Gay science fiction: meet the characters inhabiting the NARC Universe

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Part One: the NARC Complement

Command Rank NARC Officers

The most fascinating, unique and challenging aspect of the NARC series is that the carriers run with not one but two command rank officers, full captains, where neither is subordinate to the other. At first (and especially to readers who have spent decades looking at TV science fiction, which is, even now, based on the mid-20th century military and therefore 'yessir, nossir' 'rank happy') the concept can be daunting and difficult to get the head around. But give it a shot, and when the system drops into place — nothing else will make sense. Bear in mind that the NARC stories take place four hundred years in the future; change has taken place. NARC is not the military, but a paramilitary, not based on the hierarchies of any branch of the armed forces. Get away from the army (STARSHIP TROOPERS), the marines (ALIENS), air force (STARGATE), navy (STAR TREK), and even the police (JUDGE DREDD) and the sheriff's department (OUTLAND). Physically throw your mind four centuries in the future, allow for radical change, and drop the hard-line military approach. And to grasp why it's not only beneficial, but critical to have two full command rankers aboard in these stories, see the first sidebar on Aricia Gavriel's Jarrat & Stone File. There it is in a nutshell ... get your head around this, and nothing less will ever make sense.

Captain Kevin (J) Jarrat and Captain R.J. 'Stoney' Stone
Partnered two years before the series begins, Jarrat and Stone are the hub around which the stories revolve. They are 'un-engineered' homeworlds stock, but Jarrat was born on the halfway station of Sheckley — a foundling, apparently abandoned child who has no real idea who his parents were. The name of 'Jarrat' is an astute guess; his father could well have been Keith Jarrat ... read the story of his background in Stopover, plus parts of Death's Head and Aphelion. Robert Jeremy Stone ('Jerry' to his family; 'Stoney' to his friends) was born in London and raised in that city and Barcelona, Spain. His family were wealthy, but he found himself cut out of the inheritance when, as a teen, he refused to have the course of his life dictated. He followed his vocation into Tactical, and then into NARC. Read his story in Aphelion, where he and Jarrat return to earth ... meet Soney's obnoxious young cousin, Brad, visit the family's mansion in the hills above Barcelona, and fly an ultralite, in a short break in the action. By contrast to Stone, Kevin Jarrat is a kid who came up from nowhere. His path out of Halfway and into NARC was the army. At 17 he enlisted when an army carrier was passing through, and nine years later, when he applied to NARC with a view to transfer, he was accepted. His military career was brilliant, if patchwork; Jarrat was highly intelligent, superbly fit, innovative, with little regard for authority figures. In short — like Stone — he was just what NARC is looking for. The backstory on Jarrat and Stone is, by now, vast. Rather than repeat it here, link over to the Jarrat and Stone File and read the whole thing. Come back when you're done, and meet the other characters...

Captain E. L 'Gene' Cantrell
Eugene Lewis Cantrell was 'in at the birth' of NARC, with a carrier command in the department's first decade. He was responsible for the original Aphelion bust, destroying the cartel in the Jupiter System, 25 years before the current stories. Aphelion is back ... and Cantrell has spent six months assigned to the carrier NARC-Athena as an observer, breathing down the necks of Jarrat and Stone while they prove themselves in action, after the empathic bonding. Cantrell has been waiting for the launch of the carrier NARC-Huntress, which will be his final field command. He's running up to retirement now, but there's mileage to be made yet, as he demonstrates when he goes into deep cover in Aphelion. Cantrell is an old colleague of Billy Dupre, and a strong supporter of Jarrat and Stone, with whom he has worked for some time. We first meet him at the end of Death's Head, when he comes aboard with Colonel Dupre in the aftermath of the near-fatal assignment, and the empathic bonding which could easily have spelled the end for Jarrat's and Stones's careers. Gene Cantrell has been a good friend to them, often acting as mediator between them and the 'brass' back on Darwin's World, and at Earth Central.

