Test Flight

It wasn't her first time aboard a Dragonfly class space ship, but this was one of the new Imperial Army ones, and the controls were placed differently. It took her almost two minutes to find the starter, and another full minute before she figured out how to turn the radio off. Once she did, the console filled with messages from the control tower (she never understood why they called it a tower, most of the times it was just another room, lost inside the stations, with screens and little angry men screaming at her because she wasn't respecting her vectors to the line) telling her to turn the radio back on. She replied, as soon as she found the keyboard that had been hidden on her side, where she usually found the user manuals.
  "I can communicate through here. Don't disrupt my music. Speaking of which, how do I turn the music on?"
  "The DF-4XTN is a fighter ship. There is no music."
  "LAAAAAAAAAAME" - she typed and said at the same time, reaching for her ear buds as soon as she pressed the return key. After checking that she had enough battery time on her wrist-comp to last the test, she selected a song at random from her "epic fight music" folder. The cords of the quantum bass echoed in her ears as she read the exit vector and waited for the "OK to go" from the tower. After a few more back and forth with the poor low ranked soldier tasked with controlling her lane, she finally hit the release button and the small ship was shot out of the station into the minefield. She should let the computer take care of dodging the obstacles, but it was too much fun to do it herself, and the voice was singing in her ears "Dance in the nebulae, dodging lasers and shooting aliens!" so she flew, pressing the trigger (locked, luckily) and blasting imaginary aliens from the skies of Jupiter. The console was screaming at her
  "TURN THE COMPUTER ON!", "THAT'S NOT YOUR EXIT VECTOR!", "YOU ARE HEADING TO A NO-EXIT ZONE!"
   She took her time to reply to that one, typing with the left hand and controlling the ship one-handed :   "there is a exit, it's just tight" - and directing the ship to a small gap between two mines and a asteroid, the left wing almost scrapping a bit of ink from a mine. She turned the radio on for a few seconds to scream a "HEEEEEEEEEEEELL YEEEEEEEEAAAAAH!" and then turned it back off. Sometimes she wonder how long it would be until she got expelled from the army, but most of the time she just wanted to have fun. The console blinked a "ENEMY AHEAD" warning, and the targeting system directed the aim to the closest test-enemy. She turned the targeting comp off and aimed manually, blasting the small satellite from the sky, and then flying through the debris (rule thirteen of space battle : never fly through the debris of a just destroyed enemy) to take aim for the next one. A few moments later she was returning to the station and feeling so good, she let the dragonfly take control of the entry, leaning back as much as she could in the stiff chair, singing with the radio back on. She would be heavily penalised for a lot of technicalities, but the truth was, she did a better than perfect score in the part that mattered : 16 shots, 17 enemies down. Although she had to admit that the the alignment of those two satellites next to the asteroid she blasted to get rid of both was luck.
    There would be more next week, and next time, she'd do it by the book. If she felt like it.