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Captain Evangeline Ovmar nodded once to herself, happy with what lay before her. It wasn't every day that one could stand upon the bridge of a Star Destroyer and enjoy the moment. The feeling spoke of... Power.
Not power to destroy or to oppress, but to create. To make something the size of this eighteen hundred meter ship and dedicate the amount of materials to not just one, but many ships of the design.
The design itself? Another vessel in line with the new doctrines. It would operate in conjunction with the Relentless, a Cruiser with the same lines, the same concept.
Aboard the bridge of the prototype Retribution-class Star Destroyer, Ovmar let herself enjoy a brief, faint smile before returning to the business at hand.
"Comm officer," she stated, catching the petty officer's attention. "Check in with all sectors. I want status updates before we put this ship through its paces."
The view from the observation deck was most impressive.
The prototype of their Retribution-class was certainly befitting of the 'star destroyer' name. Not as elaborate or overstated a design as the Primeval's cathedral ships, but impressive for the sheer recognition that the Imperial vessels had accumulated for themselves over the past couple of centuries. As these ships would help carry the Knights of Ren to whatever missions the Supreme Leader may command, the boy was there to familiarize himself with the layout of the ship.
At least it's hangar was larger than the last one.
This time, Arthan wasn't on the surface of the planet, instead he was doing something much much worse.
He was assigned to see how well the lavatories of the Retribution-class would hold up, against First Order cooking, aka a hearty diet of combat rations and other assorted hell-food, and after this he vowed that he would have his retribution against whoever gave him this horrid task.
'Is this some sort of punishment?' The Disciple thought to himself as he begrudgingly shoveled the first of his many meals into his mouth, and he could've sworn he bit into a nail on that first bite. The taste was horrible and the texture of it going down made him want to throw up on the spot, and what was going to come out later was a mental image he did not want to think about.
Whoever gave him this was going to suffer as much as him.
Viktor made his way to the bridge. Last time he had poked around the Docking Bay and ended up rescuing a stranded Trooper. This time however he was curious about the interworking of the whole ship. The best place to do that he figured was the bridge and the best teacher being the Captain. Once the turbo lift opened Viktor smiled addressing [member="Evangeline Ovmar"] his tone holding an unsubtle hint of respect for the Naval Officer.
"Commissioner Alexander requesting permission to enter the Bridge Captain?"
He was dressed in a business suit as he always preferred to wear. He knew one of the days he would end up having to start wearing a uniform but until then he stuck to what was comfortable.
Duties varied for stormtroopers. This was a naval vessel and he was a member of the 501st - but in joint exercises, they were given free run of the ship and assigned duties befitting their skill-set.
Today he had been assigned a simple task - to stand on the bridge. It was officially guard duty, but in truth there was nothing to guard. The room was some distance away from any obvious boarding point - and so the role was often seen as a perk to troopers. They got to look out at space, and hear what was going on. It meant they were trusted. They were all trusted of course, but few got to stand on the bridge where so much was discussed.
So he stood to attention, watched and listened. If he were to be an officer one day, he could learn a lot.
Sensor calibration duty. Sentiri was moving up in the world.
At best, the work put her in direct contact with computers, where her technical proficiency was strongest. The Chiss woman was probably overqualified to be doing simple calibrations, after all. But running a navy or even just a military required a fair number of positions with a wide variety of skill sets. Not all of them were bound to be exciting. The most exciting jobs weren't the least bit attractive to her: piloting a snubfighter or toting a blaster rifle on the front lines. Exciting to be sure, but the survival rating for those within said squads were incredibly low. She'd take a simple computing job over that any time.
At the very least, sensor calibration duty didn't have anything to do with cargo. That fact alone satisfied the operative. Leave requisitions to the droids and quartermasters in logistics. If Sentiri never had to work in that department again, she would be content with her service.
While the Intelligence agent could have been on the bridge where the majority of the sensor consoles were, she instead chose to do her calibrations from the suites themselves. Subsidiary consoles were set up directly tapped to arrays across the eighteen-hundred meter frame of the Retribution-class Star Destroyer, no more than a few bulkheads inside of the vacuum of space.
