Author notes

219 - Attraction

El Cid

on May 24, 2018

Nothing like revisiting a past homicide to ignite the passions. The incident they're talking about was originally brought up on page 216. Captain Savage described an occasion when a lovesick crewmember stole her ship and left her and the rest of the crew stranded beyond the Kuiper Belt.

Captain Savage's cavalier attitude toward killing and incinerating one of her former crew may come off as barbaric, but it's worth keeping in mind that life in the lawless outer fringes of the solar system can be quite brutal. It would have been untenable for her to show clemency in this case. Not only had the woman stolen her ship, but she also very nearly killed the entire crew. Had the captain not killed her, the crew would have killed her, and in a less humane fashion. They also might have turned on the captain had she stood in their way. Still, I doubt she agonized over the decision all that long.







NAME: Panzer
HEIGHT: 1.8 m (6')
BODY TYPE: synthetic, combat celestiotype
OCCUPATION: assassin

BACKGROUND: Panzer has a sordid past that goes back well before the war, during which he took advantage of the prevailing anarchy to enrich himself through kidnappings and banditry. A lifelong criminal, Panzer was used to spending lengthy stretches in penal colonies, but when the hardline postwar regime came into power, he faced certain execution if and when they captured him.

Panzer, who was born a standard “substrate” human, had no choice but to flee to Triton's mooner underground, where he underwent a full celestiotype body conversion. In time, Panzer made a name for himself as a mooner assassin and eventually came into the services of the apocalyptic Order of the New Dawn. The Order favored violence and intimidation to win new converts and stamp out competing orthodoxies, and as such found no shortage of uses for a man with Panzer's lethal skills.

His world was turned upside down when he was diagnosed with the rots, an invariably lethal condition caused by an XNA encoding error during his body conversion. Already facing the prospect of a lingering death by accelerating tissue necrosis, Panzer gladly accepted the Order's request for him to take part in a suicide attack on Nova Dagon.