chelsey jensen

He doesn’t remember going down. Short-term memory loss; it’s not uncommon with a concussion, which is what he’s pretty sure he got. Serves him right. He knew Bernhard’s blackcollars weren’t trustworthy. He shouldn’t have let any of them get close.

What completely nails him to the floor, though, is that he wakes up in his room – at the Plinry lodge. An hour out from Capstone. Not in an infirmary, not with any visible injuries, not even with a headache from getting (he assumes) smashed in the head by a fellow blackcollar. There’s no weakness in his limbs, the sort of thing that would show up after weeks of inactivity, and it would take weeks to get him back here.

Even weirder is when he goes to the door, eases it open… and finds a completely different hallway attached. A longer glance out the window shows blank stars, not the mountains. This is something else. This has been prepared, and it’s been prepared meticulously, down to the last detail. Including the specific way Jensen has left a few strands of hair stuck in one of the drawers. It’s unreal. It’s inhuman, in the perfection of the duplication, so much so that Jensen would swear it’s the original, just transported somewhere else.

Then, he finds the device.

He closes the door securely, and reads. He pages back. He pages forward. He looks for references to blackcollars, Earth, Plinry, Ryqril… only finds one out of four. But this is clearly a prison of some kind, in space, and there’s a lot of chatter that he can’t parse. Code names, maybe, in-group slang. This could all be misinformation, but it’s too broad, too chaotic to make that the simplest explanation. Weird way to run a prison, thinks Jensen, but it almost doesn’t matter: he’s not planning on staying.

He doesn’t have time for drawn-out plans. He’s not going to wait for them to realize how dangerous he is and put more security on him. He goes into action, a few hours after reading back, memorizing as much as he can about the people he’s seen.

1-2. Jim and Orpheus --

The first two that he encounters are on patrol, which is what he expected. Since they’re the ones looking out for troublemaking, they should be the ones taken down first. He has no weapons, no flexarmor, so he eases the dragonhead ring off of his finger, pinching it in a shuriken-style grip.

He slips out from around the corner, throws the ring sharp and fast, and it finds its mark in the throat of the taller one. Not the ideal ambush position; Jensen has to take several long steps to get to the second, and it’s just enough for the man to pull out a very bizarrely-designed laser.

Jensen doesn’t wait around to see what the gun does. He comes in with a kick to the solar plexus, a hand batting the gun to the side; a quick spin, and he squarely nails the man, knocking him hard into the wall. Not quite with bone-breaking force, but that comes soon after, with the follow-up. Then a hit to the throat, all of this so quick that the gun is only now hitting the ground. The man is choking, but he rallies valiantly, with a determination Jensen might have admired in other, less pissed-off circumstances. A quick hit breaks the man’s nose, blinds him enough that Jensen can knock him against the wall, at an angle to break his neck.

He goes for the first man, then, dead from the ring hit, and digs the bloodied ring from his throat.

Pats the two down, avoiding the laser, because he doesn’t know what kind of countermeasures or tracking might be involved. Blackcollars aren’t much for guns, anyway. Neither yields anything terribly useful, and Jensen grimaces as he slides the ring into his palm. He tosses the laser into an unoccupied room – might as well cause as much trouble as possible – and then looks up to see –

3. Letty --

-- a woman rounding the corner. He recognizes her, thinks warden, and she goes for an old slugthrower, by the looks of it, at her hip. If he had flexarmor, he’d go for her directly, but he’s in cloth that abruptly feels very, very thin. He pushes off and rolls to the side, fast enough that she doesn’t get his center of mass, but he’s clipped in the arm.

He feels sluggish, and it’s now apparent to him that he’s not moving as fast as usual. Drugs? He should be feeling more effects, if that were the case.

