There was a faint, muffled hiss, as pneumatic cylinders activated and applied torque to the lid of the cryogenic tubule he could remember entering... well, it didn't exactly feel like yesterday, but not as long ago as it surely must have been. Cool air flowed over his skin and the frigid cold of the chamber began to fade as a voice came to him.
"Doctor Braun, can you hear me?"
"Yes, yes I can." He said, wincing as he leaned forward and the aches of thousands of years spent perfectly immobilised shot back all at once.
"Very good, now you might want to remain still for a moment and give yourself time to get your bearings back, your head might not feel quite right for a little while."
"No no, I'm already feeling much better, thank you." He muttered as he leaned forward to take a step out of the glass and titanium confines of the tube.
The doctor and his immediate assistant took a few steps forward, ready to catch the older, nude man, in case he fell - but Isaac had been in cryo a few times before, he'd gotten used to the disorientation; it still wasn't easy, and there was a moment where he wobbled, but he wasn't about to slip and fall in front of his comparative juniors.
"I see. You've done this before, Dr Braun?"
"Yes. Do you have a briefing for me?"
"Straight to the point, I see. As a matter of fact I do. Here you are." The younger doctor raised an eyebrow to the nearby nurse as Braun strode up to them after finally working the last of the cryo-drugs from his sense of balance. The nurse was overtly averting his eyes.
The datapad contained the most pertinent information only - the state of the crew, the events leading to their awakening, and their orders to crew the Monolith.
He nodded appreciatively. He was to crew it as a doctor, informally charge of a medical team responsible for planetside and operational care. Isaac looked over the names of his immediate colleagues, and made note of them.
"My patients, my colleagues, my duty, my self. That's the order and it never changes."
Species Human
Age 83
Sexuality Straight
Birth Born and raised on a terraforming colony in the Sigma Draconis system, left at 16 to pursue an academic career in the core territories.
Appearance Isaac Braun is a man of moderate stature, with broad shoulders and a wide, lean waist. His skin is wrinkled, creased with frowning - not by laughing - and marked by the sun. His hair is washed grey and silver by age. His eyes are hard and cold most of the time, brown and dull with only the faint outline of minimalist, function-oriented retinal enhancements and augmentation visible, and his lips are thin and unfriendly. Under his clothes, his entire left side bears the uneven patchwork of fragmentation grenade scarring, a battle fought upon flesh. His stomach bears the pinpoint scars of laparoscopic surgery and his legs and arms bear older scars from more invasive operations. He is a handsome man with an unpleasant sort of disposition and the general feeling that if you got him drunk, he'd be better company.
Both his arms have been replaced from the shoulder with matte grey military issue cybernetics, boasting the improved strength and dexterity that the army loves to brag about so much. To support this, parts of his skeleton have been augmented with organic tissue meshed titanium supports, affecting his appearance only so far as the occasional slightly larger supporting muscle to account for the additional weight, which anyone with similar augments would likely also have. His eyes have also been replaced, now being clear and clean grey rather than the blue he was born with, but otherwise organic seeming - though occasionally, given the right angle of light, iridescent rings of implanted micromachinery can sometimes be seen.
Height 6"1
Personality Isaac Braun was once an idealistic, wide eyed, charming young man. He had this roguish smile and this passionate heart that made him incredibly easy to like. Whenever he spoke about those things he loved and cared about, it was like listening to music in the shape of a man. He was charismatic, magnetic, and attractive. As he grew older and more experienced with this world, these things began to change, in the way that they do. His time in the military sharpened him in some ways, tempered him In others, and made him colder. His tone of voice changed, his mode of speech grew harder and more direct, and he stopped talking so much about things and people he loved. The sheer amount and scale of the suffering his work brought him to, and the rigid military structure he’s now spent most of his life under have both changed him. He’s different now, authoritarian and frigid inside. When he was 60 was the first time in his life that doubt was cast on why he does what he does – out of love for life, altruism, and good will, or in the name of duty, following orders, and a perverse sense of purpose. This question remains unanswered, but regardless of his reasons he is undoubtedly selfless and unflinching in his performance – indeed, it must seem like very little scares him at all. He is intelligent, insightful, perceptive, and works very well under stress.
Role Field and Combat Medicine, Disaster Relief and Planning
Equipment
Field Gear
UAF Adv. Field Medical Kit
UAF Adv. Field Surgical Kit
UAF Standard Issue Valkyrie Handgun – Regular carry
UAFIMC Issue SDW-44 ‘Pantalaimon’ pattern Personal Defence Weapon – Active Duty
UAFIMC Issue Asclepius-1 pattern body armour
Daily gear
UAF Standard Issue Valkyrie Handgun – Regular carry
Personal digital stethoscope
Personal handheld ultrasound device
UAF Clinical Dress - black combat-capable trousers, pale grey shirt, ID tag. Bare below the elbow, always.
Augmentations:
Hippocrates-Titan IMC Issue Cyberarm X 2; Improved dexterity and strength, with emphasis on dexterity. The forearm and palm are covered with soft, sensory material, not designed to mimic human flesh so as not to risk the uncanny valley, and the arm itself contains - aside from the mechanical workings - the processing capability to monitor the medical data received by the hands.
Titanium-Organic Skeletal Support Implants; a prerequisite for significantly enhanced strength in any cyberlimb, lest the limb simply break your own bones whenever you lift something heavy.
Ikon-4-M Military Issue Cyber Eyes; with wired (via a jack discreetly implanted beneath Braun's right ear) or wireless (which can be turned off, for obvious reasons) connectivity to tactical processing units, medical equipment, smartgun systems, etc, and friend-or-foe node reception capability. These eyes also come with vision magnification, enhancement, and light amplification capabilities. As a trade off, instead of the standard ballistic glass protective cover, these eyes have a ballistic polymer cover instead, and use the extra space and manufacturing space to add thermal vision up to 15m instead - it's primarily intended for patient examination, but can be handy for other things as well.
Previous Branch UAF Interstellar Medical Corps, including close work with the Institut de Medécins Galactique, an NGO charity dedicated to healthcare and emergency support on an interstellar basis. His role with the IdMG was technically an advisory one and he never worked for the organisation directly, but the UAFIMC maintained a good relationship with the IdMG and provided logistic and staff support routinely.
Biography Isaac Braun was born on the 1st of September, 2220, on a terraforming colony known to the UGC as TF-O-UGC014671, but known to the locals as Platin-7. Platin-7 was a largely barren frozen world that the UGC's Habitability Committee had decided was a reasonable candidate for transformation into an ocean world, fit for sapient habitation, and their judgement had been just about right - using greenhouse gases, stellar mirrors, and lithospheric perforation techniques, progress was being swiftly made at the time; the only real shortcomings and shortfalls were due to manpower restrictions, and those were ultimately circumvented by, in essence, cloning. Isaac and his contemporaries were all either twins or triplets thanks to in-vitro manipulation techniques being employed to artificially boost the population growth rate. Isaac to this day has two identical brothers, Josef and Lauri, one of whom is now a local official in the same colony they were born in, and the other of whom is some sort of banker or something. Isaac never paid much attention to the admittedly questionable tactics employed by the local government for workforce inflation - he was too busy thinking how cool it was, and how cool the science behind it was. It was actually what got him interested in medical science to begin with.
His childhood was not uneventful but far from exceptional - the terraformers lived planetside in pressurised habitats for the most part, as anywhere above the theoretical sea level lacked any meaningful atmosphere, and decompressive episodes meant that emergency was a well known word amongst the colonists - and he left his homeworld at age 16 to pursue education in the core sector. After some further years in regular education he earned a place in a prestigious medical school. Isaac took unusually strongly to the ideology proposed by one of the medical ethics doctors at his particular school - the idea that all people, everywhere, should be free from involuntary suffering, and that doctors had thousands of years of history behind them as the enemies of such suffering. It was the kind of idea that young men with big hearts grab onto and sing about, and the young Isaac Braun was a perfect example of precisely this. His regimented and authoritarian life in the hab-blocks of Platin-7 had left him in grave need of purpose and authority, his compulsion to seek progress for his society - something the terraformers were understandably big on - had left him in need of a cause to fight for, and his ethics doctor had given him these things. Conveniently, his ethics lecturer was also a captain serving with the UAF Interstellar Medical Corps, on assignment to the medical school through the local University Officers Training Corps. Isaac joined after the third lecture, and began his career with the IMC early.
It wasn't all business though.
When he wasn't studying or busy being one of the few members of the UOTC taking the corps seriously, he was, in fact, drinking with his mates. Pretty much all the time. He was very well liked by his colleagues and his friends, and spent a lot of time with them. It was a good time, and a lot of it went by in a blur, but he stayed away from drugs, didn't sleep around too much, and kept his reputation largely intact.
Before he graduated, the UAF welcomed the then-Officer Cadet Isaac Braun with open, grinning arms. As is standard practice, he went into his foundation training at army hospitals in the core territories, and then on to the officership selection process on Earth. He was accepted, his established relationship with the military playing heavily into his favour, and went on to the next step of training - the same shit basic infantry go through.
In the UAF, you're all soldiers. From the bright warmth of Sol to the darkest, coldest depths of deep space, from the metropolii of Mars to the jungles of Sirius Prime, from the grunt to the top brass, you've all used the same guns, dug the same trenches, and been called the same names by the drill sergeant. Isaac Braun spent six months in basic training, assigned as Cadet Lieutenant to a squad of men and women who'd had very different lives to him, learning just what being in the military meant. It was gruelling, exhausting, and didn't have a middle ground between exciting and boring. You were either running manhunt simulations, tracking or getting tracked by your brothers in arms with simmunition aplenty, or you were doing precisely fuck all but polish your boots and wait for orders. For the first time since his final exams in med school, Isaac found himself being properly challenged again; he had nothing in common with his platoon or his squad, the cadet he was 2ic to was an asshole who seemed intent on washing the entire group out... and he missed home. Not the terraforming colony. His real home.
He missed school, going out and getting blasted with his mates, pulling in the club, winning drinking contests with the fucking dental students, losing his mind studying at 3am in the library, procrastinating in the VR anatomy labs with the illicit table tennis program his flatmate was working on, losing drinking contests to the fucking dental students...
He considered giving up. Strongly.
He became intent on it. Wrote up a letter of resignation and everything.
He had it in his pocket when the traitorous dogs of Siphon's Fist finally got three suicide bombers into the military academy and gave all of the men and women of the military academy something in common.
He had been twenty five metres exactly from the blast in the main courtyard. It knocked him flat on his side, his entire left side peppered with - thankfully - the smallest and least aerodynamic pieces of shrapnel his surgeon had ever seen, including at least three fragments of Rateian bone. He was still in fighting shape when the next two blasts went off and killed a significant chunk of the immediately available leadership, and his calm and considerate conduct under fire is a part of what led to his promotion to Cadet Captain. That and the fact that the idiot who'd formerly held the job had been about to shake the first bomber's hand when it went off.
