"... but the worst part was having to spend the rest of the week painted bright Twi'lek blue."

Laughter bubbled up from one of the tables in the Morning Star's starboard crew lounge, commonly known as the Fishtank. It attracted the attention of a man who'd only entered the dimly-lit lounge a few minutes before and who now stood at the bar, waiting for his Full Throttle.

"What's that about?" Zoom asked the bartender, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the table in question. He'd recognized a few of the Blues in the crowd, as well as some of his own Reds. Good to see them getting along.

"Story time," Dargon replied after barely a glance, intent on proper mixing. "They've been at it for over an hour. Who knows, some might even be true."

Zoom chuckled. "Only some?"

Dargon shrugged. "One thing I learned serving the Blues is that asking fighter pilots anything is useless: either it's classified, or they lie like thieves." The former smuggler set down the finished drink on the bar with a grin. "Especially when it concerns their egos. And everything does."

Zoom stared at the man for a long moment, wondering whether he should be offended or laugh. Finally he chose the latter, picking up his drink and taking a sip as he made his way over to the table. He waited for a break in the murmur of conversation to clear his throat and ask, "Is this a private party or can anyone join in?"

A stir went around the table as the newcomer was recognized and greeted by a chorus of "Zoom"s and "Colonel"s. Even though everyone was off-duty, there was a noticeable straightening up in the presence of a squadron leader. Rob Baden, Biggs to most, made as if to rise and offer his seat, but Kelly waved him back down.

"I'll stand, thanks. So, what's the topic?"

There was only a moment's pause before Angel jumped in. "We were talking about the craziest stunts we ever pulled. Before we joined the Rebellion, that is." This prompted another round of comradely laughter from those gathered around the table.

Kelly raised both eyebrows, then grinned. "Well..." he began with a drawl, "it may surprise some of you to know that I was not always a respectable old man." This revelation was met by hoots and denials from the assembly. Zoom waved them all down. "No, really. I could tell you about some of the stuff I did or saw in Fool Squadron... but if we're talking craziest, I have to go back even further than that."

Chula was a pretty good place to grow up, though kind of quiet. My family lived on a small farm a dozen klicks outside the spaceport; all around us were other farms and ranches and fruit orchards as far as the eye could see. The next house over - a short drive or a long hike - was a ranch, and they had a boy, Slade, who was a little older than me and my brothers. He used to take us with him to feed the nerfs, dare us to do things, give us rides on his speeder bike; stuff like that.

When I was 11, Slade's father got him a speeder of his own, and he offered to give us the bike if we wanted. It was pretty old and beat-up by then, but we said "sure!" and our parents said it was okay. We went for a lot of nice slow rides up and down the road that ran by our place, straight as a laser. After a while, we got bored with that. Then we got an Idea.

On one of our family trips to the local dump, out behind the port, we'd seen another old junked speeder bike lying on a scrap heap. My brother checked it out and it still ran, even though the front was a little bent out of shape and some of the parts were missing. We got our parents to let us buy it with our allowance, on the pretense that with two bikes, there'd be less fighting over who got to ride next. Then we really went to work.

The first step was to fix up the second bike. That took a couple of months, whenever we could get the time after school and chores. At the end... well, it still looked like a wreck, but at least it would go straight and not stall out every two minutes. We almost played it safe and stopped there, but Justin kept us going. He and I snuck down to the dump one night on the bikes, dug a repulsorlift unit and a half-drained battery out of a speeder, and dragged them home. We wired those together and soon we were the proud owners of Chula's only flying bathtub.

You can probably see where this is going. We "borrowed" some lengths of steel cable from the tool shed and bought the other fittings at the hardware store. We lashed everything together, with more enthusiasm than sense, but we were at least pretty sure it wouldn't come apart on the first try. And we did make sure we could operate the throttle and brakes on both bikes by pulling on the fishing lines.

Four... no, five months after we started, we had our very own racing pod.

"Oh, come on!" Leo objected at that point. "You expect us to believe that three boys built a working podracer out of junk?" Several others nodded, echoing his skepticism with murmurs of their own.

"I didn't say it was a real pod," Zoom protested. "We didn't have any turbines, and if we did, we wouldn't have known what to do with them. But when you're that age, two old speeder bikes and a rusted-out bathtub make a perfectly good substitute. And, as you'll see in a moment, there were a few things we didn't think of.

Anyway, as I was saying..."

So we'd built the thing, somehow managing to keep it a secret from our parents. Now came the hard part: deciding who got to ride in it first. We drew straws, threw fists, over and over. Finally we just agreed to go oldest to youngest. That meant I was first up.

