Tyler Braedan (Tie-lur Bray-den) |
Age: 25
Height: 6’1
Weight: 190 lbs
Hair: Short, brown
Eyes: Greenish-blue
Story: Mercenary who spent his early childhood on Earth, amidst its towering metropolises. Abruptly uprooted at age 8, when his father, Kalen, was transferred to an administrative position, on the United Earth Alliance (UEA) colony of Tartan Minor, located in the Aegis system. Once thought to be a stepping stone to career advancement, Kalen struggled in his new position, leaving his prospects dim. Forced him into a deep depression and unable to cope with the stress, Tyler watched as his father deteriorated into a shell of his past self, being witness to his father’s suicide a year and half later.
Per UEA law, if someone in their service dies before their 10 year obligation is fulfilled, whether it be military or government, that person’s family must make up the difference. This meant that Tyler, his mother, and younger brother, Jason, had to make up the remaining eight years and one month of Kalen’s term of service. Tyler’s mother was placed in a secretarial position in the UEA VA office, while Tyler and Jason were enrolled in Tartan’s military academy, denied any contact with their family.
If anything, the UEA puts their personnel through a thorough, exhaustive set of training to prepare their officers and soldiers for any scenario they would come across on deployments. Some might have seen it as a reflection of the Spartan training regimen adapted for contemporary military usage, but no one debated the results, producing the finest of any army in UEA-controlled space.
After six and a half years in the academy, Tyler graduated, though not with much accolade. He entered service with the 176th MI Division on the planet Qal’tar, in the Darvin system. No older than 17, Tyler had to adapt to a new environment, guidelines, names, and faces, all while the UEA forces on the planet were in the process of quelling insurrection before it sparked into full rebellion.
Each division garrisoned on-world was responsible for their assigned sector, keeping the peace and ensuring trouble was dealt with in an orderly fashion. This arrangement was established and had been, more or less, successfully maintained since the UEA liberated the planet from a united coalition of Cektari pirate groups about five decades before. As time dragged on however, the Qal’tarian population, comprised mostly of humans, was compelled to ask the UEA to allow for increased self-governance, albeit with UEA forces garrisoned on the planet to deter any outside aggression. While the UEA listened to the plea, they strongly put down any chance of the Qal’tarians from forming their own political entity. In that ruling, a decision that was meant to bring Qal’tar back into the fold, it began to foam resentment against the UEA government among small groups of locals.
Open acts against the UEA were sparse, although clearly visible to the planetary government. As repercussion against what they deemed ‘terrorist’ acts, divisional garrisons were ordered to sweep their assigned sectors, round up dissidents inciting unrest, and pacify any local hostility. It isn’t hard to picture, a once-loyal population, now embittered, loathing the government they had seen as their protectors, who were now considered as their oppressors.
For six months, Tyler was a participant in these sweeping operations across his division’s sector. Throughout this period, nothing he thought of as unjust took place, for he believed in the sanctity and righteousness of the UEA, since it’d been engrained into his consciousness since age 10 of the infallibility of the UEA and its military. There was nothing that’d questioned his loyalty, until an event on one rain soaked afternoon that made him question everything.
A patrol Tyler was a part of encountered local resistance in a nearby town. After a firefight that lasted 15 minutes, the rebels had been eliminated; some twenty-five in number, only four had been captured. The patrol’s commander, one Lieutenant Rikard Anders, announced for the townspeople to gather in the town center, to see the prisoners paraded around in a false spectacle. Once the crowd had gathered, the prisoners were forced to their knees, and in a demonstration of the UEA’s authority, executed each rebel, one by one. What came next was a scene of tragedy. Anders had stationed soldiers on the surrounding rooftops, and through his CC-116 wrist communicator, ordered the soldiers to wipe out the population. Barricades had been set up at each entrance to the town center, leaving the people boxed in, which led to the systematic slaughter of some 500 innocents. It was slow and methodical; none but the UEA were left unscathed during the massacre. Afterwards, Anders ordered the town razed, for what he later claimed, “was punishment for a population complicit in the proliferation of rebel activities.” Anders subsequently ordered all evidence destroyed, to avoid any leaks that could link him with the crime.
This massacre, a genocidal act by any other name, was what made Tyler question everything he knew and believed of the UEA.