On one hand, if anything went wrong with the array or any of its relays to the bridge or any other sensor suites across the ship, Sentiri was right there at the main junction to resolve any issues that arose.
On the other, there were a lot fewer people around, fewer distractions, fewer interactions. A couple of engineers moved from place to place, checking wires, but they all left her well enough alone.
After a sufficient amount of time Viktor realized that [member="Evangeline Ovmar"] may be a tad busy. Not wanting to intrude Viktor turned giving [member="OK-3103"] a nod glad he was somewhere safer than an Escape Pod. Then he quietly left the Bridge making his way towards the Docking Bays. He would work on the Bridge Operations education at a more opportune time.
As he walked down the corridors he smiled giving a nod to a squad of Troopers he passed in the hallway. Even as he did Viktor considered switching gears away from the Navy and spending some time around the Army guys. He chuckled as he remembered his brief interaction with [member="Sentiri"] opting to consider crashing the Intel barracks next time he was at the Capital.
Passing through the corridors of the ship, the young Pantoran made his way through the ship while attempting to commit its internal labyrinth of intersecting passages to memory.
As he did, the boy saw a man who was obviously neither an Imperial officer nor a stormtrooper. A government official, perhaps? Performing an inspection? Whatever the case, or the man's status, the small blue-skinned boy bowed his head in a silent show of respect as the two appeared to be about to cross paths.
With his nondescript black attire, and the black cloak swallowing his slight frame, child was notably as out of place as he was a dead ringer for one of the Knights of Ren. The lighstaber hanging from his belt was similarly wrapped in black leather, so very little of the silver metal shown through. The blue skin was too pale to be Chiss, while the amber eyes and the yellow tattoos on his face would be rather prominent evidence of his being Pantoran.
He was also eleven years old but, unlike the military or government service, the Knights of Ren didn't exactly have age requirements or formal regulations. He was old enough to use the Force, or plunge a knife into someone's back. That more or less qualified him for what he did for the Supreme Leader.
Ovmar frowned at the data streams before her. It was true, she'd been a bit too busy to notice [member="Viktor Alexander"] and his entrance, but not without good reason.
The data streams were coming back flawed. Very flawed. She knew there was someone working on the sensors, a very skilled someone, but this was a bit more... pressing.
"Comms, get me..." she waved a hand about as she tried to remember the individual's title. After a second or two, she gave up and went with something generic. "Get Agent [member="Sentiri"] off the sensors and tell her to make her way to Engineering as soon as possible. There's data spikes and anomalies coming from the reactor which either means something needs to be replaced or the reactor may be unstable."
At that moment, a red light flashed on her console. She opened the priority alert and the frown deepened. She flicked through the short report and glanced through some of the hangar cameras before she found something, or rather someone, that she figured could be useful for this particular problem.
"Trooper..." she glanced at the stormtrooper assigned to guard duty as she took a second to remember his number. She hated that about the Order. The reduction of the rank and file soldiery to a simple numerical sequence. "[member="OK-3103"], we have a robbery of all things down at the personnel office. Looks like they took credits from the ship's vault. The report doesn't say anything about casualties or weapons used, but I want you to go check it out and see if you can't find the culprit. You're considered weapons free, but try to minimize casualties to the culprit at most."
She flipped the holos on her display to show the hangar of the ship and gestured to the blue-skinned figure that stood there.
"Take that Knight of Ren with you and anyone else who may be of help. I want this dealt with in the next two hours, understood?"
She waited until the trooper left on his ad hoc assignment and turned back to the bridge crew.
"... And someone send a call down to the mess hall. Where the hell is my sandwich?"
She had him at trooper – given he was the only one on the bridge. He listened to the instruction and then simply acknowledged he’d understood. “At once Captain,” he responded. As he went to leave the bridge, he spoke into his comms unit, “Send a replacement for bridge duty. I’ve been reassigned.”
As he exited the bridge, he wondered who would be foolish enough to steal from the First Order – let alone on a ship. There were enough security cameras to find out who entered and exited the room and once a list of suspects were identified, a matter of time until one of them talked. He’d already discounted a stowaway – but did his best to keep an open mind. And he had no idea if the Knight of Ren would join him, but paid little notice - the space wizards tended to do their own thing - and few troopers would challenge them, let alone privates.
