Lobos
Background
The original guards on the Corregidor prison-station were the " Grupo Correcional de Respuesta," the "Correctional Response Unit."
When the Corregidor Foundation cut the station loose, the GCR was one of the best-trained units that Warden Orozco and General Sarmiento could deploy. They were brutal and had diverse training; many had been violent PMCs back on Earth, others had served across the solar system. Men and women alike had been sent as highly-paid and lethally-trained enforcers.
As Corregidor transformed from a private prison ship into a member of the Nomad Nation, it continued to lease some of its space in the Praesidium for use as a penitentiary. Many other nations like PanOceania and Yu Jing send problematic prisoners to Corregidor, where they are extremely well-protected from rescue. Blocks A through C are normal security blocks. Block D is for cybernetically-enhanced prisoners, and the source of the Diablos. Finally, E-block is for "foreigners," high-value prisoners that are kept in relative luxury.
All of them are overseen by the GCR, though the prisoners don't know them as guards, but as "The Wolves," or Lobos in Spanish. Lobos are cruel, violent, stern, and honest. They are frequently sent on combat missions in order to keep their skills sharp, and are constantly trained for riots and similar incidents on the Corregidor. Although some say it is a waste or improper use of resources, the Lobos have been around so long they are immune to most criticism.
Trained primarily for non-lethal riot suppression and capture activities, Lobos are nonetheless ready and willing to use extremely lethal force to put down any prisoner activity. Those same unflinching skills serve them well on the battlefield as well; they always know exactly what to do. It doesn't matter what happens, the Lobos have seen it. Aliens? More like ailing once they hit them. Nanoweapons? A nanoscopic threat. Troopers? More like bloopers, as the Lobos have killed more than their fair share of men. When they have to, they use their close combat training and deploy "multipliers," blunt weapons called as such because they shatter your shins and "multiply" the number of bones in your body.
Because they have to be constantly inspecting the prisoners, they have a keen sense of who is or is not a human imposter. The last thing they'd want would be to have a flash-grown-clone or impersonator switching out a valuable E-block prisoner, as E-block is home to the most valuable individuals - political prisoners, mob bosses, and rich kids.
The Lobos have been part of Corregidor for so long, and are so ingrained into the prison-guard culture, many of them have become insular. They have various traditions, ranging from the progressive (many of their first number were women, and like the rest of Corregidor, do not bother themselves with questions of gender or bathroom use) to the conservative (they are part of the prison-industrial complex) to the bizarre and esoteric. Decades on the ship have led to the Lobos developing their own bizarre and exotic religious traditions. Santa Muerte is a Mexican neo-pagan deity, a personification of death that mixes Catholicism and folk traditions and even ancient Mesoamerican Indian religions.
It’s said that prison is hell. It’s said that prison has no rules. It’s said that in prison your life is worthless. And those who say all this really believe they’re tough guys, but no matter how tough they think they are, they haven’t been to Praesidio, Corregidor’s prison: a sealed box floating in space, crammed full of the worst criminals in all the Human Sphere, the kind of scum no one gives a damn about. It’s a nightmarish place you’d never want to visit. And the only thing worse than Praesidio is Praesidio during a riot. That’s truly hell unleashed. That’s truly a no-rules place.
That’s a place where your life or anyone else’s truth is worth absolutely nothing. Because, when inmates revolt, there’s no negotiation possible. Hatred, anger, and boredom blind them and fuel them with irrepressible rage, and they’ll lash out at everything and everyone, determined to cause as much damage as possible, without fear of consequences, without worrying whether they live or die, engaged in a vandalistic and suicidal path of destruction, because damaging a spaceship’s infrastructures is suicide. But they no longer care, as long as everyone else suffers as they have suffered. During a riot, the inmates become an unstoppable tide of devastation that can destroy the entire mothership.
So you need someone capable of restraining it, someone, willing to walk into that hell and beat it into submission before the wave of violence and mayhem spreads to the rest of the ship. And Corregidor has that someone, someone who is up to the task. It’s probably the oldest unit aboard the mothership, founded back when it was just a prison ship and not an independent nation yet—the bad old times.
During those times everything was more precarious and the ship was on the verge of collapse every single day. At that time, the Grupo Correccional de Respuesta (Correctional Response Team, in Spanish) earned the name everyone knows them by. It’s a name that was given to them by the inmates themselves, a name that’s whispered with respect and hatred in every prison block of Praesidio, the one yelled out in fear to warn of their arrival: the Lobos, the wolves. It’s a name well deserved both for its ferocity and for what it stands for the hungry and relentless predators that hunt in packs.
