Valentina Lobkovskaya

Valentina Sergeyevna Lobkovskaya, known on [Nachiketa as the Lion of Núi Chúa, is the current Commander of the Nachiketan Revolutionary Guard, the elite troops and secret police of the Revolutionary Committee of Nachiketa. A larger than life figure thanks to her actions during the Liberation of Pasargadae and the Nachiketan Civil War; stories of both her heroism and her cruelty are well known all across the world of Nachiketa, the Insurrection, and even in loyal space. Many within the RCN revere her as a war hero, a liberator of the working class and a defender of her home from the far superior forces of the UNSC. Every child in the RCN knows her name, and she is often the subject of propaganda posters and statues all throughout the RCN capital city of Eixo. Others, both within and without the RCN have a less rosy picture of her. 
While her service did secure a foothold for the RCN’s existence, she was also not above extra-judicially jailing or executing individuals found to be ‘reactionaries’, oftentimes with little to no conclusive evidence. Many blame her for using the Revolutionary Guard to silence political rivals or eliminate those not ideologically in step with the Committee. Even other offworld cells are not exempt from this; Lobkovskaya’s troops have violently turned on their Insurrectionist allies after she deemed them ‘no longer politically congruent with the RCN’ on more than one occasion.
Once a close confidant to the first Premier, Eduardo de São José, it has long been speculated that she along with RCN Defense Minister Lý Thành Bianh was responsible for pushing the Revolutionary Committee steadily towards war against the government and the UNSC.
While she is the source of much debate and contention, what isn’t unclear is that Valentina Lobkovskaya had proven to be an integral part of the rise of the RCN, turning them from a collection of poorly trained and led worker/farmer militias to something resembling a formal military. Her Revolutionary Guard, while just as controversial as she was, were similarly integral to the creation of the RCN and its continued existence. While the leadership of the RCN have claimed that the Revolutionary Guard was a wartime measure and would be dissolved or placed under the authority of civilian committees after the end of the war. Lobkovskaya prevented this from happening, under claims that the Revolutionary Guard were necessary to the continued safety of the Revolutionary Committee. Eventually, she would relent and allow a civilian crisis response division of the Revolutionary Guard to be formed, called the Nachiketan Citizen’s Guard. The Revolutionary Guard would go on to be an expeditionary force, traveling between Insurrectionist cells to assist them in their war against the UNSC.
While her public persona was often one of a patriotic and bombastic soldier of the revolutionary cause, the truth of the matter was quite different. Underneath this persona, she was coldly calculating unfazed by political matters or battlefield ones. It is also rumored that this coldness only ever melts in the presence of her Revolutionary Guard troops.
== Early Life ==
Born on the middling colony world of Pasargadae in the bustling and affluent city of New Arkhangelsk to a loving family, few elements of Valentina Lobkovskaya’s early childhood could be called particularly noteworthy. Born to Sergey Lobkovskaya and Anka Fyodorov, both high ranking directors in a major financial firm, much of Valentina’s early life was spent being doted on by her parents or nannies, tutors, and caretakers. Both Valentina and her brother Vasily had gotten top marks all throughout their academic careers with Valentina playing varsity basketball in high school. Neither Lobkovskaya child had expressed much interest in the military and aside from the occasional hunting excursion along with their father or the heavily edited newsreels of the Human-Covenant War, neither were exposed to much violence. Valentina was a notably bad shot as a youth, reportedly unable to successfully hit even stationary targets let alone animals. Both Valentina and Vasily would follow in their parents’ footsteps, on track to succeed in the financial sector of the UNSC as young adults. 
This would change drastically for the worse however, when the Covenant made landfall on Pasargadae, quickly and decisively overwhelming the defenders of the colony and establishing factories and other manufacturing infrastructure across the world once the UNSC were defeated. Unlike in many other of their invasions, the Covenant had sought to subjugate the population of Pasargadae instead of exterminate them, in order to replace production facilities lost to UNSC action. Like all of the survivors of the Battle of Pasargadae, Valentina and her family would be corralled into work camps, with the New Arkhangelsk being turned into a munitions plant for the Covenant. Work and life in these factories was grueling across the board, with people regularly being worked to death by Covenant overseers. Valentina’s mother would be the victim of this, collapsing dead on the factory floor of a Needler plant.
