Irkalla Serras
Quote:
I find your lack of focus...disappointing.
Race: Humanoid
Sex: Female
Age: 32 years (Terran Standard)
Height: 170cm (5'7")
Weight: 65kg (145 lbs.)
Hair: Black
Eyes: Brown
Known Aliases: None
Origins and Early Life
Irkalla Serras was born to a well-to-do merchant family on Hammurabi II, an important waypoint between the Terran Sector and the Mercantile League Sector. Her father owned and operated a fleet of merchant vessels to conduct trade operations between the League and the UFP. In school, Irkalla showed great aptitudes at math and spatial relations, and had a profound curiosity about space. Her father saw these interests and knew that his daughter would be at home travelling between the stars, as befit the family heritage. As soon as he could, he began taking her aboard his merchant flagship to witness the business the family conducted and to begin learning practical applications for the math that she was so good at, arranging for the ship's lead astrogator to be her tutor.
Irkalla enjoyed this opportunity and excelled in her studies. When she was 17, Hammurabi II was attacked by a Bug Colony Invasion Fleet. While the Bug fleet was ferociously engaged by what naval and civilian merchants that could help, the space battle was only a spoiling action by the ships of the Bug line. The majority of the core of the colony transports were able to reach Hammurabi II, land, dig in and become the heart of several hives. Knowing what a threat such a hive world could pose to both the UFP the League, the government of Hammurabi sent out distress calls to both parties. Digging out so many hives would require manpower and armaments that the colony world and its population of only 100 million could not muster.
Both the UFP and the League saw Hammurabi II as a potential starting point for the next Bug invasion, and they wanted more than anything to stop the expansion before it started. By the time that UFP and League naval forces arrived to contain the threat, the numerous hives had hatched waves of assault forces that either overran or had engaged in close-in fighting almost all of the major population centers. To eliminate the Bugs, the navies of each government were forced into campaigns of heavy orbital bombardment that decimated the population and eventually cracked open the hives.
All this occurred while Irkalla and her father were away on business. When they returned to Hammurabi, their world lay in ruin. A joint naval picket was garrisoned in the system to prevent a Bug fleet from returning or resupplying, and the only vessels they would allow in were those willing to transport survivors off-world. Irkalla watched her father give the order to jettison their ship's cargo to make room for refugees, just to allow them to return home one last time and try to make contact with the rest of the family.
It was a vain effort; the company headquarters had been in the capitol city of Marduk, and the shining jewel of the Istabaran Coast had been glassed from orbit. The Serras country estates had been overrun by the bugs and had been ravaged by CAP troopers trying to dig them out. Irkalla and her father found no survivors of their family. They took on hundreds of refugees and offered them transport to other worlds. This understandably marked a change in the focus of Serras Enterprises, who went on a war footing.
Irkalla's father, who had once encouraged his daughter's curiosity and creativity, pushed for her to become a full citizen of the UFP and enroll in military academy. Because it was her father's wish, she did so, not learning until later that he simply wanted her to be absent while he turned his shipping empire into a fleet of raiders with the intent of striking back at the Bugs. He had lost everything that truly mattered to him. He had finally run amok. Naval investigations by the UFP suggested that the fleet that had invaded Hammurabi II had not come from deep space as originally suspected, but rather from a local star system that held no normally habitable worlds. In naval intelligence circles, they had suspected these hell-systems as potential "sleeper" bases for Bug activity for some time, which had caused them decades before to enact a system of Terraforming sub-optimal stellar real estate in order to stave off blind spots in the star sector. When Irkalla's father learned of it and found proof of bug activity, his choice was made clear. He amassed a fleet of shipping vessels and loaded them with a special cargo. When the commerce raiders cleared the way to the lightly defended Hell-world that had spawned the attack on his home, the cargo ships entered atmosphere and detonated, raining down hundreds of thousands of tons of customized chemicals that interacted in a specific fashion with the planet's toxic atmosphere, turning it into absolute poison. His revenge was complete, and when Irkalla graduated from Starforce Naval academy, she received his final message.
