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Enkidu · (This post was last modified: 08-03-2016, 09:24 PM by Enkidu.)

NESRIN EZRA ELHERTANI KHAN

AGE: Unknown (N/A)
ORIGIN: Planet Pygar, Omicron Theta - Omicrons
RELATIVES: Maya & Mohammed Shakour Khan (Parents)
HEIGHT: 7'1" (219 cm)
MEDICAL RECORD: CLASSIFIED
RANK: Paladin
CALLSIGN: Erinyes

We are what we are.

Sometimes, what we are, is machines.

Summarised overview

Nesrin Khan is an enigma within the already eclectic chain of command officers within battlegroup Auxesia. Physically is both symbolic of the movement’s aspirations and of its failures. Psychologically, she is a time bomb. She is also a the holder of a number of curious records within Auxesia’s command structure - most elderly flag officer, tallest flight officer, longest period of contiguous pre-Auxesian military service, most experienced ground forces operative, and the most extensively augmented transhuman within Auxesia’s jurisdiction.

Pre-nomad war life (<800AS)

Khan is a product of the nomad war, no stranger to violence nor to the chain of command. Born into to a bourgeoisie Cantabrigian family of academics, engineers and traders, Khan broke tradition by choosing a military education within the BAF. Graduating Dartmouth Naval College at nineteen, Flight Lieutenant Khan flew hussars with the 99th Armoured Uhlans in Omega 3, tough, dirty work which often brought her into combat opposition with superiorly armed Red Hessian revolutionaries, Corsair raiders and the occasional gun runner. Khan became rapidly disaffected with the local Zoner population, blaming the laissez faire clientele of Freeport One for the onslaught of pirate activity in the area. Khan eventually lost patience with the Zoners after her squadron recorded munition smugglers actively offloading cargo onto the platform to prevent apprehension by navy patrols, requesting transfer to a home defence squadron in the winter of 799AS, several months before the Freeport Seven disaster and the public emergence of the Nomad threat.

The Nomad War and its repercussions (800AS <803AS)

As a relatively competent officer with significant flying hours behind her, Khan found herself reassigned to the heavy assault airwing of the battleship Suffolk, operating the (for its time) dazzlingly resilient templar heavy fighter as part of the 17th Vandals. Khan initially found the deployment on the Suffolk comparatively blissful, if slightly boring, compared with her previous experiences in the border worlds, with combat infrequent, active patrols rare, and leave plentiful. Khan is known to have made active relationships with a number of Armed Forces personnel, a few of which remain in the services to the present day, and may have even made romantic associations with fellow crew members aboard the Suffolk, although on this subject Khan is not open for disclosure. Details concerning Khan’s service record during the nomad war are patchy and indefinite, but it appears Khan and most of her wing abandoned the Suffolk for the Norfolk without a transfer order after suspicions were raised as to the behaviour of the admiral commanding the Suffolk fleet. Whilst much of Khan’s service during 800AS remains ambiguous, Khan was heavily involved in the defence of trans-Sirian refugee convoys through Cambridge, New London and onto Dublin in the final weeks of the nomad War and may have been involved in the destruction of the RNC Saarbrüken at Glasgow outpost, Leeds, during 800AS and the RNC Thuringia in New London. Out of Khan’s entire wing, only herself and flight officer Julien Miles survived the entire war. Khan, as an officer of the BAF in the post Nomad War era herself riddled with post combat stress disorder and physically fatigued with many of her friends and compatriots dead, found herself forced in front of four consecutive conduct tribunals and surgical examination for signs of nomad infection. Alienated from the service that had defined her and gripped by depression, Khan abandoned the military at the age of twenty three, returning to her family’s home on Cambridge proper where she remained, unemployed and frequently suicidal until 803AS.

Civilian life, second term of service, mercenary work, duration of the Polyhemi expedition (804AS <820AS)

