Racing the Darkness - An Alpha Centauri Photologue

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A Gaian technician monitors climate controls at Gaia's Landing in this painting made nearly seven decades after Planetfall.

The closely-controlled biomes of the Gaian arcologies were gradually divested of Terran vegetation, to be replaced with Chiron varietals, as the matriarchy took an increasingly reactionary posture toward the Shapers, embracing harmony and rejecting purity.​

Gaians spent nearly all their recreational time enjoying the lush and fragrant spaces they had crafted. Automated pleasure boats were available to carry scientists past their robot-tended handiwork, but many preferred to work in the gardens themselves.

Gaian Base Operations cited popular access to tranquil natural spaces as the determinant factor when explaining the very low incidence of physical violence within faction settlements overall.

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A Restoration Forces prime mover recovers the wreckage of Unity's primary fusion reactor while a Needlejet patrol loiters overhead on Combat Air Patrol.

Irradiated material was stored in dry casks with the intention of exploiting it as a high-yield energy source.

Both the prime movers and the casks had enormous value to the early colonies. Most prime movers were needed to carry 'Former modules, and energy shortages persisted in most settlements for years after Planetfall. Because prime movers were very rare, they were necessarily paired with powerful escorts to discourage depredation.​

All vehicles on Chiron were subject to endless modification and repurposing. For the reactor recovery mission, this prime mover, AC-1, was fitted with vacuum sifters to retrieve radioactive debris from the desert floor. A large sensor dome was also installed above the forward command housing. The casks were hauled aboard using an onboard crane not visible from this angle.

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Combat Hydrofoil 6, Revenger, sorties on the Purelake. The starboard CIWS emplacement is returning fire against an unknown target.

As on Earth, surface-to-surface missiles were the favored weapon in naval warfare on Chiron because they offered over-the-horizon strike capability that prevented ships having to brave shore defenses. Nonetheless, rapid-fire cannon were an important secondary weapon for both offensive and defensive purposes.

Following Soviet practice, the dual mountings in each of the hydrofoil's turrets were to provide greater hit probability, not firepower, since guns and their ammunition were less bulky and more easily-serviced than improved sensor suites.

Tribal fortunes were greatly enhanced after that faction's recovery in M.Y. 2 of a Supply Pod containing the two gunboats seen here. The Tribe's primary adversary of the day, the Spartan Federation, operated only gun-armed boats, all converted from Unity barges or foils, and was defeated on multiple occasions before launching a craft of equivalent capability at Sparta Command in October, M.Y. 4.

Revenger destroyed three Spartan Unity hydrofoils from ambush in one afternoon at the First Battle of the Slowwind River. The Spartans compensated by sighting tube artillery to cover river narrows, with which they later sank Revenger's consort, Remembrance.

This image apprears to have been created by Patrick Faulwetter on ArtStation for the movie GI JOE.

The Purelake is a reference to the Stormlight Archives series by Brandon Sanderson.

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A pair of Chiron-built Restoration 'Formers. The vehicle on the left bears a laser cutting arm suitable for liquefying rock or obliterating xenofungal tubers. The 'Former on the left is an amphibian with a bucket scoop used when building sea walls.

For three generations after Planetfall, "high" technology was whatever the colonists had taken or recovered from the wreck of the Unity. Machine tools and construction equipment were prized by all factions. Hundreds fell in bitter battles fought over the contents of the few dozen automated mining stations set up by the mission's pre-deployed Forwarded Contact Teams. Thousands were killed attempting to seize other factions' 'Formers.

The New Two Thousand built the first on-world 'Former from scratch in M.Y. 27, while the Nautilus Pirates floated became the last faction to ring the bell in M.Y. 60. Each design was particular to the unique environments in which they operated. The Hunters favored a cab-over design with bulbous rock-crawler tyres, each on an independent suspension to cope with the uneven terrain of the Monsoon Jungle, and the earth-moving equipment rear-mounted. All Hive 'Formers had a multi-function drilling rig, reflecting the fact that most spent their entire service lives underground. The Tribe usually fitted its versions with improvised vehicle armor, "cope cages," fighting cupolas, and active protection systems. University 'Formers, with their distinctive tall conning towers, could be remotely operated and were attended by swarms of onboard drones that assisted with both environmental analysis and light self-defense.

Picture found on the Tiberium Essence Wiki.

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The survivors of the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri pursued two types of research in their efforts to improve themselves and the new world that became their home.

