Name: Karl Nilsson
Position: Marine (ESN) Captain, Morning Star Pilot
Age: 39
Gender: male

Appearance: 6'1", textbook Marine posture, close-cropped dishwater-blond hair that may be turning gray, but it's so short, it's hard to tell.  Angular features and intense, active eyes that are used to scanning a plane's controls and indicators and take in most situations very quickly.  Muscular, fit, and almost never relaxed beyond 'at ease'.

Personality:  A 'big picture' kind of guy, who understands that he (and everyone else) is just a relatively tiny cog in the great military machine...but, like any cog, if he stops working properly, it affects everyone around him and then everyone around them.  Nobody is indispensable...but the actions of every single man have an impact on the field of battle.  Career Marine...most people expect, upon hearing that, a man who does everything by the book and is all spit and polish, but he's had enough experience to realize that, while there's a time and a place for that, the reality of life on the battlefield is that spit-shined shoes reflect light and make you a target...so he doesn't take it too seriously.  Like many others, he's more interested in what will win the war than he is in sustaining traditions which may or may not serve that function.

History:  West-Coast kid with an utterly unremarkable upbringing.  Solid family background--they're all military of some stripe or other, his parents met in the Corps, his brother works in the Logistics Command (and helped facilitate his transfer to the Hermes), and his sister was recently transferred out to Olympus to replace Demon-sympathizer troops that were 'removed'.  He enlisted in the Marines the day he became eligible, went through Boot Camp, and only then bothered with an aptitude test, when his CO asked where to send him next and nobody knew--Karl, himself, shrugged and said, "Send me where you need me."  His tests got him into Marine Aviator training, and he flew close-air-support for a while, before someone asked him if he was interested in helping with the development of a new ground-support craft.  He walked the Morning Star through its development phases, suggested a lot of re-designs and additional features, and helped troubleshoot the problems that had to be fixed to make it useful, as well as determine which insufficient flight characteristics were trivial enough to overlook until the next generation of the plane came along (like the lack of combat-able Hover flight mode).  When it was ready to send out, he asked to go with it, because he figured that was where he'd do the most good for the Corps and for Earth.