Spirit of Huk

Spirit of Huk
Class	Starfighter
Type	G-1A Starfighter
Modifications
Type	Unknown Faulty AI
History
Date of Manufacture	Year 15 Day 93
Affiliation	Rawth Shacklefist
Events	War for the Hosnian System

"Sir, the ship... It doesn't have a pilot!"

— Green Two, attempting to disable the Spirit of Huk

The Spirit of Huk is a G1-A Transport with a mischievous and suspicious past. It has seen many owners in the few years since it's construction, and has led to the capture or death of a few of them. The ship is currently owned by Rawth Shacklefist.

Design and Construction

The Spirit of Huk began life as G1-A #363104 on the factory floor of a Duhka Industrial plant. As construction began, workers reported hearing strange noises while assembling the ship. Management wrote it off as employee laziness or mechanical creaking in the mainframe. However, when the ship completed and the management team inspected it, they discovered that the noises were far more alarming than even the workers had reported. The management team ordered #363104 to be scrapped for parts on the world of Ord Mantell. However, this was not to be the fate of the diabolical ship.

Theft and Piracy

The problematic G-1A was aboard a Modular Taskforce Cruiser headed to Ord Mantell when the ship was attacked by pirates upon arrival. The Modular Taskforce Cruiser was raided of all ships aboard and set adrift. All the ships that were stolen were brought to an Outer Rim base and sold into the hands of a scurrilous ship retailer named Nazed Kim. The Devaronian salesman quickly flipped all the ships into private hands, except for #363104. Renaming it "Lucky" for its escape from dismantling, he made it his personal vessel. However, around a month after he deployed the ship, he experienced progressively worse nightmares. After the month, he began to report strange behavior aboard the ship, even when traveling alone. On one occasion, a hologram from an unknown source began to play on repeat in the cockpit while Kim was asleep. Terrified, Kim sold the ship to a Mirialan pirate named Ellona Ghast.

Ellona rechristened the ship the "Ghost" and gave it a new paint job. With the Ghost as her platform, Ghast relentlessly raided, kidnapped, and murdered her way across the southwest corner of the galaxy. The bounty on her head steadily rose, but the authorities proved unable to capture her. However, the Ghost was beginning to have an effect on her as well. She too began having horrific nightmares, and began having trouble controlling the atmospheric levels and speed of the ship. Stubbornly, she refused to change vessels, which proved to be her downfall. The ship AI glitched out, broadcasting her location to several law enforcement agents while she slept. When she woke, the ship had been tractored into a Dreadnaught and she was captured as prisoner.

Private Transport

The Ghost was impounded by the governing body that captured Ghast and later sold at auction. The highest bidder was an Yam`rii smuggler named Ury Jaeu. Jaeu was very good at smuggling. He installed dozens of little secret cargo containers on the ship he rechristened as the "Spirit of Huk". Jaeu quickly began to ramp up a smuggling operation in a similar area to which Ghast had operated. The operation was fairly successful, but Jaeu quickly began to develop identical sleeping problems that had plagued all the previous owners. He began to have problems with the lights flickering, artificial gravity being turned off, and hearing a voice, particularly late at night. A near-complete wipe of the ship's AI did nothing to stop the issues. The breaking point came in the middle of a smuggle when the ships AI glitched, again, blasting out the contents of his hidden compartments on the comlink of an Imperial Star Destroyer. While Jaeu was able evade the bulky capital ship, he immediately sold the ship to Kez Aak, the head of Endless Endeavors.

Ghost Ship

Kez Aak owned a large and profitable manufacturing corporation. He put the Spirit of Huk in que to be transported to the corporation's home base and assigned it a pilot. However, this is where the ship manifested the most unusual behavior it had ever shown. Several members of Endless Endeavors were sitting in the company radar room when one of them noticed that the ship was moving. Since there was not supposed to be a pilot aboard yet, team lead Dimitri Halden immediately sent out a query to the pilot Nathaniel Cholds to see if he had reached the ship. He was puzzled by the inquiry as he was across the galaxy from the Spirit of Huk.

One of the Endless members in the radar room, Narmo Colmven suggested that the shipboard AI might have malfunctioned causing it to appear to be moving when it was not. The radar operator, Aeron Creel sent a ping to the shipboard AI and found it was disabled. The ship was moving, without a pilot, droid, or anything else aboard. The Endless Radar team went into full panic mode to try to stop the ship from moving. Halden failed to hack into the shipboard AI and re-enable it. A pair of Y-Wings were dispatched to disable the ship. The Spirit of Huk's heavy lasers malfunctioned and destroyed one of the fighters. The second one was able to disable it with it's ion cannon and guide it to land. Kez Aak, furious with the loss of a pilot, sold it to an up and coming entrepreneur named Kellen Deming. For Deming, the nightmares had only just begun.

