When Lathril met with his subordinates assembled in the hangar, Lathril thought he understood why Sarak assigned him to this particular squad. They stood carefully separated from each other, giving each other suspicious side-eyes just as much as they did to him. The one woman stood with her arms crossed; the oldest seemed to have a permanent frown etched onto his face, and the other two men shifted and leered as if they had a background of backroom dealing on a Hutt world somewhere. When Lathril stepped before them and cleared his throat to get their attention, they haphazardly came to a salute, then went back to staring at him.
“Sloppy,” said Lathril. “Let’s try that again, in unison. Atten… HUT!”
This time the salute was more in sync. Lathril studied the bunch a second time as they came back to a rest. They were reluctant, frightened, staring at his cybernetic and then at the vibroblade sheathed on his waist, likely making up stories in their head of how this Sith had lost his eye, Lathril thought. He bit back an internal sigh.
“My name is Lathril Ja’eel,” he said calmly. “I will be taking command of you as your squadron leader. First off, give me your names, please.”
Teft and Bett turned out to be the names of the shady pair. When Lathril looked at the woman for her answer, she tersely barked out, “Guy.”
“A woman named ‘Guy’?” Lathril stuttered before he could stop himself.
“Yeah. What of it?” she asked with a glare.
Lathril decided it was better not to pursue the topic. “And what about you?” he asked, turning to the eldest pilot.
“Oh, he doesn’t have a name,” Bett broke in.
“Yeah, we just call him ‘Crusty’,” added Teft. “Because he is.”
“I didn’t ask either of you to speak,” said Lathril mildly. “Well, pilot?”
“Crusty is fine,” muttered the older man with a grunt.
Lathril hesitated, but he sensed he wouldn’t gain much respect or a name by pressing the issue, especially as Guy continued glaring at him over her name. “I’ve had a chance to review your service records,” he said instead. “It doesn’t seem like this squad has done all that much flying recently, and we will need to fix that. I expect each of you to put in 35 hours a week of flight training, at least 20 of those in your assigned starfighter.”
“Thirty-five!” groaned Bett. “When are supposed to sleep or eat! I’ve got other duties, man.”
“I will see to it that your schedule is cleared of all non-mandatory activity,” said Lathril calmly. “Also, I ask that you not call me ‘man’. I have a proper name and title.”
“And what is that?” growled Bett rebelliously. “ ‘Your glorious eminence’, or would you rather be ‘my lord and master’?”
“Careful…” said Guy, her eyebrows breaking from their glare at Lathril as she looked over at Bett in concern.
“What, scared? He’ll go down in the next serious firefight just like the last time we had a Sith apprentice put over us. He already got shot down once — he’s lucky his master wasted the time to pull him off of Edusa.”
“He didn’t get shot down,” Crusty interjected grumpily.
The others fell into a stupor of silence; Lathril said nothing, either to the accusations or to the old pilot unexpectedly sticking up for him. He was curious how the squad would resolve this quarrel on their own.
“What do you mean, ‘he didn’t get shot down’?” asked Teft. “Padril was telling us the whole story in mess…”
“He did a Banshee Dive,” said Crusty, and the sound of Bett’s mouth closing was an audible snap. The term was new to Lathril, but he could see the awe blooming across their faces.
“I did it, and then I crashed,” Lathril said.
“But not before you shot down their squad leader,” said Crusty.
“How do you know?” cut in Teft plaintively. “That’s not what Padril was telling me at all!”
“You should know Padril is an idiot. I was in his wing,” Crusty growled.
The others kept gaping; clearly this was the most Crusty had ever spoken at one time. Lathril studied the older man. Lathril hadn’t gotten enough time to introduce himself to that squad before Commander Sarak had them launched over Edusa, but now he recognized the curt growl over the comms from his wingman.
“What was the manuever called again?” Guy asked tentatively.
“A Banshee Dive, apparently,” said Lathril, now matching gazes with Crusty, but the man’s eyes had disappeared under his scowling eyebrows again. “My last remaining engine was overheating, and I hoped the thin upper atmosphere would cool it and prevent a fire.”
“And then you freefell all the way back to the ground?” said Teft.
“Shot down a squadleader and pulled up at the last minute,” said Guy, a grin breaking on her face.
“Whoa. Can you teach us that?” asked Teft, cutting in over her.
Everyone looked at Lathril.
“Well, it is a move that only works in gravity,” said Lathril slowly. The squad didn’t stop staring at him despite this, and he sighed. “You won’t let this go until I teach you, will you?”
Bett and Teft both grinned and Guy continued looking intrigued despite herself. Crusty just rolled his eyes.
“Very well,” said Lathril. “You will learn it the way I did: on speeders, on land.”
Teft and Bett were looking much less eager as they stared down the tall cliff Lathril had picked out for them. “Are you entirely certain our speeders can take that drop?” asked Teft.
“Not entirely,” said Lathril. “That is why I’ll be going first. I’m much more durable than you are.” He smiled at them casually, but he didn’t feel the same confidence inside. His stomach was practically crawling with anxiety as he walked to his speeder, the squad stepping back out of his way. He climbed up onto it, affixing the safety harness around his waist and adjusting the side mirror. When he stood up fully and pressed his knee against the power switch, the engine thrummed to life under him, and for a moment Lathril almost lost his nerve. The squad was watching him though, and he pushed through the fear.
