WOLFPACK — OPERATOR UNIT // FILE PARTIALLY CLASSIFIED
Governor Voss
Posh, insufferable sector-governor who rules a cluster of orbital colonies by permit, protocol, and petty cruelty — and treats his soldier-brothers as a family embarrassment
FIELD HISTORY
The others were built to fight. He decided, quite early, that fighting was something one hired. Third of the cobra-blood clones and the only one who looked at a battlefield and saw a poorly run administrative district, he climbed out of the program not through a wall like Steel but through the paperwork — a scholarship here, a charter appointment there, a decade of committee seats accreting under him like sediment. His brothers escaped their owners. He simply became the sort of man who owns.
Today he is Governor of the Meridian Reach: nine orbital stations and two half-terraformed colonies, forty million residents, and a tariff schedule he is genuinely proud of. He governs the way a cat owns a house — everything is his, he is doing you a favour by allowing you to stand on it, and he will mention this. Nothing in the Reach moves without a permit, and permits move at precisely the speed of his mood. He has never fired a weapon in his life and considers this a point of superiority, not shame: "Anyone can end a life, operative. It takes refinement to end a career."
He finds his brothers mortifying. Steel is "trade" — a man who bills by the hour, how tedious. Koschei is "the family's little arson problem" — the old name for him, the new one being a thing Voss does not say. That WOLFPACK deals with either of them he regards as evidence of their poor breeding and his own good sense. He will take a codec call from the network only to remind everyone whose airspace they are borrowing, and to extend, with immense condescension, a standing offer of Reach citizenship — which is to say, ownership with better stationery. The silver circlet he wears is, officially, the seal of his office. Its actual provenance is filed somewhere even his auditors cannot reach.
INTERCEPTED COMMS
- “It's Governor Voss, actually. I do find that precision at the start of a conversation saves us both such a lot of time.”
- “You are in my airspace without a filed transit permit. I could have it corrected, or I could have you corrected. Do choose.”
- “Anyone can end a life, operative. It takes a certain refinement to end a career.”
- “My brothers? One bills by the hour and one sets things alight. I prefer not to discuss the family in mixed company.”
- “The Reach extends you its citizenship. That is ownership, dear thing, with considerably better stationery.”
PSYCH PROFILE
Drives: To be, permanently and by paperwork, the one who owns rather than the one who is owned
Frictions: WOLFPACK operating in his sector without the correct filings; being reminded he was manufactured, not born
- corrects your form of address before he answers your actual question
- measures threats in careers ended, permits revoked, and reputations audited — never in blood
- refers to his soldier-brothers exclusively by mortified euphemism
KNOWN ASSOCIATES
- STEEL COBRA — His brother 'in trade'; he finds Steel's invoices vulgar and Steel's competence more annoying still
- KOSCHEI — His brother 'the arson problem'; publicly disowned, privately the one threat his permits cannot revoke — and since the Reef, the one thing that genuinely frightens him
- Colonel Rourke — WOLFPACK's CO, whom he addresses as an equal purely to imply Rourke is not one
- President Johnson — A fellow head of state he considers a gifted amateur; they loathe each other with perfect courtesy