As the hydrospanner slipped from its precarious resting place atop his TIE Defender’s top wing, Wyl Trykon tried in vain to grab the tool. With outstretched arms he lunged for the little metal cylinder, but his fingertips just jammed into one end, sending it spinning at even greater speed down the nine meters of empty air above the hangar bay’s durasteel deck, and causing pain to erupt in his right hand at the points of impact. For several heart-stopping moments thereafter, Wyl teetered on the edge of the starfighter’s wing, flailing his arms desperately to try to regain his balance, while cursing loudly in response to the unexpected pain.
The tirade went on for some time, until the Vast Empire’s Chief of Naval Warfare realized that some of the other occupants of the
Adjudicator’s secondary hangar bay were staring at him. “…son of a – bit. Of. Pain. Just a
bit of pain,” he finished awkwardly, smiling in embarrassment and pushing himself away from the wing’s edge on his stomach. The various engineers and technicians took the hint, and turned back to what they had been doing, but most were sporting smiles that hadn’t been there before.
“Great,” Trykon muttered under his breath, still sliding back towards the wing’s mounting, back near the ladder he’d used to get on top of the starfighter. “By this time tomorrow, the whole ship will know I almost fell to my death, and that I did it while working on my private fighter, without assistance.” The last piece of information was the most damning, since Trykon knew very well that Vast Imperial regulations dictated that all starfighter maintenance was to be performed in teams of no fewer than two crew members, to prevent just this sort of careless accident. An anecdote wherein he failed to personally follow those regulations wouldn’t exactly reinforce naval discipline aboard ship, and neither would it help him maintain his carefully constructed reputation as a principled military man and consummate professional.
Trykon was also agonizingly aware that the mere existence of the
Revenant – which was the name of his personalized TIE/D Defender starfighter, painted in a unique matte black finish that distinguished it from anything else in the small hangar – was in itself damaging to that reputation which he’d worked so hard to build up. He knew that his background as a former plutocrat of Imperial-era Kuat and his continuing status as a VIP in the Kuati loyalist movement did not endear him to most of the Vast Empire’s rank and file, who were recruited mostly from the Galaxy’s working classes. And it was obvious that for many of those proletarian enlisted personnel, the Kuati officer’s private starfighter, which traveled with him in the
Adjudicator’s forward hangar bay at all times, was a symbol of wealth and privilege. It was too easy to see the deadly warship as some sort of expensive toy, a prop used by a rich man play-acting at fighting a war. It was one of the few parts of his life that Trykon truly lamented, for the truth of the matter was that despite his aristocratic airs and suggestive post-childhood biography, the Kuati’s roots were more humble than most people could possibly have imagined, and he had seen more than his fair share of real combat. Much of it from inside the
Revenant’s cockpit.
Lastly, Trykon knew, too, that his estimate of such juicy gossip taking a full day to circulate through the crew was almost laughably optimistic. Most of them would know the story within an hour.
Oh, stop worrying, he admonished himself silently, as he reached out with one foot to find the top rung of the ladder. He made contact, and started to lower himself over the side of the
Revenant’s top wing.
You’re well-liked, and well-respected. Only a fool could mistake a veteran with your service record for a dilettante collector playing at being a soldier. You’ve earned an occasional trip to the hangar bay to tinker recreationally. The little pep talk to himself helped, and by the time Trykon reached the deck he was refocused on the task at hand: recalibrating the TIE Defender’s weapons systems after the recent missions around the Sollamens Asteroids, where they had been knocked out of sync by a combination of micrometeorite impacts and long exposure to high levels of radiation.
He walked around to the front of his ship, wiping his hands – tenderly, in the case of his right – on the dirty rag tucked into his belt. The
Revenant really was a beautiful sight. The familiar ball cockpit of the TIE series of starfighters was surrounded by no fewer than three quadanium steel solar array wings in the distinctive dual-dagger shape, all reinforced by titanium and then coated in a finish with significant sensor-dampening properties that dried a simple, dull black color. Three sets of targeting sensors were built into the spherical pilot module, along with two multi-type warhead launchers in the “chin.” Each of the side wings housed a pair of laser cannons, and the top wing accommodated two high-powered ion cannons. In short, it was a mean looking beast of a starfighter, designed to be the most efficient killing machine in space.
The only problem, Trykon reflected for the umpteenth time that day, was that TIE Defenders didn’t have any particle shielding at all, relying instead on overpowered ray shields and thick armor for protection. Typically, that combination was more than enough to keep the big, heavy starfighter intact, even in the face of fearsome odds. But the Sollamens Asteroids were anything but typical, and the
Revenant had the scars to prove it, despite having faced no opposition whatsoever.
After the hostilities with the Dominion ended, Trykon had flown through the asteroid field on his way to inspect the newly conquered base on Gwodd LK Nale, but on that short flight he’d found it impossible to avoid the billions of tiny flecks of rock which had broken off of the larger bodies in the belt during the battle. Most of the micrometeorites were deflected by the
Revenant’s armor, but three had been big enough to cause real harm. The mountings of both laser canons on the port side wing had been knocked out of alignment by two impacts in quick succession, and the armored casing of one of the ion cannons up top had been ripped off completely by a third collision.
Those had been the first things Trykon had noticed needed fixing, and naturally they’d been the first things he had chosen to fix. He’d just put the finishing touches on the ion weapon’s new casing when the hydrospanner had fallen, and now that he was able to admire his handiwork from afar, he had to admit: he couldn’t even tell anymore which of the cannons had been hit by rocks, and which had come through that short flight unscathed.
But even with the cosmetic damages sorted, there was still a more insidious set of problems left to fix. Specifically, Trykon had to re-tune the targeting sensors and adjust the focal point for the ship’s weapons, both of which were governed by computer systems which had been inadequately shielded against the high levels of radiation put out by the Sollamens pulsar. In a sense, the electromagnetic rays had cooked the components of those systems, which caused their software programs to realign various pieces of hardware – the sensor inputs, cannon angles, etc. – to compensate. Now that the starfighter was away from the ruinous radiation, though, those compensatory adjustments were actually getting in the way of accurate targeting. The faulty lines of code needed to be wiped from system memory, to restore Trykon’s default settings.
He smiled to himself as he went through the steps needed to run the debugging routine in his head.
This is what I do with my time off, he thought with a little chuckle. And then he got back to work.
- OOC:
- 1,322 words.
Summary: In the immediate aftermath of the events depicted in Counterpunch: Death, Wyl Trykon uses some of his off-duty time to fix his personal starfighter, a TIE Defender named the Revenant. While he fixes cosmetic damage and considers what steps need to be taken to heal the unseen scars left by the Sollamens pulsar, he also thinks about his reputation aboard the Adjudicator, and in the Vast Empire's Navy in general.
