Bill Alpine

Bill Alpine is the one human on Earth who knew what Princess could do – because he is the one who taught her.

Traits

• Corp field officer, Expanse Branch – a career spent inside other people’s paperwork
• Patient in the way people are when they have already been wrong once
• Never filed the report that would have made her someone else’s problem

Background

He and Princess were signed onto the same intake roll as new recruits, on the same day, at the same desk. Nobody at the Corp thought that was worth a second look – one more officer, one more working animal. They stayed partnered four and a half years, which at the Expanse Branch is a long tour by any measure.

Somewhere in those years he stopped training her and started teaching her. He has never said which day it was.

Role in the Story

Alpine is the reason Princess is not simply gifted – she was shown. Everything the record calls impossible traces back to one man deciding, quietly and against his own instructions, that she deserved to know how.

Then everything went down. The Corp’s account of that is a court case. His account is a sealed file, and a man who is forty-six now and has not worked a day since.