Armournauts

I came to my profession late, and for the most part I earned my fortune sitting at catered guard posts or air-conditioned checkpoints. When I fought, I made sure I was in a vehicle, away from the charge, and holding enough of an advance to pay my people if we had to leave.

You’re either a fierce mercenary or a wealthy one. War is too unpredictable. A stray bullet here, a cluster munition there, and suddenly your number is up. If you’re lucky, you go in a way that gives your friends a chance to get out.

Some very special Armournauts are both fierce and wealthy. These people ruin the sweet gig the rest of us have going. Worse, you won’t know if you’re facing the next Zunbox until it’s too late and suddenly you’re a very surprised pink mist.

There’s no reliable way to spot the real thing. You can, however, spot the fake. If someone’s monologuing at you, like I’m doing now, they’re not it. What you’ve found is someone who grew up watching Light Speed Reed and decided to play space cowboy out of some creepy sexual urge.

You may shoot these people at your leisure. They’ll probably be most upset that you interrupted their cool-ass fucking backstory.

Zunbox

Zunbox is generally considered the greatest Armournaut of all time, and most contemporary close-quarters MOA doctrine still carries his influence. He started his own band on Morganna at fifteen, fighting as the Imp: a tiny, vicious pilot who stripped armour and ranged weapons from his MOA in favour of speed, ambushes, grappling, and hitting enemy vehicles with his own machine. It worked brilliantly for him. Less so for the recruits who tried to imitate him and died.

At twenty, Zunbox returned to Morganna intending to learn strategy and discovered he first had to learn to read. A Gene Flagellant pandit taught him, introduced him to the Utopian Path, and sent him across Morganna’s poisoned equatorial wastes in search of forgotten knowledge. Zunbox returned two years later alone, dragging the bodies of his friends and carrying nothing worth sharing. The pandit was dead. The Imp disappeared with him.

The Clan Wars brought Zunbox back. Fighting beside the Gunmonks, he rebuilt his old style around discipline, martial technique, and the use of the entire battlefield as a weapon. MOAs were made to grapple, throw, break joints, exploit wreckage, and turn enemy machines against one another. Combined with his old speed and aggression, this became Zunbox Style. His new band, the Bloody Monks, carried it into the Jambles and became so feared that rivals routinely abandoned contracts rather than face them.

Now sixty-five, Zunbox has spent decades earning billions, protecting Flagellant-aligned colonies, and spreading the Utopian Path. Some think he intends to found a nation. Maybe. What matters to you is simpler: he is still considered the most dangerous MOA pilot alive. If intelligence says Zunbox is on the other contract, congratulations. You have just been given permission to leave.

Gellica

A fighter ace contracted to the powerful Seaside private military corporation, Gellica has flown more than two thousand combat sorties.

Her career began in the high-stakes world of aerospace racing, a background evident in her unparalleled marriage of aggression and grace in flight. She pilots a custom-made, blisteringly fast fighter craft called Cicindela, now as much a part of her legend as the pilot herself.

Her legend also includes a famous point of defiance. Gellica lost her left foot and refuses to have it replaced with a graft. She keeps the injury as a stark reminder of her mortality and a symbol of the will that has kept her alive in the deadliest skies.

Yoyo

Yoyo is an Averi noblewoman and industrial magnate whose empire is built on grown organs and purposed lifeforms. She serves as Sworn Spear to the Peahen Empress of Magnasanti.

Tasked with securing an Averi presence in the Frontier, Yoyo commands a private army of slave-soldiers and pursues threats to Averi colonial claims with ruthless corporate efficiency.

She is less a colonist than a warning of what a resurgent Averi state might look like.

Yagan

Yagan is the commander of the Farimba Extremophiles and is regarded as history's greatest warrior. For seventy-five years, he has waged a longitudinal war against the Yscenic occupiers of Odelke, hibernating for decades and waking only to lead raids, assassinations, and sabotage missions.

His unit survives without resupply by scavenging enemy materiel and cultivating GELF technology, including living skins that bond with the wearer to enhance physical prowess, enable survival in hostile environments, and permit years of hibernation. What the Extremophiles cannot scavenge, they grow. The Gelfbow is a noted favourite.

Yagan is not really an Armournaut, though many have offered fortunes to his government to utilise him and his unit as such. He has made it clear that he will leave Odelke only once the Yscenic occupiers have been destroyed.

Reida

Reida is twenty-three years old and already a legend, which makes me feel ancient and useless. She is an elite interfacer and MOA pilot rumoured to have studied under Superhot, history's greatest interfacer, assuming Superhot actually existed.

Her signature tactic is to hack every drone on the battlefield and turn them against their owners, overwhelming enemies with their own machines. She has stolen enough vehicles through systems intrusion to fill a pirate's hoard, and her band, the Truants, operates with the kind of disruptive efficiency that only someone young, brilliant, and utterly convinced of their own immortality can manage.

Lord Molotov

Lord Molotov is a solitary Armournaut infamous across the Jambles for one thing: fire.

Called the Vampire of the Battlefield, he strikes at night or beneath heavy smoke, using a unique fireproof GELF skin that has inspired countless imitators. No one has seen the face beneath it.

He has no known band and appears without warning, burns through a target, then disappears. Some say he is an exiled Venti prince. Others think the GELF skin drove him mad. Personally, I think cruelty explains plenty without inventing mythology.

Morocco

Morocco is a candidate for the Temple Diaconate, which means he is supposed to be a scholar. Naturally, he decided that was boring and went to study pre-Scattering technology on the wandering planetoid of Dreaver.

Unlike most Diacons, Morocco does not wear bulky power armour. He prefers faster, more agile exosuits that let him move like a dancer and hit like a truck. He is only an adequate interfacer, but up close he is lethal. His martial arts, amplified by his exosuit, make him a devastating hand-to-hand combatant.

He leads a small band of Armournauts who serve as Dreaver's local militia and take occasional off-world contracts to fund their research. They are quiet, competent, and keep to themselves.

Little Symar

Little Symar was named for a revolutionary who dreamed of a unified homeland for speciated and anthrodivergent peoples. Born amid the infighting that consumed the GELF factions, he found his calling as a tank commander.

His genius was learning how to hunt MOAs with conventional armour. He taught those tactics to his band, turning them into a lethal wolf pack capable of outmanoeuvring machines most crews considered untouchable.

Every contract now funds his real objective: stabilising vulnerable GELF communes across the Frontier. Principled, deadly, and successful. More than most of us manage.

Cassani

Cassani is a Venti princess who fled Adria with a hefty chunk of the family treasury, which is the smartest thing any Venti noble has ever done.

She forged her own legend far from the palace, with a small band operating from a single well-equipped vessel. They are already famous across the Jambles, for better or worse. Cassani earned her reputation in the brutal Bunker Conflicts on Brogno, where her tactical genius drew comparisons to the legendary commander Stel.

She is an expert markswoman, but her true mastery is in her MOA. Surveillance vids show her placing cannon fire with surgical precision.

Paren

Paren is a gifted interfacer in Princess Cassani’s band and, like me, a Temple dropout. Unlike me, he is actually useful in a combat situation.

He learned electronic warfare on Semaj by scavenging technology from the machines trying to kill him. Now, encased in durable Diacon armour, he jams communications, blinds sensors, disrupts formations, and turns the battlefield into electronic noise.

Cassani delivers the killing blow. Paren makes sure the enemy never sees it coming.