Family history of Feldwebel Nikolai Sovok

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Anyone who frequently visits the Rote Adler pub on New Berlin is familiar with the beardy, slightly overweight Rheinwehr Feldwebel in his forties, sipping high-volume alcoholic beverages not only in his off-duty time, but occasionally in full Military flight uniform aswell. Following a few rounds of vodka (which is a hidden treasure of the Rote Adler) or a brawl, he might introduce himself as Markus Meckel, regardless of the fact that the displayed name tag on his uniform says a quite eerie-sounding name, Nikolai Sovok. An observant (or not that drunk) individual might note the difference between his statement and the truth, which leads to either another brawl, or him explaining a made up family background of how his predecessors moved to Rheinland even before the sleeper ships were launched, which is what his commanders believe aswell.

His father is the only other person who knows of the Feldwebel's true origins and affiliation. He currently works as an operator of cleaning droids back on Kreuzberg depot, the place where Nikolai himself was born. The old man is called Imran Kuznetsov, "Sovok" was the nickname he was given following his sudden appearance on the Junker Station, as he refused to tell his true name for years. Around the age of 20, he was found in an escape pod drifting near the Stuttgart-New Berlin gate, where he is believed to have been for days. The busy life the corporate shipping agents led never allowed a glimpse at the drifting wrecks of a Dromedary freighter, with a human still alive in space. A Junker CSF collected the pod, as well as several crates of firearms entirely unknown to Rheinland databases.

The first person ever to have heard the conscious and full story of the Kuznetsovs, or the Sovoks as they are called now was a Bretonian junker called Diana Fisher, the mother of Feldwebel Nikolai Sovok, the late wife of Imran Kuznetsov.

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The family's origins can be traced back to the 21st-22nd century Earth, as communists were again knocking democratic governments out of power in the countries of Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa. The Kuznetsovs were a generic worker family in Russia, who were devoted believers in the ideas of National Bolshevism, as they were one of the many of the families that saw the only way out of their crumbling economy and decreasing life standards by taking arms and fighting against their own government forces. The difference was, that while the common citizens found their leading ideal to be Marxist and Leninist communism, the Kuznetsovs found all that to be only valuable as long as it stays within the border. Since the national Bolsheviks were not in notable majority, achieving a higher rank in the party did not require decades of devoted presence, that's how two of the Kuznetsov sons, Alyosha and Sergey became key figures in the Union of National Bolsheviks, the strongest nazbol party at that time. They were one of the many revolutionaries that aided the communists in grabbing power in Russia, as it seemed that the several communist parties and the Union of National Bolsheviks had mutual goals.

History however, repeated itself. The communist party in power saw no longer need, but more precisely an opposition in the national Bolsheviks, who disagreed with several points regarding the internationalist diplomacy the communists conducted. The nationalists saw no need in a world-wide revolution, but the expansion of Russia itself, they believed that it was necessary for Russia to stand on its economy alone and disclose foreign relations, while preserving Bolshevism only internally.

The communist leadership had to act to silence the critical voices. The seeds of the Coalition were about to be placed by making the alliance with the newly elected or captured communist countries' leaders, so anyone who stood in the way had to perish for the greater good. Teams of Spetsnaz commandos were sent out to ambush a meeting of the Union of National Bolsheviks, equipped with orders to shoot on sight. A bloodbath was made, hundreds have died, including the whole UNB leadership. National bolshevism was banned again, along with any supporting parties. Followers were either imprisoned or killed.

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Vladimir Nikolaievits Kuznetsov, the oldest in the family and the family's children were able to escape the slaughter, while his two sons and their wives were killed. Vladimir realized the best option for the children's survival (and the only one at that) was to go as far away from the communistifying world as possible. A trip to Mars was planned, but the lack of cash objected. They only got as far as Spain. As history indicates however, that was merely a temporary solution.

