Dr. William Stenton
Thanks to the failure of a capacitor costing no more than half a dollar, fifteen minutes of precious time with a two-hundred-meter reflecting telescope falls into Bill Stenton’s lap at the felicitous time imaginable. And as a result, he is the first to figure out that what was assumed to be a quite unusual asteroid approaching was actually, in fact, something even more unusual. In fact, something unprecedented in the history of mankind. Thank goodness, however, Stenton knew it was beyond absurd to imagine whatever it was could possibly be a spaceship.
Bill Norton
Norton is Commander of the screw aboard the survey ship Endeavour which has been tasked to study Rama, the spaceship that Stenton knew was physically impossible to exist. Norton’s job aboard the Endeavour is simplicity itself: safely alight five-thousand tons of expensive spaceship technology on a giant spinning disc.
Jimmy Pak
Jimmy Pak is member of the Endeavour crew who manages to secretly stow a low-gravity skybike aboard. This bit of smuggling will pay off later when he is charged with using it to access parts of the Rama spaceship that are otherwise impossible to penetrate. Unfortunately, he eventually crash lands on an isolated region, suffers a concussion, and wakes up to see a creature that looks kind of like a crab doing a chop job on his bike.
Laura Ernst
As if often the case in space operas of this era in general—and those written by this author in particular—the most important female crew aboard the Endeavour is a doctor. Surgeon-Commander Ernst is the first to determine that the strange creatures aboard the Rama is a hybrid of biological matter and robotic technology. As such, she deems them to be “biots.”
Sergeant Pieter Rousseau
Ever since he was a six-year-old kid, Pieter Rousseau had been utterly obsessed and fascinated by lenses. Especially those with the power to bring distant things closer. This obsession and subsequent expertise afford Pieter the opportunity to become the Biot-Watcher-in-Chief aboard the Endeavour. That experience and expertise of bring distant objects closer manifests itself in the development of his genuine talent: observing and predicting behavior. Such as the behavior of the Spiders, the Window Cleaners, the Scavengers and a host of other new and amazing creatures which keep showing up.