His letter of resignation wasn't destroyed in the explosion, but it went up in flames before it got to see another sunrise.
There were another three months of training after that and the squad never needed another lesson in unity again.
After his specialisation in trauma and battlefield medical support, Captain Braun was deployed as part of a Battlefield Aid Station, and with the gradual increase in scale of hostilities against the threat of Rateian separatism was responsible for Care Under Fire more often than anyone ought to have been comfortable - but Braun was a clone. Raised as an individual and born naturally, but in a society where there were three of everyone, where no matter how unique you seemed it was like you always had a replacement ready. His fear of death fell in the face of his duty to his brothers and sisters.
His first combat wound came at age 25 during the counterinsurgency operation in Papieri City, on the planet Kasanueva. A separatist radical got a lucky few shots in while his BAS team were distracted with a new casualty, using an improvised rifle reliant on chemical propellant. He was kneeling at the time, trying to wrap a combat application tourniquet around the stump of his patient's leg, when two of the wild burst perforated his right calf. It was the most painful sensation he'd ever felt - but it was a flesh wound and no more. One of his comrades returned fire while they saw about getting the casualty out of there, and his wound was made to shut up and wait its turn while they did so. The advances in medical science since the twenty first century accelerated his recovery and he was back in action in about a week. He was shot again in the side, and knifed twice during that tour. Of the casualties he was responsible for treating, there were no mortalities. He was awarded a Commendation for Bravery and was promoted at the end of his tour. He would remain in command of a BAS as part of the Solar 205 Medical Regiment during his time as a Major until a shift in both hostilities and the makeup of the officership of the regiment saw him transferred to the Field Hospital proper as a trauma specialist.
It was during his assignment here that he met the first woman he ever loved.
Captain María Míra Fernandez de Silva san Salvador was not, as you might have expected, a member of the medical corps. She wouldn't have been able to tell you the difference between your spleen and your liver if you'd asked her - no, she was a sapper. She was a combat engineer with a matte khaki cybernetic arm, olive skin, black hair, and this absolutely stunning smile. When she gave you the grin, and it really was the grin, it was like you were in on the joke when there wasn't even a joke, it was like she was sharing something with you that you weren't meant to have, like a high all of its own. She had this unique smell that followed her around - like gun oil, and... roses? Braun thought it was perfume and about half of it actually was.
The first time he saw her was during a consultation for a nervous tic that had developed in her cyber arm. It was the result of an attempt to modify it herself, and while cybernetics was hardly Dr Braun's specialty it was ultimately being caused by a mismatch between threshold potential in one of the motor units of the arm and the amplitude of normal human nervous system action impulses. It just needed to be reversed.
She asked him out for drinks.
He said no. It would be unprofessional to engage in that kind of relationship with one of his patients.
"What if I wasn't your patient?"
That question... it really tried him.
Tried him hard enough that he gave in.
The relationship lasted six years and might have been the happiest he'd ever been in his life. She was exciting and liberating, and did some really weird shit in bed. María was hardly the first woman he'd ever had feelings for, but she was just different. She tasted like freedom when you kissed her. On leave they spent all their time together. They drank hard, they got into a couple of fistfights - at least one of which was probably with eachother, but Braun doesn't actually remember since she knocked him out cold whether she'd meant to or not - and they decided they were probably going to move in together at the end of their next tour of duty. They booked a holiday to Caprica-6, this sunny resort world where the days were 36 hours long and you weren't expected to be awake for more than two thirds of it. They saw eachother's parents, Isaac's back on Platin-7 and hers on Hailey's World in a sector closer to the Rateian homeworld. Her father was the kind of catholic that really stressed his daughters' boyfriends out, but Braun got on with him surprisingly well and - surprise surprise - they all got drunk together, again. The military didn't necessarily approve of the relationship, but they were both senior ranks by this point and separated from each other's chain of command; as long as he didn't try to stay her doctor, they'd essentially just have an eye kept on them. They even got deployed together on humanitarian missions sometimes - the beginning of Dr Braun's relationship with the Institut de Medecins Galactique. She was his whole world. He loved her. He wanted to marry her and never spend a day away from her.
The last words he ever said to her were the worst lie he has ever told.
"You're going to be ok."
Siphon's Fist had never played by the rules. They were a pack of filthy cowards and vicious dogs that blew up hospitals and tortured prisoners with reckless abandon and wild glee. Suicide bombers weren't necessarily a part of their usual tactics but Isaac Braun already knew well enough that they were willing to use them too, and the scars he still had from his time as an Officer Cadet weren't the last a suicide bomber would leave him with.
They had been working to set up the field hospital after being relocated in conjunction with changing lines of engagement when María had stopped, frozen, and then taken off sprinting.
"IED!" She'd called.
Less than ten seconds later there was an explosion, before Isaac had even had time to swear, and it had all but engulfed her. It would later turn out that she'd managed to identify one such bomber, disguised as a UAF Private, who had been on her way to the fuel depot with a dead man's switch and a vest full of plastique. María tackled her before she got there and had tried to make distance between them once the bomber was down, but she hadn't gotten far enough. Both her legs were completely destroyed, her abdominal cavity torn open and exposed to the air, ruptured intestines strewn about the scene and her blood was everywhere. The pressure wave produced by the explosion had burst one of her eyes and both her eardrums. Her lungs were rapidly collapsing, and if it weren't for the abolition of the pressure gradient between her insides and her outsides she would have been coughing up blood; instead it was just leaking out of her mouth and her nose.
Isaac Braun will never forget how he lied to her.
"You're going to be ok."
She probably knew she was going to die. She was a stunningly intelligent woman, she must have known, even if she didn't know a ton about the human body.
"You're going to be ok."
He kept repeating it as he started panickedly tending to her wounds - and to his and the rest of his medical team's credit, she lived for another two hours - but the problem with the biofoams they were using was that if the flow of blood is too fast, they don't take hold properly and they end up getting washed out of the wound like dirt, and these wounds weren't the kind you could just use a tourniquet for. With a lot of clamps and more than one blood transfusion they were beginning to make progress, but it had simply come too late and too little.
Maj. Isaac Braun's immediate suboordinate, Capt. Saro Rettan - a Rateian doctor - was charged with declaring and recording the death. Braun was inconsolable and temporarily relieved of duty shortly thereafter.
Captain María Míra Fernandez de Silva san Salvador was posthumously awarded the Order of Mars, the highest commendation awarded by the UGC to members of the UAF, for outstanding bravery and courage in the face of the enemy even unto death. Major Braun was present at the ceremony as her registered next of kin, and he couldn't get the words 'bravery and courage' out of his head for an entire year.
She'd been so scared. She was almost never scared, but the few times she had been, he had been there for her - like she was there for him.
She'd laid there, writhing in agony, scared out of her mind, so scared she was crying; he saw it in the one eye she had left - which was the other image he could never forget.
He took two years of leave, taking up work with IdMG in the mean time - but he couldn't just leave the UAF behind. He was 32 and had given his best years to the forces, there wasn't a benefits package in the world that would persuade him to just drop the life he'd left there. His friends from medical school were either in civilian work or still in the IMC, and the squad he had trained with in basic were still serving too for the most part - that or dead, and he wasn't dead.
Losing María changed him and not necessarily for the better, but his service overall was still outstanding during his deployment. This time he was part of a bloc of manpower rationalised into the Sirius 22nd Medical Regiment, responsible for the deployment and maintenance of a combat support hospital rendering aid to both the civilian and military populations of the planet Tenex, in the Souxam system. The things he saw here were unbelievable, the augmentations these people had been made to undergo at the hands of the Evolved were beyond the pale - better still was the fact that there had been discreet advice from the local planetary guard that army personnel ought not to allow themselves to be taken alive. Dr Braun had never exactly been the kind of person to seriously consider death before defeat out of the sheer pragmatism, but what he was seeing in the hospital made him think twice on that front. On top of their bizarre and cruel experimentation, the evolved were terrifying individual combatants with highly unusual tactics, and their overall strategy didn't seem to make too much sense either from what was gathering at officers briefings. They were striking residential areas, abducting civilians for use in their sick projects, leaving what they deemed to be failures out in the open come the first dawn of the next week and keeping the rest. No pattern was forthcoming in the subjects they chose to keep, no matter how hard military intelligence tried to find one from the victims' social profiles, financial backgrounds, known contacts, or in a surprisingly large number of cases, military records. It was baffling; they were simply disappearing from their lives without a trace, almost on a weekly basis at the peak of Evolved activity, and as far as anyone knew they weren't being taken offworld - the navy had instituted a blockade around the planet after the second wave of abductions, pending attendance by COVSPEC operatives to investigate the disappearances, a disturbing aberrance in Evolved tactics itself. A pattern was eventually discovered with the cooperation of the local field hospital and their medical staff's ability to access local medical records; all of the abducted subjects who had not later been returned had histories of mental illness.
The final connection came when the missing persons returned. To cut a thus-far long story short, the Evolved had been selecting experimentation subjects with long histories of delusional mental illnesses because this particular Evolved cell had a agent with a unique nanite augmentation capable of causing the already-delusional to become further divorced from reality, enslaved to the perceptions of their controller. This became apparent when all 16 of the captured and victimised psychiatric patients, some of whom had military training already, showed up at the field hospital with a variety of subtly terrifying cheaply militarised cybernetics implanted and started killing staff and civilians alike. The then-Major Braun was among the casualties taken by the defenders - as the major tenet of the medical profession and the army doctor 'do no harm' does not take precedence over 'defend thy patient' - and lost his left arm in the process, crushed in the steel vice grip of a woman who firmly believed they were all the devil.
Having expected Utarah, they had been caught almost entirely unawares. It was a sentry failure that led to an inquest by the UAF High Command and more than one court martial. Officers and enlisted men alike were cut down by people they had mistaken for patients, people who had been victims of the Evolved's monstrous experimentation policy like so many before them, which itself had been the dust kicked up to hide the coming strike. An additional inquest was held, briefly, after the eventual capture of the Utarah with the unique augmentation responsible had ended with his primary augments publicly disassembled and his core body set on fire by a group of masked soldiers wearing neither rank patches nor regimental badges - the inquest turned up nothing and was quickly disbanded. For his part in the defense of the hospital and his cooperative elimination - with Captain Rettan - of one of the 'Unwilling Hostile Agents' as they had been called in official reports, Major Braun was awarded a further Commendation for Bravery - now meriting him one for both of his campaign ribbons - and an additional Heart of Iron medal, for 'stalwart courage and immense sacrifice in the name of defending another'. Of all the awards he ever merited, this is the one he actually cares about - it's also something that seems almost customary for soldiers who then go back into service with cyberware to make up for the material loss, and on top of that he associates it with his subsequent promotion to Lt. Colonel. While still a Major, Isaac Braun also saw to it that his suboordinates involved in the defense of the hospital saw the recognition the deserved; Capt. Rettan was awarded a commendation for bravery, and six other enlisted men were mentioned in dispatches as well, at Maj. Braun's behest.