Valentina herself would also be a victim of the inhumane conditions the Jiralhanae kept people in, contracting typhoid fever in the later years of the occupation and only surviving thanks to smuggled medical supplies. It was this experience in the work camps of Pasargadae that resulted in an intense, abiding hatred for Jiralhanae that would last to the present day. 
When UNSC special forces arrived on the world in 2543 looking to incite rebellion in the enslaved population, Valentina had jumped at the opportunity to join despite her total lack of military experience. After spending a month of intensive training, Valentina and her brother would be deemed ready to join the fight against the Covenant, with the first target of their partisan action being Cyrus, the center of the Covenant occupation forces. Armed with a surplus marksman rifle and lightweight armor plating, Valentina and her squad of partisans would wreak havoc in the ruined suburbs of the city, wiping out Covenant lances before fading into the shadows. While Valentina would prove to be a markedly unremarkable soldier, she was notable for her enthusiasm and charisma, going into and leaving fights in high spirits.
Lobkovskaya participated in many of the skirmishes that characterized the liberation of Pasargadae and while she may have started with little to no understanding of war, let alone a guerrilla one, she had emerged from it well versed in the practice of it. She had become intimately aware of how to set traps and improvise explosives from Human and Covenant weapons. She was engaged in more ambushes against hapless patrols than she can easily count, encircling enemy troops before promptly destroying them in a hail of gunfire. Valentina had even become skilled at fieldcraft, using her skills to travel discreetly through heavily wooded regions with little support from her better equipped UNSC allies, with her squad being separated from the main body of UNSC forces for weeks at a time. Valentina was animated by a hatred for the alien occupiers of her world, the spite for the Covenant only growing day by day.  Very rarely did she shirk from volunteering for assaults or ambushes against the Covenant. 
While her passion for the cause was great indeed, Valentina would be taken out of the fight thanks to a twist of fate. During an ambush against an isolated Covenant lance searching the wooded foothills outside Cyrus for partisans, Valentina was the victim of a friendly fire incident. In the chaos of battle a stray round had grazed by her eye destroying it and very nearly killing her. As the ambush against the lance had progressed poorly, the leader of the unit being cannier than usual and the partisans were forced to flee into the woodlands, inflicting casualties as they effected a fighting retreat. 
Seriously, and for the moment, permanently mained Valentina was forced from the frontlines of the resistance movement, and the partisans employed her in a support role, helping with menial labor and simple medical tasks. Despite her new role in the rear echelons of the resistance, her hatred for the invaders never abated and continued to volunteer for combat missions despite being rejected every time. She would remain in this position for the remainder of the war to liberate Pasargadae. When it came time to evacuate partisans and civilians from the world, Valentina was put on the first appropriated mining hauler off world. As the Human-Covenant War came to a conclusion, the transports evacuating the world were allowed to resettle on whichever colony was nearest to them, Nachiketa in Valentina’s case. 
=== Life on Nachiketa ===
The world of Nachiketa was not yet wholly embroiled in civil violence when Valentina and her fellow refugees set down upon the world, but the seeds of discontent were planted and ready to sprout. The stockbroker turned guerrilla fighter had done her best to keep her head down and start putting the shattered pieces of her life together. This would prove far harder than anticipated, as most positions suited to her civilian expertise were already occupied by the friends and family of various business magnates. She had struggled to find and keep work among the firms of Nachiketa. Many of the Pasargadae refugees had faced similar struggles in their own.
== Early Service with the RCN ==
Valentina’s participation with the Committee was relatively unremarkable at first, and for the first several months of her membership with it she did little more than attend a meeting every so often and pass around flyers. The Committee was still advocating for peaceful resolutions to the issues presented by the population, and Valentina was on board with such a course of action. Valentina was well within the target demographic of the Committee, young working class people disaffected with the corruption and nepotism in the government, and Lobkovskaya was a quietly devoted believer in the cause. Despite eventually finding a secure job, Lobkovskaya did not abandon her views, remaining a staunch supporter of the Committee’s cause. As tensions eventually broke out into violence, Valentina had joined in the various protests across Nachiketa’s capital city of Fansipan. Lobkovskaya was arrested once and suffered a broken arm during a riot, eventually being released without being charged. 