He comes to his feet in the unoccupied cabin, and goes for the laser. He sends a couple precise shots around the corner – a little surprised that it wasn’t keyed to its owner – and when she ducks back, he goes for her. She has ordinary reflexes, clearly, but it’s still just enough time for her to bring the gun up again. He tosses the ring straight at her eyes. This time, it’s not nearly as good of a throw, not prepared, and when she flinches back, it gets her on the brow. Then he’s on her, and a flurry of moves later, she’s down too. Again: determined, tougher than he expects, and his heartrate’s up from more than just adrenaline by the time she’s dead.

A quick search this time yields pay dirt: a pocket knife. Small, but better than nothing. He checks his arm. Bleeding freely, but not bleeding that fast. He’ll be fine.

Now he has to act fast. It won’t be too long before alarm spreads through this whole place.

4. Cold --

By this time, he’s crept from the bottom of the ship to the top, hiding when people pass, slipping by using the stairwell. It’s not easy; there are more people here than he thought. It’s like a miniature town, in its own right. But he hasn’t found a single door unaccounted for, hasn’t located any bridge or control center beyond the engine room. Not even an airlock. And, from the top, it really seems like the damn thing is actually shaped like a boat.

The knife isn’t as good as shuriken, and not really balanced for throwing, but it’s good enough.

“Hey!”

Jensen is moving split seconds after the word, taking a few steps, pushing off of a bench.

“What are you—”

It’s almost as if the man actually expects Jensen to wait and listen to what he’s about to say. The attack takes him completely by surprise, and there’s a knife in his throat before he gets any other words out.

This one is subjected to another search. Jensen comes up only with one gun, an over-wrought piece of equipment that looks, honestly, kind of ridiculous. He Frisbees it over the rail, tossing it, effectively, off the Barge. (And looks after, to see if it impacts an energy shield or canopy. It doesn’t; not within visual range. And that, maybe, is the thing that brings it home to Jensen how far afield he is right now.)

5. Ricki --

The next one he hits on the stairs. He’s heading back to the first floor, to hide, to clean up, lick his wounds, figure out what to do next. The way out isn’t immediately apparent, and he needs time to digest the information he’s acquired. He should be able to conceal himself in one of the abandoned cabins.

He hears the other man before he sees him, flattens against the wall, waits until he can hear footsteps on the turn below, on the stairs. He takes one step, snags the rail with the curve of his hand, and swings over the rail completely, letting go at the bottom edge of the curve with enough momentum to impact with the man feet-first.

They both sprawl, but it's Jensen who recovers first. The man goes for another slugthrower; Jensen's prepared, this time, and is on him before he has a chance to fire.

He's honestly surprised by the turn the fight takes next. Instead of holding on to the gun, and signing his own death warrant, the man lets go and counters Jensen's move instead, letting the gun clatter down the steps to the landing. They exchange rapid blows. Ordinarily, it wouldn't be a fight that presents much of a challenge for Jensen. But here, slowed, distracted and in pain, he's just slow enough that Ricki catches him hard enough to bruise, to twist an ankle against the stairs, before Jensen can plant the knife in his chest and break his neck.

His hands are shaking as he retrieves the knife.

X. Takedown --

So the word has gone out. Once he bursts out of the stairwell, a floor below where he planned, they come for him. One lights up a – a laser sword? and the other two bring to bear more conventional weapons. Though the third has… horns? Could he be an alien, while looking so human? Or is it a sort of genetic modification or mutation?

Not much he can do: he meets them head-on. The second gets off two shots before Jensen is in the thick of it -- one grazes the side of his skull.

This one would be a fight for the training logs, Jensen thinks, somewhere in the back of his mind. He’s not at his best, already wounded twice, but the other three are very good. Whoever trained the one on the left was exquisite, thinks Jensen, as he absorbs one bruising hit, twists so the laser sword swings just by him, goes down to trip the bull-headed one through his considerable weight and momentum. And they’re angry, too. Probably he took out a friend. That’s war.

His first impression of the three of them wasn’t of three people perfectly in synch, colleagues and allies. It was of a scattered group that he’d interrupted in the middle of getting organized. But the fact is that they fight together fantastically, and Jensen is not succeeding at getting them to trip over one another. It must be a function of each being warriors, in their own way.

