Editing John 616 (section)

==Background==
John Carter was once just an ordinary citizen of the North American Union, aka Freedom Station, one of the handful of orbital communities that managed to survive the apocalypse. Part of the sizable percentage of the station's population that are mutant superhumans, John's powers first manifested in his early teens. It turned out he was born with the ability to render his body and possessions he was in physical contact with intangible, which he discovered when he phased out of his spacesuit while he was trying to take it off. A short time later he learned he also had the ability to turn invisible when he suddenly disappeared from view after being embarrassed in front of a girl he liked. While impressive, at the time John didn't think his powers would change his life much beyond making some things more convenient. Little did he know that they would end up influencing his fate quite significantly.

Growing up John had always planned to become a journalist and get a job with one of the major news services. He was close to graduating college when something occurred that changed everything. Not just for him but for everyone in the colonies. The Arkhons had returned![https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/alien-rope-burn/rifts-world-book-9-south-america-2/#7] First encountered a few years before John was born, it seemed that a second wave of the invaders had arrived on the trail of their breathren. The Moon and the various Orbital Nations immediately put aside any conflicts with each other and joined together to oppose the common enemy.

Wanting to do his part in fighting the aliens, John volunteered for the Freedom Station Defense Force. After an accelerated track in basic training, he was assigned to be a communications specialist on NAU California.  A Wraith Class scout ship with advanced stealth capabilities, the California’s mission was to locate and monitor enemy forces and then aid in attacks when other human ships intercept and engage them. 

As a communications specialist, John’s duties were sending and receiving encrypted transmissions, decoding enemy signals, utilizing sensors to track enemy ship positions, and engaging in electronic warfare during ship to ship engagements. But John didn’t spend all his time behind a console.  Due to his mutant powers, he was the point man for any boarding actions.  His ability to enter ships without using an airlock or breaching the hull, and to remain unseen by enemy crew, made him the obvious choice to go in first to harass and sabotage Arkhon forces before the rest of boarding party performed a forced entry.

Then came the mission that would change his life forever.  John decrypted a series of Arkhon transmissions that revealed that the enemy was going to perform a coordinated attack against the Earth Containment Satellite Network involving both their forces in space and the ones that had managed to land on Earth more than three decades ago.  The plan was to overwhelm the Network by attacking from both sides and destroy enough satellites to create a safe window that would enable forces to travel between thesurface and orbit.  Needless to say, if they succeeded in their objective it could change the course of the war in the Arkhon’s favor.

As the closest ship to Arkhon vessels that were going to participate, the California’s orders were clear.  Shadow the fleet and interfere with the operation until reinforcements could arrive. It was basically a suicide mission but one the crew were willing to accept.  The California covertly followed the Arkhon flotilla and as they neared the Containment Network announced their presence by “painting” Arkhon ships, causing the killer satellites to target them earlier than the Arkhons anticipated they would be.

From then it became a tense and deadly game of cat and mouse as the California would attack Arkhon ships and then use the distraction created by killer satellite attacks to sneak away to another position, relaying sensor data to satellites that they had control access for to make their offensives more effective.  For a while, thanks to both skill and luck, they had a long streak of wins.  But it couldn’t last for ever.  Eventually the Arkhons managed to get a targeting lock on the California long enough to take out their drive, leaving them to drift aimlessly in space.

The good news was the California’s efforts were enough.  They managed to delay and disrupt the Arkhons’ operation enough that the orbital fleet would arrive in time to shut it down entirely.  The bad news was no one would get there in time to save the California.  The ship had already been jostled out of a stable orbit and was drifting downward into the Earth’s atmosphere.  Crashing down to the surface was inevitable.  The only thng the crew could do is prepare to go down with the ship.

For John, this did not equal doom.  Thanks to his powers he would able to survive the ship’s reentry and impact without being harmed.  So after one last transmission to give everyone a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones, the captain ordered John to pack anything that could be useful and weighed too much for him to render intangible in containers that had the best chance of surviving the crash.  Once John had done that, the entire crew had one final going away party before the end.

After John walked out the California’s flaming wreckage with whatever gear and possessions he managed to preserve, his first order of business was to destroy any technology the crash hadn’t which he couldn’t take with him. He could not let any evidence that an advanced human civilization exists in orbit survive.  Once that was done, the next step was to get as far away as possible.  If anyone came to investigate the crash he didn’t want to be there when they arrived.

If this had happened early during the war, John would have been in trouble due to the Earth’s gravity.  While Freedom Station simulated a 1G environment via rotation, onboard ships the amount of G’s that the crew experienced varied depending on acceleration.  But thanks to the capture of several Arkhon ships mostly intact, orbital scientists were able to slowly unlock the secrets of their gravity technology.  It would be who knew how many years before they cracked the capability of gravitic propulsion.  But they had managed to at least figure out how to artificially generate actual gravity, enabling ships’ crews to live in a 1G environment continuously to better cope with the conditions of Arkhon ships during boarding actions.

Thanks to the new artificial gravity technology, John was fully capable physically on the surface and was able to get quite far away from the California before stumbling upon someone else’s tragedy. From what he could tell from the man’s corpse, he must have been attacked by some sort of predator that got the drop on him about a week ago. Ironically, he’d been killed a few feet away from the safety of his vehicle, key fob in hand as if he was about to unlock it. 

After making sure there was nothing nearby that would do the same to him, John gave the man a decent burial before taking his ATV.  After a little trial and error, John managed to figure out how to drive the thing.  Who would have thought watching Pre-Flash media and playing racing video games would pay off this way?  Now that he had transportation, John decides the next thing he should do is find some sort of civilization.  After all, he could be down here for quite a while.