The name is said to have originated with Vicente Romero, the leader of the Honduran cartel “Los Zapes,” when he threatened his rivals in the C Block canteen with staging a riot just so he could “throw them all to the wolves,” alluding to the Correctional Response Team, which was already well known for kicking and shooting first and letting others ask questions later. The name stuck among the inmates, partly because Romero was a real influencer in C Block thanks to his thugs and no one would contradict him there, and also because it perfectly summed up how they all perceived the members of this unit.
The Correctional Response Team was created to deal with critical situations that the detachment of Alguaciles assigned to prison security couldn’t handle. Whenever there’s a riot or a revolt, this unit steps in to restore order and put an end to the problem. The way they do this is what sets them apart from more conventional forces.
This unit is composed entirely of tough guys who only speak the language of violence and are fond of beating people up and breaking bones. Brutality is the universal language in prison, and they speak it with great enthusiasm and bluntness, in a way that all inmates understand and fear. More than once, the mere arrival of the Lobos has been enough to stop a riot in an entire cell block.
There isn’t a single inmate who isn’t aware of their reputation, who doesn’t know that all the Lobos are fervently devout to Santa Muerte and that they have complete autonomy and freedom of action in the event of a riot. On occasion, their extreme violence has been criticized, but as Warden Consuelo Peña stated at one point: "“To protect the sheep, you must hunt down the wolf, and sometimes it takes a wolf to catch another wolf.”"
Since then, the Correctional Response Team has embraced the nickname Lobos and adopted it as part of its own idiosyncrasy as a unit. In addition to its members’ rituals of devotion to Santa Muerte, the Lobos don’t understand the unit just as a team, but also as a pack.
As they always say, “The strength of the wolf is the pack.” When your mission requires stepping into a place full of criminals eager to end your life, trusting your comrades, cohesion, and teamwork are fundamental elements of survival and success. And they finish with, “The strength of the pack is the wolf,” to emphasize that each one of them must always be ready and at the top of their game, as they all are essential to the team and vital support for their teammates.
In order to live up to this maxim, and to always be at peak performance—which is the standard level of operational requirement in this unit—intense and constant training is essential, as well as frequent deployments and action to keep their combat instincts sharp.
For this reason, the various Lobos detachments are divided into rotating work shifts: one will be on duty and ready to be immediately deployed, another one in a joint training session, and the remaining detachments will be deployed together with other units of the Corregidor Jurisdictional Command to keep their instincts sharp, acting in the field as controllers of penitentiary forces in Direct Action operations.
The fact is that an elite unit such as the Correctional Response Team shouldn’t be relegated to prison security tasks. The resources and investment required by this type of unit, in addition to its considerable pool of talent, must be exploited beyond its specific duties.
That’s why, currently, the Lobos are well known by all law enforcement agencies and military forces of the Human Sphere as those violent guys who pray to Santa Muerte and call their batons and electrosticks “multipliers,” because with them they can multiply the number of bones in your body by breaking them.[1]
Profile
N4
ISC: Lobos, Correctional Response Group | Spec. Trained Troop | Medium Infantry | ||||||
Fury: Not Imeptuous | Training: Regular | Back-Up: Cube | ||||||
MOV | CC | BS | PH | WIP | ARM | BTS | W/STR | S |
4-4 | 20 | 12 | 11 | 13 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 2 |
Skills and Equipment: Biometric Visor, CC Attack(+3), BS Attack(+1 Dam), Dodge(+1"), Religious Troop, Veteran |
Loadout | Special Skills | Weapons and Equipment | Melee Weapons | Points | SWC |
1 | Boarding Shotgun, Flash Pulse(+1B) | Breaker Pistol, PARA CC Weapon(-6) | 20 | 0 |
2 | Combi Rifle, Light Shotgun, Adhesive Launcher(+1B) | Breaker Pistol, PARA CC Weapon(-6) | 23 | 0 |
3 | Specialist Operative | Breaker Combi Rifle, Heavy Riotstopper, Flash Pulse(+1B) | Breaker Pistol, PARA CC Weapon(-6) | 25 | 0 |
4 | NCO | Red Fury, Flash Pulse(+1B) | Breaker Pistol, PARA CC Weapon(-6) | 33 | 1 |
5 | Specialist Operative | Breaker Combi Rifle, Light Flamethrower(+1 Dam), Flash Pulse(+1B) | Breaker Pistol, PARA CC Weapon(-6) | 25 | 0 |
Note: Introduced in N4. No profile in N3 or previous editions.