Xeno Alliance communications (iRP) (FO)

[Dusty Lens]

They had asked how the controls felt after the ship was brought in. Its prior occupant had been on the business end of an extremely pissed lady luck, having the cockpit canopy of his vessel rent asunder by a spectacular razor strike. The Xeno pilots assaulting the planetform vessel had the presence of mind to hold their attack upon the vessel's spin out of control. If word was to be believed it had been a chase halfway across Hudson before the thing had been tamed and towed in.

When the freighter appeared on the barter channels David Chambers had jumped, quickly putting up his personal Bactrian loaded down with a recently captured shipment of Luxury Foods. That and a request to not touch a damn thing on the ship, he'd patch up the holes himself. The trip from Ouray to the Barrow was not a short one, but in his current condition he wasn't in a position to move anywhere quickly.

As he sat in the remnants of the vessel's command couch, restraints that had apparently gone unfastened by its prior occupant laying slack at his sides, he responded that the controls felt familiar. It seemed a good enough answer for the pilots who had brought the ship in. They spit, shook and the deal was struck. He was now the owner of the Heritage.

The question as to the feel of the controls was not an unfair one. The X-Shuttle was not coveted for its simplicity of use; the workstations crawled with the mechanisms that allowed it to function in both deep space and the harshest of atmospheric conditions. The vessel's ponderous attitude in space drew many critics to be fair, but in the right hands it could be trimmed to gently navigate the maelstroms of gas giants that would sweep vessels with ten times its power into the screaming maw of their gravity wells. Planetform X-Shuttles were top of the line, their use and piloting coming with ease after years of training.

But that, David mused, was another story.

His cane lay abandoned alongside one of the vessel's landing struts as he hunched atop her back, carefully laying down another coat of protective paint atop the scars burnt into her hull from Xeno Widows. The paint was designed to react to extreme heat and stress, another survival tool in atmosphere, demanding that many repair kits be stored aboard the vessels. A small favor for which he was thankful. The teenage son of one of the Barrow's maintenance chiefs was focusing on laying down a requested artistic flair, clearing aside the Planetform logo in favor of a choice piece of art detailing a bosom woman riding a flower, cowboy hat high in the air.

A small tribute to an old friend that he was glad his mother couldn't see. It also made clever use of the ship's access hatch, something he doubted he would be using with a straight face anytime soon.

As he supervised the instillation of a heavily re-enforced canopy for the vessel he couldn't help but break into a grin. It was a little piece of the past come to bring some comfort to the present and damned if he didn't know just the best use to put it to.