Captain Scott N. Auel
Scott Nathan Auel is a few years older than Jarrat and Stone, and waiting for a command. He was certain the NARC-Huntress would be his ship, in partnership with Gene Cantrell, and was surprised and disappointed when Mischa Petrov was promoted and assigned ahead of him. Auel was set aside in favor of Petrov due to his partnership with Captain Janine Cruz. For some months he has been serving in a support capacity, covering for command rank officers on furlough. For example, in Death's Head he is coming aboard the NARC-Athena to lead Petrov while Jarrat and Stone take a welcome, and well-earned furlough. Meet Auel, one-on-one, in Aphelion, at the Mars facility and at Kure, Japan, at the launch of the NARC-Huntress. (Readers instantly warmed to Scott Auel; someone said he strikes you as a kind of "younger George Clooney," and we can appreciate that. Auel will be back.)

Captain Janine A. Cruz
An officer with a lot to prove — and the effort costs her career. She allowed herself to be coerced by NARC R&D into being Angel addicted in the course of an experiment to prove whether the Jarrat and Stone empathic bond can be repeated. Harry Del continues to refuse to participate in the experiment, though he offers to treat Cruz when her condition is suitable. In the meantime, her life has become that of an Angel user, and she remains an inmate of the NARC facility outside Chryse, Mars. Read this story in Aphelion. Cruz has been 'gene tweaked' and genetically modified to make herself physically astonishing. Her whole 'MO' as a NARC captain (who, at that rank will automatically be doing deep cover work), is that of the amazon, the siren, the 'shero' who is overwhelming to the competition in every department. She was somewhat cautiously partnered with Scott Auel because Auel's preference is for men, and since her astonishing 'charms' are wasted on him, they can develop a sound working relationship.

NARC-Athena Personnel
The crew aboard a carrier are divided into units, and the units mesh into a smoothly-working whole. The day-to-day business of 'driving the ship,' for instance is performed by a Starfleet crew. Three shifts of carrier pilots and top-line technicians are 'seconded' from Fleet — and they apply for the NARC transfer. Usually, someone like Curt Gable or Helen Archer will have lost a lover or relative (Archer lost her son, Gable watched his kid sister die), and the Angelwar becomes a personal vocation. The Fleet carrier crews are not just assigned to NARC, they're champing at the bit to transfer. They leave the militarized services and slide into a paramilitary where no one says 'sir' (or if you want to, don't say it too often, because in NARC it's going to sound like you're trying to be funny, or yank someone's chain). NARC people have no time or patience with rank, which makes powerful sense in a service where everyone is riding a vocation, everyone is a mission specialist in what he or she does, and a considerable number of these specialists are civilians anyway! Note especially that in NARC, officers don't wear uniforms. There's a dress uniform for special occasions, when one can 'fly the company flag' if one desires; but there's no day-to-day officers' uniform. The 'yessir, nossir,' 'rank happy' behavior is actively discouraged, just as highly-qualified specialists are encouraged to think for themselves, conference with their peers, hash out solutions to critical problems, and ACT.

The carriers, therefore, are operated by professional Fleet pilots and techs, leaving the NARC business to NARC people. This is where Jarrat, Stone, Reardon, Gable, Petrov, Budweisser, McKinnen, Del and the others enter the arena. Their province is NARC: the decisions that make an assignment come together (and also fall apart), the wrangling of intelligence data, the support for missions in the field, some of which can be months long and tedious, while others are minutes long and lethal.

And there's another level, or layer, in the NARC service — but it's important to remember that no level is higher or lower than the others, there's no fixed, rigid hierarchy. Every individual in the department has a critical part to play. Remove, or denigrate, any one of them, and the whole house of cards comes down. Absolutely pivotal to NARC's operation is the descant units. They're four units, each 25-man strong, and they're NARC's 'front line troops,' with the callsigns of Blue, Gold, Green and Red Raven. These are the so-called 'riot troops,' who jump from their respective gunships into the teeth of whatever battle. They're front and center, in the firing line; they're armed and armored. And, armor or no, they're routinely cut down. Most of NARC's casualties are sustained in the ranks of the descant units on the front lines ... and among captains, whose work takes them into 'deep cover' assignments where they will be out of communication with the carrier for days, weeks, longer, and where they can be maimed, killed, in line of duty. If the work were not a vocation, none of these people would do it. But every individual on the carrier needs to be there.

Surgeon Captain Kipling Francis 'Kip' Reardon
Career flight surgeon with decades of experience on Starfleet and NARC carriers ... rugby and aeroball fan ... family man with a grown-up family back on Mars. The Reardon clan are from a small agricultural town, Lassiter, but Kip will likely retire to Darwin's World. His work with NARC has taken him across the colonies and into every kind of challenge, the most demanding of which was treating an Angel-addicted NARC captain, in Death's Head.

