Zebulon Carter

Dr. Carter with Deety on board the pirate ship

Doctor Zebulon Carter was a scientist who served for a time on board a pirate ship prior to the Third Civil War, and then with the Resistance during it. While with the Pirates, he doubled as Chief Engineer and Chief Medical Officer, and dabbled in investigating alien artifacts and freelance archaeology. His assistant in all of these matters was Deety Burroughs, a free-spirited young woman with a keen interest in science but whose impoverished childhood left her without much formal education on the subject.

With the Resistance, he was their leading human expert on Horadrim technology and integrating it with human equipment, and also helped them keep their motley fleet of captured and salvaged warships running. Following the Battle of Mars, he worked closely with Admiral Chuck Coppinger and with Commodore Erich Von Shrakenberg to capture the Horadrim-built InSec battlecruiser ISS Canaris, and take control of its systems. Since Horadrim vessels require a living Horadrim to physically interface with the ship's computer, their Soul Web acting as part of its central processing unit, this meant killing the InSec-loyal Horadrim operating it and replacing him with a Horadrim member of the Resistance named Tiliash.

When Tiliash was needed elsewhere, Dr. Carter volunteered to be himself wired into the ship as a replacement. This meant injecting himself with Horadrim Soul Web nanobots, a procedure usually fatal to pure humans, but Dr. Carter made it work. Controlling the Horadrim ship taxed even his great intellect, and he was not able to fight the ship with full efficiency. This led to the ship's destruction in battle at the Battle of Luna, and the death of Dr. Carter and the rest of the crew of the Canaris.

Behind the Scenes

Dr. Zebulon Carter was the Season 4.1 player character of Martin. His story never really went anywhere, due to an almost immediate disagreement between Bax and Martin over the direction and nature of the story to be told, and also over the characterization of the Doctor and his assistant. He was brought back for a cameo during Season 4.3, and then killed off, something that has happened to pretty much all of Martin's characters so far. He was named for a bit-part character in Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Number of the Beast, who was a mathematician and brother of the main character, the similarly-named Zebadiah Carter. His assistant, Deety Burroughs, was also named for a character from the same book, the love interest for Zebadiah, not Zebulon. Any resemblance to DeeDee from Dexter's Laboratory is entirely coincidental, since Martin has to this day never seen so much as a clip of that show. Unfortunately, the text of his Season 4.1 story has been lost, as has his character-sheet data with such vital info as the name of the pirate ship he was on, and a decade later none of us remember such details. His Actor Avatar, after much deliberation, is Tom Baker as Doctor Who, mostly because it lets us make Deety's avatar Lalla Ward, aka Mrs. Richard Dawkins.