The first type of research was practical, yielding insights about the natural world and, when those insights were properly applied, new materials with which to shape it. In short, practical research made it easier to craft new things. The second type of research was doctrinal, consisting of revolutions in thought. The purpose of doctrinal research was to support new modes of human organization and behavior for the achievement of discrete social or military objectives. Doctrinal research enabled survivors to execute specific tasks more effectively, with or without physical tools.

Each faction implicitly dedicated itself to certain doctrines that spoke to the contingent needs and grand ideological visions of its leaders.

Some factions, including the Spartan Confederation, the Dreamers of Chiron, the Human Labyrinth, and the Lord's Conclave, embraced a philosophy of active aggression. They launched repeated and unprovoked attacks on whatever targets of opportunity presented themselves. Their common motivation was plunder, but for the former in particular, offensive warfare was also an expression of the fundamental political incoherence, and therefore disunity, at the core of the hyper-survivalist movement, inherited from Earth and faithfully reproduced on Chiron. Holnists embraced the performance of violence for purposes of both cruel self-actualization and political legitimization. Fighting could, quite simply, be fun, and physical intimidation was widely accepted within the hyper-survivalist movement as a legitimate tool of governance. For these factions, offensive warfare was also the easiest way to apply their comparative advantages in the competition for scarce resources.

Santiago had built her movement from soldiers (many of them play-acting the role), not would-be colonists. Her followers had expected to die aboard Unity. As a result, the Spartans in and of themselves were not a viable colony. They took captives to perform the technical work of settlement. The Dreamers were in a similarly disadvantageous position and compensated with the help of Sabre Company mercenaries in the pay of Roshann Cobb. The Hive raided out of a combination of hunger and fear of political subversion by outsiders. Yang knew that his utopian project was no match in appeal for even the mild stimulus of gilded oligarchy, let alone a headier drug known as participatory democracy. The Conclave turned to raiding reluctantly during a period of starvation and sickness but quickly perfected the art.

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An Ascendancy fire team observes the opening bombardment against Morgan Metals at the onset of the War for Planetneck.

Taller, stronger, faster, and hardier than the average colonist, Ascendancy Augments quickly gained a reputation as the most fearsome fighting force on Chiron during this time period. Director Tamineh Pahlavi lavished her faction's resources on its legions, equipping them with the latest in power-assisted exo-frames and sixth-generation weaponry.

The stick seen here is illustrative, carrying Gatling laser (leftmost trooper), pulse rifle (topmost trooper), Gauss rifle (rightmost trooper), and close-quarters weapon (trooper in foreground).​

Battle-hardened SafeHaven Corporation mercenaries led a polyglot Morgan Metals defense also consisting of operators from the private security firm Barricade (another aspect of the considerable retinue Morgan stowed away with aboard Unity), the Monopoly's official Corporate Security paramilitaries, and various Merchant's Guild forces with no more than a few skirmishes and some strike-breaking under their belts. They proved to be of widely divergent quality, and the battle turned into a fast rout.

SafeHaven fought practically to the last in defense from the settlement's blockhouse, inflicting the Ascendancy's worst losses, but the Barricade Group fighters, positioned to defend the main gate, were quickly slaughtered by a Steel Rain assault, which they failed to slow despite an impressive service record and the kind of heavy weaponry that could have turned the tide. Corporate Security followed SafeHaven's valorous example, but without success: unlike the CEO's original hired help, their TO&E included nothing with which to crack OR-12 Hardshell. The remaining auxiliaries attempted surrender only to be slaughtered.

Morgan Metals wrote off the cost of the lost base, along with all its defenders, in the next season's filing, and enjoyed two years without dividends owed to the Monopoly's Shareholders.

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A Tribal Minuteman poses for a holo-capture.

He is equipped for an arid battlefield, probably Sunny Mesa or the Dune Sea. The thicket of probes extending from the "snout" of the respirator was used to filter dust particles and prevent moisture loss on exhalation.

This militia fighter is archetypal of the irregular soldiers that comprised the majority of each faction's defensive muster.

The conical helmet benefits from light-refractive coating and a leather splinter-guard to enhance protection against laser fire and shrapel, respectively. The jacket is homespun--sewn from the hide of a local reptile.

The AKM rifle was a commonplace in Unity's armory. Ballistic ("impact") weapons remained the most-used firearms on Planet for more than three centuries due to their easy manufacture and repair.​

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Self-healing materials have the ability to recover their original physical characteristics, including shape, tensile strength, permeability, and molecular bonds, to achieve restoration of function, totally or partially. The speed of this restoration varies from slow to fast.

