DOC-07 · DRAMATIS PERSONAE · TRISTAR PERSONNEL & PERSONS OF INTEREST

Dramatis Personae

TriStar Interstellar personnel files, March histories, and Dominion records, consolidated — the people the Quiet File would rather you understood before you understood the machines. Names, dates, and, here and there, the thing the official history spent a full page denying.

THE STARR DYNASTY

Alexander Starr

2291–2385 · founder · Memphis

The one who started it, and a trader of famously flexible ethics: he bought the Memphis land claims off a failed Baptist colony, struck germanium, and turned a second colonization into a dynasty. Married Delilah Chen, a terraforming engineer; left four children and the beginnings of an interstellar company. Died on Memphis at ninety-four, respectable at last — an outcome those who knew him young are said to have found very funny.

Melissa Starr

strategist · Starr Traders · the "one heart" memorandum

The mind that read the Star League's collapse correctly when almost no one did, and positioned Starr Traders to inherit the wreckage rather than be buried by it — the long game that eventually produced TriStar Interstellar. The Common Heart program still opens with a memorandum in her name, the founding sentence of two centuries of doctrine: build what we can build; one heart; if it can't be fixed in a barn or a dropship bay, frak it.

Belasarius Starr

2961–3020 · President of Memphis

Architect of TriStar's media reach and husband to Marlene Davisson. Assassinated by ComStar's ROM as part of Operation BURNING BRIDGE; the death was filed, with a straight face, as a shuttle malfunction. The murder is the wound the modern company grew its teeth around.

Marlene Starr, née Davisson

2964–3020 · CEO, TriStar Interstellar

Extended the shipping net into Concordat space, and made the decision that would quietly shame her company for a decade: after losing ships to the Tortuga Dominions, she paid Lady Death — an annual "transit assurance fee," recorded to the last C-bill. Killed beside her husband by ComStar. One son, Tennessee, who would grow up to collect the account she opened.

Tennessee Starr

2993–3052 · founding commander, the TriStar Guards

The martyrs' son. Bright green hair from a young mercenary's Solaris VII career — eight years at The Factory under a stable name, in a Warhammer painted so garishly that the Marik crowds adopted him as one of their own — and a reputation built on the seam between showmanship and lethal competence. A grieving board handed him a small mercenary command as therapy; he proved better at it than anyone had planned for. Founded the Terran Revengers Company in 3021, raised the Guards in 3023, and never once sent people where he would not go himself. Killed in action at Luthien, 5 January 3052, holding the neck of a river pocket so that nine hundred cut-off soldiers could withdraw. He bought the time the only way an old gladiator could: by challenging Clan warriors to single combat, one after another, until their own honor code froze two Stars into spectators — and when the last of his people cleared the wash, he broke that code on purpose, fired everything his old Battleaxe carried at every warrior on the slope at once, and let the consequences hold their attention a few minutes more. The son of ComStar's victims died saving the Draconis Combine from the Clans; the March's obituaries did not need to write the irony down, and mostly didn't. Jaime Wolf attended his memorial on Memphis, one of his few public appearances after the battle; Duke Sandoval of Robinson condemned "Davion subjects fighting to protect those damn Dracs," and the fallout outlived them both.

Delia Starr

chief executive, TriStar Interstellar · "the still point of the March"

Tennessee's wife, and the other principal in a thirty-year partnership that settled its hard questions in private and presented the family a united answer. She ran the company through the Clan war — it was her signature beside his that sent the fleet — and when he told her he wasn't coming back, she said no, and no, and no, until she understood she was asking Tennessee Starr to be some other family's man in some other century, and then told him the company would be at the dock when the fleet came home. It was, in good order, with every promise kept. Afterward she signed all three thousand nine hundred and twenty-two casualty notifications herself, by hand, over eleven weeks, and attached to each one a promise the company still honors: the schedule that your family kept now keeps your family. She did the books every Tuesday for the rest of her life, and is said to have answered her husband's last letter in the margins, weekly, forever. Her son called her the still point of the March; every historian who has used the phrase since is quoting him.

Phillip Alexander Starr

3029–present · interim CEO, TriStar Interstellar

Tennessee's son and the builder to his sister's fighter — blue-haired in deliberate echo of his father's Solaris flamboyance. He served as a line lieutenant of the 1st Memphis Militia through the Clan war, until his father struck both twins from the Luthien rosters with a handwritten order no staff officer was permitted to soften. The most fluent man in the March came to that last family dinner with four arguments prepared, and used none of them; he tells the story on himself to this day, whenever a room needs to understand that some balances cannot be talked into moving. Holds the company's chair on an interim basis that has now outlasted every prediction, and carries the family conviction that the March's survival rests on economic foundations, not guns alone. Coordinates the shipping network's expansion into the Periphery and the Concordat both.

