Edmund Locke

Early Life

Edmund Locke was born to brilliant but dysfunctional parents whose relationship didn’t make it to his third birthday. Both were Starfleet officers, but his father was an historian and policy advisor while his mother, an engineer, had followed him to Earth. Once Aureliana Locke left Magnus Blackwood, she took young Edmund with her. Carting a child back to starships was less than ideal in the post-Wolf 359 Starfleet, so Edmund spent his formative years on starbases and planetary stations where his mother was posted. The consummate Starfleet brat, he grew up around his mother’s colleagues and their children of wildly disparate ages.

It was not surprising that this lack of reliable peers made him a little socially awkward and thoroughly bookish. He was not poor with people so much as often disinterested in them or superficial, as he quickly found that either they had nothing in common or they would soon leave anyway. Mindful of this, his mother considered sending him away to school but was reluctant to act on this until the outbreak of the Dominion War. At that point, sending Edmund to a preparatory school on Earth was a matter of physical safety as much as social and intellectual development.

Although the social development didn’t necessarily happen, Edmund flourished in a more traditional schooling environment. As the war ended, he also found himself with the opportunity to see his father more, with Blackwood assigned to Earth. Although Edmund harboured resentment towards his father for his absence, he had found himself increasingly enamoured with the study of history, and the two would talk more about work and studies than their feelings or relationship.

Starfleet

Joining Starfleet was all a Starfleet brat knew how to do. Even his schooling had not deterred him; in many ways, such a confined and structured lifestyle away from his family had prepared him better than anything for starship life. Edmund Locke applied for the Academy and studied at the San Francisco campus, training to become an anthropologist. It was here he met Jae Hyoshin, a law student training to become a JAG officer. The two hit it off quickly, but despite their connection, Locke fought to keep the relationship superficial. His parents had committed too swiftly very young, and he did not want to repeat mistakes of the past.

Locke graduated as Starfleet was returning to the stars after the Dominion War. He was assigned as an anthropologist to missions of deep space exploration, and flourished in fieldwork and starship life. In the highly-structured lifestyle of Starfleet, he found himself much better at making connections, if not friendships, and a capable manager of colleagues and small projects.

The aftermath of the Attack on Mars cut these missions of exploration short, Starfleet withdrawing to within its own borders. Superiors at Starfleet Science took the opportunity for smaller anthropological operations, and Locke was moved to lead small teams conducting fieldwork for minor studies into issues on Federation worlds. Soon enough, even this began to dry out, and Locke was singled out by Starfleet for his management skills rather than his research capabilities for his next assignment.

Cardassian Borders

Starbase 112 lay near the Cardassian border, and against his wishes, Locke found himself posted there as Chief Science Officer. The station’s duties were more about border control than scientific research, and the work proved frustrating and unsatisfying. But it was also where he was reunited with Jae Hyoshin, part of the station’s JAG team. The two were slow to reignite their relationship, Locke still emotionally withdrawn, she more than a little angry at how he had behaved almost a decade earlier.

The assignment was otherwise more of a militarised posting than Locke was used to. The station conducted border patrols and dealt with the rising violence from mercenaries and pirates acting, it would eventually transpire, on behalf of the Cardassian Central Command. Investigation of this last issue fell to Locke and Hyoshin, which invariably drew them closer.

Otherwise, Locke had the time to pursue his own research interests. Taking advantage of his location, he conducted more studies into the history of the region. This included the Cardassian-Federation Wars, conflicts in which his maternal grandfather had served and been killed, leaving a great impact on his mother. But Starfleet had demonstrated little interest in understanding this unauspicious conflict, and any knowledge possessed or scholarship conducted by the Cardassian Union was not about to be shared.

To Avalon

In the late-90s, Hyoshin was offered a position on the staff of the commander of the Second Fleet. Unable to turn this down, at last she challenged her relationship with Locke, asking him to come with her or for them to part forever. Although there was little to lure him back to the Core Worlds, he agreed to join her. The two were married and spent several years on Alpha Centauri, with Locke continuing his research as he taught at the Starfleet campus there.

For a time, he considered resigning from Starfleet and moving to academia full-time. But Hyoshin grew tired of this level of staff work, and soon after was Coppelius and Starfleet’s return to the stars in 2399. The two seized an opportunity to serve on the USS Sirius, an Odyssey-class headed for deep space, where they worked for eighteen months. Still Locke found himself somewhat listless, the work on the frontier not holding the same excitement it once had. Otherwise he would have likely refused the offer that reached him, not for what it represented, but for who it was from: his father.

Nevertheless, Magnus Blackwood came to his son with a chance to complete the work he had spent some ten years failing to fully grasp. Now it was his turn to ask his wife for a compromise for career and, after some negotiation, she agreed. They would together go to the Avalon Fleet Yards, where she could take on a role in the JAG office, and he could take on a project under his father’s historical research institute.