Unity stores included various self-healing products imbued with microscopic packets of chemical adhesive released when the material was broken. The colonists' hostile-environment suits and survival shelters both incorporated self-healing properties to reduce the failure rate from punctures and tearing. A second generation of self-healing materials copied the design principles of the human vascular system. Instead of single-used packets of adhesive, objects were interwoven with networks of the same that relied on pressure to regulate output and were considerably more effective across larger surface areas.

The warlike Human Ascendancy experimented successfully with "reversible polymers," plastics that absorbed sunlight and body heat to initiate electrostatic attraction at the molecular level. The University preferred nano-scale robots for making biological and physical repairs. In M.Y. 439, the Chiron Rangers were issued organic combat vests engineered from xenofungus that were genuine biological systems in themselves.

Source: ExplainThatStuff! Space suit picture from the 2007 film Sunshine.

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Raoul André St. Germain was born in Sidon, Lebanon to a leading Maronite political dynasty. By family convention, he became a sailor, graduating from the École Navale.

Commanded riverine flotilla attached to United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO). Mentioned in dispatches, with multiple decorations for heroism.

Worked closely with French- and Rwandan-aligned warlords in eastern Congo. On three occasions, ordered sailors ashore without prior approval to protect local collaborators and their families.

Wounded in action against Congolese Army and invalided to French Guyana. Used opportunity to join multiple overland expeditions to Amazonia. Later, leveraged favorable political climate to be returned to MONUSCO as head of lake detachment at Goma.

Court martialed, 2052, following allegations that his command massacred prisoners at Kisangani in retaliation for destruction of gunboat Légère. Acquitted on all counts but formally reprimanded for suppression of evidence to shield subordinates.

Reassigned to Submarine Forces, French Antarctic Patrol, 2053. Led several successful missions to rescue distressed submarines worldwide.

St. Germaine believed strongly that fear was a driving force in human history--hence the formation of in-groups and out-groups that expand and contract as the environment becomes more or less permissive. The most significant effect, he postulated, was that populations demonstrated a higher tolerance for security--authority, structure, and conservatism--over democracy, choice, and openness to new ideas and experiences. When western democracy refused to countenance even minimal concessions to these anxieties, St. Germaine taught his sailors, the liberal world order was overthrown from within and anti-social movements such as Holnism thrived, much to everyone's detriment. St. Germaine, like Sheng-ji Yang, aspired to the ideal of the enlightened despot. The solution to social disorder, he believed, was the neo-feudalism of which he was himself a beneficiary in his native Lebanon: a system of intensely personal obligation between subject and sovereign, the chief object of which was the physical safety of the subject and the political advantage of the ruler.

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Unity's Executive Officer was Portuguese General Francisco d'Almeida.

D’Almeida was Portugal’s man in all things. India-born parents brought him to Portuguese West Africa in 2022. Grinding poverty hardly dulled his genius, and at seventeen, he won access to the Academia Militar at Bemposta Palace in Lisbon. There, he continued to excel in the classroom and, with the encouragement of political benefactors, took his first forays into politics, a preoccupation that remained with him throughout his life.

Enthusiasm for the regime philosophy of Pluricontinentalism, or imperial union, led d’Almeida to decline appointment to the imperial general staff in favor of the Grupo de Cavalaria Nº2. Placement in the mounted service was synonymous with long tours in Africa but served to make d’Almeida’s bona fides with the Salazarist junta. Over a career of more than a quarter-century, d’Almeida oversaw the eradication of the armed wings first of the Angolan, then the Mozambican independence fronts, bottling up insurgents in the interior wastes of both territories until they dissolved for lack of access to the populace. Borrowing from the experience of Rhodesia, d’Almeida reorganized his West African garrison for air-mobile work, preferring the easy credit and cheap Puma helicopters of ultra-reactionary France over the armored cars and stinging criticism of successive American administrations. The fresh strategy was well-received in Lisbon, not least because it was dramatically less expensive than what had gone before. By age forty-two, d’Alemida wore the sash of a general.

Superficially, d’Alemida’s biography parallels those of other wartime leaders aboard Unity. Both Raoul André St. Germain and Jeremy Tanner Marsh also served in Europe’s colonial wars (the former accumulating black marks in equal or greater number), and political favoritism remains the most widely-accepted explanation for the inclusion of all three men on the crew command roster. Portugal’s national obsession with d’Almeida was not altogether different than Canada’s with Raoul Salan. Yet here, the parallels end.

