Suicide, legal name Cui Yun (born 383 IE) was a pilot, civilian contractor, and resistance leader on Amargosa. The Children of Amargosa - Group considered her a surrogate mother, especially since a handful were orphaned during the Gelt invasion of that world.
Childhood
Cui Yun was born to Cui Jiao-long, a Navy pilot, and Cui Ya, a music teacher, in Shandug, Tian, in 383. Jiao-long expressed disappointment at such a tiny baby, which earned him a scolding from his wife. They named her Yun, which means “cloud” in Mandarin, because, as her father said, “She is like a dream.” Yun’s father was full-blooded Han while her mother was half-Tibetan.
Yun preferred art to combat and flying as a child. That began to change, however, when an overzealous physical fitness instructor injured her. Jiao-long withdrew Yun from the class and had the twelve-year-old girl train with a Navy colleague. Meanwhile, he and his wing, Lt. Eileen Burke, had a chat with the instructor, convincing her to resign her position.
Some time in her early teens, she met Akrad Izumi, a Japanese-Russian boy. They both were suspended from school at the age of seventeen for fighting with bullies. Jiao-long stoically retrieved his daughter, then expressed admiration for her standing her ground when they were alone.
Yun went to art school in Shandug. It was there Akrad returned from the Navy and began a relationship with her. The pair eventually married in a Shinto ceremony. He gave her the pet name “Little Wing.”
Civilian career as pilot
Akrad taught Yun how to fly. She obtained her license and became a freighter pilot, her father and husband helping her learn the ropes. In 415, Yun found herself boarded by pirates in the secondary asteroid belt in the Invictus system, known better as the home system of Etrusca. She sealed off her cockpit and vented the rest of the ship before realizing she also cut herself off from access to a pressure suit. In desperation, she shot a pirate through her cockpit window, killing the intruder and exposing her to vacuum for thirty seconds. She would later tell people she did not recommend that gambit.
Also in 415, Yun became pregnant. However, she miscarried a few months later. On the same day, Captain Burke informed her of Akrad’s death in a raid on Goshen.
Naval career
To honor Akrad’s memory, Yun joined the Navy, piloting Falcon. She took her pet name “Little Wing” as her call sign. Like her husband, she saw combat on Goshen as the Polygamy Wars heated up. In one incident, she bounced her damaged craft off three buildings, slowing her ship and taking out two enemy emplacements at the same time. Her flight commander called her insane and ordered her call sign changed to “Suicide,” the name she would be known by from then on.
During the conflict, she rescued a downed pilot named Quentin Austin, call sign “Reaper.” They became close friends.
Last stand on Goshen
In the waning days of the Polygamy Wars, she met John Parker and Quan, two Amargosan settlers who frequently flew with her. They reported to a young, inexperienced lieutenant named Lucius Kray, an Arean soldier. Kray was a nub, but he showed intelligence and resourcefulness. Suicide grew wary of Kray, however, when the young officer took to using Section 11 killings a little too cavalierly. When the war ended, Suicide resigned her commission.
Aphrodite
In 421, after five years in the Navy, Yun accepted an invitation by Tol Germanicus to work for Dasarius Interstellar. She would fly a civilian-outfitted Falcon to help service aid efforts as Dasarius sought to build up Aphrodite‘s infrastructure and end centuries of ethnic strife. Her supervisor was Gerard Kurz, and she frequently worked with Carlo Mancuso. Early in her time on Aphrodite, she rescued a woman named Priya Chandrapurti, an artist by trade. Priya settled in Sanctuary, Aphrodite’s capital. She reawakened Suicide’s love of art. They soon began an affair and married in 422.
Additionally, she met Frederick Ansel, the founder of the Cubist philosophy. They discovered they shared many beliefs to the point where Ansel referred to her as his greatest disciple. He hoped to use his philosophy to unify Aphrodite. However, he suspected Gerard Kurz had hijacked the movement to create a violent, radical faction.
Suicide shared this suspicion. When Priya died in a café bombing, Suicide angrily left Aphrodite and moved to Amargosa to live in seclusion.