Hosnian Discovery

The following is an excerpt from a radio segment done by the Shili Free Radio's own Lahasa Fy:

"Now, exactly what happened to the ship after its computer banks were wiped remotely is a bit of conjecture. We reached out to some of the galaxy’s best stellar mechanics and physicists to recreate the spirit of Huk’s movements. The experts determined that when it was ripped from hyperspace in a mostly uncontrolled fashion, it maintained an amount of forward thrust. Eventually, this thrust carried the ship toward the Hosnian sun, and the ship settled into a mostly stable orbit at the very outskirts of the Hosnian system. It was there, after being able to remotely start up a homing beacon, the subject of our story was thrust into the spotlight of the galaxy.

While on leave from Tresario Star Kingdom, petty officer Kellen Deming was finally able to collect the ship he had won in an auction a few months ago. Excited for leave, and on an extended hyperspace trip, he did what any self-respecting junior office with more money than free time would do; he threw himself a bit of a party. A little bit of sabaac on the holowebs, a few drinks. I hope I have painted the proper picture. In case children are reading, we will not say more about the activities aboard his ship.

Therefore, in the evening hours of Day 188 on galactic standard time, Deming, taking a nap from his recreational activities, awakened to the alarm klaxons signaling the end of his hyperspace trip. Virtually crawling to the cockpit to work the controls, with a pounding headache, and eyes red and bloodshot from poor sleep, he exited hyperspace. Due to a combination of seeing his beautiful new ship for the first time, and being less than fully alert, he paid no attention to his scanners showing nearby planets. Having served aboard ships in the Anzat system, seeing planets nearby was nothing unusual. He slaved his new ship’s navigation controls to his current ship, and set the coordinates back for Tresario space, and started sobering up for his return to duty. As “The Spirit of Huk” following Deming’s other ship, winked out of existence back into hyperspace, it left behind the glittering jewel of the Hosnian System, in all its glory. Shining oceans rippled with gentle waves. Majestic peaks stood serenely ringed by wispy clouds. Fields of tall grasses swayed in a light breeze. Until 1 week later, when the scanning records from Deming’s travels were automatically cross-checked with the galactic standard gravitational computers, per typical operational procedure. The automated system verified that his scanners recorded several planetary bodies that had not yet been charted. At that moment, the automated alerts spread across the galaxy like wildfire as navigational computers everywhere were updated with the new information.

There it is folks, the story of the discovery of the Hosnian system. How a fluke accident, a single malfunctioning datacenter on a single, small transport led to the ruination of a pristine system. Whole ecosystems are now devastated, having been flattened, stripped, paved, duracreted and plasteeled over, in the name of greed and domination. All of this, because of one glitch in a computational matrix."

In the aftermath of the Hosnian system discovery, Kellen Deming sought out a new owner for the vessel that had cost him a star system. He sold it to Jay Ortega for the price of a Rho-class Shuttle and 20 million credits. Hoping to rechristen the vessel and scrub its record clean, Ortega commissioned a new paint job for the vessel and brought it to a shop on Giju. Here, he ordered the new paint along with a tune up and a full sweep of the ship's computers. In its last few days in the shop, the ship's doors reportedly locked in two engineers who had stayed after closing to scan the ship's AI. When employees returned the next morning, they found the bodies of the two dead engineers. It was an apparent murder-suicide committed by one of the engineers using a blow torch and a wrench. Upon returning to Giju to retrieve his ship, Ortega found out about the catastrophe and brought the ship to a computational intelligence scientist on Antar 4 to be analyzed. The primary hypothesis from the scientist was that during construction, a self-aware droid had somehow managed to download its consciousness to replace the main AI. The scientist refused to do further research on the vessel, claiming an eerie feeling whenever he was inside. Unsatisfied, Jay has decided to use the vessel anyway, awaiting his fate from the Spirit of Huk. After a short time, the vessel was later auctioned off to Rawth Shacklefist for a nominal fee, who had it returned to the Hosnian system in hopes of appeasing the spirits within.

Known Owners

Duhka Industrial
Kez Aak
Endless Endeavors
Narmo Colmven
Kellen Deming
Jay Ortega