Erick Thakrar

A CNIS agent attempting to sign on as a crew member of Lady MacBeth in hopes of scouting out information on pirating activities and antimatter production throughout the Confederation. He is accepted, at first, but ultimately rejected because of a nagging negative instinct Joshua has about him. He finally gets accepted by Captain Andre Duchamp for a crew assignment abroad the Villeneuve’s Revenge, an Adamist starship with a fitted antimatter drive.

While traveling on the Villeneuve’s Revenge, he becomes involved in a brawl over an alleged debt of the starship’s captain, Andre Duchamp, with Hasan Rawand. During the fight, one of his fellow crewmembers is also stabbed to death. Erick intervenes with a nanonic implant. A tiny patch of skin above the second knuckle on his hand fires out needle-sharp fission blades. Upon penetrating the body, the blades expand and release microscopic projectiles that seek out and invade nerve strands, send chaotic signals to the brain, causing convulsions and loss of muscle control in the target. This helps Andre and the rest of the crew escape.

As a crewmember of the Villeneuve’s Revenge, he serves as a weapons systems specialist. He fires X-ray lasers at the Krystal Moon’s microwave dishes in as part of the ship’s efforts to board the vessel and steal its cargo pods. He refuses Captain Andre Duchamp’s orders to fire on the lifeboat that the crew of the Krystal Moon uses to escape the stricken vessel. “Piracy is one thing,” Erick says defiantly, “I’m not party to slaughter.” He tries to turn in Andre Duchamp to authorities at Tranquillity on piracy charges but is not allowed to because of the sudden appearance of Laton and the subsequent “events” on Lalonde. Since Duchamp volunteered the Villeneuve’s Revenge to go to the stricken planet, Erick’s superiors deem it more important that he stay undercover on the vessel and make an attempt to uncover as to where the Yaku (the starship on which Laton left Lalonde) journeyed.

Being a crewmember, he remains aboard the Villeneuve’s Revenge as it sends down its six-person mercenary team to Lalonde’s surface. The ship loses contact with the team as the mysterious red cloud that seeks out all the landing teams of Terrance Smith’s mercenary force engulfs it. The ship’s space manages to reestablish contact, however, as it reemerges from the surface. Redocking with the starship, the crew is suspicious of allowing the spaceplanes passengers back aboard. But, when one crewmember takes pity on their complaints of bad air quality on the spaceplane due to its contact with the cloud and opens the hatch, the now possessed landing team suddenly boards the ship. Erick orders all hatches codelocked immediately to contain the invasion. He nearly goes hysterical as he watches the possessors chop a fellow crewmember to pieces. For the moment, he is isolated in the Villeneuve’s Revenge crew lounge, shut out from both the attackers and the crew. When the invaders burn their way through a hatch and enter the lounge, Erick has only one choice to save himself. He activates the ship’s emergency fire extinguishing system, dumping the life support system’s oxygen straight out of the ship’s hull. His arm is hit by a blast of white fire as he flips the switch, causing him great damage. The drifts on the edge of consciousness, his neural nanonics barely keeping him stabilized. He has the presence of mind to activate the Confederation Navy’s vacuum-survival program, which slows his heart down and shuts down various bodily organs thus reducing his required oxygen intake. Meantime, the possessed are killed one by one as their capillaries rupture and their membranes are ripped apart by the force of the decompression.

Erick suffers tremendous physical damage during the decompression aboard the Villeneuve's Revenge. Thanks to the high quality of his neural nanonics, the emergency suspension program he ran at the critical moment saved him from major damage to internal organs or neural structure. However, he will have to undergo a complete lung transplant and some blood vessel reconstruction. His hand and forearm were also lost during the event, but will be replaced by a simple graft.

While he is in recovery from his operations on Culey, he makes contact with CNIS Lieutenant Li Chang. He tells her he wants the crew of the Villeneuve’s Revenge arrested and wants to be sent to Trafalgar to finish his recuperation. Chang gently informs him of the outbreak of possession, the Confederation-wide ban of space travel and that arresting Andre Duchamp and his crew on Culey would not hold up because of Culey’s corrupt political and justice system. He resigns himself to all this bad news, lying helplessly in his hospital bed unable to move due to all the nanonic patches and implants.