Self-exile to Amargosa
Arriving on Amargosa, she accepted help from John Parker and Quan Jiang to secure occasional work for the colonial government. At one point, she traveled to the Compact proper to retrieve two projection-drive ships for emergency use. These she stashed on Nebraska Island under camouflage. Suicide, however, spent the bulk of her time in an abandoned mining shed in the Mining District north of the Townships.
Lucius Kray attempted to recruit her for a citizens’ militia designed for some unspecified purpose. She rebuffed him and ordered him to stay away from her.
In 429, her old friend Quentin Austin visited. Quentin and Tessa Dasarius left his son JT with the Parker’s to teach the boy a lesson. Word came back to the now-Admiral JT wanted to stay on Amargosa. However, he also found out Kray schemed to get custody of the boy to gain some sort of leverage over JT’s mother, Tessa Dasarius. Austin asked Suicide to travel to the Parker farm after the harvest and take JT back with her until such time as they picked him up. It never happened.
Invasion and resistance
Suicide remained in seclusion when the invasion of Amargosa began. She did keep her ears open for any calls to duty. Instead, Kray sent three of his insurgents and two teens they held hostage. Suicide emerged from her hut with a large pistol and killed the two hostage takers, leaving a questionable third along with JT Austin and Lizzy Parker, now Lizzy Austin. It surprised Suicide to learn the pair had married only the previous evening. She led them toward the Misty Mountains However, they ran across a Gelt battle wagon. Lizzy and the other insurgent died in the ensuing battle. JT gathered up her ashes with the help of Suicide. The sound of gunfire and energy weapons, however, drew them in the Gelt’s own battle wagon toward the Transcontinental Maglev. They foiled an attack by both Kray’s insurgents and the Gelt on a mission to use the maglev to gather more resistance. Since the commander was killed, Suicide assumed command. There, she met Ellie Nardino, Davra Andraste, and Connor Duffy.
When the maglev had to stop at a blown-out bridge, they gathered up equipment and refugees, formulating an operation to seize the Founders' Mine from Lucius Kray. The operation was successful even though Suicide suffered a head injury during the attack. Once settled in, she took JT under her wing.
Ban Ki-moon mission
Colonel Diana Jovann tapped Suicide for a mission to reach the Ban Ki-moon, a capital shp that fell into Amargosa’s Western Ocean. She picked Ellie and Duffy, a mix of Marines, Colonial Guard, and defectors from Kray’s forces, and agreed to bring five former Polygamy War rebels led by Tyler Wat. Unfortunately, JT, Davra, and Eric Yuwono violated orders to join the mission. Still, they made contact with the new resistance cell at Edoras, giving the access to the Edoras Transit Center and the ability to blow the tunnels in the event of an attack.
Beyond the transit center, they were menaced by a strange pack of lycanths who seemed to talk. They also picked up a female Gelt prisoner Duffy dubbed “Tishla.” However, two of Wat’s men, Cannon and Hauser, proved problematic. Davra killed Cannon after the pair attempted to rape Trixie. This bound Suicide to hold a Section 11 hearing with the team. Both Davra and Hauser were found guilty, but Hauser earned a summary execution while Davra had to be exiled. Suicide urged her to make for Edoras or the Founders’ Mine. She would remain unaware Davra had tried to find them a path around the ruins of Lansdorp.
Under Lansdorp, Suicide confronted Governor Croix, assumed killed in the fusion blast that destroyed the city. Trixie then stunned everyone by revealing she could speak Humanic after all. They escaped Croix and headed for the coast. While Wat stepped up in leadership, Riley, the other surviving Gohsenite, remained a problem. Suicide found herself growing more protective of JT. Eventually, they reached the coast and managed to fix a damaged fishing boat to take them out to the fallen starship.
Lucius Kray had beat them there. Upon Suicide’s arrival, the crew realized Kray deceived them and decided to scuttle the ship. She left Yuwono with Wat and her regulars to pretend to surrender. They would infiltrate Kray’s renegade resistance. Meanwhile, she, JT, and Duffy rescued Tishla and fled to Hanar.
