenant Dyson in full hearing of everybody on the base?" Max asked, sounding amused.

"Sure, why not," Kozue replied. "Turn down free food? Besides, what am I going to do, give him a reputation?"

Max snorted. "You're a danger to yourself and others," he said.

"That's the Rogue Squadron way," she said, then added in a very prim subordinate-on-the-comm tone, "I believe it was adapted from the Eight-Ball Squadron creed, sir."

Max laughed. "Careful, Lieutenant," he said. "I might be overcome with nostalgia and lose control of my aircraft. All right, then. Let's start with some basic maneuvers, then move on to mode transitions and target engagement. Just follow my lead and do what I do. Ready?"

"Let's do it," Kozue replied, then smiled wryly at herself as the next line of the old song popped automatically into her head.

Let's fall in love...

Max's Victory rolled onto its back and dove into a split-S, and with almost exactly the same motion, Kozue's Valkyrie followed.