On his redeployment - after a few months of physical therapy for the new, not-shiny, grey gunmetal cyber arm - he was sent into a true warzone. Siphon's Fist had been changing tactics while the Evolved had captured the attention of the UAF momentarily, and by now had taken a page from the book of revolutionaries and occupying forces both, some of which was knowledge from before even the days of Unification on Earth.
Hearts and Minds.
All of a sudden, the enemy had proper support amongst the populace. Separatism had gone from vile sedition associated only with the terrorist faction Siphon's Fist to a legitimate political standpoint that a person could hold without being subject to surveillance. UGC taxation had increased in the previous year, and thanks to some serious Rateian local government corruption and subsector mismanagement these taxes were driving poorer communities underground with debts, lending only further fuel to the fire. Any idiot could tell you that an underclass formed primarily from one particular ethnicity with at this point a mounting sense of alienation from the central government and a lack of legal means to act on that is going to lead to those communities becoming hotbeds for radicalism. The short sight of the Rateia was, in the immediate, responsible for this upsurgence in Fist activity. It's worth noting that not all of the separatists advocated the use of violence to achieve their goals, but the UGC lacks clear provisions for secession law and democracy had thus far failed them anyway, so these people were truly in the minority; this eventually led to a long series of smaller, individual wars of secession. Lt Col Braun was deployed to one and placed in command of a combat support hospital - from where he was eventually captured by Siphon's Fist.
The extent of fifth column activity on the secessionist world had made securing a base of operations very difficult, and when combined with the oaths taken by IMC medical personnel to deny treatment to nobody, made the security of the field hospital itself a dicey thing indeed. The now Major Rettan had been part of a combat lifesaver unit attached to the field hospital Lt. Col Braun was commanding, and had gone missing along with two other members of his unit when ambushed by Siphon's Fist en-route to a mass casualty incident after an unidentified IED went off under the tire of a mechanised infantry unit's lead vehicle on a crowded street. Command had suspected that the Fist was trying to pull false flags on the civilian population to radicalise greater and greater segments of the population and this was yet another incident in that vein - which naturally meant that Siphon's Fist had to intercept UAF medics too, lest it seem like the UGC actually gave a shit about anyone on the planet.
After the capture of Major Rettan, and then another four separate squad leaders, military intelligence identified yet another pattern; while it was not the primary objective of their presence on the planet, Siphon's Fist had been identifying and capturing officers both commissioned and not.
The acknowledgement of this pattern, however, did not supercede the oft-considered holy oaths taken by war doctors, nor the adherence to them by the field hospital.
Since the inquest held in light of the previous attack on the Sirius 22nd's Field Hospital, new screening procedures were in place for admittance to army hospitals, and the sentries had long since received vastly updated training and standing orders. Siphon's Fist, the Evolved, or any other paltry terror group, were simply not going to get into the hospital with any degree of subtlety - and they hardly had the resources to take the UAF using conventional warfare, at the very least not in a position where the UAF had been set up and entrenched for any measure of time. Knowing this, the forces of Siphon's Fist decided to employ yet another of the oldest strategems in the book.
Lure the tiger from the mountain den, deceive the heavens to cross the sea.
Early one morning a round of six explosions rocked the city, killing and wounding hundreds. To mask the true purpose of the attack, they were distributed fairly evenly throughout the city, but one of them was nearby the army hospital - specifically, near enough that the oaths taken would compel the IMC medical staff to render aid immediately, emergency doctors leaving the hospital to do so and Lt. Col Braun going with them to coordinate. There was consternation from the sentries regarding the wisdom of leaving the hospital to head into a conflict zone to render aid, but they were swiftly overruled on the grounds that army medical staff can in fact defend themselves, and that they had all signed on for this in the first place: the defense of health, life, and wellbeing in the face of adversity and danger, even unto the sacrifice of self in the line of duty.
Had they recognised the incoming ambush, they may well have acted differently - but with the fire service overwhelmed and casevac limited by the intensity and sudden nature of the attacks, their choices were not plentiful to begin with.
Isaac Braun killed three agents of Siphon's Fist when it became apparent that a third of the casualties were faking their wounds and carrying weapons, and the rest of the medical corps put up a good fight as they withdrew, giving as good as they got and showing the world that a soldier of the Sirius 22nd was as much a rifleman as anyone else - but three of their number had been isolated and captured in spite of their best efforts. Braun was among them.
A rescue operation was put together by COVSPEC - involving Kiviere Panthera as a field operative - but rapid progress often isn't rapid enough when you're dealing with torturous political radicals.
In the three days before their rescue, three of the seven captured officers had been summarily executed after drumhead trials broadcast on pirate video stations, and the survivors had their eyes put out and limbs amputated and cauterised - the goal having been to cause enough nerve damage to render implantation of cybernetic prostheses impossible, with two of the surviving prisoners having been damaged enough that this did indeed become impossible. Lt Colonel Braun was not among them, and received additional prosthesis upon recovery from captivity, which he wears to this day. Major Rettan also survived, and credits the 'immutable bond shared by all officers of the UAF' for the strength to survive it - though he retired from service shortly after his return to the Rateian home sector, turning in his military grade cybernetics for civilian strength replacements.
In fact, of all the captives rescued during what later became known as Operation Hippocrates, Lt Col Braun was the only officer who remained in the service.
For long enough that he saw another promotion. His last, to Colonel.
This one was nothing to do with sacrifice, injury, or heroism - it was nothing more than recognition of his skill in commanding a field hospital, and his ability to inspire the best from those under in service there even if they disliked him. Especially if they disliked him.
From this point onwards he began rotating between tour and home duty, managing relationships between veterans hospitals and the public health service, training recruits for the IMC at Officer School, and liasing with IdMG again. It was interesting work and for a good cause, of course...
... but men who live all their lives and know only the stress of war, they can come to depend upon it. It wasn't so much thrillseeking as it was his compulsive need for challenge and the simple complexity of combat medical detail - that is to say, simplicity of purpose, complexity of task - that kept bringing Isaac Braun back into contact with those hottest and direst of places in the galaxy, where war is the only god a man can know, and where strife and death are that god's archangels alone. He had been counting the names and the numbers, and he knew now that he was the final member of his class from the academy left alive, if not whole. His friends from medical school had gone into civilian specialties and even they weren't all alive any more - outbreaks of disease, civilian violence, and simple suicide had taken care of that.
He wasn't depressed as much as he was accepting - but if it hadn't been for the IMC sequestering him as a valuable asset for what he was surprised to find out was a private project - the Andromeda project, at that - then he would likely have died in the field the next time something went catastrophically wrong, as his career had a tendency to have happen. He had little left to keep him in the Milky Way apart from duty, after all, so when they told him that Duty had set sail for Andromeda...
Well.
He had never been one to refuse orders.
Affiliations María - His fiancée from years ago. Some men might have forgotten, but he has not. Lauri - His identical brother, a banker of good public repute. They were never close, as Lauri knew little of purpose or ethics. Josef - The other identical brother, whom he got on better with. He was a politican, about as honest as the dishonest profession can be, but still good at heart. Maj. Rettan - The Rateian he actually respected, a talented doctor and a brave soldier.
Relationships [Optional] This is how they view other characters throughout the story. This will be updated as major changes in their involvement and view of one another is expanded. Most changes will be listed from experiences out of combat, but some can occur from within their combat positioning out in the field. They can become rivals, hating on one another, romantic couples or simply comrades in arms.
"My patients, my colleagues, my duty, my self. That's the order and it never changes."
Species Human
Age 83
Sexuality Straight
Birth Born and raised on a terraforming colony in the Sigma Draconis system, left at 16 to pursue an academic career in the core territories.
Appearance Isaac Braun is a man of moderate stature, with broad shoulders and a wide, lean waist. His skin is wrinkled, creased with frowning - not by laughing - and marked by the sun. His hair is washed grey and silver by age. His eyes are hard and cold most of the time, brown and dull with only the faint outline of minimalist, function-oriented retinal enhancements and augmentation visible, and his lips are thin and unfriendly. Under his clothes, his entire left side bears the uneven patchwork of fragmentation grenade scarring, a battle fought upon flesh. His stomach bears the pinpoint scars of laparoscopic surgery and his legs and arms bear older scars from more invasive operations. He is a handsome man with an unpleasant sort of disposition and the general feeling that if you got him drunk, he'd be better company.
Both his arms have been replaced from the shoulder with matte grey military issue cybernetics, boasting the improved strength and dexterity that the army loves to brag about so much. To support this, parts of his skeleton have been augmented with organic tissue meshed titanium supports, affecting his appearance only so far as the occasional slightly larger supporting muscle to account for the additional weight, which anyone with similar augments would likely also have. His eyes have also been replaced, now being clear and clean grey rather than the blue he was born with, but otherwise organic seeming - though occasionally, given the right angle of light, iridescent rings of implanted micromachinery can sometimes be seen.
Height 6"1
Personality Isaac Braun was once an idealistic, wide eyed, charming young man. He had this roguish smile and this passionate heart that made him incredibly easy to like. Whenever he spoke about those things he loved and cared about, it was like listening to music in the shape of a man. He was charismatic, magnetic, and attractive. As he grew older and more experienced with this world, these things began to change, in the way that they do. His time in the military sharpened him in some ways, tempered him In others, and made him colder. His tone of voice changed, his mode of speech grew harder and more direct, and he stopped talking so much about things and people he loved. The sheer amount and scale of the suffering his work brought him to, and the rigid military structure he’s now spent most of his life under have both changed him. He’s different now, authoritarian and frigid inside. When he was 60 was the first time in his life that doubt was cast on why he does what he does – out of love for life, altruism, and good will, or in the name of duty, following orders, and a perverse sense of purpose. This question remains unanswered, but regardless of his reasons he is undoubtedly selfless and unflinching in his performance – indeed, it must seem like very little scares him at all. He is intelligent, insightful, perceptive, and works very well under stress.
Role Field and Combat Medicine, Disaster Relief and Planning
Equipment
Field Gear
UAF Adv. Field Medical Kit
UAF Adv. Field Surgical Kit
UAF Standard Issue Valkyrie Handgun – Regular carry
UAFIMC Issue SDW-44 ‘Pantalaimon’ pattern Personal Defence Weapon – Active Duty
UAFIMC Issue Asclepius-1 pattern body armour
Daily gear
UAF Standard Issue Valkyrie Handgun – Regular carry
Personal digital stethoscope
Personal handheld ultrasound device
UAF Clinical Dress - black combat-capable trousers, pale grey shirt, ID tag. Bare below the elbow, always.