Hanar
Upon their arrival at Hanar, Suicide, JT, and Duffy were stunned to learn Tishla actually led the rumored joint human-Gelt colony on the former Gilead. Tishla insisted Suicide contact the Compact, as well as Gilead’s former parent world, Metis. Soon, Suicide had reunions with her comrade Reaper (Admiral Austin) and former commander, Admiral Burke.
Before long, Suicide joined planning for a Compact-Hanarian operation to liberate Amargosa. She took to Mitsuko Yamato as a sort of den mother for the group who would become the Children of Amargosa. She asked Yamato to train JT as a soldier while her lover, Giddeus Modesto, trained him as a pilot. Suicide would lead the first wave of the invasion from the Challenger, her squadron of Falcons dropping Marines from orbit and landing Navy Special Forces troops. When Tishla invited JT to fly for her during the operation, JT deferred to Suicide, calling her his mother. Suicide, touched by the admission, told him she wanted her son by her side in the attack. From then on, she and JT would openly refer to each other as mother and son, later to the chagrin of Tessa Dasarius.
Liberation of Amargosa
Suicide dropped her Marine platoon into Riverside. Tragically, the entire platoon died as they fell into the mushroom cloud of the fusion blast that destroyed the city. Her landing zone, however, lay outside the ruins of Lansdorp. As Laral Farad died during Riverside’s destruction, the Gelt who had not defected already surrendered. A Marine sergeant on the ground did not accept a Gelt officer’s surrender to Suicide and shot him. Suicide personally Section 11’d the sergeant later on. She might have been more lenient. However, she had learned that Modesto had died by friendly fire defending his troops from an armed colony transport. She also found out JT’s Falcon had crashed during the Riverside blast. JT, Mitsuko, and Duffy survived and helped take down Lucius Kray, but Suicide had to inform Mitsuko of Modesto’s death.
Post-liberation
Suicide returned to her lakeside home after receiving both the Order of Hanar (the very first, actually) and the Compact Medal of Honor. She and JT secured the use of a war surplus Falcon called the Goldeneye, the first of three ships so named. While JT focused on building out his cabin and helping Quan run the Parker farm, she and JT took jobs flying the Goldeneye for the provisional government of Amargosa, the Compact, and occasionally, Hanar.
Mission to find Jayne Best
In 432, someone left a baby on Suicide’s doorstep. She and JT determined the baby to be the daughter of Provisional Governor Douglas Best, who had survived an assassination attempt the previous evening. Through a plan Best and his wife put in place, Jayne Best scattered her family, leaving her youngest infant with Suicide and her other daughter in a lycanth settlement frequented by Ellie Nardino. During the initial phases, Suicide lost the Goldeneye.
They soon learned the attack came from Juno. Governor-General Athena Jovann assigned Suicide and JT to look for Jayne Best. This required them to travel to the moon of Gohem, the Orag homeworld, to hide any hypergate trace of their presence. Their new ship, a Zaran craft, had discreet projection drive. Returning to Compact space by traveling to Marilyn, they masked their signature by naming the ship “Goldeneye,” which became permanent. They traced Best to the failed core world of Walton, where they found Madam Best in captivity, about to be reduced to medical samples by Jez Salamacis. They rescued her, taking her to the colony world of Farigha. Like Amargosa, Farigha had come under Metisian rule during the liberation. Revelations to Jovann, Best, and Farigha's administrator resulted in all three worlds seceding to become the Metisian Republic. Suicide then traveled to Thule to get Jayne proper care.
Salamacis followed aboard the Anna Khirovsky. Suicide, in a primitive pressure suit launched on a surface-to-space missile, boarded the Khirovsky. With the help of Davra Andraste, she removed Salamacis from command.
Jayne would remain on Thule for some time while Suicide returned via a secret wormhole to Hanar. Back on Amargosa, Suicide finally accepted amortality treatment at the new Thulian clinic.
