I Know Something About Pain You Don't

Tahiri had never been a fan of waiting, but she'd been doing just that for so long now it might have been days, and as she sat in the cockpit of her X-Wing (really, these boots could come off any time now), half listening to the comm chatter, she wondered how much time had passed in Fandom. She and her pilots -- who'd dubbed themselves Barefoot Squadron, much to her self-conscious amusement -- had trained and drilled for weeks on end both as a squadron and as part of the fleetwide Jedi Force-meld strategy. The past three months had been spent in a series of diversionary attacks against Yuuzhan Vong-held Core worlds, per Admiral Kre'fey's plan.

The concept was fairly simple: they'd hit a poorly defended planet and win by virtue of numbers, and in the process the novice pilots would gain experience, the fleet would build morale, and most importantly they'd cover up their ultimate destination of Ebaq 9. Jaina and Twin Suns Squadron had been on that hellish little asteroid for a while; although Admiral Ackbar hadn't outright said so, Tahiri knew the Yuuzhan Vong would do anything to capture one or both of the Solo twins and thus Jaina was bait in a trap. Tahiri was curious as to how she was doing. She worried about Jaina, maybe more so than she did about the one in Fandom, since her Jaina didn't have the same kind of support structure. She suspected the other Tahiri was in the same position.

( She was just extending her senses toward Ebaq 9 when a shockwave of horror lanced through the Force, and she knew where it was coming from. )

[OOC: NFB, NFI, OOC okay, pi to the fifteenth decimal point. Plot points of the Battle of Ebaq 9 taken from Destiny's Way by Walter Jon Williams, but guess who disappeared from this part of the narrative, forcing me to make stuff up? I shouldn't be allowed to make things up. One more later today and that's it.]

The good thing about being home, so far, was that Tahiri had been far too busy to speculate herself worried about what had gone on in the week before she'd left Fandom. After the Knighting ceremony on Mon Calamari, she'd gotten into her newly-issued X-Wing (her X-Wing, how weird was that?) and headed to Kashyyyk.

That had been over . . . she didn't know how many weeks ago, maybe three or four; nearly all her time since arriving here had been spent getting to know the eleven new pilots that had been assigned to her. That were, and this was the part that had been blowing her mind since she'd first learned this was the plan, under her command. Luckily, thanks to Admiral Kre'fey, she'd been assigned a competent executive officer, since Force knew she certainly didn't have the experience necessary to deal with the headache of military red tape, but most of her pilots were rookies, and the couple who weren't didn't exactly have their names near the top of the Flight Hours Logged lists. The time she wasn't spending in drills with her squadron was spent working with the other Jedi to develop the fleet-wide Force meld that they hoped would accomplish the same thing for them that the yammosk battle coordinators did for the Yuuzhan Vong forces. She wasn't a crack pilot, and she knew it; the only reason she was in this role at all was because she was a Jedi.

Which pretty much meant she'd do the best she could. It was all she really knew how to do.

Down time didn't come very often, so when it did she made the most of it, and with a couple of standard hours free Tahiri took the opportunity to wander off by herself, away from the constant crush of people and ubiquitous machinery that made Riina so twitchy. (Okay, maybe she was avoiding Alema Rar a little bit; she still hadn't forgotten all those times Alema'd tried to hang all over Anakin when Tahiri was right there and also Alema was crazycakes.) Running a hand through her hair -- cut short now for the sake of her pilot's helmet -- she fiddled with her comlink and debated whether she ought to check in with people back in Fandom.

. . . might be better not to.

[OOC: NFB, NFI, OOC okay, etc. Spacer post, la la la. You have to make stuff up to advance the narrative sometimes -- ah, the perils of a secondary character. Framing adapted from Destiny's Way by Walter Jon Williams with some details taken from the short story Ylesia by the same.]