Augmentations:
Hippocrates-Titan IMC Issue Cyberarm X 2; Improved dexterity and strength, with emphasis on dexterity. The forearm and palm are covered with soft, sensory material, not designed to mimic human flesh so as not to risk the uncanny valley, and the arm itself contains - aside from the mechanical workings - the processing capability to monitor the medical data received by the hands.
Titanium-Organic Skeletal Support Implants; a prerequisite for significantly enhanced strength in any cyberlimb, lest the limb simply break your own bones whenever you lift something heavy.
Ikon-4-M Military Issue Cyber Eyes; with wired (via a jack discreetly implanted beneath Braun's right ear) or wireless (which can be turned off, for obvious reasons) connectivity to tactical processing units, medical equipment, smartgun systems, etc, and friend-or-foe node reception capability. These eyes also come with vision magnification, enhancement, and light amplification capabilities. As a trade off, instead of the standard ballistic glass protective cover, these eyes have a ballistic polymer cover instead, and use the extra space and manufacturing space to add thermal vision up to 15m instead - it's primarily intended for patient examination, but can be handy for other things as well.
Previous Branch UAF Interstellar Medical Corps, including close work with the Institut de Medécins Galactique, an NGO charity dedicated to healthcare and emergency support on an interstellar basis. His role with the IdMG was technically an advisory one and he never worked for the organisation directly, but the UAFIMC maintained a good relationship with the IdMG and provided logistic and staff support routinely.
Biography Isaac Braun was born on the 1st of September, 2220, on a terraforming colony known to the UGC as TF-O-UGC014671, but known to the locals as Platin-7. Platin-7 was a largely barren frozen world that the UGC's Habitability Committee had decided was a reasonable candidate for transformation into an ocean world, fit for sapient habitation, and their judgement had been just about right - using greenhouse gases, stellar mirrors, and lithospheric perforation techniques, progress was being swiftly made at the time; the only real shortcomings and shortfalls were due to manpower restrictions, and those were ultimately circumvented by, in essence, cloning. Isaac and his contemporaries were all either twins or triplets thanks to in-vitro manipulation techniques being employed to artificially boost the population growth rate. Isaac to this day has two identical brothers, Josef and Lauri, one of whom is now a local official in the same colony they were born in, and the other of whom is some sort of banker or something. Isaac never paid much attention to the admittedly questionable tactics employed by the local government for workforce inflation - he was too busy thinking how cool it was, and how cool the science behind it was. It was actually what got him interested in medical science to begin with.
His childhood was not uneventful but far from exceptional - the terraformers lived planetside in pressurised habitats for the most part, as anywhere above the theoretical sea level lacked any meaningful atmosphere, and decompressive episodes meant that emergency was a well known word amongst the colonists - and he left his homeworld at age 16 to pursue education in the core sector. After some further years in regular education he earned a place in a prestigious medical school. Isaac took unusually strongly to the ideology proposed by one of the medical ethics doctors at his particular school - the idea that all people, everywhere, should be free from involuntary suffering, and that doctors had thousands of years of history behind them as the enemies of such suffering. It was the kind of idea that young men with big hearts grab onto and sing about, and the young Isaac Braun was a perfect example of precisely this. His regimented and authoritarian life in the hab-blocks of Platin-7 had left him in grave need of purpose and authority, his compulsion to seek progress for his society - something the terraformers were understandably big on - had left him in need of a cause to fight for, and his ethics doctor had given him these things. Conveniently, his ethics lecturer was also a captain serving with the UAF Interstellar Medical Corps, on assignment to the medical school through the local University Officers Training Corps. Isaac joined after the third lecture, and began his career with the IMC early.
It wasn't all business though.
When he wasn't studying or busy being one of the few members of the UOTC taking the corps seriously, he was, in fact, drinking with his mates. Pretty much all the time. He was very well liked by his colleagues and his friends, and spent a lot of time with them. It was a good time, and a lot of it went by in a blur, but he stayed away from drugs, didn't sleep around too much, and kept his reputation largely intact.
Before he graduated, the UAF welcomed the then-Officer Cadet Isaac Braun with open, grinning arms. As is standard practice, he went into his foundation training at army hospitals in the core territories, and then on to the officership selection process on Earth. He was accepted, his established relationship with the military playing heavily into his favour, and went on to the next step of training - the same shit basic infantry go through.
In the UAF, you're all soldiers. From the bright warmth of Sol to the darkest, coldest depths of deep space, from the metropolii of Mars to the jungles of Sirius Prime, from the grunt to the top brass, you've all used the same guns, dug the same trenches, and been called the same names by the drill sergeant. Isaac Braun spent six months in basic training, assigned as Cadet Lieutenant to a squad of men and women who'd had very different lives to him, learning just what being in the military meant. It was gruelling, exhausting, and didn't have a middle ground between exciting and boring. You were either running manhunt simulations, tracking or getting tracked by your brothers in arms with simmunition aplenty, or you were doing precisely fuck all but polish your boots and wait for orders. For the first time since his final exams in med school, Isaac found himself being properly challenged again; he had nothing in common with his platoon or his squad, the cadet he was 2ic to was an asshole who seemed intent on washing the entire group out... and he missed home. Not the terraforming colony. His real home.
He missed school, going out and getting blasted with his mates, pulling in the club, winning drinking contests with the fucking dental students, losing his mind studying at 3am in the library, procrastinating in the VR anatomy labs with the illicit table tennis program his flatmate was working on, losing drinking contests to the fucking dental students...
He considered giving up. Strongly.
He became intent on it. Wrote up a letter of resignation and everything.
He had it in his pocket when the traitorous dogs of Siphon's Fist finally got three suicide bombers into the military academy and gave all of the men and women of the military academy something in common.
He had been twenty five metres exactly from the blast in the main courtyard. It knocked him flat on his side, his entire left side peppered with - thankfully - the smallest and least aerodynamic pieces of shrapnel his surgeon had ever seen, including at least three fragments of Rateian bone. He was still in fighting shape when the next two blasts went off and killed a significant chunk of the immediately available leadership, and his calm and considerate conduct under fire is a part of what led to his promotion to Cadet Captain. That and the fact that the idiot who'd formerly held the job had been about to shake the first bomber's hand when it went off.
His letter of resignation wasn't destroyed in the explosion, but it went up in flames before it got to see another sunrise.
There were another three months of training after that and the squad never needed another lesson in unity again.
After his specialisation in trauma and battlefield medical support, Captain Braun was deployed as part of a Battlefield Aid Station, and with the gradual increase in scale of hostilities against the threat of Rateian separatism was responsible for Care Under Fire more often than anyone ought to have been comfortable - but Braun was a clone. Raised as an individual and born naturally, but in a society where there were three of everyone, where no matter how unique you seemed it was like you always had a replacement ready. His fear of death fell in the face of his duty to his brothers and sisters.
His first combat wound came at age 25 during the counterinsurgency operation in Papieri City, on the planet Kasanueva. A separatist radical got a lucky few shots in while his BAS team were distracted with a new casualty, using an improvised rifle reliant on chemical propellant. He was kneeling at the time, trying to wrap a combat application tourniquet around the stump of his patient's leg, when two of the wild burst perforated his right calf. It was the most painful sensation he'd ever felt - but it was a flesh wound and no more. One of his comrades returned fire while they saw about getting the casualty out of there, and his wound was made to shut up and wait its turn while they did so. The advances in medical science since the twenty first century accelerated his recovery and he was back in action in about a week. He was shot again in the side, and knifed twice during that tour. Of the casualties he was responsible for treating, there were no mortalities. He was awarded a Commendation for Bravery and was promoted at the end of his tour. He would remain in command of a BAS as part of the Solar 205 Medical Regiment during his time as a Major until a shift in both hostilities and the makeup of the officership of the regiment saw him transferred to the Field Hospital proper as a trauma specialist.
It was during his assignment here that he met the first woman he ever loved.
Captain María Míra Fernandez de Silva san Salvador was not, as you might have expected, a member of the medical corps. She wouldn't have been able to tell you the difference between your spleen and your liver if you'd asked her - no, she was a sapper. She was a combat engineer with a matte khaki cybernetic arm, olive skin, black hair, and this absolutely stunning smile. When she gave you the grin, and it really was the grin, it was like you were in on the joke when there wasn't even a joke, it was like she was sharing something with you that you weren't meant to have, like a high all of its own. She had this unique smell that followed her around - like gun oil, and... roses? Braun thought it was perfume and about half of it actually was.
The first time he saw her was during a consultation for a nervous tic that had developed in her cyber arm. It was the result of an attempt to modify it herself, and while cybernetics was hardly Dr Braun's specialty it was ultimately being caused by a mismatch between threshold potential in one of the motor units of the arm and the amplitude of normal human nervous system action impulses. It just needed to be reversed.
She asked him out for drinks.
He said no. It would be unprofessional to engage in that kind of relationship with one of his patients.
"What if I wasn't your patient?"
That question... it really tried him.
Tried him hard enough that he gave in.
The relationship lasted six years and might have been the happiest he'd ever been in his life. She was exciting and liberating, and did some really weird shit in bed. María was hardly the first woman he'd ever had feelings for, but she was just different. She tasted like freedom when you kissed her. On leave they spent all their time together. They drank hard, they got into a couple of fistfights - at least one of which was probably with eachother, but Braun doesn't actually remember since she knocked him out cold whether she'd meant to or not - and they decided they were probably going to move in together at the end of their next tour of duty. They booked a holiday to Caprica-6, this sunny resort world where the days were 36 hours long and you weren't expected to be awake for more than two thirds of it. They saw eachother's parents, Isaac's back on Platin-7 and hers on Hailey's World in a sector closer to the Rateian homeworld. Her father was the kind of catholic that really stressed his daughters' boyfriends out, but Braun got on with him surprisingly well and - surprise surprise - they all got drunk together, again. The military didn't necessarily approve of the relationship, but they were both senior ranks by this point and separated from each other's chain of command; as long as he didn't try to stay her doctor, they'd essentially just have an eye kept on them. They even got deployed together on humanitarian missions sometimes - the beginning of Dr Braun's relationship with the Institut de Medecins Galactique. She was his whole world. He loved her. He wanted to marry her and never spend a day away from her.
The last words he ever said to her were the worst lie he has ever told.
"You're going to be ok."
Siphon's Fist had never played by the rules. They were a pack of filthy cowards and vicious dogs that blew up hospitals and tortured prisoners with reckless abandon and wild glee. Suicide bombers weren't necessarily a part of their usual tactics but Isaac Braun already knew well enough that they were willing to use them too, and the scars he still had from his time as an Officer Cadet weren't the last a suicide bomber would leave him with.