And the one with the laser sword moves far too fast. Jensen moves to dodge one blow and he’s already on the next, like he’d anticipated the movement. And Jensen can dodge this one, but it leaves him off-balance, a little flat-footed; the next gets him a slice right near the collarbone, a blinding-hot pain that has a corner of his brain thinking at least it’s cauterized.

They have him cornered, between them. He deserves to die for this; he acted too fast. His job, now, is just to try and take more with him.

It’s too late for that kind of resolution, unfortunately, and it’s only a split-second after this that everything goes black.

Y. Zero Spam

He wakes up in blinding pain, gasping for breath. His skull feels cracked down the center, hairline fractures radiating out, and it actually surprises him when he reaches up and touches only the gray-blond hair, only unbroken skin. He blinks his eyes open, focuses on his surroundings.

Now, this is a cell. Cold concrete, stone and steel. He’s on a bunk bed. And… uninjured, though weak, full-body weak and in an absolutely incredible amount of pain. He closes his eyes, activates blackcollar psychor pain-blocking techniques, and he finds that he can push it to the side, box it away in a corner of his mind, but he can’t turn off the shivering weakness in the same way.

His eyes open slower, and he deliberately doesn’t move from where he’s lying down, curled onto his side. He does look to the door, and anyone standing there.

Over the course of the next few days, he pushes himself. He tries to stand, do a handful of exercises, keep himself moving. It doesn’t work out, at first, but he grows stronger quickly. There’s still something slow about him, though. He can feel it. There’s an edge taken away, almost like…

Almost like he was never given Backlash.

User Name/Nick: Ryann/cornichaun
User DW: cornichaun
AIM/IM: cornichaun
E-mail: cornichaun @ gmail
Other Characters: Sinjir Rath Velus

Character Name: Chelsey Jensen
Series: The Blackcollar by Timothy Zahn
Age: 60-something; however, in appearance, and to most medical tests, he would appear in his mid-30s, due to regular infusions of a youth-preserving drug.
From When?: Near the end of Book 2, when allied blackcollars turn on Jensen and the others and strike out for themselves. Jensen is canonically knocked unconscious. Here, he wakes up on the Barge.

Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Though Jensen is a warrior fighting for the end of the occupation of the human race by aliens, the weight of the war and the death of Jensen's closest friend have left him traumatized, unstable and violent. He wants revenge, and he has a dark, angry, almost suicidal streak that leads him to inflict collateral damage without regard for the consequences. His decision-making process is broken because of what he's gone through. He might try to live up to the blackcollar code of honor, but, as things stand, he's mostly just doing damage.
Item: n/a
Arrival: He was brought against his will, at the point of death.

Abilities/Powers: Jensen is a blackcollar, a sort of covert warrior in the universe of the trilogy. Blackcollars are basically space ninjas. Due to the technology constraints present in the universe, high-technology guns/armor/etc. are extremely easy to track. Covert forces have to be creative, get things in through metal detectors and past dampening fields. So Blackcollars use shuriken, nunchaku, slingshots, knives; they're fully trained in the use of high-technology weapons, of course, but they are artists in the use of traditional, low-tech stuff.

Blackcollars are also commandos, and covert operatives. Jensen is therefore trained in assimilating into a crowd or culture, dressing and acting and speaking right so he doesn't stand out. He's practiced at sleight of hand, and bluffing, and knows a little about forgery and hacking/codes. He's trained in tactics, psychology, and the art of having the serious brass goddamn testicles necessary to follow through on a plan. He can survive handily in the wilderness, too.

All blackcollars have specialties, such as mechanics, tactics, demagoguery (yes, really). Jensen's is piloting. He has experience as a blackcollar fighter pilot, and he's trained in common ship systems for everything from little individual fighters to hovercars to large warships.

But none of this covers the x factor necessary to make a blackcollar, rather than just a super intense commando space ninja. Blackcollars are given treatments of various drugs and psychor conditioning during training, making their reflexes and speed really fast. It doesn't really make them inhuman, and barely edges them onto superhuman, though a lot of people tend to think of them that way -- common wisdom says that blackcollar reflex time is "cut in half" and speed is "doubled". This speed and efficiency, combined with blackcollar training, makes an almost unstoppable warrior.

