Andrew Stock

Country: USA / Canada
Area of Expertise: None

Sky Marshall Andrew John Hardman Stock of the Third Terran Fleet was born into slavery on the Sino-American Consortium’s prison planet, Chion 16, along the outer edge of the IMAT Company’s mineral processing network. He was separated from his parents at birth under the Neodoric Act of 10212, and after undergoing basic sociografting was sent to the planet’s triclite mines, where he would labor for a few short years while the raw ore’s fumes eroded his lungs.

By his sixth year, Stock had risen to prominence in his violent dan wei, teaching slaves twice his age to fashion crude air filtration units, reconstitute long-expired rations, subdue a prison sentrihound long enough to extract its razor synthclaws and bleed the animal quietly.

Stock’s fate would have been the same as the rest of the slaves, had a routine neural mapping not flagged the child’s physical and mental attributes as meeting or exceeding the Consortium’s most stringent cadet requirements. So dramatic were Stock’s scans that the navy sent Chion 16 its first A-Sigma communiqué, ordering the boy to be quarantined until he could be transferred to the next outbound cargo frigate and taken to Ariston Prime, a high-grav moon home to the Fleet Academy.

It was there, during the early years of the war, that Stock learned the honor and price of command, as daily casualty reports streamed down the holoscreens and reminded each cadet of his future post.

Ten years after enrolling at the Academy, Stock’s graduation procession had taken only a few steps when two plainclothes MPs ushered him into a gravlift to the commandant’s office, where Col. Lytix presented Stock’s commission and his first orders: take command of the struggling counter-attack on Elythion.

He saluted the Colonel and risked a smile. He would have to hustle to make the day’s last transport off moon for registry at the Fleet Beacon. After that it would be a just a month in statisleep before reaching the Battle for Braxis.