Dieter Thiel

Overview

Dieter Thiel is the Director of Security for the Terran Resource Consortium. At 52, he’s spent three decades climbing from contract worker to the corporation’s chief enforcer. He’s not a man who justifies what TRC does as moral – he justifies it as necessary.

Background

Thiel was born on Ceres Station into the German-speaking immigrant community that was part of the station’s founding population. He was a contract worker until age 23, when he was recruited into TRC security in 2151. His family name is originally Thuringian, meaning “mighty in battle” – a detail he’d find irrelevant but that others might not.

He has no living family and has never married.

Physical Description

Tall, with a maintained physique – he still trains daily. Silver hair, meticulously groomed. He moves with controlled precision, trained in close-quarters combat. His eyes assess everyone as potential threats. He dresses in corporate severity: dark suits, minimal accessories. But his hands are rough – working-class origins never quite erased.

Personality

Thiel embodies ruthless pragmatism in service of order. He’s a systems thinker who understands how power works, how organizations function, and how to achieve objectives. His security responses are devastatingly effective.

He speaks in precise, corporate language – every word chosen for maximum effect. He never raises his voice; menace lives in the calm. He uses “we” when speaking for TRC, distancing himself from personal responsibility. Occasional German idioms surface when he’s angry, a legacy of his upbringing on Ceres. When he discusses violence, it’s in bureaucratic abstractions.

His fear is chaos – the collapse of the structures that keep civilization functioning. This drives him to over-control, to micro-manage, to escalate rather than adapt when things go wrong.

Relationships

His protege is Lieutenant Cara Engel, whom he trained personally. She represents his legacy within TRC security. His relationship with the political figures above him is purely instrumental – they’re means to an end, not objects of loyalty.