Carter Elias
The doctor who left one crew on Ganymede and has not slept a full night since. Bode Telecom's most decorated asset, selected for the Ganymede Transmission Mission because he was the only one left who had been there and come back.
Carter Elias trained as an M.D./Ph.D. before the Company found him. He flew his first deep-space mission at twenty-nine — a seven-month Mars cycler as mission medic — and his second at thirty-one as second to Captain Emma Rogers on the 2044 Ganymede installation that established Bode Telecom's optical uplink beyond Mars. He returned from that mission alone.
The Company's internal review cleared him of fault. The findings were classified at a level Carter himself does not have clearance to read. He has not asked. He has not needed to.
Three years later, with the Chirikov already crossing the belt, Bode Telecom needs the DSOC upgraded before their rival can claim the site. There are only a handful of pilots who have the training to command a 422-day Jupiter transit. There is only one who has done it before. Carter accepts the mission the way a man accepts a sentence he has been waiting to serve.
He does not tell his crew everything. He tells them what they need to fly.