“When you go off the cliff, you’ll need to shift all your weight to the back and kick down, to bring the nose of your speeder up,” he instructed. “Standing models like this one are front heavy, and if you go off level, you’ll put yourself into a nose dive. You’ll also need a good deal of speed, to keep your trajectory as flat as possible.”
Lathril demonstrated with his hand, shooting at an angle out and down. Even just that movement changed the speeder’s balance, and Lathril’s heart leapt to his throat as it lurched sideways under him. He could feel the doubtful looks of the squad on him, and his next words were just as much for them as himself.
“The main thing, however, is confidence. It may not feel like it after spending so much time in a starfighter, but this is a lot of machine under you. Go fast, and trust to its power.”
With that, Lathril turned the speeder about with a sway of his weight to the side. His whole body was shaking, and he tightened his arms and legs to keep from losing strength in them entirely. He drove a fair distance back from the cliff. “Plenty of space to pick up the speed you’ll need!” he called to the others in explanation, and he hoped the distance disguised the quaver in his voice.
Then, with a deep inhalation, he set the power of the speeder to max and pressed his foot down on the accelerator.
He hit the back of the harness as the speeder bucked and surged forward, and Lathril had a split second of panic, wondering if he was dead already. The wind whipped through his hair, the scrubby flora of the dusty planet passed like a flash beside him, and then he was streaking past the gaping eyes and mouths of the crew. Past them, past the lip of the cliff, and then suddenly the blue of the sky surrounded him, the horizon line falling away. The whine of the engines quieted without the land to echo it back to Lathril’s ears, and he felt weightless, the wind whistling against the nose of the speeder.
Time stopped. He was back on Dantooine, shooting down a canyon much too fast for the shuddering engine of the clunky farm speeder under him. Lathril had seen this same canyon over and over in his nightmares after the accident, and he could feel his vision going dark and pinching off in dread, just like it had then. He’d wake up soon, moments before the impact occurred…
But there was no impact. No rock walls. No dust in his face, fouling the speeder’s rudders and making it impossible to turn away or slow. Just open air, clean and cool in his nose and mouth.
Open air and a speeder he knew how to ride.
Lathril whooped, more than half a scream. The adrenaline he usually rejected as a Jedi surged through him, and with it came a time-slowing focus. He felt the nose of the speeder begin to go down, and he leaned back as hard as he could, nearly horizontal, hoping he didn’t over-correct. His stomach pushed up against his ribs and then his throat, then even the top of his head, as he began to fall. The ground rushed for him, but the apprentice was all business now, waiting for exactly the right moment to bend his knees and shove down; the thrusters squeezed up against the dirt and gave him a little bounce, and then he was clear.
The speed of his passage kicked up sand in his wake. He ratcheted down the power, and pushed his weight to the left, sending the speeder on a wide drift, the momentum making his hair fly and dust puff up in crescent, until he was facing back the way he had come. The squad standing on the ridge looked like tiny dots against the sun, but Lathril raised his arm and gave another whoop up to them.
The squad, one by one — Lathril thought he heard Bett’s voice first — broke out into a cheer in response.
Lathril felt breathless, the adrenaline began to fade into fatigue, but he also felt unbelievably good. He opened his commlink.
“And there you are. Not so bad now, is it?”
Nervous static-y chuckles answered him.
“I’ll be back up there soon,” he continued. “For now, I want you to practice getting the appropriate speed and getting the lean right. Then you’ll take the cliff, one by one. Bett will go first.”
They returned to the ISS-Phoenix in the evening, hot but pleasantly tired, and covered in dust. Bett was also covered in mud: on his first try, he had lost his nerve at the last moment, wrenching his speeder around so harshly he lost control and ended up in the ditch. His swagger had been severely diminished after that, but Lathril had spoken to him gently, and after Crusty made the jump with all the coolness of the old campaigner he was, Bett was convinced to try again — and he succeeded.
They clustered around the same mess hall table now, Bett still making squelches up and down the rows as they got their food and sat down. The others were full of exuberance — Teft was making a dramatic re-enactment of Bett’s crash while Guy flicked peas at him. Lathril remained quiet, watching with satisfaction. It wasn’t too much different than training young Pada’wans, he reflected. Like many of his memories of the Jedi, this one was tinged by the sadness of loss, and after a moment, he looked away. He was broken from his reverie when Guy suddenly patted him on the arm.
“So what are we learning tomorrow, sir?” she asked.
Lathril looked from face to face. Bett had wiped a little window of mud off from his mouth, and even Crusty was smiling a bit. The distrust towards the Sith was gone, and Lathril reflected that sentients were the same anywhere: all they needed was something in which to believe.
“Tomorrow?” he mused, drawing out the middle syllable and running his fingers along his chin as if he had a beard to stroke like an old Jedi master. The gesture never failed to make his Pada’wans laugh, and the Imperials were no different. “We’ll be doing that, but firing at probe droids at the same time,” he said.
“Can you even fix a laser cannon to a speeder?” asked Guy, her brow furrowed in thought.
“I don’t know,” said Lathril, a grin touching his lips. It was mirrored by the squad, Bett’s teeth flashing white in his dirty face. “…but I intend to find out.”