Tessen Brunep

Tessen Brunep grew up in one of the deeper residential cavern-tiers beneath Sullust's Pinyumb city, the daughter of two SoroSuub Corporation engineers who had worked on hyperdrive subsystems for the better part of forty years. She was apprenticed into the corporation at thirteen — younger than was strictly legal under Republic labor codes, but Sullust's contractual fictions had ways of accommodating talent — and by sixteen she was leading her own diagnostic team for ion-flux assemblies on civilian-grade light freighters. She would later say, with characteristic dryness, that the corporation got their money's worth.

The trouble started when she was twenty. She found an irregularity in a hyperdrive coupling that SoroSuub's mid-management had been quietly papering over for three quarters — a manufacturing defect in a component shipped to a small Outer Rim freight cooperative. Tessen filed the proper internal report and was politely told to revise it. She filed it again with the same conclusion. She was reassigned to a different production line. Three months later, the freighter using that coupling lost its hyperdrive in a tight asteroid field and forty-seven beings died, including a Sullustan crew family she had grown up with.

She walked off the SoroSuub floor that week with a falsified set of recommendations, a small severance she stole from the records department, and a Tool Kit she had been quietly assembling for years. She has not been back. She bought a clean ID, signed onto a series of independent freighter crews along the Rimma Trade Route, and now hires out as a freelance technical specialist — primarily for ships and crews who can't afford full-time engineers and can't afford the consequences of a corporate engineer's first loyalty being to corporate. She works in the engine bays and on the comms panels; she keeps the slicing legitimate when she can, less legitimate when the contract requires it, and she has never once cut a corner on a hyperdrive coupling.

Tessen is small even for a Sullustan, with the wide dark eyes and broad jowls characteristic of her people. She speaks Basic with the slight clicking accent of Pinyumb residents and laughs easily, but those who have worked alongside her notice quickly: behind the humor is a relentless attention to detail, a deep distrust of corporate authority, and a private list of forty-seven names she has not forgotten and does not intend to.