Jack Harper

Str:9(+1) Dex:12(+2) End:8(+0) Int:8(+0) Edu:6(+0) Soc:6(+0)
Age 42
ex-Infantry (2), ex-Enforcer (3)

Skills:
Athletics (Endurance) 3, Carouse 0, Drive (Wheeled Vehicles) 1, Gun Combat (Slug Rifle) 1, Gun Combat (Slug Pistol) 2, Gunner (Turret) 1, Heavy Weapons (Launcher), Mechanic 1, Medic 1, Melee (Brawling) 3, Persuade 1, Pilot (Small Craft) 1, Recon 1, Seafarer 0, Stealth 0, Streetwise 1, Tactics (Military) 1, Vacc Suit 0

Training:
Recon 2 points

Equipment:
Gauss Rifle, Gauss Pistol, Augments, Improved Cloth Armor, Advanced Poly Carapace Armor, Medical Records (Weatherproof hardcopy), 25,000 CR

Homeworld:
Glarsincham

Description:
Jack carries himself with a quiet confidence and dignity: He's tall, lean, broad-shouldered, and compactly muscled like someone who's been actively training for an endurance competition. He has chiseled features, deep-tanned and leathery skin, various small facial scars, a nose that appears to have seen some blunt trauma, and a mop of thick, unkempt, and pepper-gray hair.

Goals:
Jack has been making a decent living as a gun for hire on the frontier, traveling almost continually from job to job. He enjoys having a mobile life, with new adventures in every port.

History: Jack grew up working in the seaside shipyards with his father, like many other boys in his city on Glarsincham. He never knew his mother...she died when Jack was born, and his father later died in an unfortunate shipping container incident. His family gone, and with little interest in being reminded of his loss, Jack decided it was best to move along and make a life for himself elsewhere.

Jack enlisted in the Army's Light Infantry during the Solomani Rim war when he was 18. He was a fine match for the job, where young, strong men with minimal family ties were preferred. There wasn’t heavy fighting in the sector he was stationed in, but there was a lot of travel, some garrison duty, a number of minor skirmishes against partisans and separatists, several police actions, anti-terrorist operations, and a handful of anti-imperial uprisings during this time that the army was sent in to quell. The war was over before his first term was complete.

He performed admirably and got a couple promotions during his first and second terms. He was stationed in a number of different places throughout the sector - 6 months here, a year there. His longest assignment was in Suukir where he was stationed for almost the full 4 years of his second term.

This second term was very quiet, with few major operations. The Army saw officer potential in him, and put him through Advanced Training, his garrison assignment was boring, and his Advanced Training was too academic for him at this time. He had too much time on his hands at this point, and spent it at bars wooing girls.

The girls were a welcome distraction of the tedium of his duties, but one of them....Olivia, was more than a simple distraction. She worked at a local movie theater, that he frequented when he was local...mostly to see her. They struck up a romantic relationship, but his deployments made it difficult for them to maintain the romance. In the end they stayed friends, but not very close. Jack threw himself into serious physical training to take his mind off the girl and focus on his military duties. He got promoted again...to Corporal.

During his third term he was assigned to a covert mission to a planet named Leitaon. The surface of Leitaon is almost completely covered by ocean with the population living on a number of floating cities. Jack was chosen because of his seafaring background. During the Solomani Rim War, Leitaon was one of a number of worlds that broke off from the Imperium to form the Carillian Assembly. The Leitaon aristocracy wanted to remain Imperial, but there was a popular uprising and the government seceded rather than fight a civil war.

In 208, a small pro-Imperial faction attempted a coup. Harper was sent in with a small team on a covert operation to support the coup. Their team was discovered, and found themselves pinned down with little cover in the middle of an angry, and well armed mob. It was a blood bath.

His team was surrounded and outnumbered, with no reinforcements in sight. The skirmish went on for hours. Jack survived the onslaught against all odds...personally killing scores of men, many with nothing but a pistol and eventually his bare hands once his ammo out. Most of his team was dead by the time an extraction team arrived.

The coup collapsed shortly after this battle and the Imperium successfully denied and cover up their official involvement. Jack was offered a commendation and a sure promotion to Lance Sergant, due to his demonstration of valor "provided he kept his mouth shut". Jack lost too many brothers in that battle to simply tuck away their memories and pretend it never happened.

He soon retired from the Army, in good standing, and found his way to the city of Densun on Howotro. It was there that he fell in with a bad crowd. Jack was recruited by the Zangduk family (probably the second most powerful of the criminal families after Minlo), as a bodyguard/hired gun. He had all the right stuff to make a fine enforcer. Much of their business was extortion and loan sharking, but they had their fingers in almost every imaginable scheme.

Karl Cooper, a crime boss that ran a bunch of jobs and schemes for the Zangduk family, saw potential in Jack, took him under his wing as a protege, and taught him the ropes of business. Jack did a range of odd jobs for them, most of which included driving or roughing up folks unwilling to pay for protections.

The Zangduk staged a major heist, with Jack's help, that essentially made Cooper's entire group a target of the competing Minlo family. They stole an important shipment of black market military gear and supplies that were en route to the Minlos. The Minlos realized they needed an inside man to get at Cooper, discovered Jack's involvement, and tried to hire Jack to either kill Cooper (or step aside) so some other assassin could get to him.

Jack was never one to take a pay off for betrayal, so he revealed the plot to Cooper, and helped Cooper stage a fake death. Cooper was grateful for the assistance, knowing that Jack risked becoming a target himself, should the ruse be discovered. Cooper had earned enough from the heist to disappear for a while...comfortably. He knew the Minlos reach and resources were too great, and eventually he'd be discovered if he showed up on the map.

Jack disappeared as well, and spent the last few months making a decent profit as a gun for hire on the frontier. He spent some of those profits on weapons and augmentations at a planet named Irliiki, just outside the border of the Imperium, where their technology is fairly advanced and the laws fairly lax. He bartered a bodyguard job with some merchants, that left him in Neifaonshua, but once he ran low on cash, he started looking for new prospects.