Elizabeth Marlene "E.M." Starr

3029–present · commander, the Memphis Battalion · twin to Phillip

Tennessee's daughter; leads the Guards' heavy assault battalion from a royal-purple MAD-10T Marauder II as recognizable as her father's green hair once was. The purple is not insubordination — or rather, it is licensed insubordination, a standing instruction in her father's last letter that freed her from regulation paint in writing, and she has honored it to the last coat ever since. Known universally as E.M. — her initials, and a pointed reminder that she carries her murdered grandmother's name. She was a lieutenant of twenty-two when her father cut her from the Luthien deployment and gave her the real reason across the family dinner table; her answer — then make it count — is spoken now at every Guards commissioning, and the new officers give his answer back. Where Phillip builds, Elizabeth arrives: Memphis Battalion specializes in the high-risk insertions that killed her father, and she leads them from the front. TSG personnel hold that you can identify a Memphis Battalion drop zone by the purple contrails and the sound of Clan warriors swearing.

THE TRISTAR GUARDS & THE MARCH

Colonel Grayson Jefferies

interim commander, the TriStar Guards

Second son of Sherwood's House Jefferies, who scandalized Marion by taking a Guards commission over an AFFC one and then spent the Clan wars making the choice unimpeachable. Commands five regiments, two security regiments, the Memphis Battalion, the Extraction Companies, and the Fleet Protection Wing — all while wearing the rank of Colonel, because Colonel-General is not his to wear, a distinction he maintains with Sherwoodian precision. Trusted precisely because he cannot be a Starr, and, more simply, because he has earned it.

Colonel Ruthanne Pyke

Chief of Staff, the Tennessee Star Guards (Clan war) · acting brigade commander, 3052–mid-3060s

Sherwood-born and Sarmaxa-blooded, she ran Tennessee Starr's headquarters for the last nine years of his life, on the standing principle — hers — that the Colonel-General was permitted exactly one dramatic silence per fiscal quarter. When he took the reserve down to the river pocket she fought him for three minutes and eleven seconds on a closed channel, lost, and entered the entire argument in the war diary unedited, because she believed history deserved to see exactly what the decision cost and who chose to pay it. Her diary's closing line for the fifth of January — the mail moves first; the Colonel-General is delivered — is read at more March funerals than scripture. She then commanded the brigade for more than a decade without once accepting the title, keeping the Colonel-General's chair empty at the head of the Bellflower table and turning away every elevation with the same sentence: "I keep the store. I don't own it." She handed the store, in time, to Grayson Jefferies, and the Chief of Staff's office to Patricia Moreau, and is understood to have considered both transactions properly receipted.

Colonel Patricia Moreau

2988–present · Chief of Staff, the TriStar Guards

Original executive officer of the Terran Revengers Company; rose to command the 1st Memphis Militia and now serves as the Guards' Chief of Staff. Credited with much of the "talk first, talk constantly" doctrine that turned a joke about lucky amateurs into a communications culture that predated its own technology.

Captain Yara Sund

3rd Lackland Regulars · the anvil

An ocean-world company commander of diver stock, from a regiment that files its dead rather than mourns them and reads the list, once a year, to the sea at slack tide. Took her company into the shipbreaking maze of Wrecker's Yard on New Port Royal during the Tortuga Campaign, lost a third of the regiment's 'Mechs to a defense that fought like an audit, and brought her survivors out through a flooded drydock no sane commander would have used. She kept her own book of the forty-one, in her own hand, because a name that is not written down is a name that did not happen.

Colonel Augusta "Gus" Teague

founding colonel, 21st Morven Grenadiers · Commandant, the Grenadier School

She was a lieutenant of the 3rd Lackland at Wrecker's Yard, and carries a plate in her hip that nobody at the Grenadier School ever asked about twice. She came to Morven after Tortuga to teach — on the theory, stated once at her arrival dinner and institutional scripture ever since, that the only thing she had learned at the Yard worth a damn was everything they hadn't been taught first — and spent twenty-five years building the March's heavy-warfare faculty. When Bellflower's letter arrived in the summer of 3050, she raised a regiment out of her own school in a single afternoon, with a speech that ran five sentences and ended "class dismissed." It was Teague who painted the 21st in the deep yellow of Morven's own live-fire flag; Teague who, in a maintenance tent on Luthien, moved that the grieving brigade obey its dead commander's note and strike his name from the letterhead — "think of it as a savings on stationery"; and Teague who conducted the defense of the Kado-guchi's southern shoulder like the final examination her school had spent a generation writing. Asked at the first regimental parade why her new command was so slow, she answered without breaking step: "We're not slow, sweetheart. We're inevitable."

