"What kind of name is Hangfireflip?" I was asked by a genetically modified, cybernetically enchanced Koala named "Bomb Bear" in the main tavern of Hugh's Enterprise in Kunti.

Well the fact is that it's a smash of two nicknames.

The Flip part was the name my sister called me as she couldn't say Phillip when she was very young. The name stuck as one of those annoying family things.

The Hangfire part comes from my time in the engineering division of the Royal Kunti Spaceforce. Basically, we were out in the test range, running tests on the then new F-63 Condor for the Feds. They had just developed a highly illegal ship to ship missile with an advanced AI control system. The system was developed by Sirus Corp and they wanted to test it in neutral backwater where the superpowers were not looking.

I was the crew chief on duty when a rookie pilot was required to test the new missile. But as he tried to test fire the missile, it failed to fly off the rail. This, in military lingo, is known as a 'Hangfire'. The problem with hangfires is that the missiles are usually armed when they hang and this makes the ship its stuck on dangerous.

What made this hangfire worse was that it had a nuke warhead that was likely to burn off a fair chunk of the Capital Ship the Feds sent to run the testing. The Admiral ordered the pilot to stand off about 0.5Mega Light seconds from the Farragut Class ship while my crew was sent out to disarm the missile.

While on our way to the F-63, the waiting got too much for the pilot and he pulled the Ejection handle and banged out of the condor. I don't know if the shock of Remlock capsule leaving the ship was the reason, but the missile AI seems to have shifted into a self-defence mode that Sirus failed to tell us about.

When we reached the F-63, I EVAed out to the Condor, popped the maintenance panel on the missile and plugged in my maintenance pad. But when I tried to power down the AI, it triggered a 5 minute self-destruct sequence. There was no way my crew could get to minimum safe distance in our maintenance shuttle in 5 minutes and the AI had locked me out of the missile's systems. Also, the effects on the Kunti system would likely result in several million casualities in the station's of that system due to radiation fallout.

With no other way to solve the problem, I went way outside the box. I climbed into the Condors cockpit, programmed the FSD to jump to an uninhabited system 2 ly away, aligned the ship, set a 30 sec countdown and climbed out. When the countdown hit zero, the ship zoomed away and jumped seconds before the missile detonated.

As a result of this, the fleet pilots gave me the honorary call-sign "HANGFIRE".

When I left the service, I completed my basic Pilot Federation training and gained my flight license. I was asked what call-sign I wanted and so I combined Hangfire with Flip - Hangfireflip.