Executive Officer, Ops Room Controller Mikhail 'Mischa' Petrov
Directly in line for promotion (and firmly believing it's already long overdue) is the ill-tempered, impatient and somewhat frustrated Russian, Mischa Petrov. A lot of anger is simmering under Petrov's cap; like all NARC people, he feels the vocation keenly ... like few other NARCs, he's so eager for promotion, he can taste it. The ambition to succeed is what drives him, and what makes him short-tempered and often unpleasant to deal with. He can be foul mouthed, and has an unpredictable streak which makes Jarrat and Stone doubt his ability to command. Aboard the NARC-Athena, he's the absolute opposite of Curt Gable, and 'the guy you love to hate.'

Carrier's Second Officer and Standby Pilot, Lt. Curt Gable
He's young, bright, and keen. Described as the unit's 'glamor boy pilot,' he transferred over from Fleet only shortly before the story begins in Death's Head. Curt had watched his kid sister die a very ugly 'Angeldeath,' and the vocation was born in him. A transfer to NARC from Fleet put him in the 'gear train' of the carrier's command crew. (Notice than although Surgeon Captain Kip Reardon is highly-ranked, he's not part of the command crew, any more than is Karl Budweisser.) His direct superior is Mischa Petrov, the XO aboard the NARC-Athena until his promotion at the end of Aphelion, when Gable is promoted to XO. And if he stays with NARC, in a couple of years of being the understudy to captains like Jarrat and Stone, Cantrell and Auel, he'll be in line for a promotion himself. It's not actually stated in the books, but the subtle inference is that Gable comes from a 'good background,' like Stone. His family has money, he had the education to become a fighter pilot and be on his way up through Fleet.

Carrier Pilot Colonel Helen Archer (seconded to NARC from Starfleet)
Helen Archer has been flying carriers for fifteen years. Her career in Starfleet 'heavies' took her away from her family in the critical years when her son was a teen, and she blames herself for his descent into Angel abuse. His death sent her to NARC on the same kind of vocation which took Stone, Gable, and most other 'NARCs' into the service. Read her story in Equinox.

Carrier Chief Engineer Lieutenant Karl Budweisser
A Canadian, NARC veteran with twenty years, Budweisser is gruff, gritty ... and if he can't fix it, it can't be fixed. He's a hyperdrive specialist, with a knowledge of NARC carriers more profound than the engineers who designed them. (And he's described as sounding like he just walked out of The Red Green Show!) Before transferring to NARC he spent many years aboard army carriers, and he has brought to NARC much of the down to earth, even cynical approach of the other service. Budweisser's experience is vast, but possibly his most critical facet is that he knows where that experience ends ... and when to call in a specialist. This is how civilian Yvette McKinnen joined the crew of the NARC-Athena. This story is pivotal to Equinox.

Civilian Cyber-Sciences Specialist Yvette McKinnen
She's very French, very chic, and very civilian ... and if she didn't work for NARC she would probably be in prison! Her forte is cyber systems. She knows how they tick, how to build them — also how to deconstruct and hack them. The extent of her experience becomes clear in Equinox, but in Aphelion we glimpse a little of her background. And it's not all entirely legal. We guess that she was one of those cyber geniuses who can either be slammed into a cell and the door locked for twenty years, or recruited. McKinnen was placed in charge of data wrangling on the Jarrat and Stone project (when NARC Research and development set out to 'destruction test' them). It's the last place McKinnen wants to be, though she comes to see the sense of the project. Her own surveillance project was firmly founded in artificial intelligence and biocyber systems; it was put on indefinite hiatus when the Jarrat and Stone empathy came along, and McKinnen is understandably resentful.

