"Hitting a two-meter target dead on, while going around a thousand kilometers an hour and dodging enemy fire? Yeah, not simple."

"... And it sounds like you weren't used to the ship, either, since this was in the intense week and you'd only had experience flying on Tatooine."

She's sort of looking at him like he's edible. Maybe he might find this awkward.

"Well, the T-16 was Incom's civilian training model for the T-65, so I was sort of used to the controls..." he trails off a little awkwardly.

"Does flying in zero gravity without atmosphere work the same as flying on a planet in atmosphere?" she wonders, innocently. "And did the controls have all of the same quirks you need to learn to get really good with them?"

"Well, uh, no..."

He is not sure what that look means.

That look means she thinks that pulling that off is kind of hot.

But he doesn't seem to be enjoying the attention, so she smiles at him and turns back to her datapad to continue typing.

"Did the Death Star even do anything besides have a stereotypical name and commit pointless acts of destruction?" she asks.

"That's about it, so far as I know. It wasn't online very long before we blew it up."

"Good. And excellent job for the proto New Republic. I'm guessing the large ridiculous wasteful superweapon helped unite everyone against the Empire?"

"Good guess."

"It's almost like people don't want to have a planet destroying superweapon flying around! What a surprise."

"Seems like it was for the Empire, at least."

"Well, they're idiots. You can tell by how they made a planet destroying superweapon."

Giggle.

"And destroying Alderaan of all places with it - it's just - it's such a waste and such a tactical blunder rolled together into this awful unique combination of moral and intellectual bankruptcy. It is amazing the whole system didn't collapse under its own idiocy on its own, no rebellion even required."

"I think the choice of Alderaan specifically was because of Leia. She was the princess of Alderaan, and they were trying to induce her to give up the Rebels' location."

"Okay. Let me respond to that with a question. Did that work?"

"No."

"No. Of course it didn't. Because, funnily enough, destroying everything someone loves except the thing you want her to betray to you is, you know, not a smart plan. Neither is giving her a very good reason to be as spiteful as possible towards your organization."

"Is this another 'if you can't get ethics, try for competence' thing?"

"Yes! Yes it is! I would prefer both but I can sort of understand immoral competence! Immoral incompetence is just. Augh."

Her reaction is sort of adorable.

"Imbeciles," she huffs. "Even worse, Alderaan was a part of the Empire, right? So they demonstrated to their subjects that they definitely would blow up their own people. With a lot of innocent casualties, you are not safe even if you are a good Imperial subject. There are just so very many things wrong with it and if I had a perfectly nice Empire I would at a minimum not blow my own people up! Absolute minimum! It's not very hard to not blow up a planet!"

"But what if you had this massive battlestation you'd just spent twenty years and billions of credits constructing?"