The family settled in, Vladimir Nikolaievits passed away, the children grew up and obtained a family and trade. The most notable and successful family member was Mikhail Kuznetsov, who fulfilled a role as the secretary of Spain's finance minister, therefore gaining huge influence, who even had his name changed to Miguel Romirez, to avoid the blames of communist affiliations. Decades have gone in peace, but that didn't last long as the inevitable war between the Coalition and the Alliance came to pass, the Coalition gaining the upper hand followed by a steady draw at first. They took Earth in a few years, Spain was to fall after the defeat of the Italian and French combined fleets.

Most of the Kuznetsov family, using the influence of Miguel Romirez could board an Alliance refugee transport heading for the Jupiter's moons. It is unknown whether their journey was concluded in success, as the Kuznetsovs or Sovoks today in Sirius the descendants of Aleksander (Sasha) Kuznetsov, the sole individual who was left behind due to the fact that he signed up in the Ejercito de Tierra, the Spanish Ground Troops and was tasked along with his comrades and a detachment of United States Marines to defend the city of Madrid against the overwhelming Coalition forces.

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The heavy air and missile defense system supplied by the Alliance covering the city could neutralize most ballistic missiles and attack bombers the Coalition was about to send in, so the battle was mostly fought on the ground. Even so, the opposing force was in a chief numerical superiority, as well as being able to deploy paratroopers by fast-moving troop carrier spaceships. Due to the poor focus on establishing separate divisions, the Coalition's VDV elite paratroopers could capture the Alliance command center, which was a radio building located in the city's dead center. The Alliance units were split up, lost communications and started to perish by the bombardment conducted by the Coalition's 34th and 56th Armored Divisions.

Sasha Kuznetsov and two units of other infantrymen were assigned to guard the Alcala gate, one of the most famous landmarks of the city. The lost communications with the high command and the lack of support and coordination led them to be surrounded by two battalions of Coalition forces, who overestimated the defense of the landmark and the junction around it. The firefight fought to hold the area lasted for a few mere minutes. As Captain Rodriguez, the leader of the unit was killed by a grenade, the remaining Alliance soldiers lay down their weapons and surrendered.

Madrid, as well as all the other Spanish cities, fell by the end of the week. Sasha Kuznetsov was taken prisoner, but they didn't withdraw him from Spain for weeks. Rumor had it that the Coalition was trying to enlighten the Spanish captives regarding the teachings of communism, thus creating loyal soldiers defending their country under another flag. Sasha on the other hand, didn't receive any persuasion of that orientation yet. He was locked into the storage of a plastic factory, along with hundreds of his comrades, who seemed to mind his Russian origins more and more as days passed. He was eventually beaten up heavily by his own brothers in arms, but the Coalitionist guardsmen rescued him from death by getting him out of the storage and withdrawing him to an abandoned detached house nearby.

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During his captivity in the detached house, a high ranking Naval Intelligence officer, Major Fedor Nikolaievits Koslov visited Sasha. The reason for the visit and the relative comfort the prisoner could enjoy was that the secret service already knew of his presence in the Spanish infantry, even before the siege of Madrid started. It was important because the Major assumed it would be easier to turn Sasha "back to the light" than any other regular infantryman, considering his Russian origins. Since the Spanish fleet was still a key component of the Alliance forces, despite the fact that their country was now under Coalition control, the Naval Intelligence had their plans to exploit Sasha's internal knowledge regarding the subject, in short they wanted to turn him into a spy.

At that point, the outcome of the war was starting to become obvious. The Coalition was close to taking Earth and already captured almost the whole inner rim. The only choice of Kuznetsov was to aid the communist expansion if he wanted to assure that his evacuated family is given a pardon, preferably even higher circumstances of living once the war was over. Needless to say, he was generations behind the national bolshevik ideas, forgetting what the communists did to his ancestors. He was also enraged how his former comrades treated him. Given a throughout persuation, he decided to aid the Coalition forces.

His first assignments were rather basic. He did not yet go undercover, but had to decrypt transmissions between the Hispanic fleet and the final milestones of Spanish resistance. He played a key role in disabling the Portuguese air defense system aswell, then taking down the chain of command during the Lisbon siege. Fortunately for him, the Portuguese army was in strong cooperation with the Spanish one, even using the same coding setups for transmissions, most of which he already knew. He kept reporting to Major Koslov and eventually won his loyality in the eyes of the Coalition commanders themselves as the whole of Europe was captured.

