I'm starting a new project for my website: a brief dossier on the big characters in SR, but I don't own many novels, so many details slip from me.
We know he's a cold-blooded bastard, with way too much brain for anyone. He owns the biggest part in Ares due to the Nanosecond Buyout (with Dunkelzahn's help?). He's subtle and arrogant. Has a good presence and manners (anyone has a more detailed description?). Something more?

I haven't got the time to get into details right now but there are a lot of sources for Damien Knight information, the biggest are:
Target:UCAS (Detroit)
Blood in the Boardroom (Ares-Cross war)
Corporate Download (Ares)
Dragonheart Trilogy (1st book - Roxborough links Knight to Dunkie; 2nd book - reveals the truth about Gavilian Ventures when Knight captures Ryan)

Knight was a hacker and programmer...back before there were deckers, that is. He was working for Roxy, and may have been partially responsible for creating the Crash Virus. Dunkelzahn convinced him to sign on to Echo Mirage, where he became best buddies with Kyle Haeffner (Alice's hubbie), and he fought the virus with prototype decks and the primitive SK that became Psychotrope/Mirage.

After the CRash, he dissapeared around the time the government was cleaning house at Echo Mirage. With DUnkelzahn's help and Lucien Cross' technical support, he performed the Nanosecond Buyout, which netted him control of Ares, Cross the bare bones of what would be Cross Corp, and Dunkie Gavilian Ventures.

Since then, he's run his little corporate empire from Detroit, forming Knight Errant and Ares FireWatch teams, which hit bug hives in the 2050's on the reccomendation of Dunkelzahn. He helped back DUnkie's presidential bid, and developed a hate-hate relationship with Cross, but he never let the fued develop while the wyrm was alive, as DUnkie was protecting the fledgling corp.

He's known as an excellent chessplayer (played with Dunkelzahn in matches lasting days/weeks), and decker. He take regular Leonization treatments.

He takes a personal interest in the Knight Errant Security Division of Ares Macrotech, which implies it has more of an interest to him than just a money making part of his corp.

Do we have any phisical description of him? I don't recall any in the sourcebooks Synner mentioned, but it might appear in any of the novels.

He's described in the Dragonheart book in which he interrogates Mercury. I'm pretty sure there are descriptions of him elsewhere (beyond the "60 but looks 30" stuff).

Damien Knight is a bad, bad man.

*It is known he likes to eat human babies, sometimes while they're still alive.
*He keeps a harem of abused slave women in the basement of his mansion.
*He uses BTL and Novacoke regularly, and sold off Ares pension funds to pay for his habit.
*The Bug spirits that took over Chicago were just an experiment of his that got out of control.
*He likes to wear women's clothing.

---This public service message brought to you by KiddieMedia43, a subsidiary of Cross Applied Technologies. "Remember kids, tell your parents how bad Damien Knight is!"

Anyone got it near him? I'm afraid I don't own the novel, so I can't go check it.

There's a nice picture of him as a younger guy in Corporate Download... I dunno if it is a reprint from Blood in the Boardroom or not, but it is definitely out there. =)

Athenor

Another thing to keep in mind is that Knight did not actually win plurality shares in Ares with the Nanosecond Buyout. He ended up with exactly as many shares as then CEO, and founder's son, Leonard Aurelius. This ended with Knight being CEO and Leonard being chairman of the board. Cue Ares infighting between Knight and Aurelius for total domination of the corporation.

It wasn't until Nadja Daviar proxied Gavilon Ventures (inherited in Dunk's will) to Knight for a period of two years (happened in one of the Dragon Heart novels) that Knight solidly cements his control of Ares. Aurelius flees to Cross Applied Technologies.

To quote the Archive Timeline Explorer "2033: Damien Knight, a previously unknown financier, initiates his now-famous Nanosecond Buyout of Ares Industries. Using a series of expertly programmed computers in Stockholm, Sweden, Knight executes a series of transactions so complicated that they can only be read by another computer. By the end of the minute that the transactions took, three corporations have ceased to exist, two multi-millionaires have lost their fortunes, three people have become multi-millionaires, and Damien Knight has acquired 22 percent of Ares Industries. At the next shareholders meeting Knight takes the CEO position from Leonard Aurelius."

And for reference, "2031: Echo Mirage head Major David Gavilan disappears without a trace". David Gavilan is the old name of Damien Knight.

