Characters

Admiral Peyton Floyd

Admiral Peyton Floyd was captain of the IOC battleship Concordia and a key figure in the covert Oversight fleet.

Andrea Davitz

Andrea Davitz was a reclusive cyberneticist credited as the founder of HumanScale Systems and inventor of the Davitz Process for grafting tissue to artificial organs.

Cal Ransom

Once a corporate lawyer more concerned with winning than with the truth, Cal got chewed up the moment he noticed the rules were being quietly rewritten. After TrustUs! cuts him loose, he ends up on the Hard Bargain and, through a technicality weaponized by Cassandra Vail, becomes its captain.

Cassandra Vail

Once Cal’s protégé and on-again/off-again partner, Cassandra has long since surpassed him in political timing and institutional fluency. She understands the conspiracy’s contours well enough to move inside it without being crushed, and she is willing to use people as pieces if it keeps her ahead of the next wave.

Commander Tomas Rykov

Commander Tomas Rykov is an Aegis operative tasked with controlling Aralx’s checkpoint and the dig.

Davis Renn

Davis Renn was a renowned cyberneticist on the 2276 Irrakai mission, brilliant and driven, with a talent for seeing systems as solvable problems.

Delia “Deeks” Khurshidani

A veteran pilot with dry humor, sharp instincts, and a practiced calm that keeps the ship steady when everyone else is spiraling.

Elias Torrence

Torrence is a veteran repo captain with the instincts of a survivor and the patience of someone who has watched too many simple jobs turn lethal. He ran the Hard Bargain with hard-earned pragmatism: keep the ship intact, keep the crew paid, and do not make enemies you cannot outlast.

Elowen Sato

Elowen Sato was captain of the Far Traveler for the Irrakai mission, a disciplined commander forced to make decisions with catastrophic stakes and imperfect information.

Eshai Ruun

Eshai Ruun is politically savvy and careful about what the humans are allowed to see.

Eun-ha Kwon

Eun-ha Kwon was pilot of the Far Traveler, steady under pressure and focused on the only outcomes that matter in a crisis: altitude, delta-v, and making it home.

General Vesh

General Vesh is a hard realist tasked with preparing for threats the civilians would rather not name.

Hanna Klein

Hanna Klein was an engineer aboard the Far Traveler, practical and unglamorous in the way real mission-critical people usually are.

Harold Coogan

Harold Coogan is a former TrustUs! attorney who handled the Langstrom case and took the fall when it started to stink.

Isolde Fugate

Isolde Fugate was known publicly as the wife of Titus Durein and mother of Andrea Davitz, a private figure who kept a low profile.

Jim Langstrom

Jim Langstrom is a mining executive whose dispute with TrustUs! becomes an early warning flare: the paperwork does not just feel unfair, it feels edited.

Jonas Pike

Jonas Pike was security officer for the Far Traveler, deceased, and the kind of professional who ends up holding the line while everyone else argues.

Jules

Jules is an android born from a botched emergency upload: a composite of Praetor Julianus’s legal architecture and Lucia’s emergent intelligence, plus whatever else slipped through the cracks. He is not a clean blend so much as a new person assembled out of incompatible parts.

Julianus

Julianus is a Praetor-class android legal observer assigned by Fairhold to ensure repossession compliance and neutral oversight.

Lazaro Koltai

Koltai is the kind of freighter captain who can sell you a sob story and a workaround in the same breath, and he is rarely lying about both. He is clever, smooth-talking, and self-interested, but he has lines he will not cross once real people start bleeding.

Linus Korrin-Wei

Linus Korrin-Wei is a PANTHEA archaeologist specializing in Osharran artifacts and the author of a controversial paper arguing the Khala Reen were not simply annihilating AI, but attempting to purify it.

Lowell Benjamin

Lowell Benjamin is a TrustUs! lawyer and Cal’s former boss who helped engineer Cal’s fall the moment Cal became inconvenient.

Lucia

Lucia is an intelligent entity that resided inside the slipstream sync module of the research vessel Celestial Aura.

Maren Renn

Maren Renn was the daughter of Davis and Mirielle, present on the 2276 mission and remembered in the official story as deceased.

Matthias Byrne

Matthias Byrne is a director of development for Arenal and a former lab tech who cut his teeth on Tierce’s earlier VR work, the Sandbox.

Mirielle Renn (née Durant)

Mirielle Renn was a linguist on the 2276 mission whose work sits at the fault line between understanding and exploitation.

Nari Dho

Nari Dho is outwardly calm and dutiful, with the quiet authority of someone trusted to manage a dangerous situation.

Nikolai Drahn

Drahn is the public face of El Atajo and the private hand on Delos’s throat, a crime boss who does not bother pretending he is not running the place. He governs from Evergreen Station, an orbital fortress that functions as palace, court, and kill box depending on the day.

Rafi Daval

Rafi Daval is a lawyer for the Continuance Group and the mastermind behind Arenal, the VR holding world for minds waiting on a post-Accord future.

Sable Tierce

Tierce is the Hard Bargain’s systems specialist: quick, exacting, and hard to read even when she is being honest. She carries a secretive past tied to forbidden AI research and the wreckage left behind when powerful institutions decide your work should not exist.

Sloane Paskova

Sloane Paskova was the Reinhardt-Vance executive who organized the Far Traveler mission, a logistics-minded power broker who speaks fluent risk management.

Soraya Linnev

Soraya presents as an amateur archaeologist with a billionaire’s reach: a polymath who can bankroll expeditions, buy access, and out-argue professionals on their own turf. She is obsessed with the truth behind the Osharré extinction, and her intensity makes her both indispensable and dangerous.

Soren Marsh

Soren Marsh is captain of the rival repo ship Narrow Margin and Torrence’s long-running nemesis.

Steve Gideon

Gideon is the ship’s engineer and the crew member most likely to solve a crisis with a wrench, a curse, and elbow grease. He is blunt to the point of comedy, but under the roughness is a deep sense of duty: once you are his, you are his problem, and he does not abandon problems.

The Green Minister

The Green Minister is a moderating influence within the Ministry who occasionally intervenes to reduce collateral damage.

The Red Minister

The Red Minister is the Ministry’s hard edge: an unseen director of covert operations who prefers leverage, containment, and preemptive strikes to persuasion.

Thor Jenssen

Jenssen is the foreman of the Aralx colony: smart enough to keep broken systems running, idealistic enough to believe the colony deserves better, and stubborn enough to make that belief everyone else’s problem.

Titus Durein

Titus Durein was ship physician on the 2276 Reinhardt-Vance mission to Irrakai, and later a man who tried to turn trauma into something like a normal life.