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Sasha Kuznetsov's operations soon extended to space, he infiltrated the Hispanian defence fleet stationed near Triton, one of Neptun's moons. His most notable act was sabotaging the main engine of the Vellasco Heavy Cruiser during the ship's deployment to assist the Alliance forces fighting for Jupiter, rendering the cruiser inoperative and open to be boarded by a Coalition Naval Infantry squad, capturing a vice admiral of the Hispanic fleet. After being taken out of service, the Vellasco was renamed to Dlinnoye Lezviye (long blade), which was the callsign of Kuznetsov under cover. The agent earned himself a battalion of bounty hunters on his rear hired by the Alliance, as well as a comfortable villa on the Hawaii-islands, now under Coalition rule. He spent the rest of his life sitting on his balcony in the formerly famed tourist resort, under the protection of dozens of armed bodyguards.

The business of Sasha Kuznetsov was continued eagerly by his son, Andrey Aleksandrovich Kuznetsov. He was a card-carrying communist, and a convinced believer in the need of the Coalition to triumph, unlike how his father started. He made it to the rank of Colonel within the Office of Naval Intelligence, surpassing the late Major Nikolaievits, his father's mentor. Despite his high rank and vast knowledge regarding the art of spy warfare, he kept insisting on contributing to field work himself. He was nicknamed "Fantasma" by his enemies. He had multiple faces, they even said, being able to put them on and take them off as he pleased.

His work led to the utter defeat of the Hispanic fleet little before the Coalition assaulted the Pluto planetoid. He and two of his colleagues undercover assassinated the Hispanian Fleet Admiral by ventilating poisonous gas into the flagship's bridge section. As the operation was concluded with success, there was one last piece that needed being taken care of: The sleeper ships being constructed by the Alliance. Andrey Kuznetsov was one of the few Coalition saboteurs that could sneak on board the Hispania with a forged identification that he obtained from one of the security guards on board the vessel. Their task was to prevent the sleeper ship from reaching her destination, no matter the cost.

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The Coalition spies on board the Hispania hacked their cryo tanks so that they would wake up earlier than the rest of the passengers. Their plan was to bypass the ship's internal security grid, then sabotage the Hispania's engines before she reached her destination. The escape was to be made with using the landing crafts stashed in the sleeper ship's hangars, destroying any other vessels remaining there after their departure. The same practice was to be applied with all the other sleeper ships aswell, however the Coalition's early arrival to the Pluto planetoid made the Alliance launch their project earlier than it was anticipated. Not only did the Coalition fail to get enough spies onboard the other sleepers, but it also failed to fully initialize the first and last part of their plan.

Andrey Kuznetsov's cryo tank malfunctioned, or to be accurate, it didn't function as the hack was supposed to make it do so. He woke up only as his comrades left the Hispania, leaving him behind with the sleeper ship's passengers, drifting without engines into the unknown. Utter chaos erupted among the Hispanians on board, but Andrey kept his smile up. Regardless of the fact that he was shamelessly left behind to decay by his comrades, he knew that the Coalition triumphed. He remained loyal enough to preserve his ideas of Coalitionist communism and started folding plans to turn the people under the flag of the Coalition themselves, people whose existence was put into certain doom by the agents of this formation. He knew that he would most likely never meet his comrades again as they were light-years away, at best. He realized he had to carry on the war alone.

The Hispania eventually drifted above the rocky, barren world that the Hispanians later nicknamed Crete. Kuznetsov was among the ones who found their chances of survival to be larger on the newly discovered planet than going on with the drifting sleeper ship towards the unknown. He launched with some of the survivors to settle on the barren wasteland and attempt the continued survival on the said planet's surface, but even the hell that awaited them didn't make Andrey what his mission and origins were.

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Days, years, decades have passed. Day after day, the survivors of the Hispania had to sacrifice hundreds to keep the others fed. Not only were these victims sent out to labor all-day long on the fields that refused to reward the invested effort by returning means of nourishment, but as time passed and hundreds, thousands have died of starvation, the corpses that were produced were reused to pose as alternative means to feed the starving. The new home of the Hispanians started to house conditions that equaled the outlooks of hell itself.

