Private First Flight

[Kyyrk]

A S S E S M E N T

Scarif Sector
1400 Hours Local
Unmarked Location
​

Kyyrk didn't have the resources he once used to. But pull a few strings with the right people, and you can get a lot of things. In this case? The Vanguard had been acquired for a small training mission. Kyyrk had decided upon a pilot, yes. But the ship he was about to give them was far more advanced than many in the galaxy. If this operation on Rhand was to be a success, he needed to know that she could handle it. So he'd arranged for transport, and took the Vanguard out into a clear patch of space near Scarif. Though their operation was meant to be primarily atmosphere, he needed to know that Jhira could handle the ship without crashing it.

Kyyrk's vessel slid from the hangar bay, accelerating to build distance between it and the Vanguard. "Providence Vanguard is clear, switching to manual control." The ship had been manually linked in to the computers aboard the Allegiance. This ship, Jhira had been placed in charge of. From his position aboard the Providence, Kyyrk could issue commands to the other vessel, including a kill switch should the situation require. But for now, he hoped he would send little more than scenario updates. Kyyrk glanced down at the control panel as he disengaged the auto-docking procedures, but soon lifted his gaze back to the stars surrounding him. Scarif could be seen a ways off, but it was barely the size of a coin, so great was their distance. Kyyrk drew a deep breath, then sighed. Space. No matter how cold and uninviting it was, he always came back.

"Captain, you may launch when ready. The rules are simple. The ship's computer has been configured to simulate atmospheric flight, and an artificial terrain has been generated approximately four hundred kilometers below us. We'll start by testing your flight capabilities. The Providence's computer is generating a course, and transmitting it to the Allegiance. The first loop is the simplest, being little more than a series of markers. You'll have one mulligan round to learn the course, then your navigational systems will only display what you tell it to. There will be five degrees of difficulty added in sequence, with the hardest including drones that simulate hostile fire. Your goal is not to destroy them, though you are welcome to do so if you chose. Again, your goal is achieving the best possible time. She may be dusty, but her parts are all still in good working order. Don't take it easy cause you're afraid you'll break something. Whenever you're ready."

Kyyrk lifted a mug of caf to his lips as his eyes glanced back towards the distant carrier. Rings slowly began to spring to life around him, as the holo-drones illuminated their projectors to bring life to the course. Though the Allegiance could support a crew of three, he did not expect Jhira to be flying with someone during the raid, so she was in the ship by herself today. It would be interesting to see how well she handled it...

Jhira Mereel

 

[Jhira Mereel]

POLITICAL REGION: CIS SPACE
LOCATION: Scarif Sector, station keeping and exercises monitored by The Vanguard and the Providence.
Objective: Learn Kyyrk's vessel, the Allegiance | Advanced Pilot training.
TAGS: [ Kyyrk ]

The Vanguard loomed overhead, dwarfing the smaller ship. the Allegiance was just a bit larger than a YT freighter, and every millimeter of that was crammed with sophisticated technology. A different sort of passenger would have at once strapped in, eager to please or irritated depending upon temperament. But Jhira trusted both her own skills and Kyrrk’s judgment enough to use this brief respite to explore, to learn the heart of the Allegiance, not merely its hardware. So she forced her gaze away from the Energy Bomblet generator, though she tasked her on-board AI with researching -every- weapon system that she passed during her too-short, unguided tour.

The armory met with her approval; the med bay was minimal, squeezed to allow a command/control post. Yes, that problematic mind-set again, which valued a principle/ideal/objective over the people those things were meant to serve. Disquiet ghosted through her, but she reminded herself she’d be there this time. No planets blown up, no cities bombed without at least one voice raised in protest. Her stomach clenched with old horror; Jhira was too old to believe in anything but corruption and extremism at the highest levels. Yet her abhorrence of the sort of warfare which made it seem expedient to wipe out a world drove her to this place, anyway.

Aching loss threatened, a treacherous longing to be facing this with her Vode around her that brought a silent snarl to her lips. No. Those days were long past.

Buy'ce olar, kar'ta ogir. Helmet on, heart gone.

Counting doors to the passenger quarters, she paused. Only two; perhaps they were meant for double or quadruple occupancy. Ideal crew was three for a ship of this class. The meditation lounge stumped her; she could not conceive of only two crews’ quarters, but making room for a place to sit and think. That was best done in one’s Beskar, safe from the outside world. Perhaps he had different needs, being so … Kyyrk-like.

The gimbaled engines and top-of-the-line Inertial compensator she’d already studied the specs on; everything to do with flying had been absorbed while still aboard The Vanguard. The sleek lines, well-placed thrusters and superior flight controls promised her a ship unlike any other. Heart pounding, she pivoted to return to the cockpit. Three chairs: Pilot, for flying; co-pilot who would normally run shields/weaponry. And then of course … the engineer/astrogator. She’d feel that lack the most, for any number of reasons. Quietly, she double checked her link to the Vanguard’s Nav systems, and upgraded her onboard astrocharts.

