Thanks! So Iceman died (or at least was shot down) a month and a half after the Claw was destroyed, and at some point after that, Blair brings back his body.
Yes… and your upper bound is only six weeks later since per the guide Lance has to be conceived at some point in 2655. So Iceman dies in a window that's about 1.5 to 3 months after the Tiger's Claw is lost.
Given that timeline, Blair's comment about not flying a combat mission in 10 years isn't inconsistent even if flying the SAR mission would be considered a "combat mission". Blair says "it's been ten years since I've flown a combat mission", not "I haven't flown a combat mission since the Claw was destroyed" or "...since I was assigned to ISS". Court martials take time, and the Austin would have been up to her ears in Kilrathi during the retreat from K'Tithrak Mang, so it's possible it took some weeks or months before Blair would have been reassigned to ISS. If he flew the mission in April 2656 (either right before or right after his court martial), that's still about ten years before WC2.
I think the key word there is combat. He still /flies/ occasionally in those years but there hasn't been any combat. In the Wing Commander I & II guide he says that "only an occasional patrol route in a light fighter broke the monotony until the year 2664. Until that time I never heard, sighted, or suspected the presence of the Kilrathi in our sector." (And of course at the point he tells the Concordia crew he hasn't flown a combat mission he's on at least his second combat mission of the campaign!). No matter what, it has to be a rough "ten years" instead of ten years specifically. The first mission of Wing Commander II takes place in April 2665 which is closer to nine years after the Tiger's Claw was destroyed. (The problem is that the Wing Commander II writers were thinking it would be eleven years after Wing Commander I started rather than after Secret Missions 2 ended.)
It actually would be a compelling narrative point if the last combat mission he flew before ten years of inactivity was recovering the body of his friend. I could well imaging "Maverick" being officially grounded but still hopping in a fighter before or during or even just after his court martial proceedings to try to save his friend, rules be damned.
I love the story but the WC1&2 guide nixes it. We're specifically told that yes it SHOULD'VE taken months but that "Admiral Tolwyn, under the War Powers Act of 2634, had speeded (sic) up the process." This is in service of a specific story which is that he was shipped off of the Austin so fast he wasn't allowed to see any of the other pilots again as Tolwyn had intentionally kept them on duty… except Maniac, who was in the psych ward.
I think it's less likely he did it after being assigned to ISS but before WC2... unless Iceman happed to be killed in Gwynnedd or whatever other backwater system Blair was assigned to at the time, since I don't think Ferrets (or at that time, probably something else, Hornets?) were jump capable, and I don't think ISS would be fielding Broadswords or jump-capable fighters. They might have SAR shuttles that were jump capable... maybe in this scenario Blair might have borrowed one of those?
Looking at it from a ship perspective: Ferrets would be okay for the time period as Paladin's service history in the Confederation Handbook has him flying Ferrets for the Exploratory Services in 2637. We do see a jump capable Ferret in Fleet Action; Hunter is killed flying it while trying to protect Paladin. We also see a pair of Sabres on the deck at Caernarvon in Wing Commander II which are known to sometimes be jump capable! And we even see a Hornet jump once, too, in the Secret Missions intro cutscene in Super Wing Commander. Back in the WCSO days, Captain Johnny had an informal rule that anything could be made jump capable if needed and anything corvette-sized or larger could carry at least a couple fighters if the story needed that to happen. And I guess we see the results of that when we look closely enough! (Also: according to the Wing Commander I & II Guide, which is quoting the game's outline, Caernarvon has only six pilots. So maybe there are two more unseen ships!)
But the where isn't locked down–Prophecy says that Casey died on a "deep space patrol in the B'shriss system"... but it doesn't tell us where his body was actually found. He could've been dumped anywhere… which gives me another story that I'm pretty fond of, I'll try and hash it out in one of the replies below.
Your other suggesting is fascinating... that Blair might have recovered his body after WC2. This would be fairly creepy... since Blair presumably didn't recover a 10-year-old desiccated corpse, it would imply that Iceman would have been held captive, alive, by the Kilrathi for ten years, undergoing who knows what tortures, until finally being murdered and left for Blair to find after the loss of K'tithrak Mang. Very dark, but absolutely in keeping with the psychological warfare that the Kilrathi would have practiced.
Interesting! I was imagining the desiccated corpse version of the story (sort of a Frank Poole in 3001 x the Lady Be Good story) but the murdered POW aspect is also pretty compelling. There's a Wing Commander III TNC newsbrief in the Official Guide that speaks to exactly your story: "
In one of the more macabre touches to an already brutal war, the Hispania freighter Loa recovered a Confederation fighter adrift in the Veronica sector, its pilot ritually executed by the Kilrathi before being strapped into the cockpit and cast into space The fighter was immediately confiscated by the Confederation Intelligence Department, but crewmembers reported that Kilrathi symbols had been painted across the fighter's hull in its pilot's own blood, while those who saw the body indicated that it had been literally ripped to shreds." Which is to say, it has been known to happen!
But I do think maybe I'm going in the wrong direction there; if Iceman had been missing for a decade then it feels like Casey's "Only problem is he died when I was just a kid. I think my mother got his last medal when I was in diapers." wouldn't have been structured that way. But here's my idea that would cover Blair finding him in 2656 in Gwynedd.
The tl;dr is: what if Iceman's body were captured, executed and then deliberately dumped for Blair, specifically, to find?