...And that picture has a spelling mistake (says Gavilin instead of Gavilan)

IIRC, Arthur Vogel has more shares thanKnight, but Knight controls a lot of proxy votes.

Physically, and I'm sure this has been supported by what few pics there have been of him, I've always imagined Damien Knight as a large, physically imposing man with short black hair and a well trimmed black beard. Touch of gray at the temples (Now I know that's in one of the sourcebooks ), and the body of an Olympic athlete.

Basically the implication, I think, is that Damien Knight looks like... well.... Ares. As in the Greek god.

Actually... kinda looks like Mr. Darke too, doesn't he?

Daviar was blackmailed into giving her votes to Knight.

If i remember right, from the dragon heart novels, knight had something on her that forced her to giver her votes to him. I think that something had to do with Ryan Mercury.

Who exactly is Mercury? Her bodyguard? Her boyfriend? The cyberzombie?

Ryan Mercury - a.k.a. Quicksilver: the ones that didn't see that one coming can leave the room NOW - is her lover, and was Dunkelzahn's primary shadow-agent.

He's also a drake, and-and a Uber-powerful physad trained by Dunkie hisself, and-and a physical magician being trained by Harlequin, AND HE'S NAILING THE vICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES...Aeiiiii!
<Ancient's head explodes trying to fathom the sheer munchkiness of Ryan Frickin' Mercury>

Hey, he's only munchy if a player is playing him. Otherwise he's "challenging."

You call that a challenge?!! I call that a freaking suicide!!!

Oh come on he's not that powerful, I got a few characters who could take him out... wait, did you say Ryan Mercury, oh yeah, he is that powerful

What ever hapened to Fastjack and Dodger? I know FJ was rumored to have been on echo mirage, but I havent heard hide nor hail of him lately. The last time I read about Dodger was in on of the old, old novels.

Reminds me of one of the greatest idea I've heard of for SR a GM who set that the Dragon Heart Trilogy were books really published in-game. The real Ryan Mercury is a boring and incompetent office worker of the Draco Fundation "operations service" who still wonder who a fiction writer get wind of his name. But he still scares off that GM's PCs, who also work for the Fundation and fear ever being under his command.

i believe Fasty was member of Echo Mirage, but surely good ol' Cap wasn't. Well, almost surely.

Do we have a reference for FJ not being EM? Or is it suposition, 'cause I was sure that he was. I recall reading somewhere (great source I know) that he was a member and that he knew the people in it.

There are no hints one way or the other as to whether or not Fastjack was a member of Echo Mirage. Certainly, he's of an age with Damien Knight, so it is possible.

But, IIRC, he was a hacker before the Matrix was born, and a good one, no?

I always liked Damian Knight, because he was the closest thing the the SR corporate world to "nice guy." And by nice guy I mean that he only eats babies that died of natural causes.

Seriously, I know that the man is a greedy, cold, corporate raider, but there is something heroic in the nanosecond buyout, the echo-mirage project, and his friendship with the Big D and Kyle Heffner. He always struck me as the shadowrunner that made it, taking control of his world, and carrying some of the mentality of a runner with him.

Also, on the topic of Ryan Mercury, does he strike anyone else as, I don't know, a bit slow on the uptake? One of those physads with a bit more Improved Unarmed Combat than sense?

Richard Villers (for Fuchi CEO/present Novatech CEO) either had the founders of Matrix Systems killed so that he could start selling cyberdecks or he gets the largest right place/right time karma award if someone else knocked them off.

I asked Tom Dowd about FastJack one time, and he said that the character FastJack has no history. FastJack was created as an NPC during the early stages of game development, and his legend has grown in the telling ever since. Clues about his characteristics are scattered all through SR books, with the most detail about his life coming from the Denver box set, on pages 73-74 of the "red book" and his profile in "Target: Matrix." According to the Denver box set, he was born in 1999 and his first computer was an Apple Mac "Firestorm." He still has the CPU to that computer in his deck doing tertiary processing work. People have postulated that FastJack could be someone famous (like Damien Knight, etc.), but so far there's been no "official" FastJack back story.

As for Dodger, the first SR novels "Choose Your Enemies" series & his profile in Brainscan should tell you all that you need to know about him. He also plays a part in the novel "Technobabel."