In addition, Jensen has received psychor conditioning. This means that truth-telling drugs in-universe don't work on him; he is able to resist and build mental blocks around any information he needs to keep confidential. This amounts to a kind of self-hypnosis, assisted by drugs, and can only be broken by prolonged torture and interrogation.

(Thinking about reducing down Jensen's powers has succeeded in giving me a bit of a headache. I'm having a hard time figuring out where the line is drawn to what's powers and what's not. If possible, I'd like him reduced as little as possible, too, because he's liable to be more paranoid if he's significantly below his former capacity. So my suggestion is to knock him down to essentially what the Katie Ledecky of commando operatives would be able to do, or a little better than that -- around human limits, but still above what he was like forty years ago before he was enhanced.)

Personality:

He'd had a grace Gree had never before seen, a sort of submerged feline power that almost made the grapevine reports about the man believable.

Chelsey Jensen is a soft-spoken, wryly sardonic, little bit of a smart-ass, slim-built, unassuming man. He'd be hard to pick out of the crowd; he's not especially handsome, not especially distinctive. He is calm and watchful, always. And then there's the way he moves: he is graceful and quick, his reflexes inhumanly sharp. He is fluid, an awareness of his surroundings expressed through bone and skin, in a quality of movement. That is because, before everything else, Jensen is a warrior. Not just a warrior: a blackcollar.

To understand his personality, it's first necessary to understand what a blackcollar is and how that, quite honestly, defines behavior and outlook for many of the characters of the novel, including Jensen. Blackcollars are, in essence, space ninjas. They were formed as part of a weapons program in preparation for a losing war against a domineering alien race called the Ryqril. Blackcollars were given training in all sorts of areas, created to be the ultimate elite commando fighter, able to blend seamlessly into a crowd, unidentifiable except by complete physical workup, and able to hold their own in unarmed combat against the terrifying Ryqril.

"The more I see you in action the more I believe your training did something permanent to your minds. Made you... different. Monomaniacal, perhaps."
"Why? Because we don't roll over and die for the convenience of the Ryqril?"

This training deeply changed everyone who went through it -- and so did the war that came after. Blackcollars are inhumanly determined: they just don't fucking give up. They can form and re-form plans on the fly, operate in combat at incredible mental and physical speeds. They are calm, composed, and competent. The world of the blackcollars is one where supersoldiers were a thing, and it actually went pretty well. It just didn't win the war. But even the loss of the war and the subsequent subjugation of the entire human race didn't extinguish the cold-blooded determination of the blackcollars. On Plinry, the planet where the book is set, the blackcollars surrendered with the rest, and lived their lives quietly, not drawing any attention to themselves, waiting for their chance to start the war back up again -- for thirty-one years. They were dying slowly, in bits and pieces, worn down by the lack of hope and opportunity, but they still kept waiting. They kept training. When the opportunity came, they were ready, and they struck completely out of the blue, because they had spent so long waiting and lulling their opponents into a false sense of security.

"You escaped a crashing spaceship, evaded a massive manhunt for eight days, apparently killed quite a few heavily armed security men--and yet you don't have a trace of the usual blackcollar bluster."
"Well, you know how jungle animals calm down after they're fed."

Jensen, on the surface, is a fairly typical member of the blackcollars. He is not a commander; he follows orders. He's casual and calm about taking on crazy-ass operations. And it's because underneath it all, he truly does have that confidence in himself and his own abilities -- he is able to realistically assess what he can do in any given situation. He's not fearless, not emotionless, but he is damn good at what he does.