They had been working to set up the field hospital after being relocated in conjunction with changing lines of engagement when María had stopped, frozen, and then taken off sprinting.
"IED!" She'd called.
Less than ten seconds later there was an explosion, before Isaac had even had time to swear, and it had all but engulfed her. It would later turn out that she'd managed to identify one such bomber, disguised as a UAF Private, who had been on her way to the fuel depot with a dead man's switch and a vest full of plastique. María tackled her before she got there and had tried to make distance between them once the bomber was down, but she hadn't gotten far enough. Both her legs were completely destroyed, her abdominal cavity torn open and exposed to the air, ruptured intestines strewn about the scene and her blood was everywhere. The pressure wave produced by the explosion had burst one of her eyes and both her eardrums. Her lungs were rapidly collapsing, and if it weren't for the abolition of the pressure gradient between her insides and her outsides she would have been coughing up blood; instead it was just leaking out of her mouth and her nose.
Isaac Braun will never forget how he lied to her.
"You're going to be ok."
She probably knew she was going to die. She was a stunningly intelligent woman, she must have known, even if she didn't know a ton about the human body.
"You're going to be ok."
He kept repeating it as he started panickedly tending to her wounds - and to his and the rest of his medical team's credit, she lived for another two hours - but the problem with the biofoams they were using was that if the flow of blood is too fast, they don't take hold properly and they end up getting washed out of the wound like dirt, and these wounds weren't the kind you could just use a tourniquet for. With a lot of clamps and more than one blood transfusion they were beginning to make progress, but it had simply come too late and too little.
Maj. Isaac Braun's immediate suboordinate, Capt. Saro Rettan - a Rateian doctor - was charged with declaring and recording the death. Braun was inconsolable and temporarily relieved of duty shortly thereafter.
Captain María Míra Fernandez de Silva san Salvador was posthumously awarded the Order of Mars, the highest commendation awarded by the UGC to members of the UAF, for outstanding bravery and courage in the face of the enemy even unto death. Major Braun was present at the ceremony as her registered next of kin, and he couldn't get the words 'bravery and courage' out of his head for an entire year.
She'd been so scared. She was almost never scared, but the few times she had been, he had been there for her - like she was there for him.
She'd laid there, writhing in agony, scared out of her mind, so scared she was crying; he saw it in the one eye she had left - which was the other image he could never forget.
He took two years of leave, taking up work with IdMG in the mean time - but he couldn't just leave the UAF behind. He was 32 and had given his best years to the forces, there wasn't a benefits package in the world that would persuade him to just drop the life he'd left there. His friends from medical school were either in civilian work or still in the IMC, and the squad he had trained with in basic were still serving too for the most part - that or dead, and he wasn't dead.
Losing María changed him and not necessarily for the better, but his service overall was still outstanding during his deployment. This time he was part of a bloc of manpower rationalised into the Sirius 22nd Medical Regiment, responsible for the deployment and maintenance of a combat support hospital rendering aid to both the civilian and military populations of the planet Tenex, in the Souxam system. The things he saw here were unbelievable, the augmentations these people had been made to undergo at the hands of the Evolved were beyond the pale - better still was the fact that there had been discreet advice from the local planetary guard that army personnel ought not to allow themselves to be taken alive. Dr Braun had never exactly been the kind of person to seriously consider death before defeat out of the sheer pragmatism, but what he was seeing in the hospital made him think twice on that front. On top of their bizarre and cruel experimentation, the evolved were terrifying individual combatants with highly unusual tactics, and their overall strategy didn't seem to make too much sense either from what was gathering at officers briefings. They were striking residential areas, abducting civilians for use in their sick projects, leaving what they deemed to be failures out in the open come the first dawn of the next week and keeping the rest. No pattern was forthcoming in the subjects they chose to keep, no matter how hard military intelligence tried to find one from the victims' social profiles, financial backgrounds, known contacts, or in a surprisingly large number of cases, military records. It was baffling; they were simply disappearing from their lives without a trace, almost on a weekly basis at the peak of Evolved activity, and as far as anyone knew they weren't being taken offworld - the navy had instituted a blockade around the planet after the second wave of abductions, pending attendance by COVSPEC operatives to investigate the disappearances, a disturbing aberrance in Evolved tactics itself. A pattern was eventually discovered with the cooperation of the local field hospital and their medical staff's ability to access local medical records; all of the abducted subjects who had not later been returned had histories of mental illness.
The final connection came when the missing persons returned. To cut a thus-far long story short, the Evolved had been selecting experimentation subjects with long histories of delusional mental illnesses because this particular Evolved cell had a agent with a unique nanite augmentation capable of causing the already-delusional to become further divorced from reality, enslaved to the perceptions of their controller. This became apparent when all 16 of the captured and victimised psychiatric patients, some of whom had military training already, showed up at the field hospital with a variety of subtly terrifying cheaply militarised cybernetics implanted and started killing staff and civilians alike. The then-Major Braun was among the casualties taken by the defenders - as the major tenet of the medical profession and the army doctor 'do no harm' does not take precedence over 'defend thy patient' - and lost his left arm in the process, crushed in the steel vice grip of a woman who firmly believed they were all the devil.
Having expected Utarah, they had been caught almost entirely unawares. It was a sentry failure that led to an inquest by the UAF High Command and more than one court martial. Officers and enlisted men alike were cut down by people they had mistaken for patients, people who had been victims of the Evolved's monstrous experimentation policy like so many before them, which itself had been the dust kicked up to hide the coming strike. An additional inquest was held, briefly, after the eventual capture of the Utarah with the unique augmentation responsible had ended with his primary augments publicly disassembled and his core body set on fire by a group of masked soldiers wearing neither rank patches nor regimental badges - the inquest turned up nothing and was quickly disbanded. For his part in the defense of the hospital and his cooperative elimination - with Captain Rettan - of one of the 'Unwilling Hostile Agents' as they had been called in official reports, Major Braun was awarded a further Commendation for Bravery - now meriting him one for both of his campaign ribbons - and an additional Heart of Iron medal, for 'stalwart courage and immense sacrifice in the name of defending another'. Of all the awards he ever merited, this is the one he actually cares about - it's also something that seems almost customary for soldiers who then go back into service with cyberware to make up for the material loss, and on top of that he associates it with his subsequent promotion to Lt. Colonel. While still a Major, Isaac Braun also saw to it that his suboordinates involved in the defense of the hospital saw the recognition the deserved; Capt. Rettan was awarded a commendation for bravery, and six other enlisted men were mentioned in dispatches as well, at Maj. Braun's behest.
On his redeployment - after a few months of physical therapy for the new, not-shiny, grey gunmetal cyber arm - he was sent into a true warzone. Siphon's Fist had been changing tactics while the Evolved had captured the attention of the UAF momentarily, and by now had taken a page from the book of revolutionaries and occupying forces both, some of which was knowledge from before even the days of Unification on Earth.
Hearts and Minds.
All of a sudden, the enemy had proper support amongst the populace. Separatism had gone from vile sedition associated only with the terrorist faction Siphon's Fist to a legitimate political standpoint that a person could hold without being subject to surveillance. UGC taxation had increased in the previous year, and thanks to some serious Rateian local government corruption and subsector mismanagement these taxes were driving poorer communities underground with debts, lending only further fuel to the fire. Any idiot could tell you that an underclass formed primarily from one particular ethnicity with at this point a mounting sense of alienation from the central government and a lack of legal means to act on that is going to lead to those communities becoming hotbeds for radicalism. The short sight of the Rateia was, in the immediate, responsible for this upsurgence in Fist activity. It's worth noting that not all of the separatists advocated the use of violence to achieve their goals, but the UGC lacks clear provisions for secession law and democracy had thus far failed them anyway, so these people were truly in the minority; this eventually led to a long series of smaller, individual wars of secession. Lt Col Braun was deployed to one and placed in command of a combat support hospital - from where he was eventually captured by Siphon's Fist.
The extent of fifth column activity on the secessionist world had made securing a base of operations very difficult, and when combined with the oaths taken by IMC medical personnel to deny treatment to nobody, made the security of the field hospital itself a dicey thing indeed. The now Major Rettan had been part of a combat lifesaver unit attached to the field hospital Lt. Col Braun was commanding, and had gone missing along with two other members of his unit when ambushed by Siphon's Fist en-route to a mass casualty incident after an unidentified IED went off under the tire of a mechanised infantry unit's lead vehicle on a crowded street. Command had suspected that the Fist was trying to pull false flags on the civilian population to radicalise greater and greater segments of the population and this was yet another incident in that vein - which naturally meant that Siphon's Fist had to intercept UAF medics too, lest it seem like the UGC actually gave a shit about anyone on the planet.
After the capture of Major Rettan, and then another four separate squad leaders, military intelligence identified yet another pattern; while it was not the primary objective of their presence on the planet, Siphon's Fist had been identifying and capturing officers both commissioned and not.
The acknowledgement of this pattern, however, did not supercede the oft-considered holy oaths taken by war doctors, nor the adherence to them by the field hospital.
Since the inquest held in light of the previous attack on the Sirius 22nd's Field Hospital, new screening procedures were in place for admittance to army hospitals, and the sentries had long since received vastly updated training and standing orders. Siphon's Fist, the Evolved, or any other paltry terror group, were simply not going to get into the hospital with any degree of subtlety - and they hardly had the resources to take the UAF using conventional warfare, at the very least not in a position where the UAF had been set up and entrenched for any measure of time. Knowing this, the forces of Siphon's Fist decided to employ yet another of the oldest strategems in the book.
Lure the tiger from the mountain den, deceive the heavens to cross the sea.
Early one morning a round of six explosions rocked the city, killing and wounding hundreds. To mask the true purpose of the attack, they were distributed fairly evenly throughout the city, but one of them was nearby the army hospital - specifically, near enough that the oaths taken would compel the IMC medical staff to render aid immediately, emergency doctors leaving the hospital to do so and Lt. Col Braun going with them to coordinate. There was consternation from the sentries regarding the wisdom of leaving the hospital to head into a conflict zone to render aid, but they were swiftly overruled on the grounds that army medical staff can in fact defend themselves, and that they had all signed on for this in the first place: the defense of health, life, and wellbeing in the face of adversity and danger, even unto the sacrifice of self in the line of duty.
Had they recognised the incoming ambush, they may well have acted differently - but with the fire service overwhelmed and casevac limited by the intensity and sudden nature of the attacks, their choices were not plentiful to begin with.
Isaac Braun killed three agents of Siphon's Fist when it became apparent that a third of the casualties were faking their wounds and carrying weapons, and the rest of the medical corps put up a good fight as they withdrew, giving as good as they got and showing the world that a soldier of the Sirius 22nd was as much a rifleman as anyone else - but three of their number had been isolated and captured in spite of their best efforts. Braun was among them.
