Echo-1 The Whale

11: The Officers

The Zero-G commando battalion was three thousand strong with standard military personality programming. They followed orders and fought to the death. They were physically similar to myself with two variations of unit type.

The grunts, designed for physical combat, were the larger in size. The double-wide refrigerators of muscle could walk through walls and tear things apart with their bare hands. They stood three meters tall with shoulders a meter across. They could wrestle one of Veronica's monster polar bears and win. They were hulking beings, more like giant gorillas than men. Programmed as assault troopers and police officers, they were the true keepers of the status quo. Only activated when needed for combat, Zero-G grunts were placed strategically around the ship in storage lockers; always waiting, armed, fully powered, and ready for anything.

Sergeant Death, aka Dr. Death, was the grunt unit commanding officer. When he was a human in Echo-1, he was Nathaniel Det, a US Marine special forces soldier with a decade of black ops experience. He once cut a man in half with a machete. Det never failed to complete a mission and boasted a list of kills a mile long. From any normal human perspective, this man was a serial killer. 

He was utterly devoted to the Corps, lived to follow orders, and after being pulled out of the system in his sleep one night he never looked back. He found his home in space and his loyalty to the command structure of the Banga was equal to that of his pre-programmed counterparts. 

Det was placed into a grunt soldier body type but wasn't satisfied with basic unit features. He had several mechanical enhancements applied to his new form. All his internal structures were replaced with the same alloy as the ship's hull with backup hydraulic systems in his arms and legs and a retractable blade that expands out of his left forearm, like some kind of comic book monster. His skull had a built-in helmet. 

Dr. Death's only weakness, he didn't like swimming; he sank.

The second Zero-G unit type were the pilots. I had a pilot type body. Pilots were mixed gender, unlike the all-male grunt forces. They specialized in machinery, equipment, weapons, and data analysis. With heightened reflexes, the pilots were capable of superb real-time interfaces with computer-controlled devices. They kept a constant link to the ship's supercomputer to draw on the sensor array and obtain complete situational awareness.

Lieutenant X, aka Cindy X, or just plain X was the point commander of all the pilots. In Echo-1 she was Cindy Pelton a motocross champion, stunt driver, X Games initiator, and all-around thrill seeker. She came from a small American town in Texas and is generally considered to be a kind-hearted rabble-rouser with a mean streak a mile long. 

Jonas was experimenting with personality types to insert into the Zero-Gs and she turned out to be a big success. X took to space fighter piloting like a duck to water. Her tendency to push the limits of machinery gave her an edge over even the best pre-programmed artificial or droid pilots. Of the three human profile Zero-G commanders she was the most accessible, but you'd have to take a ride with her before she trusted you.

Major Uzi Anger (no one called him Anger to his face), aka Major Uzi, or just Uzi had a military dossier that spanned a lifetime. Uzi was the head of all the onboard commandos and the ship's defense systems. He was considered the fourth highest-ranking individual on the ship and he reported directly to Jonas on most matters. He was primarily a military action man, though his love for covert operations allowed him to take pleasure in being part of Jonas' more off the books philanthropic adventures. 

In Echo-1, he was General Uziel Unger, a decorated tank commander in the Israel/Arab 6-day war, he became a spy for the Mossad, and went on to become director of international espionage. After his tenure in the Israeli army, he trained American as well as Russian Special Forces. He was known to be personal friends with US and Russian presidents through contacts in both the C.I.A. and the KGB. He wrote 4 books on cold war covert operations, had been shot six times, and even took part in one of the first covert operations in space when he posed as a Russian scientist aboard the International Space Station.