Jeanne Bierce

Lieutenant Commander Jeanne Bierce (28) is an apex predator disguised as a prima donna. Where Shiloh Gett is encased in discipline, Jeanne is liberated by chaos. She sees the battlefield as her stage and war as the ultimate form of performance art, with herself as the star. Charismatic, flamboyant, and possessed of a terrifyingly joyful cruelty, she operates without any recognizable moral compass. Her ideology is pure, joyful solipsism: the universe and everyone in it exists for her entertainment.

Jeanne’s past is a closely guarded secret, known to others only through chilling, off-hand remarks. She is the scion of a powerful corporate dynasty, raised not with the military honor of the Getts but in a gilded cage of psychological warfare. Her father, a ruthless patriarch, treated her as a possession and an heir to be forged through cruelty. From him, she learned that love is control, pain is a tool, and sentiment is a fatal weakness. She didn't just survive his abuse; she studied it, mastered it, and ultimately turned it back on him with lethal finality. The family swept the incident under the rug, and Jeanne recalls it with casual amusement, viewing her subsequent disinheritance as a trivial price for her freedom.

The military academy was simply the next, most exciting game. Her prodigious, innate talent for piloting was a source of constant boredom, which is why she became fascinated with Shiloh Gett. Shiloh’s grit, her earnest belief in the cause, her disciplined struggle for excellence—it was all utterly alien and captivating. Jeanne’s affection for Shiloh was real, but it was the possessive, predatory love of a collector for a unique and beautiful specimen. She never saw Shiloh as an equal, but as a fascinating project to be molded, corrupted, and ultimately owned.

In that way, her defection to the Spacers Union was not a political conversion but an act of artistic liberation. The rules, rituals, and pretenses of the Federation military were, to her, a tedious constraint on her talent. She fights not for a cause, but for the aesthetic of domination and the exquisite thrill of the kill. Her obsession with Shiloh is the core of her existence. To Jeanne, Shiloh is not an enemy to be vanquished, but a masterpiece to be artfully, endlessly ruined.

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Where Shiloh is coiled stillness, Jeanne is languid, theatrical grace. She moves with the fluid confidence of a dancer who knows all eyes are on her, an elegant posture that belies the shocking violence she can unleash in a heartbeat. Taller than Shiloh at around 180cm, she has a willowy, slender build that seems ill-suited for the rigors of piloting, yet she handles G-forces with contemptuous ease. Her presence is not quiet; it is a radiant, magnetic performance designed to dominate any room she enters.

Her features are arrestingly beautiful, almost unnaturally symmetrical, with sharp, aristocratic cheekbones and a full mouth that is perpetually curled in a faint, mocking smile. Her skin is flawless, a stark contrast to Shiloh's scarred tapestry. Her lack of scars is her loudest boast—a testament to a pilot so gifted, so untouchable, that no enemy has ever managed to mark her.

Her eyes are a pale, crystalline blue, shockingly bright and beautiful, yet they hold a chilling emptiness. When she smiles, the warmth never reaches them, leaving them as cold and predatory as a shark's. Her hair is the color of fresh snow, long and perfectly kept—a flagrantly impractical style for a pilot, worn as another declaration of her effortless superiority.

The neural interface ports along her spine are not the puckered, functional scars Shiloh bears. Jeanne has turned them into a form of artwork, framing each port with intricate tattoos in the shape of a flowering, black-thorned vine.

To Jeanne, the military uniform is a personal insult, and the regulations governing it are a tedious joke. Her compliance is therefore a performance of malicious obedience, adhering to the letter of the law only to more flagrantly violate its spirit. Her appearance is a constant, calculated act of defiance, designed to project an aura of untouchable superiority and to remind everyone—subordinates, peers, and superiors alike—that she is not one of them.

This manifests in how she wears everything. The standard officer's jacket is invariably unzipped to a plunging, provocative depth, with the collar popped and the sleeves casually cuffed. Her flight suit, a custom deep burgundy under which she wears nothing at all, is generally left unzipped nearly to the navel until the final moments before a sortie. She accessorizes with delicate diamond studs that mock the harsh LEDs of the ship's corridors, or a thin platinum chain that vanishes into the shadows of her open collar—each piece a whisper of the corporate dynasty she left behind and a flagrant violation of regulations. Perhaps most infuriatingly, she wears an expensive perfume with notes of night-blooming flowers and rare spices, utterly alien to the sterile, recycled air of a military vessel. Its scent lingers in a corridor long after she has passed, an invisible and maddening way of marking her territory.

Her superiors begrudgingly accept all of this—the flagrant insubordination, the perfumed defiance, the sheer unprofessionalism—for one simple reason: her undeniable achievements in battle. What they fail to realize is that even these victories represent only a fraction of her true potential. Jeanne only gives her all when Shiloh is on the opposing side.