The Republic's celebrated Blue pilot arrives from Mercury carrying survivors, hard truths, and a newly stern command presence.
Colloway Char is a Blue pilot and Howler who survived the fall of Heliopolis. He has brought 2,011 survivors out of Mercury by hiding in the mountains after an EMP, hiring iron smugglers, and taking their battered Votum-disguised torchShip.
The experience has altered the formerly responsibility-averse pilot. At the Marcher base he meets anxious refugees with hard authority, insists that Mars still stands, and delivers the grim accounting of the Mercury remnants: many starved, were eaten by Atalantia's hounds, were impaled by Atlas, or were sent to Votum mines. His anger at Darrow's absence reveals how deeply the survivors feel abandoned, even as his arrival reconnects them to the war.
A very slender Blue man with dark skin drawn tight across the contours of his skull. He is underfed and weary in a jumpsuit, but now carries himself with stony authority.
Char is the returning Republic pilot whose rescue party ends Darrow's communications blackout and expands the castaways' desperate force.