Manyara Emm

Manyara Emm

Fleet Admiral Manyara Emm was one of the most powerful officers in the intelligence arm of the UNS military, and one of the principal leaders in charge of Project Laz'R'Us. For much of her tenure, she was in command of the battleplate UNS Morokweng, until its destruction in the battle for Oisri.

Character History

Laz'R'Us

Admiral Emm was introduced when she captured the Touch-and-Go as the Toughs were attempting to sell the captive General Xinchub to Ambassador Breya Andreyasn. She had located the Toughs after Xinchub tricked Ennesby into querying relevant public records in a way that alerted UNS intelligence.

After tractoring the ship, she initially intended to simply compress it and all its crew into neutronium, destroying all leaked knowledge of Project Laz'R'Us, though she then changed her mind and decided to interrogate the crew first. Their lives were saved when Doctor Edward Bunnigus negotiated a deal with intelligence chief Colonel DeHaans: Instead of being interrogated and executed, their memories would be altered to remove the secrets the UNS wanted to kill them for. Petey assisted by providing the UNS with the information needed to adapt Laz'R'Us to the non-human mercenaries.

After the alteration, the Toughs remembered Emm as having saved them after a vaguely described adventure involving pirates, an antimatter bomb, and a nanite infection (part of which resembled the truth, as they remembered a weapon being planted inside the Yomingan king). Emm grudgingly paid for the repairs to their ship to keep up the deception. Schlock managed to preserve his unedited memories by hiding a chunk of himself in one of his eyeballs. He acted on these memories by eating Colonel DeHaans, but otherwise kept them secret from the Toughs for their own protection.

The Toughs departed from Morokweng on seemingly amicable terms, and had no further contact with Emm until the events on Oisri, by which point they had discovered and undone the memory alteration with the help of Petey's technology and Schlock's original memories.

Oisri

The Gavs discovered a wandering planetoid with a gravitational anomaly that was clearly artificial in origin. Emm's intelligence agency found out about their discovery and assumed it to be a planet-sized Annie-plant that could provide near unimaginable power, and thus decided to seize it by any means.

Their method involved a nanite attack named RedHack, that would rewrite the mind and physiology of their victims into an augmented supersoldier with the identity of a special forces soldier named Sergeant Kowalski. Intending to wait until Gavcorp had unlocked Oisri's secrets, the plan was disrupted when a fatal accident by one of the Gavs caused RedHack to activate prematurely: Waldo operator Balt Binion accidentally decapitated himself, then regenerated with several augmentations and parts of Kowalski's identity in control, causing him to rampage through the facility and kill many of the Gavs.

Emm's plans for Oisri were further derailed when the surviving Gavs activated the artifact just prior to being suborned, and the Toughs' AI Tagii was reconnected after suffering isolation insanity. Oisri unleached a Pa'anuri which Tagii then manipulated into destroying the UNS Morokweng, killing thousands of its crew. Admiral Emm herself survived, along with Sergeant Kowalski and Captain Gasca, but her intelligence chief Colonel Krum was killed when Kowalski denied her a seat in the lifeboat.

Dom Atlantis

Emm and the Toughs crossed paths for a third and final time in Sol System. The mercenaries were escorting a diplomatic mission by the Oafa to Dom Atlantis on Earth, planning to reveal the existence of Laz'R'Us to Prime Tangent Breya Andreyasn prior to releasing their immortality technology to the public.

In a desperate attempt to hide her own crimes, Emm sent Kowalski to overwrite a sleeper agent, Mathilde Libretti (subsequently codenamed "Mako"), and kill the Toughs before they could talk. This plan was interrupted by an unexpected plot to spark civil war in Sol, forcing Mako to work together with the Toughs in preventing it, even going so far as to sacrifice herself as a forward observer for a Long Gun strike on the enemy.

Out of options, Emm and Kowalski abandoned their new battleplate (which had still been under construction) along with their bodies, migrating their minds into two sleeper agents in Dom Atlantis. However, Kowalski then immediately killed Emm, saying that he was done being somebody else's personal sociopath. He was then captured and turned over to Petey.