Civilian Surgical Specialist Harry Del
The NARC-Athena's other civilian specialist is one of the rare Rethan mutoids, specifically the 87/T mutation. The 'T' probably stands for 'telekinesis' but Harry Del is a healer. He has the ability to 'see' into a damaged brain, or organ, and to weave neurons back together, take apart tissue damage, crochet nerves into a working whole ... and the instrument used is his mind. He's telekinetic on the molecular scale, and, as a powerful empath he can literally feel someone else's tissues, their wounds, and deep injury. Such as Angel addiction, which causes massive tissue damage on which the healer can focus. This story is pivotal to Death's Head, where Harry is the only reason either Jarrat or Stone is still alive. But Harry Del is more. He qualified as a surgeon (even though Earth itself does not recognize his colonial license), and he's also a master biochemist. Harry's ambition is to develop a 'blocker' for the lethal Angel molecule. And he was well on the way, when his home, and lab, were destroyed in Death's Head. Harry's relationship with NARC is stormy. He does his best work in conjunction with Kip Reardon, but R&D are demanding that he perform work which is anathema. Read this story in Scorpio. And in Aphelion Harry Del reaches the end of his rope.

Minor characters abound throughout the books. Such as Field Engineer Lieutenant Ed Suzuki. He's Budweisser's gunship counterpart, another veteran with decades of experience in Army and NARC gunships. He is often called upon to retrieve the wreckage after an assignment, and when the gunships are beat up, it will be Suzuki working around the clock, with or without Budweisser's input. And Chief Carrier Air-traffic Controller, Lt. Krystal Jones, another Starfleet transfer. She 'came over' to NARC fast when strings were pulled by an influential uncle; her husband had become an Angel statistic. And Chief of the NARC-Athena's Infirmary support staff, Lt. Jagruti Patak. She's Mumbai bred and born, and another Starfleet transfer. But the next major group of characters are the 'big boys' themselves ... the descant troops: the Ravens.

The Blue Ravens
Blue Raven is the carrier's 'elite' descant unit. They're 25 men, a close-knit squad who live, work, play and fight together aboard the carrier and their gunship. (A gunship is a massive vessel, armed, armored, and enabled for interplanetary flight. Big enough to take fighter planes aboard, and have its own engineering and medical facilities.) Of the 25 Ravens who make up a descant unit, 15 are general troops, two are medics, two are field engineers, two are specialist pilots (one of whom will be the gunship pilot), two are communications specialists, one is a demolition specialist, and one is a hazmat specialist. Every member of the unit will enter the field of combat in armor; and in special circumstances, the entire unit will deploy. In a critical situation, the Ravens can and do put 25 men 'groundside' per unit, and there are four units (Blue, Gold, Green and Red Raven).

Blue Raven 6 Blue Raven Leader, Descant Trooper Chief Sgt. James Cargill 'Gil' or 'Gilly' Cronin
Towering even over Stone, Gil Cronin is a giant of a man with an equally big personality. He's ex-Army, like Jarrat (though the similarity between them ends there!), and has served aboard the NARC-Athena since long before Jarrat arrived aboard. He and Stone are old friends, and Cronin soon came to invest implicit faith in Jarrat, also. His own partner is Blue Raven 7, Joe Ramos. Cronin is the unit's master gunner, and a trophy-winner in inter-service events. He's originally from Chicago, but in the last decade has called various carriers, and Darwin's World, home. Meet him in Death's Head, in the field ... get to know him socially in Scorpio. Cronin is dedicated to the last degree, and spends a good deal of his time 'pumping iron' to maintain a formidable physique. He shaves his head, and wears diamond ear studs.

Blue Raven 7, deomolition specialist Joseph 'Indian Joe' Ramos
The name tells all. Joe Ramos is from a small town on the border where Nevada becomes California, and he's of Native American and Hispanic descent. Ramos still calls Earth home, and will return there when he leaves NARC. On furlough in the homeworlds, he and his partner, Gil Cronin, spent their downtime in the American Southwest, with Ramos's people. These two are at the spearhead of the carrier's elite descant unit, and Ramos is Blue Raven's demolition specialist. He wears his hair long, braided, and is as lethal at the poker table as in the urban battlefield.

Other Blue Ravens of especial note are Blue Raven 24, Jon Semler, the unit's chief medic, in charge of the gunship's infirmary; Blue Raven 25, Ed Munro, the unit's field medic; Blue Raven 21, Bill Parish, unit hazmat specialist, who will be called on to deal with radioactive and chemical spills, and their effects on the men and machinery; Blue Raven 22, field engineer Nick Kapshaw, who played a vital role in keeping the city of Inquanoc from turning into a mountain of rubble in Scorpio; and since the first story a major player has been the Gunship Pilot, Blue Raven 19, Sgt. Tanya Reynolds — the only woman in the unit, and deployed only rarely since she belongs in the air, flying topcover for the unit. She's from Earth, and returns there occasionally when domestic crises demand.