He awakes from a hazy sleep to discover that he is being removed from the hospital room by two “fellow” crewmembers of the Villeneuve’s Revenge. It seems that the Dechal and Hasan Rawand has also docked at Culey and will make an attempt to kill him and anyone else associated with the Villeneuve’s Revenge. Helpless to do anything about his condition, Erick alerts Lieutenant Li Chang to stop the crew before they take him back to the ship. En route to the ship he and the crewmembers are intercepted by Rawand and some of the crew from the Dechal. There is a standoff in the airlock until Chang arrives with a CNIS covert squad.

A fist-sized sphere enters the airlock and emits a photonic blast that blinds some of Rawand’s mercenaries. The CNIS squad manages to kill Rawand and his crew, but Erick and the Villeneuve’s Revenge escapes in the process.

The nanonics on his face and neck are removed by doctors on the asteroid Chaumort. The other portions of his body must remain covered by the patches, however. When the crew of the Villeneuve’s Revenge refuses to follow Andre Duchamp to New California to form part of the armada Al Capone is piecing together to deter an attack upon New California by the Confederation, Erick sees this as a chance to do useful surveillance for the CNIS. He agrees to go with Duchamp to the surprise of the rest of the crew.

He is assigned the exhausting task of searching for a nuclear device that the Capone organization secretly placed aboard the Villeneuve’s Revenge in order to force the ship to comply with a resupply mission to Arnstadt. After numerous ten-hour searches (followed by his normal bridge duty in order to keep up appearances for the organization’s liaison officer) he locates the explosive imbedded in a hull plate of the ship. He removes the plate, allowing it to float free into space.

Later, when he confronts Kingsley Pryor about the now harmless device and the Villeneuve’s Revenge’s intention to escape from the task force headed toward Arnstadt, Thakrar is shocked to learn that Pryor is a former CNIS officer and knows all about Thakrar. Thakrar convinces Andre Duchamp to keep Pryor alive as a valuable asset to the Confederation. Pryor knows much about the Capone organization and, particularly, about their next objective. Duchamp can see the value of Pryor, especially since he and his own crew are already in bad standing with the Confederation for ever agreeing to assist Capone as mercenaries.

Thakrar assists the Villeneuve’s Revenge in safely docking at the Ethenthia asteroid by secretly communicating with the local Confederation Navy bureau. After Kingsley Pryor is hauled away (having revealed to Thakrar that Capone’s next target stellar system is Toi-Hoi), he finally admits to the crew that he is a CNIS officer. But, because they have all been through so much together, fighting the possessed, he offers Andre Duchamp a deal. Instead of turning the crew in to authorities for all their piracy and the death of a girl on the Krystal Moon he insists that Duchamp provide him with the coordinates for the station where he obtains antimatter. After a briefly heated debate, Duchamp datavises the information.

He informs the local CNIS Lieutenant Commander of the location of Duchamp’s antimatter station and of Capone’s next target. In exchange for such information (and partly because of Thakrar’s experience in battling the possessed with Duchamp’s crew, he decides to drop all charges against Duchamp. The Villeneuve’s Revenge will be taken from Duchamp by the creditors, leaving the French-ethnic space traveler without his vessel and with no money. For Thakrar, that is sentencing enough.

Later, as he suddenly becomes aware that the possessed have arrived at Ethenthia, Thakrar attempts to escape the asteroid in a panic. He simply can no longer handle the psychological strain of dealing with the possessed. He is hit by an energistic blast in a brief shoot-out with the possessed. Thakrar manages to fight his way to the prep room at the dock, painfully dons a SII spacesuit and quickly enters the Tigara, a spaceship meant for a crew of three, but which he can theoretically fly alone. Unfortunately, the ship is in horrendous electronic condition and low on cryogenic fuel. He manages to jump system just as the asteroid’s SD platform locks on the Tigara.

The Tigara safely jumps into the Ngeuni system where it promptly malfunction’s and explodes. The ship’s life support capsule escapes intact and Thakrar begins to send out a distress call over the capsule’s broadcast beacon.

Trapped in the loneliness of the escape capsule, he his mind is finally reaching the sorry state of his rebuilt (but now damaged again) body. He is a completely broken man at the end of his ropes. Haunted by the death of the 15 year old girl during one of the Villeneuve’s Revenge’s acts of piracy, he no longer believes that Adamists will survive the reality dysfunction. When the Oenone locates him and he meets with Syrinx, he tells her he will only reveal his secret information about the Capone organization if she agrees to place him zero-tau…forever. Hesitantly, Syrinx accepts the offer with the only provision being she can bring him out when the possession crisis is resolved. Erick goes along with this, but doesn’t think there will be a positive end to possession for Adamists.