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, a reputation built on the seam between showmanship and lethal competence, and a founding gift — a small mercenary command handed to him by a grieving board as therapy — that he grew into the premier military force of the rimward Periphery. 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, leading an Extraction Company to cover the withdrawal of the 7th Sherwood Rangers and Wolf's Dragoons Beta — the son of ComStar's victims dying to save the Draconis Combine from the Clans. 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.

Phillip Alexander Starr

3018–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. 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

3020–present · commander, the Memphis Battalion

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. Known universally as E.M. — her initials, and a pointed reminder that she carries her murdered grandmother's name. 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 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.

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.

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.

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 and the novella The Ledger. Consistency is a work in progress and, per house tradition, a competitive sport.