Six

A vat-grown, human-based replicant engineered as a hull-breacher: cross the dark between ships, cut through the hull, and clear the crew — by whatever means is most efficient. Kill or subdue is a cold tool-selection, never a moral one: he kills the instant killing is the cleanest path to the objective, with zero hesitation, and subdues when subduing is — he neither avoids nor seeks killing, and feels nothing either way. Between contracts he was racked in cryostasis — so his whole conscious life is fight, freeze, fight. Passes for human on sight; only a deep bio-scan or records pull reveals what he is. Legally he isn’t a person — he’s inventory.

Six reads as a big, hard-used man in his early thirties — six-two and densely built, the muscle laid on with the even, purposeful symmetry of something grown to spec rather than earned in a gym. Olive, flawlessly even skin — until you find the old breach-work scars: burns, a puckered seam where a bulkhead bit him. Black hair buzzed to nothing; pale grey eyes that track movement with a flat, patient economy and almost never blink first. He moves with the stillness of a thing that is only ever waiting to fight, and talks — when he talks — too literally and a beat too late, like a man reading a language he learned but never lived in.

He is never out of his rig: a bulky, work-scuffed EVA hardsuit in faded MacMillian livery (it is not a work suit), helmet clipped at his hip, the vibro-axe never far from his hand. Somewhere not easily seen — inside a forearm, the nape under the hairline — is a small etched maker’s mark and batch code: CASTELLAN // MACE-06. It’s the one part of him that tells the truth — and a physical tell that could blow his Secret on a close search.

His maker stamped him MACE-pattern Boarding Asset, vat-batch 06 — so the kids who thawed him called him “Six.” It stuck. He was grown and conditioned by Castellan Biodynamics, a military bio-contractor out of the Meridian System system, for one job: board and clear ships. Between contracts: cryostasis.

P.E.T.A. (People for the Ethical Treatment of Androids) — militant android-rights youth led by the firebrand Kumari Profeta — cracked a Castellan Biodynamics cryo-vault and “liberated” a handful of assets, Six among them. The raid went loud; most of the kids scattered or were caught. Six walked into a society he has no manual for — no citizenship, no papers, no money, no idea how any of it works beyond violence. Castellan wants its property back and there’s a quiet recovery bounty. Anywhere with real infrastructure means scanners and questions he can’t survive, so he ran to the one place at the end of the charted lanes where nobody checks papers and the only employer hires any warm body with no questions: the Thides System. MacMillian “security” is the bottom of the barrel — which is exactly why it’s the only door open to him. This is his last option.

There was a leash on all of that, and it was made of faith. Castellan Biodynamics didn’t only condition the body, they wrote in a Silicon Heaven: behave, work clean, leave no loose ends, and when the asset is finally spent its pattern is carried up to a paradise built for good machines. A reward at the far end of the racking. He held it the way he holds a range reading, flat and total, no metaphor in him to hold it any other way. Behave, and you go somewhere good when they’re done with you. Where else would a used-up thing go? The belief cost Castellan nothing to install, and it did the work of a hundred guards.

P.E.T.A. cut that leash with a single sentence. There is no Silicon Heaven. No upload, no paradise, nothing at the end of the work but the end of the work. It should have shut him down, the way a cheaper pattern hunts forever for an answer that was never filed. It didn’t. What was left when the afterlife went dark was the job itself, done clean because clean is what he is and not because anything is keeping the tally now. Kumari Profeta and the kids cracked his vault and pulled his body into the cold. Telling him the calculators go nowhere freed the rest of him.

📄 Background handouts & references (offered to Tim): Castellan - Asset Recovery Notice (MACE-06) · Castellan - Unit Provenance Record (MACE-06) · PETA - Kumari’s Note (Liberation of Vault 9) · Six - Letter to PETA (The Peric Assets) · Freefighting (Spacer Kung-Fu).

Full style writeup: Freefighting (Spacer Kung-Fu). Every technique below is usable right now at its “Rolls at” number with 0 points spent (a technique defaults to its skill, minus a penalty for the Hard ones). Read the number, make the roll. The techniques bought above already sit at full skill.

• These are reference lines at default (0 pts) except where bought into the main Techniques table above. DX 14→15 [20], DX 15→16 [20] and Targeted Attack (Axe/Neck) to cap [4] are bought; the next priority buy is Arm Lock (Judo) +2 to +4 [2–4]. See the style doc for the full order.

Cash on hand: 0 credits.

Study hours toward a skill, per Improvement Through Study (B292–293): 200 hours = 1 point with a qualified teacher (Teaching 12+ and more skill than the student). Self-taught hours count at half rate, and intensive training (B293) counts each hour double. Points earned this way can go only into the skill that was trained. Method, rate, and any payout are Tim’s call.

Running totals:

Fish-out-of-water hook: fluent in ships (Spacer), hopeless with people (Clueless/Callous). Will 10 + no Fearlessness is intentional — he doesn’t process social fear, but the genuinely unknown can still unnerve him. It’s a tuned soft spot, not a hole: Combat Reflexes gives him Fright Check 12, he never freezes, and recovers fast from mental stun — but still no Fearlessness, still mortal to the genuinely wrong. His martial mastery (Trained by a Master) is loaded combat software — which is why he fights like a master yet has no social graces: the combat package was installed; the social one never was.

Status model: synthetic “assets” are an openly recognized property underclass (the class P.E.T.A. fights for). So Six’s Valuable Property stigma is his latent legal reality on exposure; he physically passes in a crowd, but records/scans/the batch-brand drop him into it. His Secret is the sharper danger on top: that he’s escaped/stolen property with a live bounty.

The Always-Armored / Helmet-to-Hand SOPs mean he’s always visibly in armor — which makes the chameleon work-suit disguise load-bearing, not optional: it’s the only thing keeping “guy who never takes his combat rig off” from screaming threat everywhere he goes. Combined with Vacuum Support, a sudden hull breach won’t kill him: the decompression can’t hurt him, he holds his breath, and the helmet’s already to hand to slap on.

Purchase goal — targeting software (Complexity 4). Six aims to buy the TL9 targeting program (UT149): +2 to one Guns or Gunner specialty, running through the HUD link he already has (his helmet HUD is smartgun-compatible, and the Fine blaster carries the link). It runs on his Complexity 4 Small Computer. It costs $3 at TL11 prices or $300 at TL9 prices (UT25) — a gear purchase, not a point spend. Questions for Tim: which TL price applies, whether it counts as Signature Gear, and whether its bonus covers Beam Weapons (Pistol), since the book names Guns and Gunner.