Ret’lini. Just in case.

Sliding into the pilot’s seat, Jhira ran her gauntleted hands gently over the controls, getting a tactile, visceral feel for the beautiful ship while she waited to be piloted safely free of the larger vessel. Patient as a predator, she could wait to demonstrate her skill without being lessened by the restraint shown. But still she wondered; how had he arranged this? What did he really expect her to learn?

Kyrrk’s voice reached her, the power and pain of it enhanced rather than diminished by the distortion of the COMM device; he seemed ageless and unknowable. “Roger Vanguard; Allegiance is now under manual control.” The call-and-response was automatic, a mere detail as the ship came alive around her. Between one breath and another, her senes exploded, every nerve afire as the Gar’Tkiriyr Neural Interface melded her body and nervous system to that of the ship’s. Her mind followed; the Sragivagr Control Suite one of the few with enough flexibility and resilience to cope with the sudden, vast input of data.

Laughter danced through the ship as it gracefully pirouetted, each control system individually tested, explored, evaluated. Kyrrk’s instructions slid through her mind: 400 kilometer hard deck, atmospheric flight, race the course. Drones simulating fire, that she was free to fire upon in turn. Who was he, to spend most of a planetary budget training one pilot for a specific mission? Well, she wasn’t going to waste the opportunity.

The challenge in his final words was doubtless carefully calculated, but it did free Jhira to do what she’d been longing to do.

The ship slammed forward, cutting through the simulated atmosphere, jumping to Full Throttle as fast as the ship could bear. Jhira was focused, intense; because she was absolutely going to going to test this ship to its limits before she had to trust it in battle.

It shimmied oddly, threatening a spin on the y-axis. Jhira countered with a lean, as she might in her Jet Pack; but the neuro-mapping wasn’t quite there yet. The Sragivagr Control Suite was a heuristic learning program, and she’d confused it. Countering with a mix of raw instinct and skill, she pulled through the first ring and accelerated into the second. When in atmosphere, acceleration almost always produced more control, not less; the increased flow of air allowed a smaller surface to produce more lift. Again, she burned through the ring, this time diving for the deck. This first trip through wasn’t timed, so she used it to test the flight dynamics and handling profile. With so many flight controls and directional thrusters too choose from, if she could think it, this lovely creature could do it. Skimming the surface, nape of the earth, she then screamed back up and looped through the third hoop backwards, a fancy Immelmann turn - which maybe rotated a few too many times for perfect form, but certainly taught her a bit more of the craft. The Forth hoop, she cut all power and dropped like a stone, recovering at the last possible instant … maybe a hair or two later than she’d wanted, actually, but some instinct had held her hand, while the craft sorted itself out.

It hadn’t liked the stall-out, but it was too valuable a maneuver in combat not to test it out now, and her Pilot Enhancement Package gave her enough of an edge to be confident using it. Keeping a wary eye upon the engine heat and strain, for she didn’t know the ship at all, Jhira once more slammed to full military power and zeroed the final obstacle.

Checking the time, she’d lay in a quick vector to do touch and goes on every conceivable surface until the timer counted down. As promised, most of her sensor data vanished, the fog of war closing in upon her once more. Maneuvering to the start point, she waited for critique, criticism, or a simple signal to begin her run.

No matter how skilled or experienced a warrior was, there was only ever one master in a training arena. Today, Kyyrk was the training master, and she the student.

 

[Kyyrk]

A S S E S M E N T

Scarif Sector
1400 Hours Local
Unmarked Location
​

Kyyrk smiled as he watched the Allegiance pull out of the no-power plummet. Expertly handled. That alone spoke volumes to her skill. "Had I known you were so proficient in that, I would have taken you on my last op." He'd used that very same maneuver to land an entire strike force on a space station once. Kyyrk stood from his seat, and took another sip from his cup of Caf. "Six Minutes is rather respectable for a first time through. In light of that, we'll ignore your second dry run. Six minutes is within acceptable parameters. No glory gained for flying without challenge."

"Be mindful of dives, however. The ship is uniquely equipped to recover from them, but if you cut it too close, you'll damage the engine blocks. They stick down lower than the belly of the ship." Kyyrk reached over and tapped a pair of buttons on the console. "Initiating Phase Two circuit. No direct hostiles, but there are both static and dynamic obstacles. Again, this is all simulated, so no need to worry about the paint job. The ship's computer will give you a live read-out of damage as required. If you reach Flight Compromised status by any means, the run will be aborted and marked as a failure."

The holodrones began to shift and change, a sprawling mass of asteroids now filling the space. "Time to beat is six minutes. Get used to handling the ship through debris. This is what it was designed for. Get a feel for it, then we'll add drones to the mix. Debris Fields are what the Ravager craft was meant for. The Allegiance took the Ravager concept and made it better. So long as you maintain control of the vessel, you are the dominant force in an environment such as this. You may begin your second run when ready."

