I met him for the first time when I went down to the storage hangar to check out my new ride. She came with a new crew chief-Staff Sergeant Fisher. Then they dusted her off, updated the computers, and handed me the keys. So branded, she was named “Lucky Thirteen”, and put in storage as a cold spare until they needed an airframe for the new Second Lieutenant. Not only did it have a leading and trailing 13 in it, but all the digits of her serial number also added up to 13. But one of the grease monkeys had found her assembly number plate while swapping out some fried parts one day, and the news made the rounds that the unlucky ship’s serial number was 13-02313. She wore a dark red 5 on her olive drab flanks. A ship surviving an all-hands loss without being destroyed is very unusual-surviving two of them is so rare that I’ve never heard of such a thing before or since.
Both times, they recovered the ship, hosed her out, and patched her up again. Before they gave her to me, she had lost two crews with all hands, one of them with the entire troop compartment loaded to the last seat. But pilots are a superstitious bunch, and it had been decided that Lucky Thirteen was an unlucky ship.
She was an older model Wasp, not one of the new Dragonflies, but most of our wing was still on Wasps back then.
There was nothing wrong with her, technically speaking. The Fleet has a tradition: the rookie drop ship commander in the unit always gets the ship nobody else wants.
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