A/N: Because people asked repeatedly, here some clarification: if you don't see a name you recognize, it's an OC. The little boy from Monster or the girl from Beacon – all one of those people you have never heard of before and probably never will hear of, again. There is only one exception, the young officer in Justification. His name you will most certainly have heard before.
If we called our angels devils and our devils angels, we would change the meaning of the word, but also the meaning of the thing. Such is the nature of a name.
Traditions older than space travel demanded that a ship should always be considered a female entity. And while the Navy Board religiously stuck to principles older than true sentience when it came to the naming of crafts in the Imperial Navy – namely (pun intended) that a proper war-name should strike terror into the hearts of anyone who heard it – crew names differed substantially from the official usage. Whenever Avenger and Devastator assumed orbit around their respective stations, to those in the know, Ava and Diva were coming home.
Contrary to what some bureaucrats, safely ensconced in some far-away office, might assume, the nicknames were by no means meant to downplay the destructive potential of the ships. Species all over the galaxy were in agreement, after all, that a properly enraged female was more dangerous than any male. Everyone with a shred of experience in these matters also understood that ships – like females in general – were more agreeable if shown appropriate attention. There was no telling what a captain thought, when he put his hand on a control panel, occasionally, in a gesture that might or might not have been a pat; but there was many a technician faced with a recalcitrant part of his ship that pleaded, "Talk to me, girl, tell me what's wrong with you." And who could count the gunners leaning over their consoles, whispering, "That's it, baby, give 'em hell!"
All in all, it was more or less inevitable, that the new Flagship of the Fleets, monstrous even by the standards of her kind, would be dubbed Cutie, by the multitudes that built and crewed her, as soon as the intended name had been leaked.
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On the evening after the newly installed main reactors had been test-fired for the first time, leaving the half-completed ship supporting itself at least partially by its own power source – a moment generally recognized amongst ship-yard personnel as the one when the ship became an entity in her own rights – the foreman of the No. 1 construction unit solemnly poured a glass of sparkling Glova wine onto the deckplates of the engine room, where heat and vibrations given off by the nearby reactors caused the alcoholic liquid to evaporate so quickly that the plating seemed to swallow the drink.
"To the awe-inspiring Lady Ex," he intoned ceremoniously, "known to her friends as Cutie. Most terrifying lady I ever hope to meet. May your career be long and glorious, my lass!"
"To the Cutie," the rest of the assembled crew echoed, emptying their own glasses – though not onto the floor.
None of the gathered men – and rare alien – noticed a tall, dark shadow on a gantry high above them, one hand splayed, almost caressingly, against a bulkhead. If the ship herself felt any connection to the man who had had considerable part in designing her, there was no obvious sign. Nor was there any indication if the man ultimately meant to be her master preferred to think of the gigantic war machine as Cutie or the more dignified Lady Ex or possibly even her official designation.
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In the years to come, though, the tech crew – most likely to call a ship by her given name, so to speak – found, to their immense relief, that the Supreme Commander tended to ignore the occasional slip of tongue within his – uncannily far-reaching – hearing.
Among the units assigned to the fighter decks, there was even a rumor about the Sithlord's personal TIE-Advanced – a fighter his lordship not only took to battle but sporadically would tinker with himself. There were those who swore that his lordship not only talked to the TIE the way any good mechanic would, but that he called the deadly little craft Angel.