St. Germain, Marsh, and Salan were aristocrats all, and the former pair were warriors first, officers second. Salan’s star actually rose in counter-poise to his battlefield accomplishment: he was the Francophone who refused the siren call of French-Quebecois subversion and yielded up his two sons on the altar of True North, Strong and Free. D’Almeida derived his popularity neither from a demonstrated willingness to share his troops’ privation, nor Lost Cause mythologizing. Rather, he could claim unbroken success in bringing adversaries to the peace table with a minimum of sacrifice from those under his command. If he had the reputation of a “brass hat” who rarely left his air-conditioned office in Luanda, it was a footnote hardly worth remarking upon: the men appreciated his skillfulness and forgave him his weakness for tawny port.

D’Alemida was the asking price for U.N. access to Portugual’s space elevator at Rio de Janiero. For the Lisbon government, placing one of their own—particularly an individual as odious in the eyes of their NATO allies—so near the top of the expedition’s hierarchy satisfied an appetite for prestige. By implication, Portugal’s racial and counter-insurgency policies were therefore acceptable to Western sensibilities.

Temperamentally, d’Almeida was unsuited for an environment in which compromise, not coercion, was intended to shape decision-making. Judging the General to be volatile and of overweening ambition, the mission’s Psych Evaluation Board took the unusual step of filing special protest with the United Nations Security Council, to no avail.

As in the British Royal Navy, the emergency action station for Unity’s Executive Officer was the ship’s central Damage Control Center. This isolated the general from the discord taking root between other senior staff. Only Zakharov was likewise at a remove from the Command Center for the full duration of the crisis. Activating Damage Control just 39 minutes after impact with the micro-object above Chiron, d’Almeida was first to have a coherent picture of the unfolding disaster.

Unity’s logs, later recovered by the Peacekeepers and uploaded to the Planetary Datalinks unencrypted, memorialize d’Almeida’s immediate actions and findings. At 01:58 hours on 1 November 2116, he initiated automated recovery from hibernation of 300 damage control technicians and 150 damage evaluators. At 05:02 hours, he dictated a report to Garland summarizing what was known: more than 40% of the ship’s automated fire suppression systems had lost pressure and dozens of airtight bulkheads were confirmed locked in the open position, hampering repairs. He blamed widespread faults in the ship’s electrics for the loss of emergency lighting in most compartments aft and amidships. Life Support readings indicated that global supply of breathable atmosphere was down to 82 hours. Worse, navigational data suggested that, without immediate intervention, Unity would overshoot Chiron and pass through the Alpha Centauri star system—an almost mathematical certainty if the primary fusion reactor remained offline.

According to survivors present with him at the time, access to so much information contributed to d’Almeida’s strong belief that Unity’s destruction could not be prevented. Like Garland, he was caught off-guard by the patent insubordination of the ship's Chief Science Officer, whom he observed on camera violating orders to awaken emergency responders in preference to engineers and failing to execute evacuation protocols from irradiated compartments.

Beyond the damage inflicted by the meteorite strike, d'Almeida became aware of hundreds of armed assailants actively intervening to prevent repairs. Damage Control Center personnel were astonished by the number, recklessness, and reach of the attackers, who seemed to be swarming at all points, as well as by the fact that most clearly wore U.N. Security Forces togs, indicating that a crucial segment of the crew complement had been suborned. The General remotely initiated recovery of Marcel Salan and his Marines, but their contributions were focused forward, on the personal defense of the Captain. The situation went from dire to untenable when the initial group of shooters found themselves in running firefights with a new set of organized attackers whom d'Almeida could not raise by radio. He was watching Kellerites begin to escape one of Unity's many vestigial cargo bays. Over the next few hours, many Charterists, including stowed-away Morganites, followed their example.

At 20:08 hours, d'Almeida acted on his own initiative to begin pulling awake 400 further crew members, ordering them to take arms and secure engineering spaces. The chosen personnel were those whom d’Almeida knew personally—an admixture of Portuguese, British, and French military officers, mostly. Deidre Skye encountered dozens of these unexpected newcomers as she led her scientists to the Hydroponics Bays. She failed to convince them to surrender their weapons and join her errand.

This redirection of resources was gross insubordination, for it limited d’Almeida’s availability to Garland at a crucial moment. His hagiographers say that d'Almeida emulated Zakharov only to stop him. The Bridge learned of the act almost at once: Chief of Security Rachael Winzenried observed and reported d’Almeida’s override of armory lock-outs. Fifteen minutes later, d’Almeida ordered his officers to begin jettisoning Cargo Pods for automated descent, hoping to deny their contents to the Spartans.

