Glen Johnson

Glenn Johnson served as a United States Marine Corps pilot for over ninety years. Early in his career, he flew piper cubs against the Race's [killercraft]], and his final tour of duty ended aboard the FTL starship Commodore Perry.

When the Conquest Fleet invaded Earth, Johnson was training to fly airplanes for the US in World War II. Superior radar technology on the part of the Race allowed them to detect and destroy all but the crudest of military planes, such as the piper cub. These were no match for the Race's killercraft, however, and pilots had an extremely high mortality rate. Johnson was badly wounded on a combat mission and continued to recuperate till after the Peace of Cairo; he believed this saved his life by excusing him from further missions.

Johnson piloted American rockets in Earth orbit in the early 1960s when the Race's Colonization Fleet arrived. At this stage in his career he became friendly with German astronaut Johannes Drucker.

He became intrigued by the air of secrecy surrounding a project on the American space station. He made some inquiries into this, and was warned off by General Curtis LeMay. To satisfy his curiosity, he engineered a malfunction on his capsule that forced him to dock with the station--right before it stopped being a station and became the atomic propulsion vessel Lewis and Clark. He was made a pilot of the vessel on its mission to the asteroid belt.

In 1984 Johnson went into cold sleep in preparation for a journey to Home aboard an American starship. He travelled aboard the Admiral Peary with two old friends, Mickey Flynn and Sam Yeager. He was revived for shipturn and was again revived in Home orbit in 2034.

During his time in Home orbit, his skills as a pilot impressed the Race when he took part in a rescue mission to save two Lizards stranded in a shuttle, and the Race asked him to take part in a technological exchange program. When he found that he had inadvertantly taken part in a ginger smuggling operation, he refused to take part in further missions without assurances that ginger would not be involved.

Johnson was dismayed s diplomatic relations between the US and theRace broke down, and feared he would be forced to engage the Race's orbital defense ships in combat while firing nuclear missiles at the planet's surface. When the FTL starship Commodore Perry arrived in Home orbit and aleviated the situation, Johnson agreed to retire and return to Earth. Having earned a huge amount of back pay during his time in cold sleep, Johnson, who had spent so much time in zero-G that he could not safely reenter a planet's gravitational field, intended to spend the rest of his life aboard an American space station in Earth orbit.