Huit sur douze - Babylon IV
Huit ont quitté l'Alamo avec le reste du groupe. Il n'avait peut-être pas d'intérêt personnel pour cette mission, mais huit accumulaient toujours des données. La Babylon IV une nouvelle chance pour lui d'avoir l'expérience de première main d'un autre type de système. Chaque lecteur FTL était différent. Ils fonctionnaient tous selon le même principe de base de l'altération de masse, mais chaque entraînement a été construit de façon unique.
Lorsque les bombes ont sonné, Huit ont suivi la durée de l'explosion, le son de l'onde de choc, et la couleur de la détonation et ont conclu que les révolutionnaires xénoviens utilisaient des explosifs de particules photoniques. Après l'explosion de ceux-ci ont laissé une concentration de particules denses dans l'air l'inhibé le processus de transfert d'énergie qui a rendu beaucoup de technologie tout sauf inutile. Ils étaient plus efficaces pour les attaques au sol qu'ils ne l'étaient pour les combats interstellaires, de sorte que tant que la Babylon IV débarquerait bientôt la zone, ils ne seraient pas touchés.
Huit ont couru pour la Babylone, surtout pour qu'il puisse y jeter un coup d'œil. La Babylone qu'il pouvait voir de sa conception comme il est entré était un navire de transport méridien, Theta Class. Il avait une cale de chargement importante et les moteurs ainsi que la conception du navire étaient destinés à la maniabilité et à la vitesse, ce qui signifiait malheureusement que ses systèmes d'armes étaient nominaux. Probablement l'une des raisons pour lesquelles Starfire avait été contracté en premier lieu. C'est le compliment de l'équipage ne serait pas plus de quinze. Les navires de la classe Theta ont été construits pour être à la fois rapides et remplaçables. La compagnie de transport Yamikov-Fujikawa ne connaissait pas la piraterie et avait appris à minimiser ses pertes.
Avec un schéma complet de navire dans sa tête Huit se dirige directement vers le noyau de génie du navire, ignorant le hulk comme Krull qui avait embarqué avec lui. Une fois que huit personnes sont arrivées, la petite équipe d'ingénieurs savait pourquoi il était là à cause du patch sur son épaule qui le proclamait membre de l'escouade Raptor de Starfire. Huit ont exigé un poste de travail qui lui a été fourni et ont acheminé un rapport de situation constamment mis à jour sur tous les grands systèmes ainsi que la création d'une liaison ouverte avec le pont du navire de transport et l'Alamo au cas où il y aurait des informations pertinentes qu'il aurait à transmettre au capitaine de l'un ou l'autre navire. "Capitaine, il serait prudent d'initier la séquence de lancement maintenant avant que la Babylone ne soit désactivée par des charges photoniques." Avec l'accord du capitaine, huit ont préparé les moteurs pour le lancement alors que quelqu'un sur la passerelle prenait la barre.
Name: Stephen Walker: Eight of Twelve
Appearance: Has brown hair that's always untidy. His skin is unnaturally white and he has freckles on his face. His eyes are a sort of storm cloud grey and around the right one are the remains of an exposed ocular implant that mark him as a cyborg. His left hand is still covered in an exoplating that protects it from electricity and heat. He's 5'10" and around a hundred thirty pounds. Normally wears brown leather clothing and a vest stuffed with spare parts. Likes to fiddle with them when nervous.
Race: Human... mostly.
Gender: Male
Age: 18
Background: When Stephen and his sister Laura were ten years old they contracted a strain of the Xenovian flu. Not deadly but highly contagious so while they're parents were travelling the siblings were put in quarantine on the Pegasus Space Station. While they were separated from the general population the Xenovian Revolutionaries hit the station, their target was a shipment of Oppenheimium being temporarily stored at Pegasus before it could be transported.
Several of the major power conduits abroad the station exploded causing massive damage to the structural integrity of the station. In the infirmary where Stephen and Laura were quarantined the walls collapsed burying the siblings in rubble. Now Pegasus Station was a layover point for much of the galaxy and often enough it was where rare materials were stored and experimental technologies developed. Such a technology was being worked on in the lab adjacent to the infirmary that day. Nanites, programmed to infiltrate a host and repair there body from within regardless of what species they might be. However while test results were promising the nanites were far from being ready to test on living subjects and certainly not on two young children.
All the repair scenarios were already programmed into the nanites but they only had a rudimentary understanding of anatomy. Without a clean DNA sample and understanding what Stephen and Laura looked like healthy they were unable to do there jobs properly. These were still prototypes and had yet to have safeguards built in. Despite only being vaguely aware of what they were supposed to do, when the nanites found Stephen and Laura's broken bodies they set to work. Unable to identify exactly what was organic and what was metal the nanites did they're best. As a result a number of synthetic aspects were built into Laura and Stephen's bodies, metal ended up grafted to parts of there skeleton and in some parts replacing there skin. An optronic data sequencer was grafted into Stephen's optic nerve replacing his damaged eye.
Both the siblings also suffered brain damage as a result of the accident but the nanites found the remains of a central computer processor that made use of bio neural circuitry. A processor design that was modeled on the human brain, able to do billions of calculations a second. Because of the similarities between the processor design and the human brain the nanites were unable to tell the difference and used pieces of the processor to effect repairs to the damaged areas of the brain, the most notable of which was the memory centers.
When Stephen and Laura were finally dug out of the rubble both of them resembled machines more than they did humans. Unknown to the two of them (they were told there parents left them) Stephen and Laura's parents were told they died in the explosion on Pegasus. Afterwards they were taken to a lab in a highly restricted section of the Pegasus station.
