Name : Stefan Bulevski<br/><br/>Age : 33<br/><br/>Occupation : Volunteer Guard<br/><br/>Description : Damn bloody handsome, fine figure of a man, and in a uniform too!<br/><br/>Brief biography : Educated in electronics and electromechanical science, worked as a research engineer in renewable energies for 10 years. Wife and Mother killed in freak tube accident three years ago, cause never ascertained. Sent his son to live with his brother, father and their spouses at their farm in Plymouth colony. He resigned his career after the funeral and lived on the fringe for a year before reintegrating with society and beginning anew as a volunteer guard. Noted for unusually hard line, non-tolerant stance of misdemeanours and minor crimes. Nicknamed 'Bull' by colleagues. Has killed two criminals, justification for one received, one pending completion of internal investigation. Acceptable fitness reports from superiors. No exceptional ratings in any assigned tasks, no commendations.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>I could scarcely believe how well it had gone. When the order came through to evacuate nobody was more shocked than I was. A fleeting moment of concern for Ali and Sven flickered across my consciousness, but they knew the score. The cause was worth the sacrifice. I logged onto the net and put a scan out for their PDAs, but nothing pinged back. They must have been destroyed, and so in all likelihood had Ali and Sven because a PDA is never far from its owner. That the pair might have died, when I thought about it, was not a bad thing really. This had gone far beyond what Plymouth's Elders had originally intended when we had been tasked with shutting down the electrical substation that fed the complex while the presentation to Eden's Elders was taking place. The event had originally been meant to be an act of sabotage to embarass them, but obviously taking down the power grid had caused a containment breach of whatever the hell it was they were creating in there.<br/><br/>So much the better. Accidents happen.<br/><br/>But how many innocents had died? How would Plymouth's Elders take that news? It was for sure that Eden could never be allowed to find out the root cause behind this disaster because it was undoubtedly an act of war, and Plymouth had no warfighting capabilities should it ultimately boil down to that. If Ari and Sven weren't dead and their missing PDA signals were down to a subnet comms failure then I would have no choice but to kill them myself - their reactions might be more emotional than mine, and there was no more dangerous a mix than emotions and secrets. There was no way the truth could ever be allowed to come out, and I wondered if the Elders would despatch somebody to silence me. In their shoes I know I would. Knowledge such as this surely had to be suppressed with extreme prejudice.<br/><br/>Details were slow emerging on the disaster, but the scale of it seemed to be wholly unprecedented. Strangely I felt no guilt, no remorse in my role in this crisis. Eden had it coming. The hypocrisy in the naming of the colony alone was staggering. While Plymouth adopted an agrarian policy, one based on maintaining the planetary balance, Eden forged full speed ahead down the path of high technology, paying nothing more than lip service to environmental concerns and had embarked down the path of total planetary terraforming that would destroy all the achievements made by Plymouth. I was in full agreement with my father on this, though he was possibly the most radical of Plymouth's Elders. Eden's relentless poisonous spread across the surface of New Terra had to be curtailed by whatever means possible.<br/><br/>Vulcan's hammer had been a message from God himself that he would no longer tolerate the pollution of his creations by man and thus he had destroyed the Earth, but mankind had escaped in its technological marvels and sought new worlds to lay waste to. Left to run free Eden would inevitably repeat the cycle and call down the next calamity from on high, whilst Plymouth colonial values directly contributed to preserving the ecology such as it was here, and in many instances was actually enhancing it by using perfectly natural methods to create a harmonious union between mankind and nature.<br/><br/>Whilst I regretted the scale of the calamity on humanitarian terms, the bigger picture was much better served with this outcome. A disaster of such proportions would help convert many of those who enjoyed the comforts of technology to the safer philosophies that those who cared about this planet had adopted. Eden needed to consider this a warning, a wake-up call if you like, because sooner or later something like this had been bound to happen. All today signified was that the timeframe had been brought forward, albeit artificially. Perhaps the next calamity would have been even worse. Enhanced Fusion research and singularity harnessing technologies that filled the evening newscasts could potentially devastate the entire colony far worse than the release of this high tech virus, and military black projects alluded to in countless reports could only have one target - Plymouth. What other enemy was there?<br/><br/>I strapped on my torch and nightstick and trotted down the tube toward my assigned station in hydroponics, wondering how much of the VeeGees command structure had also perished in the catastrophe. Hopefully enough to see me vault up the ranks. That should magnify my use to Plymouth's elders beyond measure. As I walked I pulled out my PDA and entered my personal log, typing in a brief sentence, that simply said; 'Job done. Waiting.' My handler would hack it when he got within line-of-sight of the IR receiver and leave further instructions in the log - had he survived the calamity, of course.<br/><br/>Ahead of me I spotted somebody idly meandering past the big hydroponic vats in the agridome, peering inside, then running his hand across the leaves of the plants. While not in any way illegal, it irked me to see it. Those plants were the future of life on this planet, not animals in a childrens zoo to be petted by those who were so immersed in technology that they didn't understand those plants were far more valuable than they themselves were. He probably did no harm, he certainly meant none - that was obvious from his demeanour - but it irritated me nevertheless. This was not the time to crack the whip on a numskull who knew no better, however. This was time to get back to work.<br/><br/>" Beautiful, aren't they?" I called to him.