Early Life & Appointment
William Henry Robinson was born in SY 78 in the United States on Earth. The archive does not detail his early life or the path that brought him into Consortium diplomatic service, but by approximately SY 100 he had been appointed by the World Congress as the official Consortium liaison to Taikojing — the People's Republic trade hub on Mars, the most economically developed city on the planet.
The liaison appointment was the posting that defined his life. He spent most of his career on Mars. By the outbreak of the Solar War he had been resident on the planet for more than a decade — long enough to have watched the red regolith, as he later wrote, cover him head-to-toe. His role was to stand between two parties and make each comprehensible to the other: Free Mars to the Consortium and the Consortium to Free Mars. He was, by all evidence, very good at it. Scaevola wanted him to command CONPOL's Martian operations. That is the measure of the regard.
The Crisis & The Choice
As Consortium-Martian relations deteriorated in the years approaching the Solar War, Robinson's position became untenable. He was the Consortium's man on Mars. He was also, by then, a Free Martian — not by birth but by the only definition that mattered to him: he lived there, he had chosen it, and he would not leave it to be governed by anyone who had not.
He co-authored the Free Martian Council edict declaring that Consortium involvement in the war was unwelcome and that interference would constitute an act of war. He then wrote a series of private letters to Marcus Cato Scaevola making the same argument in personal terms. Scaevola was not persuaded. He was enraged.
What happened next was the pivot on which his life turned. Scaevola offered him the position of Commander of Mars for CONPOL — the militarized Consortium peacekeeping force being organized for the war. It was an extraordinary offer: Robinson was being asked to be the military governor of the planet he had spent thirty years serving as a diplomat. He refused it without hesitation and tendered his immediate resignation from Consortium service.
Having resigned, Robinson immediately turned his inside knowledge to use. He informed the Free Martian Council of the Consortium's intentions and brokered a series of meetings among the Alliance, the Confederacy, the Free Martian Council, and the Army of Eastern Kamijing that produced the founding of the Spacer Protectorate. The man the Consortium had sent to represent them on Mars became the man who organized their opponents into a faction capable of fighting them.
The Solar War
Robinson accepted commission from the Free Martian Council to form a militia unit. He raised and commanded the 1st Taikojing Militia — drawn from the city where he had served as diplomat, the city whose people knew him. Under his command, the 1st Taikojing participated widely in skirmishes engaging both Technocracy and Consortium forces throughout the war's middle period.
During the first Blockade of Mars, Robinson made the most consequential contribution of his military career: he provided Protectorate forces with first-hand intimate knowledge of Consortium technology — the systems, protocols, and vulnerabilities he had learned across three decades of diplomatic access. That intelligence played a key role in breaking the blockade.
The most intense combat Robinson experienced came during the twelve-day Siege of Mars in SY 138. Blockaded by combined Consortium and Technical forces, the Unity Government demanding Martian resources as Solar trade collapsed, the siege made Martian defeat apparent. When it became clear that Mars could not be held, Robinson refused to surrender. He gathered a warband — Martian Militia veterans, expatriates from Luna, and refugees — and departed with the retreating Protectorate. He named them the Remus Exiles.
The Remus Exiles & Final Years
The Remus Exiles stationed themselves around Jupiter, maintaining friendly relations with other former Protectorate loyalists scattered through the outer system. Robinson led them as their warlord from SY 138 until his death — a span of 136 years. He was 196 years old when he died, of natural causes, having outlived the Protectorate, the Consortium, and the war that had consumed the centre of his life.
The Exiles under his command kept faith with what they had fought for even when what they had fought for no longer existed in any formal sense. Robinson's longevity — itself a product of the Consortium genetics program he had access to through his diplomatic years — meant he held the Exiles together long past the point at which another leader might have let them dissolve into the Twilight Era's general disorder.