Laura and Stephen spent the next five years on the station in that lab being studied. The most interesting thing about the accident was that because of the way the nanites repaired Stephen and Laura's brain some of the data files from several different computers had been patched into there memories, overriding the damaged memory centers of the brain. The computer used to repair Laura had been the medical terminal from sickbay, as a result she'd retained a large portion of knowledge regarding anatomy and medical practices.
The computer the nanites had assimilated into Stephen's head was from an engineering database a floor up from the infirmary that had collapsed into the room when the conduits blew. As a result Stephen carried the schematics and design specifications of every ship ever to dock on the Pegasus station. Through some fluke of the sibling's meld with the bio neural circuitry the designations of the computers had been grafted over the sibling's identification of self. The Pegasus station was controlled by twelve main computer systems, Medical was Five of Twelve and Engineering was Eight. After the accident the siblings started answering to these designations much more readily than their own names, even if they did remember that the names belonged to them.
Over the next year as much of the implants the nanites had created in both the siblings systems was harvested by the doctors. Pieces from there arms legs, etc. The sequencer that had been grafted into Eight's eye was replaced with an artificial eyeball though an amount of circuitry around his eye couldn't be removed without making him blind. A year after they were first brought to the lab Five was taken to another section, Eight never saw her again.
When he was ten Eight was too young to understand why he was in the lab or why he wasn't allowed to leave but as he grew up Eight understood more. Ship schematics weren't the only thing in Eight's head, he also had a complete design scheme for Pegasus itself. So when he was fourteen he began to plot a way to escape. It took him a year to finalize and get to the point where he thought success was a reasonable possibility.
First he tricked the Pegasus computer into thinking there was a fire in his room. The doors opened automatically. Then he opened up a conduit access panel and crawled inside. These tubes ran throughout the station in case engineers had to make manual repairs, or turbolifts were damaged. Eight tapped into one of the computer conduits that regulated internal sensors and fed the security sweeps false data detecting himself running for the docking ring on level H. In reality he crawled through the access tubes emerging at the docking ring four floors above. Eight stowed away on a cargo freighter, hiding himself away in the smallest corner he could find. Because he had the ship's blueprint in his head he knew where to find the smuggler's hatch, and keep himself hidden inside.
When it docked at its destination, Eight escaped unnoticed and made his way to the reason he'd come to this planet. The Andorian Waste Yards. Hundreds of miles of dispossessed ships, their working parts stripped and sold, only skeletons and broken parts left over. It was the system's junk yard for anything that wasn't worth the effort of salvaging. Of course they're were laws against scavenging from it but people did it anyways and the local authorities didn't care all that much.
Eight found a decent ship, a tactical bomber, designed to be piloted by two for deep space missions. Of course any stealth technology Eight knew it once had had long been stripped but the craft itself was more or less intact even if all it's major systems were for the most part, missing.
Eight spent the next week on that planet scavenging for parts, rebuilding the ship. He build the engines up from scratch, Stole a communications array off another vessel. Eventually he managed to cobble together a ship. It wasn't pretty and it wasn't exactly comfortable but it would fly.
Eight has spent the last three years searching for any trace of what became of Five. He joined the Starfire Company the previous year on the hopes of using their resources to locate his sister.
Because of his implants and alterations Eight doesn't require sleep however, every twenty four hours so he has to go into a regenerative hibernation in a chamber on his ship which helps to keep the balance between his biological and technological systems.
Personality: Eight has a far greater understand of ships than he does people, he takes great pleasure in rebuilding and augmenting systems. With people however he is very blunt and to the point, he's almost mechanically rational and tends to accomplish tasks his own way. Doesn't follow orders very well unless they fall under what he was planning on doing anyways. Always wants to learn and understand new things but does so from a clinical standpoint, this can make relations with him trying.
Gear:

 A Distortion Field Generator - Masks the readings of his technological components so he registers as pure human on scans.
 A Tetrion Particle Weapon - An energy weapon that doesn't leave a trace signature once it's been deactivated, very good for sneaking past security sensors.
 Engineering Kit - All the tools a mechanic would need to interface with any system he encountered.

Personal Ship:


The Aurora is the same vessel as he built himself however it hardly resembles itself from it's maiden flight. Was made for two pilots, Eight retrofitted it to include weapons and removed the high yield bomb systems. The ships has three rooms, the bridge which consists of two consoles and a Cyborg integration chamber, once sealed it fills with an oxygen rich fluid which is full of bio neural interfacing solution which allows Eight's brain to function as the guidance computer. The other room houses the engine which while haphazardous is fully functional and efficient, the last room doubles between a sickbay and Eight's living quarters. This is where his regeneration chamber is.