Maria Diaz was a junior ISRAn representative on the First Qinshui Expedition.
Overview[]
Maria was a pretty good clairvoyant, but felt overly-specialized compared to the neutrals on the expedition. When the Upeo wa Macho left Earth in 2114, the First Expedition worried that Earth had been destroyed; they were stranded on Qinshui and completely out of contact. Members coped by starting a betting pool on what the Qin looked like outside of their bio-suits; Maria bet on something "six-legged and furry."
In December of 2119, Maria and two engineers, Laura Roberts and Jerome Sandoz, decided to sneak out of the human quarter together, using Maria's psi abilities to avoid being seen. They discovered that the Qin, in their natural state, are meter-long gray-brown slugs. During this outing, the group was spotted by a Qin ornithopter; afterward, a Qin named Meizhu singled Maria out for meetings to tell her about Qin society.
Meizhu discussed with her the political balance of power on Qin, and implied that House Tung Jen was monopolizing contact with the human delegation and preventing them from learning more about the rest of Qin. Maria also wrote in her diary that the other houses were more willing to unite against the Aberrant threat and try to get the human expedition home, but House Tung Jen was keeping them isolated to maintain their political advantage. Maria was unsure whether to share these insights with Ambassador Floras; she didn't want to get in trouble, but she wasn't sure he knew what he was dealing with.
Roughly a month after her last diary entry, just when the Leviathan jumpship Ananda from Earth arrived, Maria, Roberts and Sandoz were killed in an "accident" outside the ambassadorial sector.
References[]
- TU: Trinity Field Report: Alien Races, p. 10-12