Mud, Hanar, and King Edward
In 433, Suicide responded to a distress call from JT as he tried to evacuate Edward Windsor, now King Edward of Bonaparte, from Mud, a distant planet where he had been posted. Juno mechs had boarded and seized the Queen Maria Sophia while Juno destroyed the startship Marcus Aurelius. Suicide arrived with Admiral Burke aboard the Valles Marineris. She led a team with Mitsuko Yamato’s troops to retake the Sophie. Along came Eric Yuwono, Ellie Nardino, and Connor Duffy. Once the ship had been secured and the threat eliminated, Suicide and JT took Edward, his party, and a company of surrendered Gelt Warriors to Hanar to fulfill a deal Edward made so both could escape.
While on Hanar, JT learned of Suicide’s association with the Cubists. In his ignorance, he did not differentiate between the majority of Cubists and the radicals. He and Suicide would not speak for over a year.
Rift with JT
The rift with JT hurt Suicide like few things had. She compared it to the loss of her daughter from miscarriage and the deaths of Akrad and Priya. During her winter stay with JT, Ellie paid Suicide a visit and promised to convince JT to reconcile with her. That process began when Suicide ran afoul of Kurz during a trip to Aphrodite.
Return to Aphrodite
At Frederick Ansel’s recommendation, Suicide took Mitsuko to Aphrodite to track down Kurz. The radical leader had a scheme use giant mechs from nearby Ares to overthrow the protectorate regime on the humid planet. He took Suicide prisoner, but she helped Mitsuko escape. Mitsuko returned and rescued her in a raid, but now Mitsuko had been taken prisoner. When the younger woman escaped, Suicide joined her final attack against Kurz, providing support on the ground for her mission to disable Kurz’s fission device. Kurz died in the process.
During the mission, Suicide and JT mended their relationship, and she once again became his “mom.”
Hosh mission
As foreign civilian contractors, JT and Suicide went to Hosh, bring Ellie with them to assist Eric Yuwono. Yuwono was on the non-aligned world to take out a Juno lab storing bio-weapons and stolen resurrection technology. Admiral Burke brought Duffy and Mitsuko, along with an elevated team of Household Guards. Yuwono lost most of his Cybercommand support team, as well as a foot, but was extracted by Davra.
Personal Life
Cui Yun intended to become an artist early on, but picked up her love of flying when she began her relationship with childhood friend Akrad Izumi. She soon became a civilian freighter pilot. Upon Akrad’s death and the miscarriage of their daughter, she went into the Navy where her skills soared. It was while servicing aboard the CNV Hancock she took on the call sign Suicide. After the Navy, exhausted from years of war, she accepted a contract from Dasarius Interstellar to help with their modernization project on Aphrodite. While there, Frederick Ansel gave a name to some of the beliefs she held throughout her life. She also met Priya, surprising both of them as neither had considered a woman for a lover. The pair married. However, while on Aphrodite, radical Cubist terrorism, fueled by ethnic strife, threatened to destroy the project. Priya died in a related incident.
Cui became reclusive and moved to Amargosa. The invasion forced her back into action. While she openly referred to JT Austin as her son, she repeatedly said she considered the so-called Children of Amargosa all her children, including, eventually, Mitsuko Yamato and, to a lesser extent, Lattus Tishla.
Suicide stayed loosely affiliated with both the Compact and Republic navies as both a reservist and a civilian. She considered the fight with Juno and peace with the Realm too important of work.
Akrad Izumi: Akrad and Yun were childhood friends. They often defended each other from bullies. When Akrad returned home from the Navy for the first time, he took an interest in her artwork while showing her his love of flying. They married, and Yun became a pilot. The combination of his death and her miscarriage on the same day devastated her. She joined the Navy as a way to fight Goshenites, whom she encountered a few years before Akrad’s death, and to honor her husband’s memory.
Priya: Suicide rescued Priya from an embattled Kolkat district. Like Suicide, she was a widow and had a love for art. Priya setup an art shop in Sanctuary, Aphrodite’s capital which Suicide frequented. It reawakened Suicide’s latent love of art. The pair fell in love and were eventually married by Master Ansel atop Mt. Buxanshal. More than Akrad, Suicide was deeply in love with Priya, who wanted to become a captain’s wife when Suicide left the planet. She died in a café blast, which left Suicide bitter and angry for years afterward.