Valentina was a first hand witness to the breakdown of peaceable relationships between the government and the Committee, and like many members of the Committee she had called for direct action against the government. It is believed that this moment marks the start of her involvement with the leadership of the RCN, as she had assisted in organizing strikes and offered her military expertise to the RCN’s committee if it was deemed necessary. Lobkovskaya and small groups of RCN members would regularly clash with police and other security forces. 
It is also thought that Valentina was present during the July 4th Riot, but it is uncertain what if any role she played in organizing the protest. 
With talks of an armed revolt spreading throughout the RCN, they had turned to various veterans, primarily from the the Human-Covenant War. It’s believed that approximately a hundred UNSC marines from Nachiketa had served as the first unit of the RCN, training the workers and planetary defense force troopers into an armed service. Valentina’s expertise in guerrilla warfare was more than welcome among the nascent military’s ranks. The former partisan had little experience in training other soldiers, but her trainees had taken well to her teachings. The heavy foliage of the Nachiketan jungles were similar enough to the forests of Pasargadae, and many of the principles used during its liberation were applicable here. The RCN and Valentina had worked on a short timetable, intending to use their new military to spark an all out revolt in Fanispan as soon as possible. 
Valentina had partaken in the Two-Week Revolution, leading her troops from the front. Her unit was tasked with the destruction of a radio tower being used to coordinate local troop movements. Utilizing her knowledge of the city’s backstreets, she was able to evade UNSC supported patrol routes. Her unit had ambushed several enemy infantry units, seizing their explosives and using them to sow chaos by destroying checkpoints and security cameras. While the radio tower was heavily defended by both NPP and UNSC forces, many of their forces were taken elsewhere to respond to heavy fighting in the city, leaving them vulnerable, and Valentina’s troops had stormed into the facility and captured it after a brief but intense firefight.
== Conclusion of the Two-Week Revolution ==
Despite suffering several casualties, and several minor injuries herself, Valentina’s squad had managed to capture the radio tower allowing the leadership of the RCN to broadcast their general call to arms to Fansipan’s populace. Valentina herself had read off her own call to action, emphasizing the crimes of the NPP’s security forces in her message. While the messages had resonated with a portion of the city’s populace, few had chosen to join the RCN’s cause. Valentina’s squad had continued to hold the radio tower, securing it until additional jammers could be placed around it, leading to widespread radio outages that caused disruptions to coordination between the UNSC and local security forces. Confusion had reigned throughout the city as its defenders struggled to maintain order and push back the revolutionaries and in an attempt to regain the initiative, the Marines had stormed the communications centers all across the city, including the one occupied by Valentina and her troops. Another intense firefight broke out between the RCN militia and the Marines, this time with the Marines overwhelming the RCN troops with superior numbers and weaponry. All of Valentina’s squad was killed or captured during this counterattack and she was arrested and tried as a ringleader of the uprising. 
While the Marines had briefly questioned Valentina on her role in the RCN, the platoon was needed to reinforce a firefight elsewhere. With nobody to secure her, Valentina had slipped away into the city, once again relying on her knowledge of the city’s backstreets to escape notice.
Despite the RCN’s initial successes during the early stages of the Two-Week Revolution, the battle quickly turned against them. The large-scale uprising in Fansipan never occurred as had been hoped for, and the UNSC had responded too efficiently to the RCN’s assaults, even with their communications infrastructure severely hampered by sabotage. Relatively satisfied with the result of the Two-Week Revolution, the RCN had retreated back to their jungle camps and town strongholds. While the NPP had demanded an immediate counterattack, the UNSC had refused and chose to consolidate their power in the cities, expecting further guerrilla action in population centers in the near future. 
