The fighter pilot with the callsign Spice was new to the team and, although all her credentials assured that she was not, indeed, new to space fighting as a concept or a skill, still the team had to be reassured.

The ‘old men’ – venerable veterans at twenty, twenty-two – watched from a safe distance on the carrier as Spice went through her first series of maneuvers. The training run wasn’t their hardest – nobody thought she could do that one, half the old men couldn’t pull it off flawlessly – but it was not easy, either, with a 1% fatality rate.

Spice zipped around the first obstacles – not too fast, not too slow. “Those are easy,” one Old Man scoffed. “Just wait till-“

But she made the trick shot as easily as any of them had.

“Too slow,” the doubter chided. And then he was laughing, as she bopped the wrong way around one of the hardest targets. “Looks like she zigged when she should have zagged!” His cronies laughed, some uneasily. That was the most deadly part of the run, the part they’d lost friends on.

The speakers blared to life. “All right!” Spice taunted, as she popped out on the other side of the target, the “flag” in her jet-ship’s catch-claw. “Zig-a-zig-ah!”

Thimbleful Thursday: https://thimblefulthursday.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/thimbleful-writing-prompt-10/

And Zig-a-zig…. ah: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spice_Girls

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