Kevin Tolwyn

Kevin "Lone Wolf" Tolwyn is a fictional character in the Wing Commander series of computer games and novels. He is a fighter pilot who is the nephew of Admiral Geoffrey Tolwyn. (It is worth noting that early scripts for Wing Commander Prophecy said, instead, that he was the admiral's son.)

From the moment Kevin Tolwyn entered the Academy, eyes widened, jaws dropped and crowds parted for him. He shared the last name of one of the finest commanders in the fleet, Adm. Geoffrey Tolwyn; and if pressed he would admit to being the man's nephew, as his aunt was Tolwyn's late wife. Spoiled and pampered as a child, he nonetheless knew that he would eventually enter the military, as Tolwyns had served Terra and England (not necessarily in that order) for over a thousand years. A natural pilot, he scored well at the Academy and gained popularily from the almost infinite depth of his wallet.

It was expected he would never see actual combat, but on his first assignment, he was assigned to the flight group aboard the TCS Tarawa CVE-08, then a newly-minted escort carrier constructed (alarmingly) by stapling a runway to a transport. He made quick friends with her commander, Capt. Thaddeus O'Brian (formerly a transport commander) but aroused only skepticism with her flight group commander, Capt. Jason "Bear" Bondarevsky. During the engagement above Vukar Tag, the first for the fresh-out-of-flight-school Tarawa crew and flight group, Lone Wolf was assigned to escort a damaged Sabre heavy fighter back to base. When a lone Sartha light fighter sortied up, Lone Wolf gave chase; he got it, but allowed several other Kilrathi fighters to close with the Sabre and destroy it, resulting in the loss of one crewmember. Tolwyn's actions, exacerbated by his possibly-phony explanation that his radio had been damaged, led to his indefinite removal from the flight line; as far as Bondarevsky was concerned, Tolwyn was simply looking out for himself and could not be considered reliable.

When the Tarawa was assigned to Task Force Valkyrie as part of its now-famous raid on Kilrah, Bondarevsky put Tolwyn back in the cockpit; they'd need every pilot they could get, and arrogant or not, Lone Wolf was one of the best. In the ensuing campaign, he achieved his ace strip and, in light of pilot losses (as well as Bondarevsky's emergency ascension to captain of the Tarawa), was promoted to commander of the Rapier medium fighter squadron. The campaign erased from him any delusions of grandeur; what he wanted, he discovered, was not the phony camaraderie of his affluent civilian life, but the life-and-death trust of his fellow pilots. During the Kilrah campaign, he got it. He was one of only fourteen pilots to survive the raid, and returned to a proud uncle on Earth with the right to call himself a valued member of the Tarawa crew, one of the First to Kilrah.

During the armistice, he was one of the retired Confed personnel who transferred to the Free Republic of the Landreich, but was not aboard when the Tarawa penetrated into Hari space and discovered the Hakaga-clas supercarriers; he had returned to Earth with his uncle, to send out a phony radio signal cribbed from the Battle of Midway. Both Tolwyns were planetside when a bomb wiped out most of the military's senior staff; when intelligence from the Tarawa arrived only minutes later, the picture became clear: not only were the Kilrathi planning to attack Earth under cover of the armistice (proved by the radio signal), but they had the firepower with which to do it. Admiral Tolywn was immediately reinstated and made commander of the Third Fleet, with orders to defend Earth against the new threat by any means necessary. Kevin, assigned to the Concordia, flew in both the Battle of Sirius and the Battle of Earth, where he personally escorted Brigadier General "Big" Duke Grecko's marine landing craft into Thrakhath's flagship; shortly afterwards he was hit and forced to eject. Though he received a dangerous dose of radiation when Grecko's marines blew their thermonuclear weapon to destroy the carrier, he was rescued in time and survived.

After the Battle of Earth, he was rotated off the front lines by Admiral Tolwyn, who, despite his pride in the boy, could not bear the thought of losing someone who had become less of a nephew and more of a surrogate son. As a Major, he ran courier services and information across the Confederation. He came aboard the TCS Victory for a short time to brief her Wing Commander, Col. Christopher Blair, on the TCS Behemoth project, and only declined to join Blair's flight group because he knew it would pain his uncle.

After the war, Kevin found himself still flying fighters, but this time as a wing commander himself. He commanded the fighter wing flying off FRLS Independence, the renamed Tarawa, which was now in Landreich hands. By the end of the events surrounding the recovery and refitting of the lost Kilrathi carrier (chronicled in False Colors), he had been promoted to naval captain, and had become the Independence's commander.