A rescue operation was put together by COVSPEC - involving Kiviere Panthera as a field operative - but rapid progress often isn't rapid enough when you're dealing with torturous political radicals.
In the three days before their rescue, three of the seven captured officers had been summarily executed after drumhead trials broadcast on pirate video stations, and the survivors had their eyes put out and limbs amputated and cauterised - the goal having been to cause enough nerve damage to render implantation of cybernetic prostheses impossible, with two of the surviving prisoners having been damaged enough that this did indeed become impossible. Lt Colonel Braun was not among them, and received additional prosthesis upon recovery from captivity, which he wears to this day. Major Rettan also survived, and credits the 'immutable bond shared by all officers of the UAF' for the strength to survive it - though he retired from service shortly after his return to the Rateian home sector, turning in his military grade cybernetics for civilian strength replacements.
In fact, of all the captives rescued during what later became known as Operation Hippocrates, Lt Col Braun was the only officer who remained in the service.
For long enough that he saw another promotion. His last, to Colonel.
This one was nothing to do with sacrifice, injury, or heroism - it was nothing more than recognition of his skill in commanding a field hospital, and his ability to inspire the best from those under in service there even if they disliked him. Especially if they disliked him.
From this point onwards he began rotating between tour and home duty, managing relationships between veterans hospitals and the public health service, training recruits for the IMC at Officer School, and liasing with IdMG again. It was interesting work and for a good cause, of course...
... but men who live all their lives and know only the stress of war, they can come to depend upon it. It wasn't so much thrillseeking as it was his compulsive need for challenge and the simple complexity of combat medical detail - that is to say, simplicity of purpose, complexity of task - that kept bringing Isaac Braun back into contact with those hottest and direst of places in the galaxy, where war is the only god a man can know, and where strife and death are that god's archangels alone. He had been counting the names and the numbers, and he knew now that he was the final member of his class from the academy left alive, if not whole. His friends from medical school had gone into civilian specialties and even they weren't all alive any more - outbreaks of disease, civilian violence, and simple suicide had taken care of that.
He wasn't depressed as much as he was accepting - but if it hadn't been for the IMC sequestering him as a valuable asset for what he was surprised to find out was a private project - the Andromeda project, at that - then he would likely have died in the field the next time something went catastrophically wrong, as his career had a tendency to have happen. He had little left to keep him in the Milky Way apart from duty, after all, so when they told him that Duty had set sail for Andromeda...
Well.
He had never been one to refuse orders.
Affiliations María - His fiancée from years ago. Some men might have forgotten, but he has not. Lauri - His identical brother, a banker of good public repute. They were never close, as Lauri knew little of purpose or ethics. Josef - The other identical brother, whom he got on better with. He was a politican, about as honest as the dishonest profession can be, but still good at heart. Maj. Rettan - The Rateian he actually respected, a talented doctor and a brave soldier.
Relationships [Optional] This is how they view other characters throughout the story. This will be updated as major changes in their involvement and view of one another is expanded. Most changes will be listed from experiences out of combat, but some can occur from within their combat positioning out in the field. They can become rivals, hating on one another, romantic couples or simply comrades in arms.
There was a click and a brief whir as Sharp's camera cycled, capturing an image of two men meeting - one from the Kings and one from the Pure - for beer and information exchange. He wasn't entirely sure who they were working for just yet but these two gangs don't get along well enough for this to be a part of their normal operations; these two were up to something abnormally shady, and Sharp couldn't have that, not without him getting to know about it.
Click, again. Whir, again.
The pair were shaking hands outside a dive bar, the Pure's expression muted and dull, the King's vibrant and boastful. Both were grinning, creases forming at the sides of their eyes, expressions sly. The King was wearing a black leather bomber jacket that looked like it was one full size and three quarters too large for him, lined with torn navy synthetics and stained deeply with sweat - the buttons on the left side front pocket had long since been lost to time and the pocket itself had torn through, though that last part was an intentional if ham fisted modification, as this particular criminal also kept a gun concealed on the left side. His trousers were filthy off-white cargo pants, trimmed in what might have been purple a decade ago, with a bright golden handkerchief hanging out of both back pockets, just screaming 'look here, look at my ass and my clothes, look how much better I am than you'. His boots were the most interesting part and Sharp had taken great care to catch them in the photos from his perch on the second floor of the next building over - combat boots, MARCO Security issue ones, caked in pale mud from one of the flooded districts of Korven that are technically abandoned. The fact that MARCO had leaked surplus product into Korven was no surprise, even while Sharp had been-
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- they had done that. Cost cutting measures, they'd said. They never sold the surplus that was anything other than fashionable inside Eden, so Sharp wasn't surprised about this at all, it was only logical that some ganger would want boots that looked as good as they served. The only informative part there was the mud - this King was a King of Smugglers. Sharp had spent as much time in the shadows of the flooded parts of the sanction as any smuggler, and he knew roughly where this idiot was keeping his shit. The Pure here was interesting too - all simple clothes and asceticism - but one thing he couldn't hide were the marks on his arm; not tattoos or scars, needle marks. The rest of it was irrelevant. Pure aren't meant to do drugs, and the King here had what looked like a small crate full of them.
Working theory? At least one - though probably more - of the Pure were collaborating with at least one - though probably more - of the Kings either for profit, a fix, or both.
Sharp took the camera focus away from his eyes for a moment, shifting a caffeine pill around in his mouth for a bit before crushing it between his molars and holding it under his tongue. Those things were bitter as hell, but they didn't kill you, and they kept you alert - and they didn't smell. Smells in Korven were myriad, strong, confusing, overwhelming - all of the above - but they give you away all the same. Sharp always took care to keep his smell either neutral or ambient. Preferably neutral. No deodorant, no cigarettes, no scented or flavoured gum or mints. If it stinks, even pleasantly - especially pleasantly - then folks will smell it.
Nobody realises how acutely they can pick up an out of place smell until they do in their own home. Sharp didn't need that kind of heat.
Sharp put the camera back to his eyes. The Pure junkie handed his Kingly counterpart a slip of paper with something written on it - Sharp couldn't see the text in the moment it was passed over, but he could look back through the feed on his camera later and figure it out. He might not need to, of course - the chances were that it was an address for a dead drop or a pickup point, most likely a pick up point for human cargo either in part or in whole. Any criminal organisation that grows to the scale of either of these gangs learns to accept that a certain level of skimming off the top in their operations. When you deal exclusively with other criminals then the norm is to get fucked over - profitable and sustainable gangs just make it known what level of skimming is acceptable, and what level gets you turned into livestock.
Working theory? These two were trading in skimmed product. The King needs flesh, the Pure needs drugs. The King was offering up a footlocker's worth of high, the Pure was offering the location of their payment in kind. This leaves us with a number of possibilities.
1. King's giving drugs they legitimately had as part of their business and therefore is doing no wrong by their gang other than dealing with the Pure - which, for the right price, could easily be forgiven. Pure is trading human body parts in return, which they're less likely to have had access to legitimately with the Pure, from the look of their rank - thus the Pure is skimming in order to provide for a drug habit or drug dealing. Is this likely? Not really. If they only had to transport body parts then sure they'd need to keep them cold, but the deal would simply have taken place somewhere where that could be arranged, so the King could take the merch away with them. But then what does a King need with dead bits anyhow? Not a whole lot, most of the time. This ain't likely.
2. King's giving drugs they legitimately had as part of their business, is doing no wrong. Pure, instead of trading dead body bits, is trading a live human being, or live human beings plural. This, this is a bit tricky, but probably more likely. See, the Pure tend to run a tighter ship than the Kings do - they're still motivated by greed and profit about as frequently on an individual basis, but the overall organisation has this terrifying tendency towards religious fanaticism. How they reconcile this with committing a variety of the worst crimes known to man, Sharp could never tell, but it made it hard to get certain things past them. Stealing a bunch of body parts in a cooler is one thing, stealing a human being still alive and crying is another - even if it were part of their legitimate, usual sales goods, covering up for their disappearance is harder and makes you more of a target. Why is this the more likely option then? Specifically because it's harder to do; the Pure ganger only gave the King information here, meaning he doesn't or can't have the goods on hand. You might not want to be caught with a bag of arms, but they're not gonna try to escape custody like a person might, doubly so if the person in question is people. More likely.
3. King's giving drugs, legit or not. Pure isn't trading anything material, but in fact solely on information. The intention is the same - Pure get drugs, Kings get people - but the MO is radically different. Sharp knew that the Pure kept their living stock together for ease of administration and security but also that these sorts of places aren't impossible to break open, especially with insider help and info. The King is fraternising with the enemy and possibly stealing from his bosses, but the Pure might even be turning traitor for profit. Only thing against it is that the Pure are well known to deal especially harshly with people who actively betray them, but for a fix when they're itching people will do a lot of dark and dangerous shit, religious fanatic or not.
Conclusion: Need to go look at the photo to be sure, examine the details of the note itself. Never act on suspicion alone unless lives hang in the balance. Reasonable cause to believe X, Y, or Z doesn't matter in the court of law or on the court of the streets, only evidence past the threshold of a trigger's pull.
The two subjects of Sharp's surveillance exchanged a few more words, but their relationship was clearly enough business first and nothing second; they dropped the niceties soon enough and headed their separate ways. Sharp, not being in a rush, took the time to dismantle the tripwire he'd set up around the entrance to the room he'd squatted in - and then the backup tripwire and two further redundant traps too. Nothing flashy, plenty deadly.
Then he went home. For the first time in three days.
It’s a bit like the Authority in this setting have taken the Imperium of Man and inverted it - instead of using Terminator Space Marines to clear space hulks they send in the Imperial Guard, who are a red army analogue for a reason, and when they’re keeping the peace and protecting the status quo they start deploying super soldiers.
Edit: Aye, I figured that just shooting a random pipe on a fuel refinery platform would get everyone in a ten mile radius incinerated, but even in the modern day you can usually see steam pipes labelled. Breaking the circuit of coolant will be bad in the slightly longer but still immediate run, but if it’s that or receive instant cranial vault penetration, I know what risks I’d rather take.
Given the scenario as stated, and assuming that I really am on my own here, then I’m honestly probably going to die here. The authority militia don’t have the training that the security corps do and they’re usually much worse supplied, I’m gonna have to rely on my wits and the fact that I’m used to witnessing horrors to get me through this.
I may not know a lot about heavy machinery, but all things hot must at some point be cooled, and the water that cools it is gonna either be under pressure or exist as steam. That stuff’s gotta be piped and stored, and even the authority aren’t quite dumb enough to not label pressurised steam pipes. My first shot is putting a hole in a steam pipe somewhere between me and that thing, so slow it down or block it’s advance, the next shot I’m gonna take the time I’ve bought to aim and go for the head. Or whatever passes for a head.