Located amidships, d’Almeida and his support staff were in imminent danger from the stowaways. At one point, Kellerites masquerading as damage control parties looted the general armory after being granted access by d'Almeida's picked guards. More than three-quarters of d'Almeida's original armed defenders were shot dead, some by Kellerites, most by Spartans. Citing the extent of damage and inadequacy of compensatory measures, d’Almeida recommended to Captain Garland that the order be given to abandon ship. The message never went through.

After learning of Garland's assassination, d'Almeida conferenced with his staff. Consensus was that the situation was hopeless. D'Almeida, acting as Garland's successor, thus gave the order for each of the surviving senior commanders to gather those crew still ambulatory and abandon ship. In his last official act as a U.N. representative, he declared the Mission Charter dissolved.

General d'Almeida is presumed not to have survived the destruction of his last command.

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Retained by the United Nations from the New York Police Department Counter-Terrorism Bureau, Terrance LaCroix spent much of his career running hyper-survivalists to ground.

Awakened on the order of Captain Garland, he managed to isolate Corazón Santiago's transmissions to within a 20-square meter section of Unity, allowing Salan's Marines to pressure her fighters long enough to safely evacuate Unity's amidships muster stations.

LaCroix escaped Unity with a sergeant's guard of U.N. Marines who rallied to the summons of Pravin Lal's Peacekeeping Forces. LaCroix was persuaded to place himself and his charges under Lal's authority when he observed the Peacekeepers choose to fight the Spartans in defense of Deirdre's Skye's botanists.

LaCroix's Signals Intelligence section was first on Planet to begin to articulate the scientific principles behind Dreaming.​

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Most of the land surface of Chiron is thick with a dense carpet of tall, green vegetation built up over the nitrate spoilage undisturbed since its geological birth. Shallower seas are likewise clogged, discouraging wave effects and permitting the practical extension of the land-based ecosystem over huge spaces from which it would ordinarily be excluded. The floating structures produced in this way resemble lily-pads and range in structural integrity from perfectly solid to dangerously spongy. The water-table, too, is nitrate-infused. Drinking water not blasted by ozone is deadly.

Chiron’s plant life is similar to that of prehistoric Earth: spore-bearers and seed-bearers are commonplace, with very few flowering plants. Pollen counts are staggering. The "Planetgrowth," as it has been called, shows markedly poor tolerance for cooler, dryer weather.

Fungus, like bamboo, grows in cylindrical shoots or tubers that can rise more than eight stories high. Fungal growth is aggressive but unpredictable, using multiple vectors depending upon the season. During planetary hot cycles, root systems spawn creeping tendrils that climb toward the sun, gradually mineralizing until they are still. When the temperature drops for extended periods, the fungus blooms. Sporangial sacs expand to the point of explosion, when pent-up pressure launches mucus-laden spores up to 200 meters.

Fungal tubers, the outer walls of which can grow up to two feet in thickness, are approximately as hard as chalk. Inside a fungal tube are dense bundles of pulpy plant matter that produce a sweet milk. Stripping or sapping the interior plant matter causes the surviving over-structure to decay, much like a root canal will destroy a tooth. The biologists of the Pathfinder Probe, which preceded Unity by slightly more than a century, hypothesized that cables of this pulp formed the “tendrils” observed during growth of a fresh bloom.

Fungus contains both organic and inorganic material with excellent nutrient, energy, and mineral value, although the culling and processing of fungus for any human purpose required an understanding of Centauri chemistry and ecology that eluded the Unity survivors for several generations.

Some, but not all, of the Pathfinder colonists attested to hearing unexplained noise during a bloom, which they describe as a “hum,” song, or “keening cry,” not unlike tinnitus. The instrumentation of the Pathfinder Probe had been unable to detect this noise. According to records accumulated by the United Nations, but never shared with Unity's command staff, the Probe's colonial administrator, one Joralomon Hardacre, claimed to have developed data linking these auditory episodes directly to injuries and deaths. Hardacre disagreed with his own medical staff, who believed strongly that the afflicted colonists were suffering auditory hallucinations brought on by stress.

The Unity's Forward Contact Teams experienced the same distress as the Pathfinder colonists, combined with aggressive and worsening visual and tactile hallucinations, and first credited their experiences to the spores. Filtering technology had a mild salutary effect, but distance was the best known cure, and when the road crews could not steer clear, they turned to fire.

