The Albion Courier, Features Desk 

[William Darcy, Marcher of the Last Repose, declined multiple requests for interview. This profile was assembled from public records, Parliamentary testimony, and conversations with crew members who asked not to be named.] 

There is a moment, when the Last Repose comes into view, when you understand why people find William Darcy difficult to ignore. 

The ship is enormous. That much you know from the figures. At somewhere north of thirty kilometers in diameter, this is the largest marcher-ship in active service in Albion Space, and one of the oldest. What the figures do not prepare you for is the Repose’s shape. Where every other marcher-ship in the family wears its asteroid origins plainly, that characteristic lumpen potato silhouette, the Last Repose is a sphere. Not by design: the original asteroid was simply, and unusually, spherical, a geological accident that the first Darcy to claim her evidently considered worth keeping. Generations of maintenance have preserved that shape, pitted and scarred and dark with age, but unmistakably round. 

It is, you find yourself thinking, exactly the kind of ship that suits a family who have never needed to explain themselves. 

The Darcy Name 

William Darcy did not build the Last Repose. He inherited her, along with the Marcher title and a reputation that arrived fully formed before he was old enough to do anything to deserve or contradict it. 

The Darcys are old money by Belt standards, which is to say that Mr. Darcy is perhaps eight generations removed from the original settler who was wealthy enough, and bold enough, to claim a spheroid of metallic rock and to fit it out as a marcher-ship. That settler’s descendants have held the Marcher title ever since. In a Commonwealth that has no other hereditary titles, that fact alone makes the Darcys, and similar Marcher families, an object of persistent fascination and persistent ambivalence. They are, depending on who you ask, either a necessary institution or an uncomfortable anomaly. William Darcy has never, as far as public record shows, expressed an opinion on the question either way. 

It is worth noting that Darcy has at times taken a more active stance in the protection of his family’s privacy. Some years ago, a matter involving a family member at the Flight Academy was resolved with startling speed and thoroughness. The details remain unclear, even to close observers of the Marcher families. What is clear is that when William Darcy chooses to apply his family’s resources and attention to a problem, the problem tends to disappear. 

What the Ship Says 

In the absence of its owner’s cooperation, the Last Repose does most of the talking. 

The brief, camera-free tour authorized by Parliament offers a carefully curated window into life aboard. The crew who conduct it are professional and courteous, and choose the touring locations with an eye to impress. The deflection arrays. The ordnance bays. The hydroponic levels. The greenspace. 

It is the greenspace that stays with you. 

Every marcher-ship carries one, a legacy of the original colony mission design, but few carry one like this. What the Last Repose’s greenspace shows visitors is an apple orchard: groves of trees heavy with fruit, the air smelling of something that takes you a moment to place before you realize it is simply outside, or the best approximation of outside that thirty kilometers of hollowed rock can manage. There are birds in the trees. How long the Darcys have been maintaining a breeding population of robins and other avian wildlife aboard a marcher-ship is not a matter of public record, but the crew treat them with the casual familiarity of people who have never known the ship without them. 

What it tells you about the man who maintains all of this is open to interpretation. The charitable reading is that Darcy takes the original purpose of these ships seriously, that the greenspace is a living archive, a piece of Terra kept whole against some future need. The less charitable reading is that it is the most quietly extravagant possible way to signal that extravagance is not a concern. 

Both readings may be correct. 

What the Crew Says 

The crew of the Last Repose are, uniformly, unwilling to say much about their captain on the record. Off it, the picture that emerges is consistent if not entirely illuminating. 

He is fair. He is demanding. He does not ask his crew to do anything he would not do himself, and he has a long memory for both competence and its absence. The ship runs well. Disputes are resolved quickly. People who perform their jobs well tend to stay for a long time, and people who do not tend to move on to a posting aboard a different marcher-ship, with a less demanding Marcher. 

None of this is scandalous. Most of it is, frankly, what you would want from any Marcher. What is harder to pin down is the atmosphere the crew describe almost in spite of themselves: a ship that takes its work seriously without being grim about it, where the greenspace is genuinely used rather than merely maintained, where there are real books in the captain’s library, physical objects made from Terran paper, a detail that every crew member who mentions it seems to consider either deeply eccentric or quietly admirable. 

It is, by all accounts, a good ship to serve on. 

Whether that reflects well on William Darcy as a person, or simply as an employer, is a question this profile cannot answer. He did not give us the opportunity to find out. 

Pride & Planetoids is a space opera retelling of Pride and Prejudice, set among the asteroid families of the outer solar system. William Darcy, Marcher of the Last Repose, is one of its two protagonists.