Colonel Harlan Petty

founding colonel, 33rd Broken Wheel Cavalry · Valvo Circuit junior champion

Broken Wheel's own: Landing-born, a Circuit junior champion at seventeen, and then twenty-six years up the Guards' mounted arm and the MMW trials sheds, where he ran the Malevolent B-model through its acceptance hell and gave the 129-kph hover tank the name it still carries — the unfair advantage. When the Guards decided to grow a cavalry regiment on his homeworld, Petty requisitioned the racing circuit itself and held the Selection: one race, open entry, night start, two hundred and ninety kilometers with no smooth in it, and a scoring system nobody on the grid knew about. The telemetry never measured finishing order. It measured who stopped, in the dark, for somebody else's wreck. Seventeen drivers did, and all seventeen made the regiment — as did the race winner, who radioed the flare position without lifting, because Petty was building a unit, not a sermon. He dressed his troopers in stormbell teal, after the desert flower that sleeps through the droughts and blooms only in the season after the great storms, and let the whole planet work out the heraldry for itself.

Wilhelmina "Deuce" Calloway

33rd Broken Wheel Cavalry · Charlie Troop · the twelfth run

The eternal second: nineteen runner-up finishes in thirty-one Circuit starts, beaten again and again on the long smooth by factory money, and untouchable in the rough, where the money didn't help. At the Selection she finally got the course with no smooth in it, led it outright by four minutes — and stopped, in the bottom of a black wash with no drones and no witnesses, to cut an unconscious stranger out of a burning rig. She finished forty-third, and made the regiment, and learned why. On the fifth of January at Luthien her vehicle log records eleven runs through the corridor at the river pocket with wounded on her rear deck; she went back a twelfth time, alone, after the recall sounded, and came out with nine strangers aboard as the last vehicle through — the final friendly eyes on Old Man River's stand, which she described exactly once, at the memorial dedication, in four sentences, and never again. Her Malevolent stands in the Memphis museum today, mismatched Kurita-built fans and all, wearing the words she stenciled on its bow by torchlight the night of the batchall: DELIVERY REFUSED.

Amos Thrale

Comptroller, TriStar Interstellar — Transit Assurance account

The man who kept the ledger. For eleven years he signed TriStar's payments to a pirate queen and recorded every C-bill correctly, buried three layers deep in the accounting system; and in the end it was Thrale who was asked for the exact total and gave it — 25,920,000 — the number that became the shells of the Ledger Barrage. Dry as a receipt, and the closest thing the whole affair had to a conscience, on the theory that a man who writes everything down cannot pretend he did not know.

Hollis Vance

Vice President, Fleet Operations · architect of the Longest Run

Twenty-two years under the Big Board at Stars End made him keeper of the thing the March calls, with the definite article, the schedule — the promise, renewed daily, that four hundred and seventy systems' tomorrows would be administered. When Tennessee Starr came up the mezzanine stair with two cups of coffee and asked for the math, Vance spent a month alone with the arithmetic of the impossible and delivered it whole: fifty-four starships consumed, the four-month rotation bent to seven, every shorted ton on every far world written down, so that if the March chose to do the mad thing it would do so with its eyes open. Then he built it — sixty-eight hulls, forty-one jumps, twenty-two days, and a single nine-hour failure in the entire run. His only office decoration is a needlepoint sampler, made by a predecessor's widow, that reads WEIGHT × DISTANCE ÷ TIME. A jump-point station carries his name now; he fought the honor for years and lost, which the operations floor regards as the only schedule slip of his career.

Ruby Tran

the Weather Desk · Cotton Exchange Annex · file 48-11

A shrimp-boat family's daughter from the Landing who reads envelopes for a living — never letters, a distinction she will explain to anyone, because a letter can lie and usually does, while the envelope tells you what the letter cost, and cost is the only language everyone speaks without an accent. In the spring of 3048, off nothing more than a missing survey ship and a search called off from the top, she wrote the first document in the Inner Sphere to forecast the storm: weather, she called it, arriving from off the map. Nobody acted on it — the correct call on the evidence, she has always insisted — and she kept the file in her top drawer until history caught up eight months later. During the war she ran movement security for the Run, the craft the shift rooms named "dark paint," which hid fifty-four starships inside a wartime economy for a year; she was given the job after catching the operation herself, in her own company's traffic, in roughly four seconds. Her grandmother's law from the boats is quoted on the Weather Desk to this day: the forecast never once stopped a storm — it tells you whose crews can get home, and who has time to go back out for the ones who can't.