Unity scientists generally accepted that the fungus was semi-sentient. Both Gaian and Ascendancy researchers used the paradigm of the human immune system as a near-perfect overlay for xenofungal behavior. The most thorough early examinations of xenofungus were performed first by the Gaians, then the Dreamers, who fast discerned clear links between fungal growth and human brain activity.

Sources: The image, titled "Fungal Bloom on Alpha Centauri," is the work of caerwynentllc, and was found on DeviantArt. The language for this entry was drawn and reworked from Chris McCubbin, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, game manual (Tustin, CA: Loki Software, Inc., 1999-2000), 210-227. Information and inspiration on fungal spores comes from the UMASS Center for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment and their fact sheet on Spore Shooting Fungi.

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Name: Wasoné Erkins
Rank: Captain, Canadian Forces (AWOL)
Position: First Sergeant, U.N. Security Forces, U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri
Country of Origin: Canada
DOB: 2-8-2030

Service Record:
Born 2030 in Little Burgundy neighborhood of Montreal as separatism surged in Francophone Canada. Father, a Canada Post mail carrier, invalided by FLQ bombing. Joined Canadian Forces upon graduating secondary school. Posted to Royal Canadian Regiment. Deployed in Montreal under War Measures Act. Disciplined for signing open letter protesting U.N. peacekeeping deployment to Quebec. Participated in arrests of terror suspects following Black Watch Killings. Discovered personal effects later used successfully to unmask perpetrators as Soviet spies. Veteran of the stand at Montréal–Trudeau Airport, where separatists, heavily equipped by WARPAC and French Union allies, threw themselves against outnumbered Canadian and American regulars for more than 36 hours. The defenders held, but the city itself was lost and the Appleton Government suspended combat operations to enter negotiations. Joined failed Price Mutiny, October 2055, when Canadian PM signed accords recognizing Quebec independence.

Entered wartime United States c. January 2056. Traveled to Lake Tahoe Basin after reading Corazón Santiago's "Spartan Thesis" and learning about her role in the defense of low-income Miami neighborhoods two years prior. Entrusted with training Spartan militia volunteers, including paroled Holnists. Went to ground after the calamitous fall of Reno to federal auxiliaries.

Assigned to U.N. Security Forces, U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri, using false credentials provided by Spartan sympathizers within the U.N. Department of Operational Support. Promoted to rank of First Sergeant upon completion of mission training. Placed into cold sleep in May 2071.

Recovered from cold sleep by Spartan saboteurs during Unity Crisis. Led one of three Spartan squads assigned to secure the ship's hydroponics facilities. Encountered unexpectedly heavy resistance from crew under command of Lieutenant Commander Deirdre Skye and Chief Medical Officer Pravin Lal. Captured by U.N. Marines after Holnists within her party disobeyed orders during the firefight and declined to provide covering fire.

Held prisoner by U.N. Peacekeeping Forces after Planetfall. Agreed to hold Spartans neutral during period of internal strife within the Peacekeeping Forces at Warm Welcome. Paroled by direct order of Commissioner Pravin Lal. Subsequently defected to U.N. Peacekeeping Forces. Assigned to lead settlement garrison during Battle of U.N. Relief Station.

Psych Profile: Idealist
Highly sensitive to perceived "betrayal" of Montreal citizens, both Anglo- and Francophone, by Canadian Government.

Expects personal loyalty to be rewarded by superiors with courageous leadership and consistent application of stated ideals.

Record of dissenting behaviors indicates subject will not consistently obey command decisions with which she disagrees. Subject claims not to have been aware of "the depth of Holnist depravity and the emptiness of their political rhetoric," paying little attention to the politics of American unraveling during Canada's civil war, and describing their behavior and demeanor in Tahoe as "typical of what we had come to expect from Americans." When reminded that Canada suffered its own rash of Holnist violence, subject replied that she had believed the Holnist badge was "just an off-hand, over-used-and-abused label used for movements people didn't really understand." During questioning, Commissioner Lal did not detect duplicity.

Draws unfavorable contrasts between Canadian Forces' response to Quebec separatism and Santiago's Florida State Guard, a volunteer militia that occupied seawalls and municipal sluice gates during Hurricane Ivore to prevent Federal destruction of Miami's storm barriers in bid to relieve flood pressure on wealthy neighborhoods.

Appears not to take specific umbrage with the U.N., blaming Canada for failing to prevent the intrusion on its sovereignty.

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What is a Charter colonist?