We'd been keeping it under a tarp behind the barn. We pulled the tarp off and switched everything on together for the first time, tugging on the cables, making a final test. I put on a pair of safety goggles - but no crash helmet, what can I say, I was young and stupid - and climbed into the tub. It wobbled a little, then stabilized. My brothers got out of the way and I gently pulled on the throttles, making sure to pull both at the same time. There was a jerk as the bikes took up the slack in the cables and then the whole thing started to slide forward, more or less as a unit.

My brothers were whooping and yelling as I nudged the throttle a little more, up to about walking speed, and pulled on one of the cables. That bike turned to the side, the other drawing ahead a bit, and I led them through a complete circle like a pair of docile draft beasts. Nothing to it.

Justin came toward me, saying it was his turn now, but I wasn't ready to give up my seat. I yanked hard on the throttles and the contraption took off. He ran after me, of course, but he couldn't keep up. He was still yelling when I lost sight of him. For a moment I wondered if he was going to go tell our parents, but then I realized that if he did that, he'd never get his turn. I hoped he'd figure that out too.

Now that I was ticking along at a good pace, I realized that the pod had a tendency to pull to the right; something in its construction, maybe the mismatched bikes. I wound the cable a few turns tighter and that seemed to help some. I wrestled "my" machine around a corner and headed for the front gate, which was conveniently already open. When I got out onto the road, I took a deep breath and opened the throttles as far as they would go.

I didn't have any kind of speedometer, so I don't know how fast that was - probably only about 50 or 60 kph, I'd guess. But at that moment, with the wind in my hair and my ears and the trees and fenceposts whipping by on both sides as the fields blurred into an amber sea, it felt more like 300. I was a pod racer, zooming down the final stretch of the Boonta Classic with my engines roaring, straining against their bonds.

Well. (Ahem.) When I figured I'd gone far enough, I found a nice empty field to turn around in and headed back the way I came, trimming back my speed a little but not much. I was going about 30 when I made another sharp turn through the gate - I'd figured out by now that I could steer the tub some by shifting my weight and leaning into it - and headed up the driveway. I figured on making a neat three point stop right in front of my envious brothers, and as I drew abreast of the barn, I pulled hard on the brake cables.

That was when I discovered the flaw in our design.

"Did they not work?"

Zoom grinned and shook his head. "No, they worked just fine. The bikes stopped. But I didn't. See, we hadn't thought to put any sort of brakes on the tub."

There was a collective gasp of horror, accompanied by hysterical laughter. "Oh no!" Vape cried, still giggling.

"Oh yes."

I only had a moment to realize what had gone wrong, as the tub shot between the stopped bikes and right past my brothers. I can still see the looks on their faces. Then the tub snapped completely around as the cables ran out of slack again, and the bikes came together with a crash. Now I was scooting backwards on a repulsor cushion, dragging the idling bikes behind me by their tangled cables, completely out of control. And did I mention that I was heading for the wooli pen?

My brothers were yelling at me to jump, but I was still going too fast for that: I'd break my growing bones, or maybe my head. For one desperate second I thought about yanking the wires between the battery and the repulsor unit, but that was a bad idea too. The tub might skid to a stop, but it was just as likely to flip over or pitch me out. Meanwhile, the woolis saw me coming and started to scatter away from the fence. I didn't have much time.

Then I remembered the bikes. They were facing backward now, bouncing along in my wake, so I should be able to use them to slow me down, right? I let go of the brake lines and grabbed for the throttle lines again. But like I said, they were all tangled up together. Nothing happened at first. I gave a couple of sharp tugs to try to free them...

And then one of the bikes comes to life at full power, spinning the tub around again and yanking me off to the side. I miss the pen by that much. Instead, the tub slews around and slams right into the side of the kokkura coop. BAM!

The next thing I know, I'm covered in kokkura feathers. The tub has gone right through the wall of the coop and is sitting on dirty straw and lots of broken eggs. Kokkura are running everywhere, squealing their stupid little heads off. The one speeder bike, Slade's hand-me-down, is still running flat out, bobbing up and down at the end of its tether. Then the cable finally snaps and it goes flying off to who-knows-where... we never did find it.

Naturally, when my mother and father came out to see what the hell was going on, my brothers were nowhere to be found either.

Zoom sat back and finished his drink, letting the last of the laughter at his younger self's plight subside.

"How bad did you get punished?" Vape wanted to know.

"Hmm. I wasn't exactly punished," Kelly said after a moment's consideration. "I did have to round up all the kokkura. And fix the coop, first a quick patch and then for good. And take care of them myself for a month. But that, as my parents explained firmly, wasn't punishment. It was just my responsibility. Oh, and I lost my privileges on the surviving bike." He sighed, looking through the bottom of his empty glass at some place far away in space and time.

"Was it worth it? I don't know. But I never forgot those few minutes of pure joy before it all went wrong. That incredible feeling ... of speed."