This isn't fair, he repeated in his head for the hundredth time as he scanned the engine compartment of the Tayce prototype he'd had moved to the launch bay the previous evening. Everything was still where he'd left it, just as it had been ten minutes ago, and fifteen minutes before that. It's Helen's fighter. They knew I was going to have it finished. Once he'd learned that Helen had been assigned to patrol duty for six months, he'd made a request to have the demonstration postponed, but his superiors had denied it out of hand. They saw no reason to delay when there were plenty of qualified pilots that could use the equipment, and Cas couldn't come up with any good reasons either.

Not fair.

Stepping into the launch bay, Vex cringed as she heard something slam. Her stride didn't waver, however, and she approached the prototype with admiration. Through the transparent dome of the craft, she saw young man peering into the cockpit. She could only hope he was the engineer. By the way he moved protectively over it, he must be.

Though he must have been expecting her, three minutes late as she was, he looked up, surprised, as she saluted. No harm in being polite, after all.

Cas looked up with a grimace and looked the woman over in irritation. It didn't matter that she was qualified; it wouldn't have mattered if they'd sent him some overdeveloped specialist who could fly a teacup through a hurricane. It wasn't Helen.

"Hello," he said shortly. "If you'll step this way I'll explain the basic instruction. It's a modification on the old VF-32 model fighter, and most of the navigation is still pretty close to the original. There are four forward lasers, two aft and eight missile slots that can be fitted for anything between the Spitfire and Northstar classes. The control panel has..." he went on, explaining the stats on the Tayce, re-explaining when she looked like she didn't understand. Given his current mood, that was probably more often than necessary, but Cas wasn't going to give her any excuses to crash his ship.

"No sir." she said blandly. No wonder they'd had to call her in. This poor young man would have already brought out the arrogance of most of her peers. Pilots are a touchy lot, my lad. You could learn to appreciate us a little better.

"If you took a normal fighter and took out all the extraneous crap, this is what you'd have." she murmured before remembering that her comments would be recorded. She began reciting the run to the recorder as she accelerated past the first set of beacons and looped around the second. The rest of the run was a full twenty minutes of the most extreme maneuvers the tactical guys could come up with. By the end, Vex could feel the tension across her shoulderblades. As she slid the Tayce into its slot, she relaxed against the padded seat.

The Tayce performed precisely to specifications in every category, outperforming the latest IF designs by seventeen percent at the least. The maneuverability was really its best feature, an showed improvement over the Talons by forty-three percent. With the footage Essen provided he would certainly be granted a competitive test to prove it, and by then, maybe Helen would be more accessible.

If she wasn't, though, Essen might be a good back up. She executed the more complicated maneuvers as easily as she did the standard ones. She wouldn't have Helen's battle sense, perhaps, but she certainly knew how to fly.

As Cas led their way through the identical-looking corridors, Vex studied the engineer. He was polite and formal, friendly in a distant way. She wondered how he managed to get through command school unscathed. Or if he had simply avoided confrontation, as she had.