If I have pals with me, all the better, but with the treatment these soldiers get from the party you can’t guarantee that they’re up to scratch with a modern military - if they were, they’d try to overthrow the government more often - and even so I can’t guarantee they won’t break and run when it charges. Everything I do must be based on the assumption that I can rely only on myself.
Charsheet is up, made an edit to it to add a theme song since I had one I thought fit. I'll make an IC post in a wee bit if all is well with the sheet. Happy to be joining in lads.
"Stopping power is a myth until we start talking about landmines. Speaking of which, don't touch my stuff."
Known Aliases: 'Sammy'; 'Sharp' Age: 38 Years Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Ethnicity: White British
Appearance Details: The former staff sergeant sports a tall and wiry athletic build, standing at about 6"0, bound with deceptively dense muscle and sinew. His hair is dense, thick, and untidy, dotted with streaks of grey and white. His eyes seem to dart constantly between any company he keeps, the door of the room they're in, and his own gun.
Tattoos, Piercings, Scars, Other: The left side of his face and head is peppered with streaks and dots of scar tissue from a fragmentation grenade explosion at medium range some years ago. His left arm bears a MARCO Security Solutions division tattoo, complete with regiment name, rank and serial number, and medical identifier - to be specific, the original insignia is a kite shield of blue and white, bearing a black sword crossed with a black hammer in front of it, all upon a field of cross-hatching. It used to glow thanks to implanted NanoLEDs, but no longer, as the entire design has been crossed out with a pair of scars inflicted with a kitchen knife. The term 'EOD' is still identifiable, however. His right arm is also tattooed with a full sleeve of cultural design, utterly covered with the intricate interlocking branches of an oak tree in an old celtic design. In minute text between some of the branches text in Welsh can be seen. Even Sharp doesn't know what it says. The area around his ID tag has been mutilated during several tampering attempts, and is now a mangled mess of purplish scar tissue that he is barely able to hide with makeup during his brief trips into Eden.
Brand/ID Tattoo Placement: Left wrist, integrated with the regimental sleeve tattoo of the MARCO Marines. Notably, it is surrounded by scar tissue left over from tampering.
Assets and Bank Account: Disseminated throughout a number of small private accounts with various different smaller banks, a grand total of 3000$ worth of currency can be found. A further $3K is stored in secure, intricately and paranoiacally trapped lockboxes, buried (or sunk into water) in a variety of discreet locations in Korven. In some of these lockboxes additional assets such as fake IDs or weapons can be found, but that's hardly reliable. For a lot of this, Sharp wasn't sober - either hopped up on combat stims, or in the depths of the paranoia. There may honestly even be boxes he doesn't remember and didn't record, containing money that is entirely lost to him.
Gang Affiliation: Sharp takes exceptional care to avoid antagonising either of the gangs, or being seen as favouring one or the other, at all. For him, the Kings are too overtly violent and unpredictable - even if this, in its own way, made them all too predictable - to be around. Their constant displays of bravado, their concept of face and honour and standing, it makes them prone to acting irrationally and finding people to blame. People like Sharp. The Pure are almost - but only almost - worse; their religious fanaticism and their obsession with subtlety make them equally dangerous and potentially much harder to plan for, and their involvement in the trade of humans, in part or in whole, is more than even Sharp will tolerate.
Occupation: Former MARCO Security Solutions explosive ordinance disposal specialist - informally, the MARCO Marines - and currently a private detective of sorts operating in both Korven and Eden (the latter more limitedly) out of a ramshackle office in the inner part of the Korven sanction. Nobody ever visits this office, of course, as it is wired to all fuck with explosives. After all, they're probably still looking for him, there's no way they don't know he survived.
Sanction: Permanent residence(s) in Korven, limited operations in Eden, under a false name and identification.
Favorite Season: Early autumn. The growing smell of decay and the increased rainfall, paired with decreased temperature leading to reduced diffusion of particulate matter through the air as a result, means that tracking via olfactory and thermal detection is more difficult. If you can't be tracked, you can't be found, killed, dismembered, and disposed of.
The former EOD Staff Sergeant Samuel Swinston is a pale shadow of his former self, half consumed by paranoia and fear, the remaining half kept from decay and destruction by nothing more than the breadth of a hair and the abuse of copious chemical stimulants; now known primarily as Sharp for the quickness of his mind and the nature of afflicted existence, stripped down to a ragged edge from the person he used to be. Even his bed is practically wrapped in tripwires - a holdover from the days where a smartly placed claymore was all that came between his life and a knife at night. In spite of all this, however, Samuel is still a genuinely bright and intelligent man, educated too. He thinks quickly and sees more than he lets on, drawing conclusions and working with them like a flash of lightning, sifting lies from truth and connecting the dots of the plot behind the plot. Apart from that, there is only the rare turn of compassion or generosity to show you that Samuel Swinston still exists as anything other than a legal name. Sharp is his name now.
On a psychological level, Sharp suffers intensely from survivor's guilt and PTSD.
Likes and Dislikes:
Likes:
Safety
Caffeine
Nicotine - but never through cigarettes or flavoured vapes, they smell too much, it lets people know you're there.
Adderall, ritalin, et al.
The rain, and the quiet. Thunderstorms too, ironically, but only when the thunder is more like a distant rumble. It's like white noise, it helps him take his mind off of... well, everything. It just keeps things under wraps.
Tea
Dislikes:
THE ENEMY
MARCO corporation and their various lackeys. They have eyes, they have eyes and they're always watching, just waiting for you to slip up. You slip up and then suddenly you're covered in your best friend's blood, ears ringing and your face stinging. Some of them - though only a few of them - might even remember what his face looks like. He still has nightmares every night, every single night.
The taste of watermelon. He's only actually had it once, but it wasn't sweet enough for him.
Overbrewed tea, or tea with too much milk. Or milk. It isn't really milk.
Being lied to.
Hobbies and Interests:
Electronics and electrical engineering
While it isn't much more than a hobby in passing at this point, Sharp found his skill with booby traps plateauing and started to pick up hobbyists manuals on the electrician's trade. They were surprisingly hard to find, as not many people want to go through an apprenticeship with no job at the end of it, but he has his contacts and he got his hands on them eventually. Now he's gone through his entire home with a fine toothed comb, looking for bugs. He found one once and rewired the receiver to pick up a pirate radio station broadcasting nothing but erotica from the 1980s. It was very amusing, and mostly by accident.
Demolitions and explosives
Another thing that Sharp finds oddly satisfying is the careful mixing of chemicals to produce exceptional booms. This he figured out mostly from his secondary education in Eden. It simply wasn't worth the risk of asking about, even in the shady environment of the Korven underworld. What he enjoys most is actually the weighing of individual ingredients and components more than the mixing or the results - nice, full, round numbers.
Journal writing
It's really more like reconnaissance notes, but Sharp keeps a journal. It's written in code, which itself is coded twice further, but it genuinely contains his deepest thoughts and innermost feelings. This is where those fleeting reflections of the original Samuel Swinston most frequently show themselves, even if most of it is still detailed notes on the passers-by of his flat and office.
Instant meals, takeaway food, and coffee left two minutes too long to be adequately hot or fresh
It's weird, you know. You stay on stakeout for too long, you follow marks too far, and you leave your home behind entirely... and eventually you simply forget what food you cook yourself tastes like. Or what food cooked for you by family tastes like. Eventually you become a sort of connoisseur of mediocrity and consumerism, learning the intricate differences between one questionable kebab and another, the delicacies of one brand of instant 'coffee' and another, the safer places to eat and the more dangerous food poisoning-y ones. It's a sad twist of reality, because when he lived in Eden good food and real cooking was actually his hobby there too - only he was the one doing the cooking, with real, hydroponically grown ingredients. Now he finds that anything he used to love turns his stomach and makes him upset. It's been years since he had tomato soup. It was his favourite food.
Small Biography: Samuel Swinston was born in the urban core of Baruel, in the heart of Eden, to a loving family as their second child of four. For Eden they were not well off, living a comfortable but stressed and cramped life in a home slightly too small for all of them, but well appointed and supplied nonetheless. Sam did not want for nothing, but was satisfied with what he had and lived a happy life. Despite the stereotypes of sibling relationships he also got along well with his brother and two sisters, developing close bonds with them and learning to easily enjoy their company in the downtime they had - and when the time came, he would follow his older brother's example and step into the MARCO Security corps as a tactical strike officer. Where the beat cops of MARCO are more like calmer SWAT, and the SWAT of MARCO are like poorly trained commandos, the TSO make up for it; they're given advanced and varied training in both sides of their job, police work and active combat, they're equipped with some of the best MARCO has to offer... and most importantly, they're all ready and willing to give their lives for the corporation, some of them even excited at the prospect. Their indoctrination is all but absolute, being groomed for the Tactical Strike Office since before their standard education certificate exams, being taught that MARCO is the last bastion of Order, Peace, and Purpose in the postmodern world after that, even being told that to die in service is an end to your life above all others, the surest way to guarantee your place in the halls of fame and the minds of the people. Sam took to the indoctrination for sure - but he was nothing compared to his brother. Stephen Swinston was a radical young man his entire life and everybody knew he would go far one way or far the other - a radical subversive, or a radical supporter - and it just so happened that he went in what everyone thought was the 'right' way. In his spare time his favourite topic of conversation was the duty they had to MARCO, the gifts MARCO had given them, and what they would do to the people threatening MARCO.
Immediately after that, his next favourite topic of conversation was craft beer, and girls. His brother always had the nicest smile. The squad had taken bets, they all reckoned he would settle down and get married first out of all of them.
Sam was put under his brother's command when he graduated from the MARCO Security Protocol academy, and served there first as a trooper and then as his brother's First Officer for a total of 7 years. It was a long and distinguished career that saw their squad go from reactive work to proactive work very quickly. Eventually they were selected to undertake support operations for the Clandestine Operations Office - which is to say, spy work - but the first blow came before even that.
There was an armed robbery ongoing in the outskirts of Eden, a few blocks in from the boundary keeping Korven out. Six suspects, four armed with long bludgeoning weapons, one armed with a machete, and the leader armed with what seemed to be a homemade shotgun from intelligenec reports at the time. The job they were trying to pull - snag some valuables from a luxury vendor and pull back into Korven before anyone showed up - had gone wrong before the police were even called, when one of the store workers had tried to pull a taser on their assailants and had her hand cut off for her trouble. Intelligence also suggested that these men were members of the Kings, which in conjunction with the fact that a civilian had already been maimed, and that some mid-level manager had a personal interest in the plae, meant that SWAT wouldn't cut it and the TSO were being deployed. Their squad was made of ten men, four going in with riot shields through the front door, two coming in from the roof, and the remaining four split between the side entrances.
