Throughout the rest of the trip, the two Republic officers spent their idle hours discussing the differences between serving in the Fleet and being a ground-pounder. Laera had always been rather hopeless at flying; the best she had ever managed to do was to keep up some pretext of being willing to obey landspeeder traffic laws. Carth, it turned out, was a crack shot with blaster pistols, and the two vowed to pit their skills against one another at the first opportunity. The Marine officer admitted to herself that, perhaps, she might have been able to become good friends with this starry-eyed flyboy. That assumed, of course, that he could wrap his mind around her having been dead. However, life in the military tended toward the unpredictable; it was possible that, after this leave, she woul