Challenger

The P-100A "Challenger" was one of the earliest predecessors to the Stormcatcher's modern experimental spy drone fleet, including the XM-Siren "Laplace" the Baikonur Space Agency has a copy of. The Challenger gained a reputation akin to the mid-90's Toyota Corrola of experimental aircraft; no matter how clunky, un-stealthy, unstylish, awkward, and overall mediocre the devices were, each Challenger was too resilient to finally just... die. It couldn't be deployed as a stealth aircraft as initially planned, but the damn aircraft was built so well, it found use deployed in border disputes just because it was so cheap to keep it running. Everyone who'd ever laid eyes on a Challenger was thankful when they were replaced with the faster, more maneuverable P-152, the new cheap workhorse on the block. So long had the P-100A's career lasted, that the P designation had been changed from "Pursuit" to "Predator"! The Stormcatcher's exalts happily hid the Challengers in a hangar somewhere near the desert, glad their Flight's greatest fashion embarrassment was hidden from public view for good.

However, to the surprise of an aircraft by the callsign of P88TW, this didn't mean their lives were over. He awoke one evening in an unfamiliar location. A Fire engineer, her robes far too graceful to be an exalt, informed him that over the next eighteen months, he'd be transformed into a spacecraft. As she performed his shutoff sequence, he mused that the next time he awoke, he'd be a rocket!

That, as it turns out, was far from the case. 8TW awoke almost monthly to updates on his progress, and descriptions of his new future. Upon his first awakening, the engineer, a welder named Agena, taught him the history and purpose of the Baikonur Space Agency, and he discovered he was being refurbished in his first home base! Agena and other engineers, with patience he'd never been granted as a machine, slowly introduced him to his new purpose: as an EVA drone, he would be one of two operators responsible for maintaining the Eagle module, a section of a space station dedicated to the study of astrobotany. It would be his first peacetime assignment since he'd left the experimental wing for the front lines as a three-year-old P-100A.

By his last awakening, 8TW was a new flying machine. His airframe had been completely stripped to its basic components and built from the ground up out of lightweight materials, some of which were younger than him. His old aerodynamic control surfaces were stripped out and replaced with reaction controls, which would function far beyond his old altitude limit. What had once been airfoils had been replaced by solar panels which unfurled like real Pearlcatcher wings as he extended them. He'd considered his old cameras to be high-resolution, but the things they'd replaced them with felt like a much-needed set of glasses. The very software running his mind felt faster! Most visibly, his old utilitarian matte gray aluminum finish was completely removed, replaced with a patchwork of foils that crinkled as he moved.

He looked like his out-of-date idea of a satellite, but they weren't done. The new dragon who greeted him was a Skydancer from Shadow he'd never seen before. She informed him that they had one more layer to add, and that they thought he might have opinions on his idea of what the last coat of paint should look like, if he was capable of having opinions at all. She wondered if he'd like a look commemorative of his military service?

8TW shook his head. He was proud to serve, but he didn't miss the LIAF. If he was a plantkeeping robot, he wanted to look the part.

So he emerged from the Baikonur Agency HQ Robotics Plant as a completely new robot. Where there had once been an unassuming matte gray, he was green and patterned and covered in more types of paint than he'd ever seen on one aircraft before. A striking design of vines were painted over the jaguar-print primary and fishlike secondary. He looked and felt closer to being alive than he had in decades.

He was even given a new callsign: Challenger, to commemorate one of Lightning's most valiant workhorse aircraft of recent wars. But to 8TW, he wasn't a P-100A anymore. Rather, the felt like a return to his experimental aircraft roots. Shooting to altitudes no drone had ever reached above the baked desert groud, learning to recover from stall patterns wind tunnel simulations had revealed only the night before, feeling a sonic boom reverberate through his airframe as he made his way onto another speed test... None of it was too far off from the feeling of being stored on top of an overpowered missile waiting to take off. That's what 'Challenger' meant twenty years ago, to the pencil pushers who named him: challenging not other dragons, but the boundaries of dragonkind itself. He'll never see battle again, but pushing the boundaries of science, in flight testing or a botany lab, feels more like himself than the front lines ever did.