Sam had been expected crazed killers, torturing their hostages, painting themselves with blood, killing indiscriminately and too drugged up to care about anything but hurting people... and instead, when he came in through the roof, he found two of them weeping and holding eachother, paralysed by fear. They were brother and sister, it would later turn out, and they weren't members of the Kings or the Pure. The sister had been the one to overreact when her brother was tazed, and she had swung without thinking - she hadn't even really taken the hand off, that had been another misreport (accidental or otherwise) by the scouts. They'd just panicked. They were just people, they were only doing this because they were starving. All of this didn't occur to Sam until later, however, and they killed them both in cold blood.
The fight lasted less than a minute after entry. The only serious resistance came from the guy with the shotgun, which turned out to be a prop without ammo that he just tried to use as a club. All six of their broken and perforated bodies were dragged into the street and laid out like meat, and that's when Sam started thinking, at long last finally thinking. These people had at their oldest been no more than 20, their youngest no more than 15, and his brothers in arms had slaughtered them - he had slaughtered them, like they just didn't matter.
He tried to shower it away and he couldn't. Scrubbing couldn't get the dirt out. Drinking did.
In a weird subversion of what you would expect a rational man to do when confronted with the moral darkness of his life, he threw himself deeper into his work and clung onto his brother's strength even harder. He woke up every morning with their faces - broken and fractured and pulped as they were, stained with tears and blood - fresh in his memory, clearer than anything else he had ever seen, and then he went to work and trained harder than any man had ever told him he could. He went from a fine point to a razor's edge, with a quick trigger finger and a mind like cut glass - Sharp, and Clear. As his team matured and passed the trial by fire customary for their kind, they began to specialise as individuals too - Stephen, his brother, took advanced training in negotiation and leadership, the Koslov twins took marksmanship and sniper school classes, Brigitte decided she really liked the riot shield and started practicing at what they called 'Dynamic Battlefield Alteration'.
Sharp, as he'd started getting called, was getting knee deep in demolitions and bomb disposal. His superiors reckoned he had the nerve for it and in the beginning they were completely correct.
But he never forgot the Outskirts Six, and it kept happening, not just to people from Korven. He grew hard and cold, the easy charisma and intuitive, empathic personality being washed out of him like colour from a painting. His mind became calculating and flint - but through it all, regret and fear began growing.
With the regret and the fear, there finally came the idea - what if I tell my brother? I have to tell my brother. He needs to see, he would want me to make him see what we're doing. He's a good man, he deserves to be free of this, if I feel like I do then how must he be feeling? I can't let him be alone in this, we have to get out. It's our duty now to abandon our cause, that's all the duty we have. We have to get out.
Before they could get out though, they were pulled deeper in.
The Spy work they did mostly consisted of armed support and heavy hitting for a group of intelligence operatives on the barest outskirts of Korven, in the shittest and darkest corners of the un-city, doing some real shady shit for some shadier people. Their official area of operations was normally limited to Eden when they were functioning as a police unit, which meant that they were acting illegally as cops, or above the law as something else. Sharp, not being stupid, was not under the illusion that the police had ever been under the power of the regular law, and similarly was not constrained by the belief that they were anything more than disposable, deniable assets at this point. His training as an explosives officer was instrumental to the operations they were undertaking - namely, demolishing a slum block suspected to house a drug lab exporting into Eden as part of the token efforts by the police to control the drugs crisis, burying everyone inside it with the building. This was the kind of thing that would be attributed to the lab itself suffering a catastrophic mixing failure, or something like that, and it was part of a larger series of sting-and-boom operations in the same few year span, but while undercover in Korven he kept his eyes open and started seeing what the people there would do if they realised what was going on. They would do the same thing plenty of the folks in Eden would do in the same situation.
They'd tear MARCO apart, staff included.
MARCO had to know this. They were idiots sometimes, but they knew their shit - after all, even if they somehow lacked a particular expertise they could just hire it in. This then led Sharp to believe that in the name of information quarantine, his own squad would be on the chopping block - or under the burning rubble, as it might be - as soon as the op was over. In a stroke of mixed luck, the squad believed him when he broke down and told them - and in a stroke of undeniably poor luck this then led the rest of them to the natural conclusion of confronting their Intelligence Operative handlers.
This didn't go well.
"You must think we're really stupid if you think we haven't seen what happens next, spy boy." Stephen growled, hand reflexively bound to the matte polymer of his sidearm, tucked into a concealed holster in his jeans.
"I dunno what you're talking about mate. We stick together, your kind and ours." Their covert colleague retorted, his eyes bloodshot in the yellow glow of the basement lighting. They'd been using the place as a meet spot for the past week and Sharp had a feeling this guy was allergic to it. The spy was a thin, sallow man with filthy blonde hair and stained teeth. Some of it was a disguise. All of it was disgusting.
"Don't lie to me any more than you have. Eden would burn if Korven figured what we were doing here, so you're burning us before we can leak the secret." Stephen snarled back at him, pressing on the conversation. They had the spy outnumbered three to one in this, Stephen, Sam, and Brigitte, with the twins upstairs with the Spy's other mates and the other half of the squad across town. If it came to a fight, one of the squad might take a bullet or a knife wound assuming the guy was faster than they expected or he got the first move in, but he would go down sure as shit.
The spy inhaled sharply when Sharp took a menacing step forwards with fury in his eyes and an improvised dagger.
"Fuck! Fuck, fine! Yeah we did! We had instructions to burn the team at the end of the op or if you started getting paranoid - clearly I waited too fucking long!"
Stephen punched him in the mouth with a wet crunch, sending the operative to the dirty brick floor and knocking off his fake nose. Sharp hadn't noticed that one.
"You're gonna call it off, tell them we're too useful and that we can be trusted, and then we're gonna hit the last spot and head back to Eden for pink gin and lemonade, alright handsome?"
"Jesus, are those teeth real? I was hoping they were the fake bit." Brigitte chimed.
"Sure, but it's not me who makes the call. It's gotta be done with my whole team. It's an anti-subversion measure - hey, don't hit me again, please."
Sharp's hair stood on end.
"What?" Sharp muttered, the prickling on his neck keying a realisation.
"What." Stephen replied, louder, not taking his eyes from the folded form of the spy on the floor.
"What?" The spy added.
"That doesn't make any sense. You wouldn't even need to vote on it, you'd just give the signal - and what if some of you got killed? The whole process doesn't make any sense for burning a team... unless..."
The spy's eyes widened, the stain of pain in his expression giving way to a similar realisation.
"Unless it didn't matter what we said. Unless they were gonna burn us all anyway."
"They've probably had a team on hand the whole time," Sharp began, "we've been being watched the whole op, we just didn't think to look for other spies like us because we figured nobody from Korven was gonna be on our level."
As the tension reached fever pitch a wave of 'oh fuck' crossed the room.
"They were always planning to kill us all."
"We've gotta get everyone out of here, both our teams need to bug out right fucking now, we can head for the edge of the city and see if working for the gangs will get us anywhere in terms of a bolt hole." The Spy began climbing to his feet. "Guys, I'm sorry about our differences, but we're gonna have to work together if we want to-"
The floor above them exploded into action, the harsh rattle of gunfire raking the room and the screams of their cohorts getting torn up piercing the air.
The fight didn't last long. A strike team from the TSO had been called in to launch an assault on a building in Korven where a rogue TSO squad had been hiding out and collaborating with members of the Pure and a bunch of ID chip smugglers, and they'd been the scapegoat. The Koslov twins and the pair of spy-types upstairs had gone down in the first wave of gunfire, riddled with holes with only enough time to turn their heads to the door in surprise when they heard the guns cocking. Stephen caught a bullet in the leg when the strike force started shooting blind through the floor and into the basement, and when the spy boy made a run for the back door he ended up literally being hit in the face with a frag grenade - the same one that gave Sharp his facial scars and probably killed Brigitte. The poor spy was blown to pieces, absorbing enough of the blast that it didn't kill the rest of them outright. Sharp had the good sense to fall back into a corner and play dead, but Brigitte was actually dead, and Stephen was going to try and fight it out anyway. The strike force came in and killed Stephen personally, but evidently fell for Sharp's play despite the noise he made when his brother bought it.
Or maybe they thought he was gonna die anyway when they brought the building down on him. It didn't quite work.
He managed to recover the go-fund for the operation and transfer it to a new bank account he opened with a fake ID, putting what was left over into dead drop boxes wired to fuck with frags and HE grenades. Once he had a small safehouse up, he got to work trying to remove his own ID chip and scratching out the old regimental tattoos he'd been left with. If he could help it, he wouldn't have traitor ink in his skin.
A year passed. He was living in body, but dead in heart and dying in mind. The TV held a memorial service for his squad, claiming they were all killed in a counter terror operation, even going so far as to hold a funeral with what looked like real bodies in the coffins - and the real Sam had gone down into the ground with them when they did. His neighbours knew him as Sharp, and in truth everything other than Sharp had been torn out of him when his brother got double tapped, and they brought the building down on top of the still-moaning Brigitte and the rest of the squad. His depression and his guilt ate him away from the inside as he gradually became obsessed with the idea that MARCO might know he's still alive, and come to finish the job. Sometimes he still has idle one sided conversations with their ghosts, while he works on his gun or checks the traps in his flat, telling them all about how he wouldn't let MARCO take him too. The paranoia was like a cancer, robbing him of his personhood and making him violent.
After a while and having burnt through most of the spy cash on stimulants and illicit homecooked explosives, he got it through his head that he would need to work at some point, and he went back to the only thing he'd ever done well.
Technically, he's a private detective. Really, he'll do most things if it pays well. He won't let the bad guys get him, even if he doesn't have anything to live for other than spiting them any more.
He just doesn't realise they'd forgotten him as soon as his brother died.
Family Members:
Parents:
Jack Swinston, 64, his father, who had believed his sons to be dead for the past seven years and only been over it for a month.
Maria Swinston, 62, his mother, who still thinks that at least one of her sons is alive and will never know the truth
Siblings:
Hazel Swinston, 34, his immediately younger sister, who studied law and still writes to Stephen and Sam in her diary
Ruby Swinston, 21, who has tasted HALOs and heroin at the same time, and wants to be writer
Relationships: None presently. Some scattered contacts and contract work, nothing significant.
I would add something, but there’s nothing I can add to that. It’s pretty much what I was thinking in the first place but far more comprehensive, so I’m afraid I’ll have to concede the point here.
Edit: as an addendum, yeah don’t worry I’m aware that there’s no maximum speed in a vacuum, was just wondering if he ship had stopped firing the thrusters or was keeping on with it. If they’re keepin on keepin on, then you’re fucked.
Medical student living in Scotland, a lover of beer and steak mostly - but also writing, and politics. Because why not make myself [i]even more[/i] divisive.
<div style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Medical student living in Scotland, a lover of beer and steak mostly - but also writing, and politics. Because why not make myself <span class="bb-i">even more</span> divisive. </div>
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