Realising that their daughter was not going to recover without intervention, Khan’s mother, Professor Maya Khan of the Cambridge Research Institute, signed Nesrin up without her knowledge for a veteran’s scholarship at the Cambridge Research Institute studying philosophy. Khan was initially begrudging of being roped into academia by her mother, but eventually embraced her studies with due diligence, struggling to replace the motivation the BAF had given her. Khan passed with honours before returning for her masters, using most of her service pension to fund a third degree, this time in aerospace engineering. However, Khan’s addiction to combat flying had returned with the steady stabilisation of her emotional health, and, in contradiction to the anxieties of her family, returned to BAF service in the fall of 811 AS, at the age of 33. Khan took little pleasure in the suppression of political dissidents and cooperate nemesi that mostly occupied the navy’s day-to-day activities between 811 and 814 AS, and, predicting correctly that Bretonian adventurism in the Taus would lead to another inter-house war, abandoned the services shortly before the outbreak of hostilities, thus providing herself temporary reprieve from the draft. However, Khan had still not lost her love for combat flying, nor entertained any ambition to abandon a skill set that had sculpted her consciousness so completely. Falling in with the Zoners she once detested, Khan became a gun-for-hire, acting as an enforcer for the protogenic Federation of Freeports. In practice her employment was little different from that she once held sixteen years ago - muscling unruly Corsairs around in the Omegas, but the money was less consistent and the rules of engagement looser. Uncomfortable with the questionable moralism of her new-found job and conscious that her job would lead to the death of her given enough time, Khan enlisted on the Zoner lead, CRI sponsored Polyhemi flotilla, named after the Jinkusu class Colony Vessel of the same name leading the group, devoted to the discovery of the lost Edge Nebula colonial expedition of 490 AS. Finally bestowed a cause Khan conceived as morally virtuous, Khan readily adapted to life aboard the cramped, isolated, nomadic lifestyle of an Edge Worlder, flying APM Mantas as the commander of the Polyhemi’s airwing. Khan quickly formed close-nit bonds with her newly found compatriots, training her inexperienced Zoner wingmen on military drill and the conventions of convoy escort - habits that they readily adapted to amidst the broiling suns of the Eagle and Edge nebulas. Khan, initially irritated by the habitually lax Zoner life, had adapted to them readily, briefly maintaining a relationship with the Polyhemi’s navigator during the long cruise. Khan, by then a well respected member of her community, had found her calling. News of the Rheinland Libertarian conflict and the apocalypse of the Gallic hordes seemed distant and fantastical, the work of fevered minds and unresolved nightmares.

Destruction of the Polyhemi expedition, Khan's augmentation, Khan's arrival on the Eidolon Wraith (820AS <823AS)

On the 7th January, 821 AS, the Polyhemi and her flotilla oriented for a slingshot manoeuvre around the desolate planet Pygar, Omicron Theta, bound a routine resupply at Freeport 9. Upon passing low Pygar orbit, the Polyhemi and her flotilla were immediately subject to immediate and unrelenting assault by an unknown, previously undetected assailant, forcing the flotilla into panic and confusion. Whilst details on the attack are minimal and Khan appears to have no accurate memory of the assault, Khan was in the process of climbing into her Osprey when the Polyhemi suffered a massive, total loss of structural integrity. As the hangar sheared apart around her, Khan was able to blow away the partially unsealed hangar door with the fighter’s mines, badly compromising her own vessel in the process. Before Khan could make measure of the tactical situation, her own vessel came under fire, forcing Khan to abandon the remnants of the flotilla and seek refuge in the extreme wind shear of Pygar’s atmosphere, a tactic which successfully deterred pursuit. Khan, suffering severe stabiliser damage, was unable to keep the osprey sufficiently level to attempt to regain orbit, instead hunting for clusters escape pod transponders upon the planet’s surface. Khan succeeded in forcing her fighter into a relatively soft crash landing close to a significant cluster, but lost sensors to debris ablation on the final approach. Forced to fly blind, her cockpit glass frosted over with bullets of silicates, Khan wrestled the broken osprey into the dunes seven hundred metres from the pod cluster. After waiting ten hours for waiting for the wind speed to drop under a hundred and twenty five kilometres per hour average, Khan struggled out of her cockpit in general direction of the pod transceivers, battered by glass sand and ciliate stones the size of tennis balls. Khan, crawling against the dirt in wind speeds high enough to kite her off forever, dug her way up the side of the dune, bruised and fractured, her suit cut, her flesh lacerated and studded with a thousand glass beads worming into her. Screaming, lacerated, blind, a shattered Khan crested the ridge, draining her lifeblood into her pressure boots.

On the top of the ridge lay the only meaningful shelter not scoured flat for thousands of kilometres - the hulk of a Gammuian harvester, lying part-buried in the sand. The pods that survived Pygar’s eternal maelstroms lay scattered, shot-ridden around the Harvester’s walls, apparently piloted there by survivors who realised the utility of the wreck, but lacked sufficient protection to reach the cruiser from their pods. The bloated puss of what was once human beings lay scattered around their exit hatches. The ridge had formed around the wreck, piling up against the kilometre long, broken back of the dead machine as the wind struggled to push the steel mass aside. Weapons fire had carved holes in the hull, and it was through one of these holes Khan staggered, collapsing onto the plates as glass whistled around her, breathing gas escaping through her suit punctures, too crippled to stand. Convinced of her own death and gulping blood, Khan blacked out as the harvester’s nanobots crawled around her.

