Eileen E. Burke (317 IE – ) was a flag officer in the Compact Navy. Among her commands were the Tian Regional Command. As of 429 IE, she held the rank of vice admiral and used the Utopia Planitia as her flagship.
Burke had three sons and was a mentor to Quentin Austin. She had the unhappy task of relieving Austin of duty. She acknowledged he had pressed to retake Gilead instead of Amargosa and offered to help him once he was either court-martialed or put behind a desk. She also voiced disdain for his ex-wife.
When Austin revealed that Anacreon was the next target for invasion, Burke demanded Fleet Admiral Vu give her a task force to intercept it with a better battle plan than he gave Austin at Amargosa. Tran authorized the operation with Austin assigned as an observer.
She met the enemy fleet aboard the Valles Marineris, forcing their surrender. However, she lost three ships in the process. Burke let Austin dictate terms of surrender.
Immediately after the incident at Anacreon, Burke ordered reserve activations for Hideki Okada and Peter Lancaster, two of the leading members of the original Warp Project. She sent Cybercommand agents to Thule to retrieve Okada while Lancaster voluntarily came back after being caught in a scandal with an Etruscan politician’s wife.
When Captain Okada objected to Cybercommand engineers’ work on the Challenger, she prevailed on the G-2 overseeing that service’s involvement by informing him Navy personnel once involved with the Alcubierre would complete the work. As a concession, she allowed the G-2 in charge to assign O-4 Weiss to the ship as a security officer. She also applied pressure on Fleet Admiral Tran to allow the crew a three-day recovery break before launching the ship.
Burke had to deliver orders that amounted to genocide against a Gelt colony. She and Read Admiral Austin sent secret messages to Okada and Weiss asking them to travel to Amargosa to see the damage, then decide if they could opt out of the mission. When the Challenger returned, Burke admitted to the pair and Lancaster that they all had essentially committed treason, but that she and Austin had already been covering their tracks. She assigned all three permanently to the Warp Program.
In 430, she and Austin traveled with the Challenger to Hanar to meet with their First Citizen. Giddeus Modesto had been ordered to escort them to the ship, but Austin insisted on flying the shuttle himself. In the meantime, Burke chatted with Modesto, who had just crashed a shuttle trying to shortcut through Demeter‘s atmosphere. She informed him that the current fleet admiral had bounced his own shuttle off Aphrodite‘s atmosphere as an ensign.
Just before jumping to Hanar, Burke revealed to Modesto and Yamato the mission. Modesto would serve as Athena Jovann’s personal pilot while Yamato would see to her security. Burke and Austin would accompany Jovann and assess the situation on the surface. After speaking with Lattus Tishla, she and Austin agreed to approach, under armed escort, human separatists who did not recognize Tishla’s leadership. They found themselves taken prisoner after an ambush, but, thanks to persuasion by Suicide, were released unharmed. Burke then ordered the Challenger‘s special forces unit and pilots to train with Hanar’s troops in anticipation of liberating Amargosa
Appearances: No Marigolds in the Promised Land, Broken Skies, Flight Blade