Jens Hartmann

Jens Hartmann grew up in a small town in Schleswig-Holstein, close enough to the Baltic coast that the sea was part of his childhood. The son of a municipal engineer and a schoolteacher, he was the kid who took apart the family radio, the lawnmower, and — on one memorable occasion — the neighbour’s outboard motor, to see how they worked. He put most of them back together. The outboard was never quite the same. He spent his summers swimming in the Baltic, diving off jetties, and helping his uncle maintain his fishing boat. The water was never something to fear — it was where he felt at home.

He enlisted in the Bundeswehr at 19, tested into the Pioniertruppe (engineer corps), and discovered that the military would actually pay him to blow things up and build things under pressure. He excelled. His instructors noted an unusual combination: meticulous technical skill, physical toughness, and an almost pathological need to understand every system he encountered. But it was his comfort in the water that caught the attention of the Kampfschwimmer selection cadre.

The Kampfschwimmer — Germany’s combat swimmers — are the Bundeswehr’s naval special forces, equivalent to the British SBS or American Navy SEALs. Selection is savage: long-distance open-water swims, underwater navigation in zero visibility, demolitions work while hypothermic and exhausted, and a psychological resilience phase designed to break anyone who isn’t completely certain they belong in the water. Jens passed. Not through brute athleticism — he’s fit, not a monster — but through that same bloody-minded refusal to quit and an engineer’s ability to solve problems when his body was screaming at him to stop. They gave him a Pionier who could swim like a fish and think underwater. He gave them back a frogman who could drop a bridge from below.

He deployed to the Horn of Africa for counter-piracy operations and to the Mediterranean for maritime interdiction. His reputation grew: Hartmann was the man you called when you needed limpet mines placed on a hull in the dark, a harbour approach mapped through hostile waters, or an underwater IED problem solved. He could cook up a demolition plan over dinner — literally, because Jens was also the best camp cook in the unit, and the galley was where he did his thinking. He was also, less officially, the man you called when something was broken and nobody else could fix it — dive equipment, boat engines, comms gear, the coffee machine in the operations centre. He never said no. He couldn’t.

When the meteor fragment crisis emerged, KSK command needed their best technical operator for the defense contractor assignment — someone who could approach a problem from angles nobody else would think of. Jens was the obvious choice. A combat engineer who could infiltrate by water, place charges in impossible locations, and think his way through any technical challenge. But there was another reason he volunteered: the fragments. Materials that grant superhuman abilities? That violate everything he knows about physics and engineering? Jens doesn’t just want to fight people who have fragments. He wants to understand them. Take one apart. Figure out the mechanism. It keeps him up at night — which is fine, because Workaholic means he’d be up anyway, probably making Eintopf for the morning shift.

He arrived at the contractor facility expecting to be the smartest engineer in the room. He probably is. The problem is that smart engineering and a perfect approach swim don’t help much when the other side can bench-press a truck.

GURPS B p.550. The single most-referenced table in ranged combat. Memorise the first five entries.

Aim Bonuses (Stacking)

Jens’s practical rifle accuracy: Skill 15 + Aim (Acc 4) = 19 at point blank. At 100 yds: 19 - 10 = 9. At 50 yds with 2 turns Aim: 15 + 5 - 8 = 12.