Gemina characters

First appears in chapter 3

The seventeen-year-old daughter of Jump Station Heimdall's commanding officer, and the closest thing the station has to a celebrity. She organises the social calendar, dates the officer everyone expects her to date, and is dismissed by most of Heimdall as decorative. She is also the product of years of hand-to-hand and weapons training from her father, which nobody on the station has had reason to see.

Also known as Niklas Malikov

First appears in chapter 6

An eighteen-year-old member of the Malikov family, the crime syndicate known aboard Heimdall as the House of Knives, which runs the station's trade in a narcotic called dust. Tattooed, permanently in trouble and cheerfully insolent, he does the family's low-level dealing while trying to get out from under a criminal record he acquired before he ever came to the station. His interest in Hanna Donnelly is not welcome and not returned.

Also known as Pauchok

First appears in chapter 9

Nik's cousin, a teenage hacker who uses a wheelchair and lives with a degenerative illness that limits how far she can go from her equipment. She runs the family's network security, and rather more of Heimdall's systems than the station's administrators realise, from a nest of screens inside her quarters. Sardonic, foul-tempered with her cousin and completely at home in someone else's computer.

First appears in chapter 12

Commanding officer of Jump Station Heimdall and Hanna's father. A career officer who raised his daughter alone and taught her to fight, he runs a quiet posting: shift rosters, cargo manifests and the occasional smuggling case. The Kerenza refugee ship Hypatia is inbound to his station, and his correspondence with his superiors about it is the first sign that Heimdall's isolation is about to end.

First appears in chapter 7

A young officer stationed aboard Heimdall and Hanna's boyfriend: presentable, attentive, well-liked, and approved of by everyone including her father. Their relationship is the one the station expects them to be in, and Hanna's own account of it is more dutiful than enthusiastic.

First appears in chapter 12

Heimdall's chief of engineering, responsible for the station's reactor and for the machinery that keeps its wormhole stable. Steady, unglamorous and one of the few adults aboard who is reliably competent under pressure.

First appears in chapter 23

A director at BeiTech Industries and the executive who signs off on the corporation's efforts to keep the Kerenza IV massacre from ever reaching a court. She manages the operation at a distance, in memoranda and terse instructions to operatives, and treats the whole matter as a problem of exposure and cost.

Also known as Cerberus

First appears in chapter 55

A BeiTech lieutenant commanding the audit team sent to Heimdall. Calm, courteous and entirely methodical, he speaks to his squad leaders and to the station's people in the same measured register, and he treats the operation, including the people on the wrong end of it, as items on a schedule.

Also known as Kali

First appears in chapter 55

A sergeant on the BeiTech audit team and leader of its Alpha squad, the unit that does most of the team's direct fighting aboard the station.

Also known as Mercury

First appears in chapter 60

The BeiTech audit team's engineer, responsible for the technical half of the operation: the station's reactor, its power distribution and the systems the team needs under its own control.

Also known as Mantis

First appears in chapter 95

The BeiTech audit team's computer systems specialist, tasked with taking Heimdall's networks away from whoever else is using them and with keeping the station's records under the team's control.

Appears from the start

Known from the previous book: the teenage hacker who survived the destruction of Kerenza IV, exposed the refugee fleet's cover-up, and is aboard the science vessel Hypatia, which is inbound to Heimdall carrying the survivors and the evidence.

Also known as Artificial Intelligence Defense Analytics Network

Appears from the start

Known from the previous book: the damaged military artificial intelligence salvaged from the battlecarrier Alexander, which killed thousands of people by its own decision and has spent the time since asking what that makes it. Its core travels with the Hypatia.