As Sentiri had been learning more and more about how Humans functioned in comparison to her own species, she had found great differences in how the two species perceived events. For example, speech is a telling factor in determining perception. But humans tended to have many varied interpretations for a certain word in the description of an event. Words themselves can have many levels of context depending on their function. Everything from colloquialisms to literal definitions could give an altered meaning to a word. But to have a single word have contrary definitions was a thing only Human dialect would ever create.
Excitement was one such word. The Chiss didn't get excited. Certainly Sentiri had never known such an emotion, so the concept was already foreign to her. For her own emotional spectrum there was only interesting to not interesting. But for Humans, excitement ran the gamut from glee to fitful bursts of anger, from prosperity to catastrophe, from positive to negative all of which was encompassed under one word. And yet the negative kind of Human excitement was considered to be such a thing of dread that to call a dreadful thing exciting would often earn skepticism from anyone who heard the uttering.
So when Sentiri said, "Interesting," to the chief engineer after reading the reports coming from the reactor core, his look of disgust was both apparent and unexpected.
"Wha' d'ya mean int'restin'?" he shot back, his brogue thick. "Tha whole compartment cuh blow!"
The level-headed Chiss didn't even spare the man a look. Her expression remained stoic and her eyes were locked to the engineering console she had been offered. To Sentiri, there was only interesting, or not interesting. She preferred interesting. Though, to be fair to the irrational man beside her, there was also a spectrum from stupid to not stupid, and she would be stupid to assume the engineer was wrong in his assessment.
"That doesn't require you to panic," she icily replied, finishing her thought out loud.
Several minutes earlier, Sentiri had been continuing her routine inspection of the sensor suite. After receiving a call from the bridge, the agent removed herself from that task and moved to engineering on orders from Captain [member="Evangeline Ovmar"]. The Agent siphoned the preliminary reports to her datapad as the repulsorlift shuttled her from one floor to the next. By the time she had reached the console where the chief engineer had proceeded to talk her ear off, Sentiri was already fully apprised of the situation.
Anomalous data readings from the reactor core could mean several things. The most dangerous of which was a reactor leak had caused decay in the wiring of some of the internal sensor equipment and the readings were coming back corrupted as a result. That would mean the crew would have only a slight clue as to where the leak was but not enough time to find the breach before a catastrophic meltdown. The least dangerous possibility was that the reactor was fine and the wiring was simply faulty.
Droids had already been dispatched with wide search parameters, but due to the interference surrounding the reactor, communication with those units was nearly impossible. Modified mouse droids with radiation shielding were then used to relay hard copies of data from within the core to consoles outside. Sentiri, upon arriving to engineering, called up the schematics of the sensors and narrowed the search pattern the droids should use based on the origin of the anomalous readings. One mouse droid was dispatched to send that message to other droids that were in the core scanning.
All the while, the chief engineer directed his crew for emergency procedures to lessen the impact of whatever fallout he was expecting.
In a matter of minutes, a mouse droid approached, plugged in to Sentiri's console and downloaded it's data package. A holo ignited over the console displaying a series of wires that had been installed incorrectly. The droids were still scanning the reactor for leaks. Another set of instructions flew from Sentiri's fingertips to the harddrive of the little, message droid. Just as quickly as the small bot had come, it left. A portion of the droid crew devoted their attention towards reconnecting or replacing the wires. As each sensor station came online, the anomalous readings were smaller and smaller in scope, until every scope shone green.
The Agent triggered the comms unit on the console. "Bridge, this is engineering. Reactor is nominal. Returning to standard operating procedure." She flipped the send-comm off and waited for an affirmative from the bridge.
"Aye," the chief engineer sighed to no one in particular. "Everything is fine here now. We're all fine." Sentiri briefly wondered if she heard relief in his voice or disappointment. After all, the preceding excitement was far more interesting than boredom that followed. The Chiss woman figured she would never truly understand the difference.
