K.T. is like every other sixteen-year-old girl her age, or is she? At fifteen she enlisted for her capsuleer papers. Like most other rich kids who want for a life of daring and adventure she got Daddy to pay for it as it was the cool thing to do. Daddy is a high-ranking official in some Sebiestor shipping company but she doesn't ask too many questions. She doesn't see Daddy much at all. She certainly doesn't know the name of his company. As long as the digits of ISK flash green in her bank balance each month she is a happy girl.
K.T. has never piloted a spaceship. Not yet anyway. She has the simulator training but, she'd much rather hang around the hangers with the grease monkey kids or shop at the station malls and drink synthetic coffee or buy some new lipstick. Spaceships are very much on the horizon. It's just right now the horizon is just a little far away. The life of a teenage punk kid is hard you know?
Pale and smooth skinned, a tight body, curves in all the right places, red lipstick, hip clothes, attitude, a neat jet-black crop of hair that hides a lacquered black implant switch at the back of her neck. K.T. oozes hotness and she knows it. She is innocent but damn can she manipulate and bend the rules. She rides a hover board around the station because, like, what teenage kid doesn't?
Pator Tech School, Heild. A low-sec shit hole if ever she saw one. K.T. is here for studies. That's what Daddy is told anyway. The courses are good, admittedly, but so is the night life. It is quite clear to her, after some weeks of life in this station that she is surrounded by twisted freaks, crazy people.
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A sixteen-year-old Sebiestor chick away from home is never short on time and for things to do. A couple of friends have invited her down to hangar T71. She has never seen one of the guys with the black jackets before, the Rifter Guys as her friends know them. She has heard about them sure. Never seen one. She had in all honesty started to think of them as some kind of myth.
A frigate is chucking smoke up into the air of the hangar bay, the ship looks like it has ran into a storm of bullets. The station's air ventilation system booms and sucks at the smoke as a team of nanobot drones put out the flames.
It's a Rifter.
K.T. and her friends watch on as the frigate sizzles on the hangar bay floor, so battered and bruised that it doesn't even float on the parking exhaust gas. Crumpled it leans to one side like an old fighting dog ready for his owner's last goodbye bullet.
There is no sign of the pilot, the capsule already removed from the frigate. K.T.'s mind wanders to the shower rooms for a moment. This burning Rifter has stirred some kind of emotion deep inside, the mystery is eating away at her. She wants to know more. She's only ever really seen spaceships in showroom condition. Shiny and new. Not like this. Who are these guys who fly like this?
She kicks at her hover board and heads back to her quarters.
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