Constantine Bronstein

Constantine Sergeyevich Bronstein (2 April 2629 – 19 August 2680) was a Terran colonial terrorist leader, bandit, and warlord who was the head of the Bandit Union, a network of bandits, pirates, street gangs, and terrorists on the planet Keystone. Referred to as the Bandit King in the media, though he rejected this apellation, he was responsible for the most deadly terror attacks of the Keystone Incident, in which around two million civilians died in a series of nuclear bombings and orbital satellite drops. He remains one of the most infamous terrorists of the postwar era.
Prior to his campaign of terror, he served as a soldier in the Terran Imperial Army. It is conjectured, in part from Bronstein's published manifesto, that his experiences in the late Colonial Wars greatly affected his mindset towards the Earth-based central government and compelled him towards a life of crime.
Bronstein was assassinated at his oil derrick compound in the Oka Ocean, in the aftermath of his terror bombings in mid-August 2680 after an intensive investigation deduced his whereabouts, by a covert State Security strike team composed of agents from various departments, including the Silver Team.
== Early life ==
Constantine Sergeyevich Bronstein was born in the military hospital at Fort Dusken, planet Keystone, to Sergei Geryonovich Bronstein and Lena Wittenberg on April 2nd, 2629. Both of his parents were military officers in the Army Reserve, garrisoned at Fort Dusken. He was the fourth of eight children, and all of them attended the Dusken Junior Academy, a military-style primary and secondary combined school. Constantine attended this school from 2634 to 2647, and then studied at the Fort Dusken Municipal College from 2647 to 2649 for civil engineering. Like his siblings, he enlisted in the Imperial Army. His elder siblings were already serving tours of duty in different active-duty units.
== Military service ==
Bronstein enlisted on 1 June 2649, at age 20. He attended Basic Training, Infantry School, and Harsh Environment Training through the summer and then Combat Engineer School in the fall. He was assigned as a combat engineer in the 355th Grenadier Division, and served four tours of duty from 2649 to 2664, attending NCO School in 2652. His unit was primarily deployed in the Banat region during the 2650s, and the Perseid Frontier in the early 2660s.
In early October 2662 he was captured by the CLO during a combat mission and was held as a prisoner of war for four months. He was freed from captivity in a daring raid by Air Force Pararescuemen of the 23rd Air Rescue Squadron in late January 2663. After six months of therapy and rehabilitation he returned to active duty. He was honorably discharged in August 2664 at the rank of Master Sergeant. During his service, Bronstein had been awarded the War Merit Cross and the Distinguished Service Cross as well as the Wound Badge twice and numerous decorations for combat action.
== Bandit leader ==
After discharge, he returned to Keystone. He was offered civilian contract work with the Army Corps of Engineers, but refused. He disappeared from the public record around three months after his return home. His exact activities for the next twelve years are a matter of speculation. He had removed his identification chip and tracking hardware, itself a felony action, making it impossible to directly track his movements. Crime historians estimate that he disappeared into the wilderness of Nordendusk, the northern continent of the planet Keystone, and became part of a roving bandit gang. He seems to have come to lead this group and networked with other bandit groups throughout the continent during the 2660s. In the early 2670s his "Bandit Union" appears to have struck deals with seagoing pirates in the Oka Ocean. The bandits expanded from simple outlaw violence and raiding to complex monetary fraud schemes and black market trading in firearms and controlled substances to increase their revenues.
By the mid 2670s, this "Bandit Union" was quite extensive and making large amounts of money. In 2676, he published online his political manifesto, professing a radical program in which Keystone would seclude itself from the rest of the Galaxy, and where each citizen could "forge their own destiny" without interference from a state. He professed the need for violent revolution to achieve this goal, and admonished the Terran Empire and the new Republic for its "hypocritical war of man against man, and oppression of the Colonial working class". His manifesto was politically syncretic, drawing ideas from both radical left and radical right ideologies, though generally falling within insurrectionary anarchism. Some have speculated that it was a disinformation campaign, considering the somewhat apolitical nature of his criminal career prior to the Keystone Incident. It is believed by historians that during this time, Bronstein planted his agents into various places in Keystone's civilian infrastructure; construction agencies, traffic control, and even local law enforcement possessed some persons allied to Bronstein.
It is now known that Bronstein used these specially-placed agents to hack into the planet's satellite network and occasionally bring down nuclear-armed defense satellites and retrieve their warheads. These, along with conventional explosives mixed into concrete, would be hidden inside new construction in various cities across the planet. Vast sums of money were poured into these operations, especially in bribing local and provincial politicians and law enforcement officials into allowing all sorts of unchecked activity. The climate of extensive political corruption endemic to Keystone exacerbated this situation. It would only be through the actions of State Security in conducting a security audit and acting directly to counter organized crime that Keystone would begin to see reductions in blatant corruption, starting in 2679. By this point, however, much of his activity in placing these instruments of terror had been completed.
== Keystone Incident ==
Bronstein played a leading role in the Keystone Incident in the summer of 2680. The State Security investigation into the incident reported that Bronstein likely hired one of the assassins that killed provincial prefect Richard Hawking in June 2680. Whether or not he played a role in the assassination of planetary governor Rufus Blackwall later that month is not known; the evidence indicated the involvement of the Fenian Daggers criminal gang, but Bronstein's suspected involvement has not been ruled out.
What is known is that Bronstein's agents had placed nuclear weapons inside of new construction in six cities in different locations across the planet. When the incident sparked a cascade of instability, he set his terroristic plan into motion. The Fenian Daggers on Keystone were largely brought down in a gang war in June and July 2680, in which their leadership was slain. It is been conjectured that many now-splintered gangsters came to the Bandit Union for aid and protection, leading to a spike in violence in the late summer. This distracted law enforcement significantly, and all were caught by surprise when two nuclear weapons detonated in Lakeside City, the planet's capital, on August 14th. Further efforts to stop the detonation of other nuclear devices were of mixed success: a 2-kiloton weapon was used in Hauberk, destroying the city's water treatment plant and river docks, but timely evacuation led to less than 1,000 deaths; another 2-kiloton weapon was detonated in Grady Bay, causing 10,000 deaths. Three other were defused in time, but not without firefights between police action teams and terrorist defenders, leading to around 112 further deaths.
On August 17th, the planetary satellite network was forcibly deorbited, directed by a cyberattack conducted by Bronstein. Kinetic bombardments from the falling objects into several city centers killed around 5,000 people over the following two days. The mass deorbiting knocked out global and interstellar communications, cutting Keystone off from the outside galaxy.
Category:Army personnel
Category:Assassinated people
Category:Crime bosses
Category:Deaths by firearm
Category:Military personnel
Category:Military personnel of the Colonial Wars
Category:Pirates
Category:Terran colonials
Category:Terran Eastern Orthodox Christians
Category:Terrorists