Under the Unity Mission Charter, colonists under contract with private mission sponsors, while accountable to that sponsor and its duly appointed representatives among the crew, were to be treated identically to “mainline" U.N. colonists for the first five years after Planetfall. After that time, the healthy colony would ostensibly release its contracted members to make their own way.

Designated corporate officers would assume responsibility for the people and property belonging to their employers. Something more than a fifth of the colonists would then serve out periods of what amounted to indentured servitude, both fixed and variable.

This paradigm provoked long and impassioned debate among both U.N. leadership and mission leadership. Though the only alternative to accepting private mission sponsorship by the mid-twenty-second century was laying Unity up in ordinary, there were numerous and obvious conflicts of interest inherent in such a marriage of convenience, not the least of which was the fundamental incompatibility of U.N. and entrepreneurial philosophies.

The precise nature of the five-year commitment was as great a concern to the corporate set as to the U.N. How could the mission’s new financiers be assured that mission command wouldn’t manage the early colony so as to exhaust all valuable supplies and heavy equipment ahead of the corporate partition? Why should they believe that Captain Garland, with all the coercive power of the U.N. Security Force and Marines at his disposal, would not declare force majeure to keep the first colony whole? Would the U.N. not experience moral crisis when enforcing obligations of service on people who believed the Unity Mission was their only certain escape from global cataclysm? Popular and press opinion had it that the colonial contracts let by sponsors were exceptionally unfavorable to the point that most signatories would likely perish before satisfying their obligations. Even as they denied all such charges, sponsors braced for the certainty that "their" labor force would plead urgently for U.N. intervention when the time came to pay out their obligations.

Corporate influence either crucially altered or badly mutilated mission design, depending on one’s point of view. With each body of Charterists came a healthy contingent of security men—Struan’s Strategic Services, Morgan SafeHaven, Pinkwater Security, Iron Key, Directed Outcomes, and the Twin Cedars Trust. On paper, they undertook to "deliver training and operational capabilities" that most corporate recruits lacked by virtue of having received only a very abbreviated course of preparation before launch. In practice, everyone from Jonathan Garland and Francisco d’Almeida to Ian Dunross Struan and Nwabudike Morgan understood exactly what the mercenaries were sent along to do.

Larger numbers of armed guards did nothing for already-sour relations among the crew. Four outlooks predominated.

The so-called “mainline” colonists were recruited through national committees or special invitation from the U.N. Security Council. They were always individuals, usually young and without deep attachments to the family or nation from which they came. The experience of mission training consumed a significant fraction of their whole lives to that point. Perhaps inevitably, they came to see themselves as the deserving best that a dying species could bequeath to the future and never expected to see their homeworld again. On Chiron, they stood to enjoy the best government they could bring about through their own dialectic. The crew dismissed colonists as a faceless mass of ready followers, while Charterists asked why the United Nations thought the billets of playwrights would not better be occupied by more carpenters.

The Unity "crew" was itself a mix of True Believers, typified by Captain Jonathan Garland, and careerists, typified by Francisco d’Almeida, Raoul St. Germaine, and Marcel Salan. Many were in the middle or at the end of life. The term "crew," although popular, was largely misleading, for it encompassed mission command staff as well as a very small list of personnel with narrow shipboard emergency operations roles. Nonetheless, a distinct self-identity developed, and along with it, a certain mode of thinking. Colonists of all types were there to be led. The crew's inclusion on the manifest reflected previously proven capability, whereas others aboard could point merely to a hopeful expectation of future performance. Unlike the U.N. colonists, "crew" had a past that had shaped, and possibly dogged, them. The loyalties and impurities of a lifetime could not be burned away through a few years of study and exercise.

True Believers looked toward the founding of a colony untroubled by national allegiance and prepared to forgive itself for the sins of the past. “Good” was anyone or anything likely to help the settlement prosper and cohere. They took for granted that they would be alone after mission launch and usually dismissed the idea that the colony would find it prudent or necessary to honor pre-launch obligations such as corporate charters after five years on the hard edge. The caricature of a True Believer was of an overweening egotist blinkered by naïve faith in the essential goodness of the human spirit, convinced that their personal moral authority alone would suffice to solve problems that had not yielded to centuries of predecessors.