For the next few months, he made contacts with rebel sympathizers who could smuggle him off world. Because of the massacre, Tyler no longer believed in upholding the UEA’s doctrines, not if men like Anders could pick and choose when to follow them. Once he’d be smuggled off Qal’tar with a group of refugees seeking to escape the brewing violence, Tyler found his way to Tectum, a planet in the Aquila system, which lay outside the reach of UEA authority.
By the abandonment of his duties, Tyler was now seen as a fugitive and traitor to the UEA, and would be hunted if he ventured into any system they actively controlled. From this point forward, he would need to hire-out his services to survive, to remain outside the reach of the UEA and its agents, and knew, if he were to ever clear his name, he would need to prove that Anders had orchestrated the massacre.
With his training, Tyler would eventually build enough of a reputation to form his own group of professional mercenaries, known throughout the galaxy as…Titan Company. |
Natalia Sterling |
Age: 20
Height: 5’6
Weight: 120
Hair: Shoulder length, blonde
Eyes: Light green
Story: Born on New Manchester, in the Hampshire system, to David and Charlotte Sterling. Natalia’s parents were hard-working, middle class workers, who provided as best they could for their three children. Excelling in studies throughout her schooling, the UEA took notice of Natalia’s academics at an early age, and kept a watchful eye on her progression. Almost as soon as she graduated secondary school at age 18, the UEA recruited her, based on her exceptional finishing scores, hoping to groom her into an intelligence operative.
Upon the completion of basic military training, Natalia was selected for training by the Bureau for Strategic Information (BSI), the UEA’s intelligence branch. Not only did Natalia possess remarkable intelligence, but had an uncanny beauty for someone raised primarily on an industrial-based world, it was an asset the UEA believed they could exploit during field operations. After six months of rugged physical training, along with extensive mental conditioning, both inside a classroom and on supervised field ops, Natalia was deemed ready for her first solo operation.
On her first op, on Diamant in the Gellick system, Natalia was to pose as a representative for a buyer of the synthetic drug Syronic, and was tasked with “using any means at her disposal,” per her operational mandate, to get close to and dispatch the supplier. For the next four months, Natalia did precisely that, using her persuasive personality, along with her physical charms, to move through the supplier’s inner circle.
Once having gotten close to the supplier, Natalia used her sex appeal to convince him to take her to his place, in other words, to get comfortable. After they’d gotten to his lofty penthouse, that’s when everything went wrong. It had nothing to do with her cover being blown, it had more to do with a pair of mercs dropping in, literally, and assassinating the supplier, just as he was about to slip in the bed with Natalia, who’d been planning to do it herself. Reporting the operation’s failure to her handlers, and the extraordinary circumstances under which it occurred, Natalia wouldn’t be reprimanded and was ordered to return to the BSI. Before returning to her ship, Natalia had been invited, by an unknown party, to meet them for lunch at a local restaurant. Natalia’s instincts were to expect an ambush, what she got in return, however, was a recruitment pitch to join the group that’d killed her mark before she could.
Mulling over the offer for a month after returning to BSI headquarters, Natalia thought about her options carefully, making certain there were no loose ends or complications that might hinder her departure, should she choose to leave. Two weeks later, Natalia resigned her posting with the BSI, and opted to accept the unknown party’s invitation, and while officially out of their ranks, the BSI has a long history of not forgetting those who have failed them. |
Nakamura Masaki |
Age: 24
Height: 5’5
Weight: 140
Hair: Short, black
Eyes: Brown
Story: Born on Earth, amidst the towering spires of Fukuoka, Japan, spending his youth coding computer systems for small businesses. Masaki became such a savant, that by the age of 11, he routinely entered competitions against coders two to three times his age, winning each by sizable margins. During one such competition, Masaki took down at least four challengers in two and a half hours, catching the eye of a UEA recruiter, who’d been walking back to their post from lunch.
By the time he was 21, Masaki had been hired by the UEA to write new training programs, to help recruits acclimate to the rigors and intensity of modern combat. It was well known, that some recruits who passed basic training couldn’t always cope with the specialized training, washing out and returning to their civilian lives. But when he found out that the ‘ultra-realistic’ holographic training system , which Masaki wrote, was causing soldiers to commit suicide because of acute onset PTSD, and the UEA was discounting them as ‘statistical anomalies’ for the sake of inflating positive results for their Advanced Warfighter Simulation (AWS), Masaki had had enough.