Raymond-Roger Marsin

3022–present · Duke of the Periphery March

Career AFFS officer elevated to the coronet by Princess-Regent Yvonne Steiner-Davion in 3079, and the man who threads the March's central needle: a working relationship with TriStar's leadership held in one hand, formal loyalty to New Avalon in the other, and both, so far, intact.

Martha Culhane

2979–3054 · University of the Stars · itinerant educator

Coordinator of the University of the Stars' traveling-school program — the fleet of tutors, tri-vid libraries, and examination barges that carried literacy to the worlds the Federated Suns kept forgetting to fund — and the most quotable critic Hanse Davion's education policy ever acquired. Her remark on what the Fourth Succession War cost the Periphery's schools ("they took our teachers and left us the war, and called it a fair trade") passed from a lecture hall into March popular memory, and has since been misattributed to at least four better-known people, which she is said to have regarded as a professional success.

THE TORTUGA DOMINIONS

Paula Trevaline, "Lady Death"

2991–3030 · Pirate Queen of the Tortuga Dominions

Born on Tortuga Prime to a gunnery master and a kidnapped pharmacist; watched her mother murdered at nine, poisoned the killer at seventeen with her mother's own profession, and took his Banshee — and his death-name — for her own. By 3015 she had unified the pirate bands into the one thing five centuries of piracy had never produced: a state that kept books. She taxed TriStar's shipping for eleven years, made the TriStar Guards pay in blood to collect the bill, and, when the campaign reached her capital, surrendered it intact — so that the Ledger Barrage would fall, on the record, on a city that had already put its hands up. Tried on Memphis and executed by firing squad, 14 August 3030, at thirty-nine. Her last words, to the assembled directors: "You paid me for years. You'll pay someone. You always will." TriStar's official history devotes a full page to refuting the claim, which is how everyone knows it was true.

Mira Carey

orphan · bookkeeper · author of the Dominion Charter

Orphaned at nine in a Dominion raid and taken in by Trevaline, who entered her in the ledger as dependent, obligation carried — the one account the Queen never closed. Trained to keep books in Lady Death's own exacting hand, Mira survived the fall of Tortuga City and spent the next two decades answering the one charge her mentor could never disprove: that all she could do was take. Mira built. She became an author of the Dominion Charter of 3049 — the constitution of the pirate kingdom that disarmed itself into a demilitarized democracy — and signed it in the flat neat hand of a lifelong bookkeeper, beside a private notation no clerk transcribed.

The surname is her own, taken only after she had left Tortuga for good — made once, quietly, to a registrar who did not get the joke, out of the single word Lady Death had ever written against her name. Obligation, carried. She made Carey of carried, and spent the rest of her life closing the account it stood for.

Odalie Fontenot

first First Minister of the Tortuga Dominions, 3049– · New Gascony · the Fontenot Note

Born on New Gascony to the descendants of trafficked people, she spent nine years reading manifests at the Gate for the Rimward Customs Inspectorate before her country asked her to help write its constitution's hardest article, and then to live under it. As the Dominions' first First Minister she checked the public water figures on Basin Street every morning of her tenure, drank the founding toast in purified ocean water, and answered the era's one serious rearmament motion with eleven minutes every Dominion schoolchild now memorizes: every armed force ever raised on Tortugan soil ended by feeding on Tortugans, and the Dominions would be defended by being worth more intact than plundered. When the Clan war began quietly stripping her guarantees, she moved first — the Fontenot Note released the Federated Suns from its garrison obligations before New Avalon could default on them by increments, converting a promise about to break into a debt of honor the Suns have been conspicuously repaying ever since. She kept a private ledger in a customs officer's hand, and its founding entry ends with the sentence the histories quote: we are small, we are honest, and we are very, very good books. Somebody must be, this century.

Arturo Vega

dock rat · clerk · the count no one kept

A dock-rat boy taken into the household a few years before Mira, and its conscience: the clerk who maintained, in a place his queen would have killed him for, the true tally of what her efficiency cost — 12,847 names the perfect official books never carried. He never chose a new name the way Mira later would; he kept the one the docks gave him, on the theory that a man who means to remember everyone else has no business editing himself. He did not live to see the shells fall on Tortuga City. He was right about nearly everything, and wrong about the only thing that finally mattered — whether anyone could build something better on the ruins she left. Mira spent her life proving him wrong, and never once stopped agreeing with him.

« The Story Until Now · The people, like the machines, are drawn from TriStar Interstellar's own records, the novella The Ledger, and the novel The Longest Run. Consistency is a work in progress and, per house tradition, a competitive sport.