While Valentina had managed to escape capture and flee the capital, she still had a long road ahead of her before she reached safety. The retreat from Fansipan was anything but organized, and many RCN troops were captured during their escape from the battlefield. Written off as dead along with her troops, the RCN’s troops made no effort to regroup with her in their rush to evacuate Fansipan. It took nearly three weeks for her to cross kilometer upon kilometer of jungle wilderness. After fending off wild animals, starvation, and UNSC foot patrols Valentina had finally reached the RCN stronghold of Eixo, arriving with much fanfare. She was labelled a hero for this miraculous return to the RCN, with the truth of her escape from Fansipan being propagandized by the media machine of the RCN. 
After several weeks, Valentina would be put to work in developing a professional military for the nascent rebellion.
== RCN Commander and Militia Trainer ==
While the RCN initially had few professional soldiers, the chaos of the Two-Week Revolution had allowed defecting security force soldiers to make their escape from Fansipan, and in some cases, defectors had launched their own attacks against UNSC positions, to varying degrees of success. In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, the RCN’s troops were bolstered by a substantial number of well trained soldiers who often brought their equipment and weapons along with their expertise. However, these regular troops were still outnumbered by the combined forces of the UNSC and NPP by several orders of magnitude. To compensate, a draft was implemented and a civilian militia was raised to bolster the number of the RCN’s military. Apart from the militants who had served in the Revolution, these militia troops were nearly completely untrained, leaving it up to the the veterans to form the RCN into an able military 
The RCN’s planners, now including Valentina, had entertained no fantasies about pushing the UNSC off of the world through military action. Instead, they had intended to fight a defensive war, aiming to secure their sovereignty by making any offensive action against the RCN too costly in time, lives, and material. Whatever offensive action that the RCN was to take would be to either inflict casualties rather than take any objectives or strike fear into the hearts of the enemy. At the center of this plan would be the militia, who were responsible for launching ambuses and setting up traps in the jungle. 
As the foremost expert in guerrilla warfare among the command staff of the RCN, the training of the militia had fallen mostly to Valentina. While her own training took place years upon years ago, she had nonetheless been able to impart the tactics ONI taught to her onto her troops. Among the most important lessons she imparted upon her troops was usage of the environment and the concealment of one’s passing. The thick leaves of Nachiketan pitcher plants were excellent at absorbing thermal emissions and many of her troops had taken to wearing them over their uniforms or outfits. She had also spent a great deal of time honing basic infantry skills into her soldiers, ensuring that they were just as competent if pushed into conventional combat. Many of the RCN’s officers and other military leaders were also taught by her, resulting in an exponential growth of her reputation.
Valentina was not satisfied with remaining in the backlines and offering support to RCN troops, and had petitioned multiple times to join the fight in the jungle. However, the RCN was concerned with the possibility of losing her in combat, which would undoubtedly be a severe blow to morale, in addition to the loss of an exceptionally skilled and experienced officer. Eventually, the commanders within the RCN relented and allowed her to join frontline combat units, where she advised RCN militia and supported them during firefights. Much of the action during this early phase of the war was marked by small-scale skirmishes in the jungle as both sides tested each others’ strength.Among the first actions that Valentina had participated in were the small scale infantry battles in the deep jungles of Rừng Sác. The jungle was positioned between Fansipan and Eixo, stretching for several square kilometers between the two cities, cleanly dividing the rebel and loyalist controlled cities. Aware of UNSC air superiority, Valentina had advised the RCN to deploy anti-air assets in the least accessible regions of Rừng Sác, personally leading the teams dispatched to set up rudimentary launchers equipped with smuggled onto the world by United Rebel Front allies. As most of Rừng Sác’s inner regions had remained unmapped thanks to the sheer density of the flora present, such a task would prove to be exceptionally difficult. Valentina and her troops had spent daylight doing the backbreaking work of hacking through the jungles or spraying defoliants to clear their paths. Despite this, she had remained in high spirits, and attempted to keep the morale of her troops high. She and the RCN militia had spent their nights keeping watch for nocturnal predators that seemed to hound them at every step of the way on their journey. Even the militia, many of whom were no strangers to the jungle and its dangers had fallen victim to its carnivores and venomous snakes. 