Jensen, as a blackcollar, was someone who embraced the word ‘elite’ and who wanted to fight for humanity. He was someone whose determination and courage and tenacity helped him survive the war, and he took those skills and applied them to the postwar environment, by keeping himself trained, fit, and knowledgeable in case he was ever called on again. Jensen is a veteran; he had a fight and lost it, but kept fighting anyway. We just don’t get any information about Jensen from before blackcollar training. During training, though, he even was an unusually determined candidate, with a bit of an ego; when faced with lasso practice, trained by yokel plains ropers from a planet called Hedgehog (“Hoggy”), Jensen was unwilling to be shown up and he became the best roper in his unit. He's determined, like the rest of the blackcollars: only, even more so.

"Being a freshly graduated blackcollar is heady stuff. I think most of us lost our conceit after our first few weeks of actual warfare. When enough of your comrades have been killed beside you the word 'elite' pretty well loses all meaning."

In the beginning, when he started out as a blackcollar, his determination was because he wanted to protect humanity against the invading Ryq. It was borne of his sense of honor. Now he clings to determination because it's the only thing he has left. He fights now because not fighting means losing. He keeps fighting things he's already lost because hanging on is the only thing he remembers how to do.

"This is war, and we have a job to do. If you expect to make us tuck tail and slink off by threatening innocent people, you aren't even worthy of contempt."

Importantly, blackcollars also follow a fierce code of honor. It's not quite Japanese, but it owes some of its roots to Japanese samurai codes; some Japanese stories are referenced in explanation. Blackcollars are committed to fighting their war as efficiently as possible, and that means minimizing loss of life -- but it doesn't mean being unwilling to sacrifice when it's necessary. When blackcollars see that death is inevitable, they take out as many enemies as they can. They are willing to crash their fighters into enemy ships, or to sacrifice themselves by drawing missiles away from someone else. A meaningful death, and a death in combat, is a clean death. There's no real enforcement mechanism for this code of honor. Except that sometimes violating that code means committing essentially high crimes, like treason. Several people are executed for treason over the course of the novel. Jensen, though, even though he goes too far, gets too violent, is treated more like a colleague: nudged back into line, guided, not kicked out. (I'll get back to this in a moment.)

What makes him an inmate, in particular, is also what makes him different from the other blackcollars. And that starts with an extremely important friendship, with a fellow blackcollar named James Novak.

Let’s put Jensen and Novak in perspective: none of the main blackcollars fully dropped out of the war even after 31 years of occupation and surrender. None of them married. None of them stopped training or preparing for a chance that might never come. Their closest connections were each other. They only had each other. And yet, even among this group, secretive and close-knit as it is, Jensen and Novak’s relationship was notable. In a set of people renowned for restraint, poker faces, not giving anything away, Jensen and Novak were always noticeably tense and unhappy whenever the other was in danger. They were really devoted to one another.

So this is the main difference between Jensen and the other blackcollars: he embraced some kind of chance at happiness. Doesn’t matter if this relationship was platonic or not; the fact that they formed it, over thirty years, means that Jensen was willing to hold on to something that made him happy despite the potential cost. The cost was huge: Novak was killed. What defines Jensen, now, is what he lost.

After Novak dies on the planet Argent, Jensen goes a little unhinged. He does it in a quiet, controlled way; he barely even shows that he's different, most of the time. But the other blackcollars notice. He has a "hard edge", says the commander. He's a little intense. What they don't fully realize is that Jensen, blaming Novak's death on traitors, now has made it his personal business to kill every traitor in sight.

"What exactly is Jensen building back there, anyway?"
"A full-fledged death house gauntlet," Hawking said, shaking his head. "Hidden escape doors, scud-net drop ceiling panels--the works. His idea, incidentally, not Reger's. And if you ask me, he's just a little too enthusiastic about the whole project."
Lathe pursed his lips. "He's had that hard edge ever since Argent. I'm hoping it'll fade with time."

I said I'd get back to treason, and executions, and here's the time. Several blackcollars do kill traitors over the novels -- some in outright fights, at least one while the traitor is unconscious (though, notably, this one is Novak, killing a traitor responsible for Jensen's capture). But there's something in common: all the blackcollars display regret and conflict. None of them like it. Most of them act only under direct orders to take out someone who's passed information to the enemy.