Resigning his post, Masaki fled Earth for the colonies, finally landing on Minori, located in the Kyushu system. For the next three years, Masaki began hacking into UEA systems, sending false information, disrupting communications with local ground and fleet operations, and rerouting supplies for planetary garrisons, all while remaining undetected. His greatest feat, was deceiving the garrison and small number of naval vessels in orbit, into thinking that there was an imminent, large-scale pirate invasion on the way, forcing a planet-wide mobilization of every person the UEA could muster. When the rumors turned out to be false, it caused a great deal of embarrassment within the UEA, and later became known as the ‘SNAFU in Kyushu,” turning Masaki into a myth, or his screen name that is, niGhtR4id3R.
After the incident, Masaki was contacted via hacked UEA comm buoys, by someone calling themselves Hermes, with an offer to conduct further misdeeds against the Alliance. Packing up his gear, Masaki took a shuttle off Minori to the trading outpost orbiting the planet, where he would rendezvous with Hermes and his ship, to create mischief in the outer reaches of space. |
Zachery ‘Fig’ Newton |
Age: 29
Height: 5’11
Weight: 180
Hair: Short, blonde
Eyes: Dark green
Story: Born on New Perth, in the Queensland system, spending the majority of his youth flirting with the girls, getting into scraps with their boyfriends, and generally causing trouble around town but nothing serious. After graduating high school, Zach had no plans on attending university, and spent the next two years working various part-time and full-time jobs, never holding one job for more than a few months. Fed up of living day to day, Zach saw Alliance recruitment posters, weighed the pros and cons, figured service with the UEA would be an improvement from his current situation, and went to an enlistment center.
From the moment he ran his first drills in basic training, Zach knew he was going to thoroughly enjoy himself. A job that allowed him to raise havoc and mischief, shoot people and blow up a wide assortment of things, all while getting paid to do it. In this element, basic was a walk in the park; from week to week, Zach surprised himself about how well he was performing and his steady progression in becoming one of the top recruits in his class. Along the way, each recruit was asked to pick their preferred specialization, and for Zach, the choice couldn’t have been simpler: demolitions.
Proficient in both combat and demolitions, there wasn’t an obstacle that Zach couldn’t find a solution for, whether it is a wall breach or shortcutting a 20-foot gorge, nothing stood in the way.
Four years into his service, on the frozen world of Niveus in the Sortisia system, UAE forces were evacuating several towns ahead of a rebel offensive, which was advancing through the region. The plan had been to wire a bridge with AE-51 thermal explosives, hold it until all the civilians had gotten across, then collapse the bridge to delay the rebel advance. Zach and his squad had wired the bridge just ahead of the civilians’ arrival, yet as the Alliance was trying to conduct an organized retreat, the rebels were launching determined thrusts into Alliance territory.
The bridge lay in the path of one such thrust, and Alliance forces were pressed to hold them back, making the fight to evacuate the civilians all the more urgent. With only three close-air support (CAS) aircraft, one fighter and two bombers, in the area to provide cover, Alliance ground units had to withstand the rebel advance until the last possible second before destroying the bridge. Unfortunately, the rebels’ dogged persistence broke through Alliance lines sooner than planned, and there was a mad rush to get everyone across the bridge. In the confusion, the detonation cord to the explosives was severed when rebel fire began hitting the opposite end of the bridge, where Zach and his squad were providing covering fire. Once someone realized this, knowing that rebel units could reach their position in minutes if they got to the bridge, a soldier frantically told an aerial liaison officer (ALO) to bring fire down on the span, forgetting there were still civilians coming across. Before it could be called off, one of the bombers flying CAS was making their attack run, dropping their ordinance and demolishing the bridge, killing some 75 civilians and Alliance personnel. Rebel ambitions were blunted, and within two weeks, their offensive was stopped, another week after that, what remained of their forces surrendered and were summarily executed for treason.
Zach finished his service six years later, though wasn’t quite the same after the incident on Niveus. Alliance officials, in their reports, saw the demolition of the bridge as ‘necessary’ to halt the rebel offensive, glossing over the fact that innocents died in the process. The morality, or lack thereof, to justify the incident was sickening, to see those people as expendable, when they were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
After his discharge, Zach returned to New Perth a different person than when he’d left years earlier. Then, like before, he performed several odd jobs here and there, never keeping any for more than a few months, until he found ‘entrepreneurs,’ which was another word for mercs, actively recruiting over the Holostream. He answered the ad for Titan Company, was sent an encrypted message, with a temporary decrypt code, about when and where to meet. |
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