Disclaimers blah Joss blah Mutant Enemy blah.

***

Beepbeepbeep! Beepbeepbeep! The tinkling little alarm was starting to get on Wash's nerves. He'd take a blaring one to this soft noise anyday. Come on, an alarm should be saying, "Hey! Screwball! Something's wrong, dammit! Now fix it!" Not, "Umm... Excuse me? Sir? There's, umm, I think there's something wrong. Could you maybe umm, look into it when you have, er, the time?" It was an alarm, gorramit! It needed to be demanding and urgent.

Still, Wash let his eyes drift over the screens of the cockpit to find out what was wrong with the flight simulation that needed correcting now. Apparently you still had to go through some basic training, even if you were second (only because someone hacked into the record books and made themselves top of the class) in your class at one of the best flight schools this side of the 'verse. Something about the military aspect of flying a ship. Whatever that meant. It sounded like training to deal with getting shot at to Wash. And hey, hadn't he done that just last week, only without the training?

Being cooped up in this flight simulator wasn't sitting too well with Wash. He needed the wind beneath his wings, the sky's embrace. But no, he was sitting square on his ass in some base on the ground listening to frightened little alarms. Hopefully the actual ships had real alarms. Wash was used to alarms, having spent most of his youth on a polluted sphere of congealed factories that they liked to call an industrial world. Then he'd gone away to flight school, which had an alarm for everything just to keep students on their toes. Wash had dealt with alarms practically every day for the twenty cycles he'd been around to deal with them.

But the alarm couldn't be helped right now, and neither could the simulator. Heaving a sigh, Wash set his jaw and sucked it up. It was just something he was going to have to live with for a week or so. Then he'd be back in a real cockpit in a real ship and everything would be fine. Except