Jensen? Jensen enjoys it. He does it even when he doesn't have to. He sets up an entire security system with a full-on death trap made to catch blackcollars, just in case a team they ally with in a mission to Earth betrays them. And when that team does turn on them? He takes grim satisfaction in their deaths. Jensen is taking out Novak's death on some symbol of the people responsible, over and over and over again.

"That's the mark of a true blackcollar, Caine: loyalty. Loyalty to your teammates, to other blackcollars... and sometimes even to allies you don't approve of."
A shiver went up Caine's spine. "You're talking about Reger, aren't you?"
"Lathe's the one who makes our deals and alliances," Jensen said, his eyes focused elsewhere. "That's the doyen's job, and commandos don't expect to have much voice in those decisions. Fine. But there are other ways I can influence events."
"Such as building a death-house gauntlet in Reger's mansion?" Pittman asked quietly.
"You've got it," the blackcollar said, grimly. "Think of it as a loyalty test... with death as the punishment for failure."

Jensen is, at the moment, a sort of manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder. With trauma, a person's body, the physical expression of their emotional state, gets stuck at one point. Their body cannot understand that the trauma is over, and so the mind echoes those emotions, over and over, oscillating between hyperarousal and exhaustion. Jensen is exactly this: he cannot physically understand situations that are not the war with the Ryqril, and he relives the emotions around Novak's death constantly. Somewhere in there, there's the devoted warrior who genuinely wanted to defend Earth. But he's covered by layers of scar tissue and neuroses, with a man who's learned that sticking to the path and not wavering is the only method of survival. Except now that very survival method is what's preventing him from having any chance at recovering from the trauma of war and the trauma of losing the most important person in his life. That survival method is driving him to greater and greater violence just because he can't physically and mentally comprehend what it would be to turn off.

So, that's Jensen. A wounded warrior. Unfortunately, we don't get to see any of Jensen's backstory from before he was a blackcollar. The sense of the character, in the book, is that before Novak's death he is one of the steadiest and most intelligent blackcollars, trusted and relied upon, and one of the only two to create such a deep individual connection with someone else. The loss of Novak changes him -- it makes him into the hard-edged one, not gentle, not merciful, not honorable. It turns him into the killer that blackcollars try so very hard not to be. And it might take the Barge to pull Jensen back from that brink.

Barge Reactions: First, Jensen is aware of aliens, and he comes from a universe where humanity occupies 28 separate planets (including Earth). So, space is familiar to him, and he won't be completely shocked when he spots people who aren't human. That said, the only aliens humanity has encountered are the giant lizard-men Ryqril and the "short, dumpy, hairballs on legs" Chryselli. The vast variety, and near-humanity, of the races on the Barge is going to be a hell of an eye-opener.

See, Jensen has made completely ridiculous amounts of sacrifices for humanity. Defending humanity against aliens. This doesn't mean that he hates all aliens; the Chryselli, for example, become humanity's allies real quick against the Ryqril. But it does mean that Jensen has a strong feeling of belonging to the human race, and a strong sense of solidarity within the human race. He is automatically going to look for hostility from aliens, and humans turning against humans for aliens is going to feel like some form of treason to him. It will be hard for him to battle his instincts on this point, and his success depends fully on whether anyone manages to get him to think about his snap judgments.

Next, there's the matter of the Barge as a prison. Jensen will see the Barge as something keeping him from the fight, and therefore the Barge is, by definition, part of the fight, on the Ryqril side. He will not want to cooperate at first, and will be annoyingly stubborn and most likely will kill several wardens before he's persuaded to sit the fuck down. (Only wardens, though; it's not out of any sense of inmate innocence, it's just that wardens are the ones between him and his fight, and inmates aren't part of that.) After he stops actively and violently defying Barge authority, he might have a long journey before he accepts that what's keeping him on the Barge is his own eternal grudge-holding.

