Safety Tests Read Online Free Page A

this morning’s other retest, that male pilot I complimented so highly, had such a nice touch.
    The ship unclamps and floats out as if no one controls it at all. Only real pilots know how hard that is to do.
    We have an actual cockpit window on this ship, and she raises the metal curtain. Suddenly the cockpit fills with ship butts, running lights, glare, and three-dimensional nightmares. The Moon looms in the distance as if it were really our destination.
    I can see the routes as clearly as if they’re marked. They’re not, of course. They change as the station’s orbit around the Earth changes, but I’ve done this so long it’s like there’s a map of the trajectories in my head.
    There probably is, too. I can see which ships are a little off-course, which ones are traveling too fast for their route, which ones are not certified for the station itself.
    She doesn’t seem distracted by the ships at all. She waits until she’s the required distance from the station before engaging the engines. Her hands on the controls are firm and delicate at the same time. She’s clearly used to hands-on flying. I wonder if she ever uses the automated system.
    We ease forward, out of the first protected zone around the station. Speeds here are regulated just like everything else from engine burn to communications chatter. The tiny robot deflector ships hover near the bays, ready to knock some ship aside if it gets too close to anything.
    Farther ahead, through the second and third protected zones, ships move faster, some of them actually speeding their way to Mars.
    But no one speeds here. Six ships surround us, all heading on different routes for different things. L&R learned long ago that we should have only one test course running per day, because any more and the stupid candidates might bump into each other (literally).
    Add in the private pilots (some of whom are real doofuses), the folks who should have Sectioned out long ago, and the pilots from countries with regulations less stringent than ours (and who aren’t allowed to use our space station), and the first protected zone is the Wild West—ships moving every which way on trajectories not assigned by any standardized route.
    I count at least three inexperienced or just plain inept pilots out of the six. One ship keeps turning on half of its running lights, then turning on the other half, never both at the same time. A another ship slides from one standard route entry to another as if the pilot can’t decide where he’s going, and a third seems to be on yet another attempt at docking with the station.
    Iva manages to avoid all of them with an ease that would lead any passenger to think there’s no trouble at all. She seems to be able to do complicated equations in her head, adjusting for this, adjusting for that, working the three-dimensional space in a way that most pilots never learn.
    Then she translates all of that math, all those spatial relations, into her fingers with a gentleness that I’m not even sure I can attempt.
    We head toward the Moon at a pace that feels unnaturally slow.
    I run Iva through the paces—a turn here, a pretend crisis there—and she does even better than I expect.
    Then we begin our return. I’m going to ignore her attitude mistake, and pass her with the highest possible grade.
    At least, that’s what I’m thinking until I realize we’re heading too fast into the high traffic around the station.
    “You’re coming in hot,” I say.
    She ignores me. Or maybe she didn’t hear me.
    “Iva,” I say with a sharp twist on her name, “you’re going too fast.”
    “You desk jockeys,” she says and that pisses me off. I am not a desk jockey. If I were, I wouldn’t be sitting here, feeling my heart rate increase.
    “Iva,” I say, keeping my tone level, “slow down.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” she says. “I can handle it.”
    She narrowly avoids the ship with the running lights problem.
    “You know that handling it isn’t an issue.