Business As Usual

[Kelly Perris]

Perris’ mouth twitched as nervous laughter tittered from the only other man in the room, Ocasta. He swallowed the first reaction that years of jocking around offered him and put on deadly serious and icy eyes in its place. His mouth followed the eyes, forming a thin line.

I... have royally fucked up here.

The CAG turned and jerked open his locker and yanked out his flight suit, wasting little time in slipping into it. He pulled the sleeves of the flightsuit over his arms and pulled the zipper up, up, up. He adjusted the collar down into an un-popped position so as not to be accused of looking like the classic douchebag. So many little things that could be made a joke of and the brief, subtle encounter with the Commodore had burrowed into the rational, responsible, grown-man part of his psyche, forming a worrying want to avoid the usual bullshit. It was concerning, it threatened to set him on his head and ultimately fouled his mood. These things could cost him more than he was willing to pay and he could only be angry at himself for any consequences he might reap.

"Enough. Get the message, Captain." He pulled the remainder of his flight gear from the locker and tucked it under one arm, helmet and all, before shoving the locker shut with a hard bang and turning to leave. "Make sure your subordinates get it, too - I will not tolerate any more of this childishness or disrespect."

The Major then fled for the flight deck on fast-walking strides, the naggling feeling of dread following in his wake, that this dawning change had the chance of being too little, too late.

He had never wanted anything more than to fly.

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Uncharted Star System

The little entourage of four snubs and one recon reverted to realspace in an off-timed group of flashes, initially being greeted with little else beyond a star-speckled view of space, the light of the stars being affected by the light of the system’s dwarf star. The Major scanned around from the view the position of his snubfighter afforded him. From there, not much to be seen. He turned his head to one side, catching a view of the fighter Captain V’Larr piloted. The time alone with himself in hyperspace had given him a little space to cool down, but his mood was still more to the side of unfavourable.

“Well folks, I guess we can see why this system is uncharted – given the severe lack of anything useful to chart.” He softly clicked his tongue inside the cage of his teeth. It made him wonder – if there was anything to find here, there wasn’t much in the way of obscuring natural features, so where would it hide? Shit like that concerned him. “Scan about for answers to our little mystery, but stay sharp, ladies and gents. Just because we don’t see anything right away with our meatsack eyes doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.”

[Aris V'larr]

Aris couldn't help but think that Major Perris's characterization of the star system was unfair. The star, which had never been given a designation outside its catalog number, was a classic D-series white dwarf, a ball of electron-degenerate matter with the volume of a terrestrial world but the mass of a main-sequence G-type star. The strong spectral lines of carbon and oxygen indicated that it was once large enough and energetic enough to support a planetary system, perhaps even one with life. But time had run its course, and the star had swollen until it had swallowed up whatever satellites it had once enjoyed, and then, over the slow degradation of millions of years, it had shed its outer layers leaving behind a dense metallic core and a few wispy rings of luminous gas as the only legacies of its former glory. This saga had run its course long before the Republic, before the Rakatan Infinite Empire, before any known sentient species ever lifted sapient eyes to behold the heavens. Stars marked the evolution of life itself as a momentary whisper. Aris thought there was a certain poetry there.

She didn't expect the Rogues to understand, of course. Not without pictures and a lot of careful explanations.

"Scanning," she reported. "I'm detecting emissions in the vicinity of the star, but I cannot resolve them at this range. Echo, are you reading my telemetry?"

[Carré Inirial]

Hyperspace certainly afforded her plenty of time to think - about the other evening, about Kelly's suddenly sour attitude that day, about everything else that had been plaguing her as of late.

And plenty of time for a shifting knot of worry to form in the pit of her stomach. Carré had trouble telling if it was over the mission with scant details, or something else. It wasn't exactly a very forthcoming knot of worry.

By the time the uncharted system resolved into so many pinpricks of light in the swath of black velvet that was space, she still had no answers. Just unease.

With a sigh, and a shift of her position in her seat, Carré shoved away those troublesome thoughts and locked them down tight. They had other things to worry about, and she didn't need any distractions. Those were dangerous to a pilot on a good day, never mind out here in the black where they had no idea what they were getting into.

She lifted a hand and flipped her comm on, listening to the chatter of her fellow pilots and remaining silent for the time being. Carré did, however, run her allotted diagnostic scans and watch her screens as information poured across them slowly.

