The Spectre
| Callsign | Origin | Age | Sex |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sable | CSA (ex-military) | 38 | F |
Every crew has someone who goes in first and is never seen doing it. Not the loudest gun — the quietest one. The Spectre is how a boarding starts before anyone knows it has: a body already inside, in the dark, deciding which way the fight will go before the fight is told it exists.
Sable learned it in a CSA uniform — regular service, ground and black work, never the space branch. She left with the tradecraft and none of the loyalty, and she carries the one lesson the service taught her that she still believes: the gear that gets you killed is the clever gear. The suit with the exploit. The blade that needs a charge. The scope that talks to the network the enemy is already inside. So she doesn’t carry it. What she brings is boring, kinetic, and works cold, wet, jammed, or EMP’d — because she has been each of those, and the boring stuff is what got her home.
The stealth isn’t in her kit. It’s in her. That’s the whole point: the class already makes her a ghost, so every gram of her loadout goes to being a problem once she stops being invisible.
Sheet
- Class: The Spectre (Skill: Infiltration)
- Initial Attributes: Body 12, Ghost 8, Mind 6
- Gear Loadout — reliable, traditional, no chrome:
- Void Marine: combat EVA suit, AV 2. [Binds 3 Body + 1 Ghost]
- Heavy Kinetic Assault Rifle: DV 3, ballistic, no energy cells to run dry. [Binds 4 Body]
- Combat knife — the backup that never jams. [Binds 0 — light gear]
- Calculations:
- Body Binding: 3 (suit) + 4 (rifle) = 7 · Ghost Binding: 1 (suit) = 1
- Current Pool:
- Body: 12 − 7 = 5
- Mind: 6 − 0 = 6
- Ghost: 8 − 1 = 7 (barely touched — she spent nothing on stealth gear, because the stealth is the class)
- Heavy option — Hardshell Combat Exoskeleton (FRM 24 / SYS 6, AV 4). She keeps a frame racked for the jobs that are a stand-up fight, not a sneak — the reliable military tank, not the exotic stuff. In it the rifle mounts to a hardpoint (no Body binding), the frame soaks the hits, and she trades her ghost for a wall: [Binds 3 Ghost; +1 targeting] → Ghost 8 − 4 = 4, Body free. A Spectre in a Hardshell is a contradiction on paper and a very bad morning in a corridor.
In this scenario
- She is the act-two threat, wearing the wrong badge. Sable trained in the doctrine the CSA breach team runs on — the stacking, the timing, the no-witnesses discipline. She can call their moves a beat before they make them, because she was made the same way. The scenario’s thesis (the crew wrote the playbook used against them) lands hardest here: one of them learned it in uniform, and now reads it back to the table like sheet music.
- The machines-betray-everyone theme has one holdout. When the QNA forges orders and the assistant can’t be trusted, Sable’s flat refusal to rely on any of it stops looking like paranoia and starts looking like the only clear head aboard. She and the Fixer share a doctrine from opposite trades; let them recognize it in each other.
- Infiltration is a class skill — it does not care what she’s wearing. She can go in cold and quiet in the Void Marine, or (rarely) creep a Hardshell into position, and the rules let her, because the silence is training, not gear. Lean on that: the heavy soldier who is somehow already behind you is the whole horror of the archetype.
Hooks (draft)
- Keeps a paper notebook. Actual paper. Says anything that can be hacked, will be — and she has watched it happen to better operators than the table.
- Left the CSA over an order she followed, not one she refused. Doesn’t discuss it. The no-witnesses clause on this contract sat in her gut wrong from the first read, and she took the job anyway. Ask her why.