Eileen Burke: Burke was Suicide’s first and really only commander during her Naval service. She held the rank of captain when Suicide came aboard the Hancock. Burke so valued Suicide’s service she promoted the younger woman to lieutenant commander.
After the liberation of Amargosa, Burke frequently called upon Suicide’s services even after Metis and her colonies seceded from the Compact.
Quentin Austin: Suicide rescued Quentin “Reaper” Austin during the Polygamy Wars after he had been shot down. Reaper nursed an amputation wound. The two became friends, and Austin eventually became the Hancock‘s flight commander, making him Suicide’s immediate superior.
Shortly before the Gelt invasion of Amargosa, Reaper’s son JT arrived on Amargosa and was left in the custody of John Parker, a Marine both of them knew from the Polygamy Wars. He made a secret trip to Amargosa to ask Suicide to take over custody to keep the boy away from Lucius Kray.
(In a yet-to-be-published novel, the encounter is actually depicted. Suicide demonstrates a clear crush on Quentin, having learned of his recent divorce. She later related the conversation to JT, admitting she’d have loved to be his stepmother.)
JT Austin: From the moment they met, Suicide took a protective attitude toward JT. It began when he and Lizzy arrived as hostages at her home. She freed them. When Lizzy was killed and a despondent JT tried to gather her ashes, she promised to help him make a bullet locket.
He proved his potential to him during his disobedient arrival on her mission to reach the Ban Ki-moon. She realized he craved her approval, showed contrition for disobeying orders, and, most importantly, took initiative taking Tishla prisoner and treating her well. Though she never admitted it, she took JT and left Eric because she wanted JT under her protection.
She tried to break him of his sudden crush on Tishla, but he stunned her when time came to choose whether he flew as Hanarian or Compact during Amargosa’s liberation. He told her his “mother’s opinion mattered,” though he cagily kept secret his sexual encounter with the First Citizen. She assigned him to Mitsuko and had her fly with him.
She would partner with him after the liberation flying Amargosan-provided ships called “Goldeneye.” Even when JT went into the Compact Navy, they worked together. When, during a radical Cubist terrorist attack killed his captain, first officer, and new lover, he did not respond well to the revelation Suicide had Cubist beliefs. They did not speak for a year, which hurt her almost as much as the deaths of Akrad and Priya.
The two reconciled during the mission to Aphrodite. He came to rescue her without question, prompting Ellie Nardino to tell him, “That’s the man I fell in love with.”
Mitsuko Yamato: Mitsuko Yamato already admired Suicide by reputation alone when she arrived on Hanar in early 430. Suicide noticed JT gave the younger woman more credence than others when training or dispensing advice. She admitted their passing resemblance played a part, but Suicide admired the same things JT did, namely Mitsuko’s loyalty and discipline. Suicide asked Mitsuko to take JT under her wing as he trained to be a soldier and a pilot. Their close friendship would be one of Suicide’s proudest achievements.
Quan: Suicide and Quan served together in the waning days of the Polygamy Wars, along with Lucius Kray and John Parker. Their platoon frequently flew with Suicide and was present at the final surrender at New Kirkland on Goshen. Quan procured the abandoned mining shack for her when she came to Amargosa, allowing her to have some well-deserved solitude. The one sour note came days after Lizzy Parker’s death. As Lizzy’s godfather, Quan blamed JT for her death. Suicide intervened and told him to stand down. After that, they worked together closely and frequently visited each other. However, Quan did not step into the rift between JT and Suicide as he felt it was none of his business.
Bio Capsule:
Species: Human
Birth Year: 383
Birth Place: Shandug, Tian, Helios
Homeworld: Amargosa
Service or Occupation: Civilian pilot (411-416, 430- ), Compact Navy (416-419), Dasarius Interstellar contractor (419-425), Amargosan Resistance (429-430)
Family:
Mother: Cui Ya
Father: Cui Jiao-long
Spouse(s): Akrad Izumi (411-416, his death), Priya Chandrapurti (422-425, her death)
Appearances:
The Children of Amargosa, Second Wave, Among Wolves, Storming Amargosa, Suicide Run, Checkmate, Winter Games, Royal Orders, Another Way to Die