The Gold Ravens are the first level of backup for Blue. When two gunships deploy, it's usually Blue and Gold in the forefront of the action with Green and Red on launch alert. Blue and Gold are deployed in the urban battlefield, where the pilots and riot troops are most experienced. Green and Red are most usually held in reserve to defend the carrier itself, and provide backup for the premier squads. In command of Gold Raven for years now is Gold Raven 9, Sgt. Sven Hellstrom. With the same stature as Cronin and Ramos, and the same physical toughness, he's ex-army and an obvious recruit to the Raven units. He's also much more laconic and laid back than many of the others. He's from Darwin's World, but his parents were born in Norway and 'followed the work' into the colonies. Gold Raven 5 is the unit's tactical specialist, Buck Dumas. If Cronin is Blue Raven's master gunner, Dumas is Gold Raven's. He's backed up by men like Gold Raven 4, Brad Cooper and Gold Raven 19, Ron Yu, who found themselves unexpectedly back on the job in Stopover. Then, importantly, there's —

Gunship pilot, Gold Raven 17 Sgt. Evelyn Lang
Eve Lang only became the Gold Ravens' pilot when Pilot Karoda was killed in the Jupiter system in Aphelion, but she had been almost as affiliated to NARC as Harry Del since the story began in Death's Head. It was Lang who quite literally scraped Jarrat off the ground in an alleyway in the portside city of Chell. She had parked the skyvan there; and it was very close to the 'van where Jarrat was dumped, left for dead. Eve Lang is from 'Bally,' the town and region of Ballyntyre, far from the centers of civilization, on Rethan, where NARC had undertaken the Death's Head assignment. The job almost cost Jarrat and Stone their lives, and their survival came down to the healer, Harry Del ... Eve Lang's old friend. She joined the NARC-Athena in Scorpio, flying for Blue Raven while their usual pilot, Tan Reynolds, was home on Earth with domestic crises. With Reynolds's return and Karoda's death, Lang was permanently assigned to Gold Raven, and was indispensable in the action of Aphelion, where no one was certain who could be trusted, even inside the department itself.

THE NARC BRASS

Colonel William 'Billy' Dupre
Commnding the quadrant between the homeworlds and the Cygnus Colonies is the Barbadian Colonel William 'Billy' Dupre. Like his longtime friend Gene Cantrell, he was among the first people to 'come over' to NARC, and at sixty years of age he is now among the department's most senior officers. There is no higher authority in the colonies, but even Dupre has his 'bosses' in the homeworlds. He worries that the homeworlds are so far away, with a month-long signal lag, and the people of Earth are extremely out of touch with their colonial cousins, whom they have come to deride. Dupre is unlikely to return to Earth when he retires. For the moment, he is the buffer between NARC Central, in Chicago, and the carriers which work the quadrant, and when he reports to a superior at all, it's to the offices of...

General Sebastian Gaunt and Colonel Mayling Gretski
They're homeworlders, from rich families and high social circles. What they know of citybottom even on their own world is little; what they know of the colonies is even less. Gaunt is on the cusp of retirement, and it seems Gretski will replace him. She appears to have more concern for ordinary people, and more grasp of their plight, than Gaunt possesses, but until Gaunt stands down she can do little more than mediate. Also, Gaunt is caught in a political trap. His rank, his position, places him in the unenviable role of liaison between the paramilitary department itself on one side and its civilian oversight on the other. His role is an almost political one, and he is under considerable pressure from both sides of the field. Ultimately, NARC's bosses are senators and congressmen both from Earth and the colonies, and these people come in all kinds, from Lenore Maddigan in Equinox to Cassius Brand in Scorpio and Aphelion, whose son has been sealed in a cryogen tank for twenty-five years, technically Angel-dead ... but can Harry Del bring him back from the edge, as he did for Stoney? And it seems NARC's greatest enemies are not among the Angel syndicates ... they are among the senators of Earth itself.

In Part 2: the Tactical Colonels (Stacy, Duggan, Janssen, Friedman, Voight), and the civilian affiliates (Jesse Lawrence, Tim Kwei and others). In Part 3: the other side of the fence (Mavvik, Dorne, Michiko, Denehy, Assante, and a lot more guys you love to hate!)

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