No sufficient data exists to explain the following occurrences. Not only did Khan survive multiple lacerations and extreme tissue damage, but Khan appears to have been become symbiotically bonded with the harvester’s host AI, which presumably employed its nanobot reserves to reconstruct Khan from the atomic level using local area materials, elements of its own ship, and Khan’s pressure suit. As to why the AI chose to use Khan as a host rather than repair its own functions is equally unknown, but it is likely that the AI had at its disposal sufficient consumables to repair and augment Khan’s physical body, but an insufficient quantity to repair its own, materially massive, brain. The Gammuian instead modified Khan to serve the same purpose as its ruined harvester - as a vessel to enforce its will and provide it with mobility, redefining Khan’s central nervous system to accommodate a secondary, alien intelligence. The Gammuian then appears to have activated a terran-made distress beacon, presumably hoping that Theta’s resident Zoner population would attempt to rescue Khan as one of the Polyhemi’s survivors, thus enabling itself to escape off-world. Khan remained unconscious for this duration.

Unfortunately, the first responders to the wreck of the Polyhemi were not Zoners, but operatives of the Core, intrigued by the possibility of technological plunder from the Gammuian beacon. Discovering the newly augmented unconscious Khan, the operatives apparently took Khan with them as an oddity amongst the spoils.

What happened to Khan’s body between the Core’s recovery of her and her awakening is mostly unknown, the logistics records involved lost to Auxesia during the rebellion. However, by the slimmest of fortunes, Khan’s body happened to be a holding crate on the Core bullhead the Eidolon Wraith during the rebellion of 822 AS, marked for vivisection at a later date. Khan’s occupying AI, finally deciding that it was time to bring its vessel to consciousness, awoke Khan from her coma into the pitch black, unventilated environment of the shipping crate. A screaming, insensible Khan was found crying into her steel hands after a crewman noticed unexpected movement within the holding area, and for a significant period of time was a medical oddity within the battlecruiser’s sickbay. Gradually coaxed back to sanity and made conscious of her situation, Khan has slowly come to terms with both the physical loss of her body and the emotional loss of her loved ones, living mostly for the opportunity to find (and murder) whoever and whatever destroyed the Polyhemi, be they Nomads, Core, Order, AIs or some other party. Equally, the AI piggybacking Khan’s consciousness is equally motivated to nullify whatever threat succeeded in downing its harvester, meaning both entities have, for now, parallel objectives. As both Khan and her AI host recovered, they became increasingly grateful for Auxesia’s hospitality in treating her and the very function of Auxesia’s existence at all, without which both Khan and AI alike would have ended up vivisected by Core researchers. In addition, Auxesia’s strong moral objective to preserve the diversity and of Sirian life against the adversity of pirates and ideological demagogues appeals stringently to Nesrin’s sense of honour, whilst her AI handler concurs with Auxesia’s continual quest for human advancement through research and deep learning. For these reasons, along with a strong sense of identification with Curator Hunt and Keeper Raven, Khan is devotedly loyal to Auxesia’s advancement and survival. She will advance the cause, whatever it takes.

The nature of Khan's symbiosis

It is ambiguous if the augmented Khan is truly self aware, or if Khan is indeed conscious, how much of her opinions and actions are formed entirely as a result of her own cognition. As a functional asset towards the objectives of her AI controller, Khan may be motivated to act against her will, or modify her opinions in tune with the Gambian’s own, which can cause her behaviour to seem somewhat odd, starched, and computer-like on occasion. Khan attempts to compensate for this by presenting a vivant alter-ego, but Khan’s concern over the control her doppelgänger wields is obvious and much-voiced to Raven. It is as of yet unknown how significant a security threat Khan would present if the AI commanded Khan to conduct an action contrary to Auxesia’s objectives.

Whilst Khan has been a component of Auxesia since the initial split, Khan has only recently chosen to return to flight status, being given a clean bill of health for the first time by the Eidolon’s psychologists. Khan has spent the intermittent duration operating on Auxesia’s myriad of small craft, fighters and shuttles as an aircraft technician and propulsion engineer. She has also spent the time practicing silat and akido, two martial arts passions that have persevered since her youth. Khan has not yet had reason to employ these talents in Auxesia’s service beyond the sparring chamber, but is a more than competent infantryman in her own right, serving as the ship’s security officer and a trained marksman under BAF combined arms doctrine. Her cybernetics, comprising over eighty percent of her body mass and providing her with significant physical acuity, speed and stopping power, only enhance her formidable nature. She is a blade, burnished by war, sharpened by bone. All you need to do is stay out of the way.

THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)

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