The Argent-V missiles had been successfully deployed on a number of high points across Rừng Sác, elevated enough to allow the missiles’ sensors to acquire targets, but low enough in the canopy to disrupt many detection methods. The task of defending these missile sites had also fallen to Valentina and her troops. Rather than moving to fortify the newly established sites immediately, Valentina had allowed her troops to rest and recuperate, personally speaking to each member of her cell not as their commander, but as a fellow Nachiketan who desired freedom.  Fully aware that the UNSC would prioritize their elimination in order to commence bombing the rebel cities, the RCN had moved quickly to supply Valentina’s troops with heavier weapons, including , and a number of of various designs. Intending to reduce the load on her soldiers, Valentina’s troops were equipped primarily with small arms, such as , , , and . 
Valentina had advocated for a more aggressive defense of the sites, reasoning that destroying the enemy before they could locate the missiles would be ideal for keeping the locations concealed. Time was also of the essence, as the UNSC had employed mass defoliant usage to clear the way for their armored vehicles, which the light infantry of the RCN had little answer for. Moving under cover of night, the cell had monitored and mapped the UNSC’s progress through the jungles, relaying their findings back to RCN command. As the governmental forces had reached the outskirts of Rừng Sác, the UNSC stopped defoliant efforts and instead had dispatched their own light infantry into the jungles, aiming to root out any RCN guerrillas before they could ambush the heavier elements behind them. Sporadic firefights had broken out between the UNSC backed government forces and the rebels across the jungle, short engagements with few dead or wounded. While these skirmishes had inflicted little tangible damage onto the government forces, it had shaken their confidence in their ability to take the fight to the rebels.This loss of confidence would however, not last long and the Nachiketan Planetary Plenum along with their UNSC allies would redouble their efforts to destroy these missile sites. Hoping to improve public opinion on the regime and prevent the rebellion from metastasizing further, the Plenum’s war council had demanded swift and decisive action on the part of the UNSC, who held the better trained and equipped soldiers under their command. The UNSC’s commanders however, had realized that a victory over the RCN would be neither quick nor decisive, and settled in for a long siege against the distant rebel cities. As the RCN had relied heavily on smuggled goods and locally produced or extracted resources, a general blockade across the world and in orbit would go a long way in forcing the RCN to the negotiating table. While civilian leaders within the UEG had expressed worries over the long term economic effect such a prolonged war would have, especially on the newly resettled frontier of the human sphere. 
Valentina and her platoon was still in the deep jungle when these events came to pass, and they were among the hardest hit by the clamping down on resources the RCN was forced to enact. Unwilling to give up the missile sites but facing a more and more inconsistent supply line, one of the first difficult command decisions Valentina had to make in her short career as a rebel commander was deciding whether to retreat or hold their ground. Her troops had turned to living off the land, which had proven easier said than done thanks to the hostility of the fauna in the jungle. Despite her initial confidence in her decision, she would come to doubt herself as hunger had set in among her troops. The suffering among her men outside of combat had affected her significantly, and despite her best efforts to improve their morale, there was little she could do to encourage troops to fight on an empty stomach. The UNSC had initiated several raids against outlying units on the outskirts of Rừng Sác, and the RCN troops there were forced to defend their positions with limited supplies. While these battles had thrown the UNSC back out of the jungle, the losses the RCN had suffered began to compound. She had advocated for the retreat of the missile sites further to the rear, but this request was not authorized for several weeks as the RCN’s commanders had struggled to maintain cohesion and organization throughout their territory. 
After Valentina’s troops were pulled back from the Rừng Sác zone, she had stepped down from her command position, fatigued from what she endured in the jungle. Tales of her exploits during the Two-Week Revolution and in the Rừng Sác had spread throughout the populations of Eixo and other RCN aligned cities. Propaganda had embellished further on these deeds even as she was on deployment, making her into the poster child for continued military action. She had taken a dim view of this behavior despite the fame it garnered her. Many civilians and soldiers alike had offered her gifts in thanks for her service, all of which were refused. As the war had lowered in intensity, Valentina had taken work as a humble clerk in the nascent RCN bureaucratic machine. She had insisted on maintaining a life away from the war