Jhira Mereel

 

[Jhira Mereel]

POLITICAL REGION: CIS SPACE
LOCATION: Scarif Sector, station keeping and exercises monitored by The Vanguard and the Providence.
Objective: Learn Kyyrk's vessel, the Allegiance | Advanced Pilot training.
TAGS: [ Kyyrk ]

“Next time you’ll have to ride along, instead of sitting up there sipin’ your Caf.” Jhira all but purred back at Kyrrk, a smile flickering through her words as the Knight praised her controlled stall. He murmured back, assessing her run, upping the challenge. And oh, Jhira loved a challenge. Glory had once held it’s allure, though reality had long since burned most of those ambitions away.

Low hanging engines?

The warning immediately triggered a manual entry into her HUD of the ship’s actual physical dimensions, overriding the factory specs. The droid-brain lodged in her cybernetics disagreed, vehemently; the tac-computer overriding and rejecting her modifications. Swearing softly at Breshig Warforge in general, and her onboard AI in particular, Jhira accessed her flight recorders, and fed the data into her system once again. Jhira played with the flight controls, demonstrating that the ship’s extreme maneuverability came with a cost. The gimbaled engines affected the flight profile significantly in atmosphere. Depending upon their position, they altered the ship’s dimensions and lift profile; it was no longer factory-standard. But no; her solutions were rejected again. Given her programing skills (or lack thereof) there was really only one way to teach her control rig that the ship’s feet dragged. A soft, evil chuckle followed, both imagining the engineer’s horror at her picturing it that way … and for the heart attack she was going to give Kyyrk.

Too bad he was going to miss out on all of the fun.

Before she’d even finished fighting with her AI, the HUD lit up as hundreds of asteroids - both pure holographs and those with drones at their core - phased into existence all around her. Adrenaline shimmered through her, and her flight suit beeped protest. She shushed the tell-tale, psyching herself into a state as near to actual combat as she could manage. When it was real, adrenaline and fear could diminish performance significantly. Training hard, with real (if controlled) risk was the only way she’d found to counter it.

So her heart slammed in her chest, but her hands remained rock-steady upon the controls. Given a choice of when to start, she delayed, running a trace upon the movements and orbits of the asteroids, plotting her own route by eye and instinct. The Tac-comp in her cybernetics calculated trajectory on 30 separate threats, and the ship’s systems picked up a few dozen more, straining even Jhira’s ability to sort true information from white noise.

A trajectory was offered at last; but the bad guys would be running trace, too. Heading down the ‘safe’ path would be murder-suicide. Jhira slammed forward, hitting maximum speed so fast it hurt, and metal screamed around her. Twisting and pirouetting, she feinted towards the ‘safe’ path, then dropped at maximum velocity towards a large, fragmentary Asteroid. They were a pilot’s gift in a place like this; weapons waiting to be used. She dropped some of those beautiful energy bomblets the ship had stockpiled, and scattered them behind her. If she’d only had a tractor beam or two, she could have placed them precisely. But as it was, she set them for delayed detonation - a way to clear a sudden path to freedom for her return trip.

Running her laser battery out, Jhira exploded the composite asteroid, the chain reaction pushing fragments away from her and bending the path of lesser, crowding asteroids. Charging the debris field, front shields maximum, she headed through the safest part of any collision: the center. Laughing as she reached the next check point, her instincts picked out a path that lit up every sensor and beacon in her HUD with collision warnings.

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Two massive, spinning Asteroids covered her next check point, threatening to crush her ship if she tried to skim along them, or to make her take several passes to destroy them, costing her time. Never one to waste time in combat, Jhira poured on the acceleration and curved just over the gravitational center of their orbit. Using a modified Cobra Maneuver, she slammed her ship upright, so it was standing on its tail, virtually eliminating all forward momentum. Balancing upon her rear thrusters only, the ship sank like a rock, straight down to her checkpoint.

She kissed the deck, falling forward beneath the orbit of the asteroids, scraping along the simulated surface. The heuristic learning program screamed protest until her on-board AI accepted the ship-diameter correction. Rising like a breaching whale, she took the amazing vessel fully onto its back, an elegant, controlled maneuver that still allowed her to scissor past obstacles and slide through the next target point.

Eyes narrowing, she scanned the debris field for her final point, dancing through the crowded sky. But this ship, this amazing ship didn’t merely fly. She danced, she soared, able to pivot literally within its own silhouette. Jhira coursed the field, refining her data, moving as much from memory as from the sensors until she found thefinal check point.

Ah, they had used a touch of ECM to help conceal the end point! Triggering her bomblets, in case more was concealed than the navigation beacon, Jhira cleared the path before her, swan diving over the final check point.

Laugher rippled over the COMMs, beads of sweet trickling down her back. Just a touch breathless from the exertion and adrenaline. “That was fun. Let’s do it again,” only this time … they would be shooting back.