Several times over the course of the game, the Concorida is sabotaged by a planted bomb!
Shortly thereafter, a murderer is revealed to be aboard the Concordia! However, this is revealed to the player out of character during a cutscene; meaning the player character is out on a mission when this all goes down, and doesn't learn of it until later.
Murder! But who? Who?
At this point it's obvious that a traitor is aboard, and speculation abounds that the traitor is a member of the Concordia's own flight crew, even a member of the Society of Mandarins!
No one is safe. Stingray, a nay-sayer of yours from the start of your time on the Concordia, is suspected of Specialist McGuffin's murder.
In several missions, the player character encounters the mysterious "stealth fighters" mentioned at the beginning of the game, only to find that the flight data recorder has subsequently and mysteriously gone missing in the same manner as it had during the game's intro; of course, without this valuable piece of equipment, you're unable to prove your story about the cloaked fighters. The traitor's presence does explain why your flight data recorder is always mysteriously "missing" whenever you've encountered the Kilrathi stealth fighter.
However, the universe isn't using you as its galactic punching bag the entire time. Many of your old friends, and some new ones, stand by you regardless of what the word around the campfire is.
Look who pops his head in mid-game!
While defending the ship The Bonnie Heather during an escort mission, we find out Paladin's in command. It was great to see that he had also escaped the disaster aboard the Tiger's Claw. I guess he retired and hauled butt just in the nick of time, didn't he? He even has a few words to say about another fellow crewmate from the Tiger's Claw, Todd "Maniac" Marshall. At this point, I was starting to wonder who hadn't survived. We've seen Spirit, Angel, Doomsday, Jazz, Paladin, and heard about Maniac. That leaves Bossman (but he died in Crusade), Hunter, Knight, and Iceman. They never come back in VotK, so I guess those three are the only ones who bought it when the Claw was destroyed by the Kilrathi stealth fighters.
Even the Drakhai from the previous game make their return.
But they're no more invincible now than they were before.
Of course, nothing lasts forever. Continuing the precedent that Crusade set, we see several more "scripted death" scenes. Good friends Shadow, Spirit, and Downtown all see the axe come down during the course of VotK in a classic usage of the "anyone can die" trope.
Shadow was just about to retire, too.
Remember the sad story of Spirit's fiance from the original games? Referencing yet another random conversation from the first three games, it turns out that her fiance is still alive on a star base in the Heaven's Gate star system. The Mandarin traitor sent her an e-mail, trying to use her fiance, Phillip, as a bargaining chip to get Spirit to betray the Confederation and join the Mandarins.
She would not, and thus she knows that they will kill him for certain now. When you and Spirit are ordered to attack the base in which Phillip resides along with wingmen "Meron" and "Dekker," Spirit commits suicide by crashing into it, instead.
Say, what did her cryptic last words mean, anyway?
These deaths and traitorous activities are made even more suspenseful by adding in the budding relationship between Angel and the player character. The two pilots develop a romance over the course of VotK, and Angel is foisted into danger many times. With the death of all these good friends, how can we put the possibility of Angel suffering the same fate out of our minds? As a kid, having seen so many good pilots die, my sense of security was shattered. No one was immune! If it could happen to them, it could happen with her, too. I forgot about all this as an adult, so the suspense was a welcome addition to the game after over a decade of not playing.
