Tank

APPEARANCE
Hair Color: Brown
Eye Color: Brown
Height: 2.00 m
Weight: 100.00 kg
Description:
Tank is huge, some sort of mutant or something. He kinda sticks out. This sucks when you are hunted by Imperials. Oh well, at least it’s fun hunting imperials back.

BACKGROUND
Tank was bred to be a combat slave. His DNA ‘was’ originally human but heavily modified. They made him both hard to hurt and built like a tank. Hence the name he has given, Tank. He came out exceptionally bright as well. That was an accident. It’s not good for slaves to be too smart, but his physical stats were just too good for them to flush him.

Born into slavery, he had little choice as to his daily activities. From the time he could walk, he had been thrown to the wolves, sometimes literally, to fight and hone that talent. Hand to hand combat was a daily regime, and as soon as he was good enough, his training became spectator sport as well.

There’s only so much physical fighting a slave can do in a day however without wasting the huge investment. No matter how careful one’s use of a combat slave is in gladiatorial fights, sooner or later you break them. When that happens, it helps if you’ve cross-trained them to be useful in some other manner. So in addition to hand to hand, he was trained with heavier guns so he could someday serve as a ship’s gunner. There’s no danger in putting a slave into a gun station simulator.

Tank through all this had an active mind, that unusual intelligence he was born with. He had little to do with it other than dream dreams, dreams of escape, dreams of vengeance upon those who held him in slavery, upon the Imperium that let the slavery be legal.

He did get lucky however. He found several opportunities over the years to steal books, most often tech manuals. He would leave them not in his barracks, but just laying about where they were inconspicuous and innocuous, so they wouldn’t attract questions and they wouldn’t be discovered in his possession if they were noticed. With them, he managed to teach himself how to read and even figured out how to handle the math that was in the books. It took many years, but it gave his mind something to do when not training.

There chanced finally a day when Tank had his golden opportunity to get away. A band of mercenaries hit the camp he was in to liberate some other prisoner who had apparently been held there. As a distraction, they blew out the security and released a whole lot of other prisoners and slaves, including Tank.

Despite the distraction, the mercs found themselves outflanked and outgunned and were in dire straights. It was Tank’s intention to get away himself, but he quickly realized that the best way to do that was in cooperation with the mercs, who were bent on exactly the same thing. So they saw him in operation, working with them to clear the way, tank taking out with his hand to hand skills several guards that were pinning down the mercs.

They did get away, and none objected when Tank went with them. They had their own ship, not far away, and again, though they exchanged a few looks, none said anything when Tank boarded as well.

They’d seen him in action. They’d also lost a couple of their crew in the action. So after querying Tank for a while as to who he was and what he could do, when they heard of his simulator training, they put him in the seat of a real gun for the first time and had him take potshots at asteroids as the ship whizzed by. The results of that testing done, they offered him a position on their ship. They were overjoyed when they later discovered that all his time with those tech manuals had left him an extraordinary ship’s mechanic as well.

It turned out that while these mercs were always in the market for paid contracts, such contracts were sadly few and far between. So they made up for it by preying on merchantmen. They mollified their consciences by praying only on Imperial ships. and they never had to actually kill any merchants. Tank was really good at nailing engine shots, and the mercs had a rep that a crew would be treated humanely if they didn’t put up a fight. They called themselves privateers, not pirates, even if that wasn’t strictly true.

A pirates life is rarely a long one, especially if you are preying on the Imperium. Ultimately they fell for the bait of what looked like a fat, laden merchant, only to discover that they’d gotten well within gun range of a Q ship, a Q ship much heavier than their little gunship, and with much bigger weapons. The fight did not last long.

Tank managed to bail in an escape pod after the reactor critical alarm went off. As far as he knows, he’s the only one that did. Fortunately for him, the trajectory of the pod closely matched that of a whole lot of debris chaff, and the Imperial Q ship didn’t see him.

The pod re-entry was rough, but the landing successful. He has no idea what planet he’s on, or what awaits him outside the pod. He’s got his Gauss pistol on him and he’s wearing his combat suit, but other than that, not much else. Time to find the way in this new place.

POWERS/TACTICS

PERSONALITY/MOTIVATION
Tank is morally ambiguous, but accommodating of friends.