Next, magic. He's going to think this is absurd. However, he is also someone who, after checking for basic fraud, will accept the reality in front of his eyes. He deals with the world as it is (or, he would like to think that he does). He won't take refuge in denial. He'll be curious, and want to learn more about it.

Finally, let's talk about floods and breaches! In one sense, these will be some of the most disorienting and terrifying things that Jensen has ever experienced, because they represent a complete and total loss of control. And blackcollars are real big on control. However, Jensen has a natural longing and curiosity for lives that aren't the life that he led. His whole damn existence has been sacrificed for a losing fight! That's a horrible thing to have to live with. So, while floods and breaches would be terrifying and nutty, they actually would also hold a lot of possibility and intrigue for him. I don't think they would be traumatic. I think they would be eye-opening.

Path to Redemption: Jensen does, in the most basic sense, understand right and wrong. He's the kind of person who would sacrifice a lot for other people -- especially 'other people' as an abstract concept. The problem is really that he's taken his principles -- the principle of loyalty, especially -- and taken it to a merciless extreme, with a sort of righteous ideological purity that leaves no room for empathy. Jensen isn't without empathy, he's just letting his own rage cloud it out. He won't let himself sympathize with someone when he could crush them for their betrayal instead.

So what Jensen needs is to come back down to Earth. Figuratively speaking. People are fallible, and not every transgression is about life and death. Even more importantly, the Barge is not a part of his war. Dealing with the PTSD that has him unable to switch out of war-mode is a necessary step to backing down on the All Traitors Must Die stuff.

This also means accepting that a future can exist. A future that could include retirement, not death, or maybe even peace, not war. A future where he isn't one of the handful of people responsible for the entire fate of the human race. Jensen can't accept that yet because the mere act of hoping has hurt him so, so badly that it's inconceivable to try again. Yet. If anywhere can get him to open up again, it's the Barge.

So the ways to get at Jensen are through honor. Warrior principles. Standing up for the defenseless. Helping. But also through the connections that are forged through comrades-in-arms. It's by understanding him without condemning him, and showing him that he can extend that same forgiveness to others, without it being a weakness that leads to death or pain. Any warden that can get on "his side" and who can understand the psychological burdens he's operating under can make this happen. It might not be easy, but the potential is there.

Deal: n/a

History:
As an overview:
2370: the Terran Democratic Empire makes contact with the Ryqril, a leathery-skinned bipedal race, reticent but apparently willing to trade.
2410: the TDE finds out that the Ryqril are planning to invade the TDE, having finished another war of conquest on their far border. The TDE starts frantic preparations for a war that they're never going to win. 28 human planets vs. 140 Ryqril planets is a foregone conclusion.
2416: The Blackcollar program, one of the desperate measures as an attempt to win the war, begins.
2418: War begins.
2426: Plinry is captured; the blackcollars on Plinry turn to guerilla warfare.
2431: Earth is captured. The war ends. The Plinry blackcollars surrender.
2460: "The Blackcollar" begins.

Early Life: Unfortunately, we don't know anything about Jensen's early life. He seems to be on the young side of the blackcollars, not a senior officer, so he likely wasn't in the blackcollar program before the war started. He is experienced, though, so he wasn't freshly minted when Plinry surrendered. I'd peg him at 3-4 years of experience by the time Plinry surrendered. Most young fighters in training in these books tend to be 19-22 years old. This places Jensen in his sixties at the time of the book, which seems about right.

Here's how I fill in the gaps: Jensen was always headed for a career in the military. He was the sort of athletic, intelligent, incisive personality that the military worked extra-hard to recruit -- good reflexes, good eyesight, aptitude scores that landed him in the top few percent every time. He lived his teen years knowing that humans were headed towards a looming war with the Ryqril empire of conquest, and he ached to be somewhere he could make a difference, defend the home that he was fiercely attached to. He joined up as a pilot. It was in the military itself that Jensen applied for the blackcollar program and was accepted.