Andrey was among the ones who died of starvation, as he refused to taste human flesh. But he didn't die without passing on his heritage. Interestingly enough, it was not one of his two sons that first got to adopt the ideas of communism among the survivors, but the only friend he made during his presence on Crete, Antonio Sanchez. He tried formulating a group of survivors to gather and share every piece of agricultural product they gained, according to the need of individuals. He even named the group "The Kuznetsov Kolkhoz" in memoriam of his dead friend, even though he never told his name to anyone but Antonio. It was eventually suspected that Antonio was a Coalition spy himself and was killed by his own group of laborers. That's when the last person with Coalition affiliations died in Hispania, with him the ideas of communism and the art of Russian language.

The sons of Kuznetsov never adopted either of the two, they even gave Hispanic names to their descendants, however they somehow preserved among each other their real family name, eventually started using it even in public, as about 200 years have passed. Many of the Kuznetsovs have died in the impish conditions they had to face on Crete, but the bloodline never died out.

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The dramatic change that the Rheinland exploration party and the Schiller appearing brought didn't have an effect on the Kuznetsov descendants, until one of them who was skilled at engineering so far only fertilizing machines, Juan Kuznetsov was asked to fulfill engineering tasks on board one of the vessels created by the Cretans. The vessel's design was similar to that of the Rheinlander exploration ship, it was built from the metals the Cretans harvested from some of the newly discovered asteroid fields nearby, as they were now in possession of the means to collect resources from space, decades after the Schiller's arrival.

The newly commissioned ship was named La esperanza (hope) and it was tasked to survey one of the system's nebulas for minable materials. The journey was supposed to last for two mere months, but the ship never returned to Crete. The Cretans never learned what happened to the vessel, but the truth is that it was sucked in by a gravitational anomaly in the nebula, or a "jump hole" as it was later called by travelers. The ship ended up in a system with a dead sun, emitting an amount of radiation that disabled the ship's systems within minutes, even beginning to literally melt the hull. The crew members suffered heavy radium poisoning, but miracaculously they were boarded and rescued by a vessel never seen before.

The ship was in fact a freigher deployed by the Independent Miners Guild, which was planning to expand into the system, regardless of the heavy radiation that seemingly infested the whole area. The technologically advanced IMG ship extracted the La esperanza's crew, shamefully only two of the five crew members survived the heavy radiation poisoning. Their most terrible deaths were witnessed by Juan Kuznetsov himself, who was needless to say, one of the two survivors. The exploration vessel returned to its original base of operations, which was a supply station somewhere on the edge of Rheinland, from which Freistadt was later expanded.

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As an addition to his life, Juan Kuznetsov owed a great deal to the developing IMG, as they gave him a shelter and free food in exchange for his engineering services on the supply depot which eventually began its expansion into what is called Freistadt today. Juan Kuznetsov and his two children, Miguel and Helena were chief elements in the construction of the aforementioned station, by installing things ranging from a gravity stabilizer to metal processors. The expansion lasted decades due to the fact that the closest installation was light-years away in Rheinland as an addition to Daumann and Kruger also expressing their interest in the area. Juan never lived to see the station in its full might.

Again, decades of peace and relative welfare dawned upon the Kuznetsov family, some of the descendants even left Freistadt and moved to Rheinland or Bretonia. Troubles only erupted as the Kuznetsovs' former comrades, the Cretans (now called Corsairs) started appearing in the system, attacking and looting IMG supply ships inbound from Rheinland. The eerie similarity between the native language, naming conventions and family origins of the Kuznetsovs raised their employers' awareness, eventually concluding rightfully the fact that the family formerly was or still is affiliated with the Corsair marauders. To avoid the repeated shame and distrust that surrounded them, the Kuznetsov family with the 90 years old Miguel as their head, moved to Bretonia.

The elderly Miguel couldn't bear the lengthy journey and passed away during the flight. At that time, trade lanes were not yet built in either of the Omega systems. They eventually got as far as Cambridge and settled in one of the developing farmlands.