Now you are probably disgusted with me. That is far, far too "small universe." They're targeting one man specifically in a war involving trillions of people? Why would the Kilrathi ever bother doing that? And I think… there's actually a reasonable explanation for why they might have had to.
After The Secret Missions, Prince Gilkarg is executed for his failure and his son Thrakhath replaces them. Thrakhath is an interesting guy, he has a strategic mind and he has a long term plan to change the shape of the Empire to give himself more power. It's repeated a couple times on Academy, in Secret Missions 2 and in the movie stuff: he wants to unify the clans so that all Kilrathi swear fealty directly to the Kiranka instead of their Barons. He's been pushing for this since before he was first in line for the throne, conspiring with his sister to make this change in the shape of society a religious doctrine instead of a political one (which is foiled when the Sivar fails at Dolos).
But like LBJ before his re-election, he doesn't have a mandate to do what HE plans yet. His hold on power is incredibly tenuous; the other clans all know his father was executed for incompetence and that any similar failure could put one of their sons in line for the throne instead (an unprecedented possibility that the Kiranka line might dilute). Thrakhath HAS to unify the clans and the people behind him and he has to do that by framing what happened to his father. We know that he privately gristles about the Emperor, correctly blaming him for Gilkarg's death. But he looks around and he understands something important: the people blame someone that is rapidly becoming a folk hero, someone the all important warrior class has in the wake of Gilkarg's execution specifically taken to calling "the Heart of the Tiger".
What Thrakhath does, literally days after taking power, is that he issues a public vow to the galaxy. Naval Intelligence's translation is printed in the Kilrathi Saga manual, it's called "Thrakhath's Vow". He says he recognizes that this Heart of the Tiger was responsible for his father's death and that he will have his revenge. Specifically, it promises that "in the eight of moons to come, I too will strip you from something you hold dear." So this isn't Tom and Jerry chasing each other for the sake of it, it's an established fact that Thrakhath's political standing (and probably survival) is based on his need to establish that he has the power to enact revenge on Blair.
And we know that some of the first things Thrakhath does are focused on Blair exactly. The vow itself is necessarily tied to the Hobbes plot (it's where he provinces the name). The Hobbes thing always seemed so contrived but this is a great explanation for it: Hobbes wasn't slipped into the Confederation to spy on some future project no one could've predicted… he was sent there to get Thrakhath's public revenge on the man that killed his father… something that, again, was genuinely necessary to him. And when events changed how and when that was needed, Ralgha went into cold storage. (Those events were, specifically, Thrakhath using his spies to turn Jazz and have him destroy the Tiger's Claw–another 2655 focus on knocking down Blair specifically… because Thrakhath needs to establish his dominance there within the next calendar year.)
Now with all of that setup in mind, to me it makes perfect sense that it would be an incredibly powerful thing for Thrakhath's propaganda/psychological warfare to ritually execute Blair's mentor and then leave his corpse to be recovered by the man himself (as they do later for similar purposes, quoted from the WC3 guide above). So my story would be that Blair found Iceman's body and that he did it in or near the Gwyendd System… because Thrakhath put it exactly where he knew Blair would be flying one of his previously mentioned occasional patrols. (Note that Thrakhath's vow is dated July 2655… so his promise to murder someone Blair holds dear can't refer to Angel, it needs to be someone who is killed by the middle of 2656… square in the middle of our Iceman window!)
A related question... when did Hawk fly with Iceman? Off the Claw, right before K'tithrak Mang? Or after the Claw's destruction, in those weeks in February and March? Was Iceman flying off the Austin at the time, or a different ship? Unless there's some hidden insight somewhere, we'll probably never know.
I think we can establish that the 'first mission' Hawk describes in Prophecy WAS aboard the Tiger's Claw. In Wing Commander IV, Hawk says that he met Seether when he first signed on with the Confederation. The Wing Commander IV novel further explains that that was when Hawk was attending Flight School and that Seether was taken away by black ops shortly after that. So we assume that this is when Seether was chosen for the GE program… which Tolwyn repeatedly says was twenty years before Wing Commander IV. Which if we're exactly literal would be 2653, the year before Wing Commander I. So Hawk would've graduated flight school about a year before Blair and then his first assignment was with Iceman… so we reason it must've been the Tiger's Claw (since that's where Iceman was then). But it seems he *wasn't* there when Blair came aboard the following year. The Prophecy guide confirms he wasn't serving with Iceman when Iceman was killed, they were just corresponding and the news made him angrier. (Iceman was assigned to the Tiger's Claw in 2649, if you want an absolute lower bounds for some of this.)
That would have been really cool. Except that it wouldn't have made sense for Blair to have had a wingman in the intro mission, since the entire court martial plot point revolved around the fact that without Blair's missing flight recorder, there was no way to corroborate his sighting of the stealth fighters. If he'd had a wingman, the wingman could have confirmed his story and cleared his name. (Unless the wingman was Jazz... but that would have given things away). I guess they could have come up with some circumstance where Blair and his wingman were separated right before Blair sighted the stealth fighters, but an easier story is that he was flying solo.
Also, they presumably would have had to add a 2650's era flyable ship into the game for just that one mission, which might be part of the reason why they dropped that. (I guess they could have just used the Rapier?)
At that point the plan was to reuse the existing Rapier art instead of making a new one. But Origin managed to train up some great 3DS artists faster than they'd hoped so there was no shortage to have to deal with. (I believe the original has Iceman and Blair separated to show off the new in-flight cutscenes.)
