Mušen de Lagge

"You never treat with a woman scorned; hell hath no fury as such. I may have treated with the devil so as to become Pharoah to this world, but it is not our destiny to be absolved of such sins by so simple a death." 
-- attributed to Septimus Severus Gaiaus Quintus, commenting on her breaking the Siege of Mars 
Mušen de Lagge was a spacer and freebooter during the First Trilogy Era and on into the Twilight Age. She would become one of the most cunning and ruthless of the warlords in the Rim after the Solar War, only to be brought down by Manu and the Sons of Andromeda. After her defeat and capture, she would fall in love with Heracles and become immortalized in the Heracliad. 
== Biography ==
She is the widow of Šukara de Lagge, an idealistic Rimmer who just barely started to make his own living when the Solar War broke out in SY 129. Šukara was commissioned as a privateer by the Protectorate during the Belt War in SY 137 and died following the rupture of his vessel during the Siege of Mars. 
The loss of her lover broke her. She left the Rim on a stolen freighter towards Mars to recover Šukara's body.
She sails black flags in an open mockery of the Army of Eastern Kamijing. Her elite warriors are former AEK who fought in the war.
She will become known as the "Queen of Diamonds" for her eventual control of carbon mining and shipping in the Rim.
After the recovery of her husband's body, she rampages her way through orbit, killing at least several dozen spacers in the process. During the Siege of Mars, she is let past the blockade due to the merciful actions of Lord-Marshal Septimus: 
When the long-broken Main Belt received the news of Septimus' death at the hands of Free Martian hard liners (RED OR DEAD), all grieved, enemy and friend alike. Marcus Cato Scaevola and Nikanor take his death as a major blowback, who have largely consolidated power on Earth to themselves. This creates a massive power-and-structure-vaccuum in the Main Belt. Within this environment, Mušen won the respect and admiration of her first crew by boarding a badly damaged Army of Eastern Kamijing warship and impressing the spacers she found still alive into service: "It's either me or the Void."
"Only some are aware of the call of the Void. On Earth, it was a chosen few who came to realize we lived on a cosmic planet orbiting a star in a vast universe and not simply some desolate scrap of land on an ocean that we had managed to work into a half-way house. No, the Void calls all but few are chosen ... endlessly falling we are ... that, in space, is the only thing you can do ... is fall. There are then three things you can do. You can accept your fate, fight it by leaping upwards and stilling yourself for a moment only, or you can leap into the Void and accelerate with the fall, gain power. So our Black Queen is the choicest among those who are chosen." 
When being released from her service which is at will and under free employ, entitles one to a parting gift: a diamond from the Queen of Diamonds. It's a diamond's worth of raw free carbon AKA graphene. 
Category:Characters
Category:Twilight Era