Commander Wade Samstone

Wade is solidly built, the product of decades of physical discipline that began in his Academy years and never really stopped. Blond hair going grey at the temples, grey eyes, and he stands six feet exact. He looks like a man who has spent his career making hard decisions, able to make peace with most of them. He carries himself with the particular ease, confident but still an aura of concern. The Romulans have re awakened that part of him more than he cares to admit.

Wade is more of an observer than being boisterous or loud. He prefers to observe before he speaks and then acts accordingly. Both habits to serve him well commanding a ship on the edge of the Neutral Zone. He can be warm when he wants to be and has become more so over the last couple of years. Leadership has changed his perspective in many ways.

He has a particular dislike of bureaucracy that does not serve the people it is supposed to serve and a talent for finding ways around it when necessary. This makes him effective in command and occasionally difficult for the admirals who supervise him.

He reads situations quickly and can delegate well. He holds people accountable without making it personal, important as a leader. He is patient while working through problems and however is considerably less patient with people who create problems they could have avoided of their own accord. Being on a border where a single overreaction can start a war, his steadiness under pressure is trait Starfleet values.

His weakness is that he typically prefers to keep his own counsel more often than not. He will carry something for a long time before bringing it up, and by the time he brings it up, things have changed enough to have grown more so around his silence versus giving indication of the issue at hand.

To bring his people home from a posting where neither safety or security is guaranteed. He spent the early part of his career learning how much a border like this one can cost, and he would like to spend the rest of it proving that the careful way of doing the job, the war prevented rather than the battle won, is the right one. He takes the Rubicon seriously in a way that surprises people who expected a young Commander to be chasing a captaincy.

Baseball. Scotch, the real kind when he can get it. Amateur warp theory, a hobby left over from his Academy years that never quite became anything and never quite went away. He flies whenever there is something to fly, and still logs helm and cockpit time because he refuses to command pilots from a chair he has forgotten how to sit in.

Wade was born on Luna and grew up there, visiting Earth only a handful of times as a child. His father was a scientist who found his son's compulsive disassembly of working equipment to be both baffling and useful at times. His mother was overprotective in many ways, always concerned of him wandering into somewhere dangerous that he didn't understand. The concern was legitimate in many ways. Luna certainly was a safe place to grow up in itself, but a curious child who understood machines and technology better than he understood most people tended to find himself on the edges of things he had no business being in, like a maintenance tunnel or the docking ports. Places a boy was not supposed to be for any reason. Wade spent his childhood with a curious nature, thinking of how to take parts of the colony apart in his head and the re assemble them once more.

His parents are both still living on Luna and he speaks with them when he is able to, which is less often than any of them would prefer. His father has followed Wade's career with a quiet pride he rarely ever spoke out loud, a regret he feels deeply at times. However his mother has followed it out of more worry that she has never managed to hide. Wade has spent most of his adult life a very long way from the two of them, and has also made peace with the distance that he knows they have never grown accustomed to.

Wade applied to the Academy at seventeen during his senior year of High School and started in the Academy at eighteen years old. He focused on piloting for the first two years and was elected class leader in his third year. His final year project was a theoretical application of scaled warp field technology to assault fighters, which was judged as sound in theory and premature in practice. It was an interesting concept, however with Star Fleet focusing on more of a diplomatic angle versus being more combat driven, his project remained just that, an assignment for grading and advancement to graduation. He has continued to refine it informally over time. The instructors who reviewed his project certainly have remembered Wade over the years, although more so for his defense of the project versus the man himself. He was calm, precise, and unwilling to overstate what he wasn't able to prove at the end of the day.

He was assigned to the USS Galileo fresh out of the Academy and spent two years learning what operational piloting actually was as opposed to what the Academy had told him it would be. His second posting was the USS Rose, where he served through the late 2350s conducting patrols and long-range flight operations along the frontier. It was on the Rose that he met Jill. They married in 2361 and were happy together in many ways, happy to have chosen one another and finding no reservation in the love that they shared. Any shore leave he got, they spent together, just as much as they did with any time off he had while on the ship.

Their marriage came to an abrupt end however when Jill died in 2364 in a transporter accident while the couple was returning from Risa. He was thirty-one. He spent the better part of a year in counseling and on medical hold before he was cleared to return to duty, not a day before being declared fit and passing all psych evals presented to him, as well as checks on his competency as a pilot.

His career after that was defined through grief and a sense of needing to belong. When the Romulans broke half a century of silence and re-emerged along the Neutral Zone in 2364, Wade volunteered for and was posted to the frontier during the tensest years the border had seen in a very long time. He served through seeing many destroyed outposts, chasing sensor ghosts, and all the while a careful staring-match of the cold war being restarted.

He served first as a wing commander and then later was re assigned being strategic operations officer. In that role he learned the thing most Starfleet officers his age never had the chance to learn, how the Romulans actually think, how they probe, how they wait, and how important maintaining composure as a whole was. Performing well in his duties allowed the ship to perform well. He made his reputation not by winning engagements but by keeping his people out of any that were unnecessary.

He was made Executive Officer in the mid-2360s aboard a Neutral Zone patrol vessel, the USS Andrews, where his performance was exemplary. In 2370 he was given the USS Rubicon, an Excelsior-class ship assigned to patrol the same stretch of Neutral Zone he had spent years learning to read.

2351 - Entered Starfleet Academy, Piloting Track

2354 - Graduated Starfleet Academy (Ensign)

2354 - USS Galileo — Flight Officer

2356 - Promoted Lieutenant JG, USS Rose — Flight Officer

2359 - Promoted Lieutenant

2361 - Married Jill Samstone

2363 - Promoted Lieutenant Commander

2364 - Jill Samstone died; medical hold and counseling

2364 - Romulan Neutral Zone frontier — Wing Commander (Romulan re-emergence)

2366 - Re assigned to Strategic Operations

2368 - Promoted Commander, Executive Officer, Neutral Zone patrol, USS Andrews

2370 - Assigned Commanding Officer, USS Rubicon