[Oisin Ocasta]

"I see it, Angel," Oisin called into the comm, angling his Recon-X towards the system's star, and goosing a little more power into the throttle. He tried not to think about how awkward it was referring to Captain V'larr by her callsign - on his world, 'Angel' was a term of endearment that he most certainly would not have voluntarily used to describe his pointy-eared, cyber-brained squadmate - but unfortunately his brain decided to dwell on it anyway.

Echo's fighter saccrificed torpedo tubes - not to mention a little of it's aerodynamics and good looks - in order to sport an array of advanced sensor systems. In theory it had been designed for reconnaissance - repurposing an existing craft was far cheaper for the Alliance than obtaining an entirely new design of scout - but since joining the Rogues, the ground crews had been having a field day, slapping every bit of sensor, E-WAR, fire control, and communications equipment that they could get their hands on onto Oisin's fighter. Captain Luka had joked that if Oisin wasn't careful, he'd show up in the hangar one day and find the back-end of an ARC-170 welded onto his plane.

The fallout however was that Echo's fighter was far more versatile than a mere makeshift scout. Some squadrons had a slow and lumbering shuttle or gunboat providing them with ECM support, and with an albatross that often needed to be protected in dogfights; the Rogues meanwhile had his Snoopscoot, which was as fast and as agile as they were.

Despite how intensely useful he - no one else was brave enough or skilled enough to fly in an ugly fighter with no missiles - and his fighter were to the unit, Oisin often felt decidedly under-appreciated by his peers. It was that thought he dwelt upon as he raced towards the blip on V'larr's telemetry.

The thought was swiftly pushed aside as data began to appear on the array of additional screens and consoles bolted onto his cockpit. A small holographic projector flickered into life, constructing a broken and distorted image before his eyes. Initially, Oisin thought the data was corrupt; but as the visual resolved he realised that the object itself was missing chunks of itself. An approximate circle some three kilometres across, a huge impact gash had torn through part of the outer ring and grazed the central sphere; but even with the damage, the craft was unmistakable.

"Guys," Echo's voice called into the comm again. He wasn't sure whether he should be excited - after all, the Jedi had recently stumbled across a Clone Wars derelict, and that had turned out pretty well for The Wheel in the end - or deeply concerned. He manipulated the necessary controls to relay his territory to the rest of the Rogues. "It looks like we've found ourselves a Lucrehulk Battleship."

[Kelly Perris]

The same emissions that V’larr had mentioned showed in his scans as well, nothing that the T65B’s limited scanning equipment – compared to what Echo’s snoopscoot was packing – could resolve into something ultimately useful without shortening the range over which the scan was done. If there was anything that was useful in situations where they were otherwise essentially going in blind, Echo’s fighter – preferably with Ocasta in it – was a fortunate tool to have. When Echo came in with the results, and the Major heard and looked over the findings himself, it caused him to whistle low.

“From my understanding, there have been a few of those in the Alliance’s holdings over the years. One in particular, the Fortressa, met its end thanks to a Death Star and its compliment of about five hundred X-wings and their pilots went down along with it. ” He grimaced at that. “But according to the signal, this likely predates even that. I wonder where this one came from and what it’s doing all the way out here.”

He looked out again at the long-dying star, then again at the gatherings the recon pilot had forwarded on.

“In any case, finding a place to land on that thing should be a non-issue and barring any unwelcome visitors, this should be a fairly simple in-and-out.” Perris ran the tip of his tongue over his bottom lip. “Echo, relay initial findings back to Challenger. Angel, Joker, Phoenix, with me. Let’s get a nice and personal close-up of what we’re dealing with.”

[Jamo Jakatta]

Given his track record, it would have been a safe assumption that the silence on Joker's end of the comms channel was down to a technical malfunction in his 'fighter. Chewing at the inside of his cheek, he flipped the channel to 'talk' for just long enough to acknowledge Kelly's order before muting his helmets mouthpiece once again.

“Oh, hey guys – look!” he said, talking to himself as he pushed his X-Wing towards their target, at the left edge of the four-pronged formation the Rogues had instinctively fallen into. “More space junk. Let's lasso this onto the back of the snoopscoot and drag it back to the Wheel. It'll fit right in with the rest of the floating crap.”