Appointment of an unenthusiastic individual to the Unity Mission, whether by the United Nations or a national military, produced a Careerist. Either the assignment was a disappointing end to a professional journey that had once aimed much higher, or a death sentence foist upon the luckless recipient by well-meaning but incompetent superiors. Some still clung to promises from national command structures that Earth would overcome its present difficulties and thereafter labor to bring them home, but most partook in a gallows humor that acknowledged their essential dispensability. The worst were officers who adopted a policy of trying to “save” the mission from itself by means of hectoring memos and endless war stories. In his diary, Garland fretted about how many on his command staff were “little Wilkinsons,” mouthing their allegiance to Geneva but still taking their instructions, or even pay, from other sources. (Sponsoring corporations knew to grease the hands that would one day direct the guns that might be turned against them when it came time to part ways with Garland.) Humorists put it that the quintessential Careerist was an unhelpful killjoy, prone to “splittism." Someone whose definition of “cooperation” might go only to the extent of malicious compliance.

Charterists were supernumeraries grudgingly appended to the Unity mission as the price of its completion. They were, on average, considerably older than the other colonists, and had more to lose in leaving Earth. Charterists were either hired directly by the mission’s corporate sponsors or received their passage because of personal affiliation with someone so hired. Charterists might be fully “vested,” meaning that they had satisfied the cost of passage up front and would become salaried members of a future private settlement, or they were “under contract,” in which case they owed a certain number of years of labor. By reputation with U.N. colonists and crew, Charterists saw the expedition as through a jewler’s loupe. Chiron was the motherlode, and each of them a latter-day Forty-Niner. Any activity that did not advance the cause of economic development was to be despised as indolence. To the mission factors and mercenaries, their future workforce consisted of morally dissolute strikers, shirkers, and layabouts who would certainly spend the first five years after Planetfall doing all they could to bring about total abrogation of the contracts they'd entered into with both eyes open.

Stowaways, including but not limited to Spartans, Holnists, Kellerites, and Morganites, were any of more than ten thousand people who were taken aboard Unity at some point during its construction, sometimes against their own will. Spartans and Holnists were followers of "Survivalism," a creed that preached armed self-reliance. Spartans generally regarded the practice of these tenets as a mental and physical discipline--a deeply personal lifestyle choice, albeit one that set them morally apart from those who were unable or unwilling to make the same sacrifices. Holnists regarded the credo as a license for predation. The two factions, once united in their opposition to the Unity Mission, fell out during their attack on the ship and its crew. Kellerites were followers of failed farmer-turned-lay preacher and radio personality Jean Baptiste-Keller, an anti-disassociationalist derided by most contemporaries as a cult leader. Morganites were, quite simply, hirelings of Nwabudike Morgan. In each case, the idea was not to be left behind on Earth to suffer what all agreed would be an unpleasant but rapidly-impending disaster of planetary proportions.

[Trenacker]

Name: Sardul Singh
Rank: Commander
Position: Superintendent of Prisoners
Country of Origin: India
DOB: 3-31-2037

Service Record:
Jodhpur, India. Son of provincial inspector general of prisons. Studied engineering and public administration at Indian Institutes of Technology. Master's degree in criminology from Southwest University of Political Science and Law.

Youngest MP in Lok Sabha for the Technocratic Party of India (TPI). Lost seat during nationalist revival following riots over tainted vaccine in 2058.

Joined Indian Prison Service at age 23. Awarded special commendation for the successful use of convict work gangs to perform work in high-radiation zones as part of national recovery from Six Minute War.

Appointed Minister of Law and Justice in national unity government, 2064. Notable for consulting in the design of numerous maximum security detention facilities in India, Russia, and China. Accused by opposition parties of corruption for negotiating favorable deal with Struan's Pharmaceuticals in connection with national adoption of neural re-socialization regime for all offenders.

During Unity Crisis, subject dispatched with U.N. Security Forces constables to organize convicts for evacuation. Forced out of detention bay by unknown attackers (later identified as Sabre Company troopers led by Aleigha Cohen), Singh gathered those survivors he could, activated approximately three dozen robot warders, and made for the Landing Pods.

Singh landed with roughly two-fifths of the ship's convict workforce in hand, very few of whom had been re-socialized. While this meant they were capable of full cognitive function, it placed significant demands on the badly-outnumbered constables.

Singh's solution was to construct his base in the manner of a panopticon while enforcing a brutal discipline. Without the means to inflict the nerve staple, and recognizing that savagery would not produce a cohesive, or productive, community, Singh searched for alternative methods of behavioral correction, including prisoners' councils, personal gardens, and the intentional use of color, open space, scents, and music in public and private spaces.

Psych Profile: Planner
Strong belief in the power of planned communities to complement social and criminal rehabilitation and promote physical and mental well-being.

Near-pathological commitment to order and economization.

Leans heavily on operant conditioning as a method of governance.