The War: Jensen fought only for a handful of years before he was assigned to Plinry, under the overall command of General Lepkowski. The planet was conquered, and Jensen went underground with the rest of the blackcollars, harassing the shit out of the Ryqril invaders. But the Groundfire attack devastated Plinry, and the Ryqril eventually took out Earth, and so the blackcollars made the difficult decision to surrender and seek amnesty. They weren't done; they could wait for their chance to make a real difference.

Jensen lived like this for thirty years. During this time, he found an anchor: a very, very close friend named James Novak. The two of them depended on one another. They grew old together -- sort of. The Idunine, a drug to extend youth, kept them young physically and mentally.

Book 1: Finally, opportunity came. A resistance fighter from Earth named Caine told them that there were five warships out there, armed, fueled, ready to fly: part of a plan that never materialized to harass Ryqril shipping lines. The blackcollars geared up. They took action on a dime, taking out the spaceport, freeing habitual hostages, and breaking Caine into the library so he could find the coordinates of the ships. The planet was Argent. They headed out immediately.

Jensen, as the pilot, was put in a tough spot. The rest of the blackcollars dropped in pods from the ship as Jensen faked engine trouble in Argent's sky. Jensen then crashed the ship in the mountains, bailing out as fast as possible. The problem? That left him on his own, away from any allies, with no way to get back in touch with them.

Jensen survives the manhunt in the mountains, eluding the security forces. At one point, he heads into a camp to steal some food, tries to pretend to be a fellow security officer, fucks up hard, and has to take out like fifteen people before he slips away into the mountains again. Another time, he strolls right into town and buys supplies with stolen money. Again, he fucks it up, and is found out almost immediately -- but this manages to hook him up with the local resistance, who can get him back to his blackcollar pals.

Only one problem: the resistance is riddled with spies. One of them passes on Jensen's location and safehouse. Jensen is captured. He manages to take out 15 people, plus tons of equipment, part of a building, and an aircraft, but he's captured. He is then tortured for information on what the blackcollars are planning. Deprivation, electric shocks, vomiting -- but he refuses to break.

Two blackcollars come to rescue him. One of them is Novak -- and Novak purposefully sacrifices himself in order to make sure the operation succeeds. As he's half-dragged, half-carried to the getaway car by the other blackcollar, Jensen says I want to kill them. He means the traitors. The ones that revealed Novak and the other blackcollar's plan -- the ones that caused Jensen to be captured in the first place. Unfortunately, Jensen never gets his chance. The traitors are already dead by the time he recovers.

Book 2: Over the next year, Jensen develops a hard edge. He becomes fanatical about loyalty. As he's a key member of the team, and their only pilot, Jensen is one of the team of six selected to go along and help the next mission to another planet. That planet is Earth, and the mission is to try and find the drug formula for Backlash, the key drug of the Blackcollar Program.

On Earth, the blackcollars shack up with a local crime lord named Reger. In payment for his shelter and resources, they create a security system for him. Jensen purposefully puts in a keyhole and a death trap, made for killing blackcollars. Later, at the cusp of success, the blackcollars from Earth that ally with the Plinry team turn on them, and on Reger particularly. Jensen is knocked unconscious in the fight. Instead of waking up with his teammates, he wakes up on the Barge.

Sample Journal Entry: [ The voice that comes on is soft-spoken, reassuring -- the sort of voice that should belong to a teacher or a doctor. Not a warrior. ]

What is a weapon?

[ A quiet question, posed, and then a pause almost long enough to think that he's waiting for an answer before he speaks again. ]

Maybe it's one of those ideas, like pornography: you know it when you see it. What's a weapon, what's an army, what's a war. We thought we knew, until we found out that the TDE was going to be invaded. Then we thought it out all over again.

Humans have fought with each other. But we'd never fought with something else before.

Does it have to be wielded? Can it be unmanned? How much armament can one person carry? When is it a soldier, and when is it a vehicle? When it comes down to it, what makes a fighter dangerous?

And what if you went in the other direction? Improved the soldier, not the equipment. Then, what's the weapon?

[ This time, after the pause, he cuts the transmission. ]
Sample RP: Test Drive Threads

Special Notes: