Olga Soloviova studied accounting. Naturally, she became an interstellar criminal.

If some Smyrnian denizens have an uncertain pedigree, we have a very good idea where Olga Soloviova came from: her criminal record is the size of a Firebase warship. Soloviova was born forty-two years ago in Donesk, Popular Republic of Ukraine. Her parents were both state accountants, working for the Office of Rice which administrates the communal wheat farms of the Donbas region. As far as one can see, her ancestors hadalways been bean-counters. Hence, even after the premature death of her parents, the young Olga was destined to a mundane career in the USRE state apparatus and, at age nineteen, left Donetsk to study accounting at the Popular University of Kyiv.

In July of the same year, a short shootout was initiated by Moscovite nationalists belonging to the Old Rus movement alongside the Donbas border. The so-called "Third War of the Donbas" lasted only for an hour before High Fleet stratosoldiers dropped in and forced a ceasefire. All belligerents, as well as the Moscovite executive, would later be arrested by solar envoys. In August, the oblasts of Kursk, Belgorod and Donetsk were put under direct Open Hand control, a subordinate status that is still in effect to this day. Olga Soloviova probably didn't care about the onwards march of USRE politics: she had been jailed for her active participation in the defence of her hometown. Much like most participants of the July disaster, Soloviova lingered in an overpopulated jail for more than three years, as a political deadlock in New Delhi paralysed the USRE legal apparatus. There, she was forcefully recruited by the Black Sun mafia, which at the time had captured the off-world contraband market and was looking to launder vast sums in the eastern European socialised economy. On the eve of his trial, the man only known as Brahms, her new employer and one of the major figures of the USRE parallel market, made a run for it. Twenty-third year old Olga Soloviova followed. On August 4th, at 2.35 a.m, she slit the throat of a prison guard and hopped into the streets of Kyiv.

Two weeks later, Brahms was found dead in his Belgorod hideout, two guided fléchettes in his head; then, two days after, the Russian drone AI who had coordinated the shelling of Donetsk suffered the same fate. In September, Soloviova murdered the former military governor of Kursk, throwing him from the fifty-seventh floor of the Barents Arcology, and grievously wounded the Open Hand agent sent to arrest her. How she then left the solar system is unclear: it is not impossible that she worked as a hired killer for a time, as several unsolved assassinations in cislunar space may be linked to her. What is certain, however, is that she disappeared for two years, only to reappear in one of the few places in human space where USRE solar envoys have no recognised authority: Smyrnia-Silesia.

Was it bloodthirst or her taste for accounting that then lead Soloviova to join a pirate crew in service of the meta-queen? In any case, she displayed both in a rapid ascension to the top of Smyrnia-Silesia's chaotic ecosystem. Her competition folded in the face of a combination of geopolitical acumen and pure ruthlessness. She became adept at pushing violence of action just underneath the threshold of unacceptability, skirting the line between pirate and mercenary. After five years, she had risen to the rank of ship-mistress, commanding a contingent of Almaz Pickets which acted as the meta-queen fast response fleet. When the monarch's luck turned due to the actions of Maya Tiangong and her railway cannon, Soloviova didn't hesitate to make a run for independence. A short, violent boarding action later, she was in control of one of the Meta-Queen's gold-plated Luciole and burning hard for the edge of the system. She rallied a few independent outfits in her wake: the Smyrnian Recyclers were born.

Interestingly enough, Soloviova's patronage of her independent pirate group proved to be much more low-key and diplomatic than what one could have expected from the prolific murderer. She began offering insurance services that went beyond the simple racket practised by the meta-queen and included navigation, extended warranties, technical assistance and long-range escort. The Smyrnian Recyclers transitioned from pirates to corsairs, operating as a private military in the Smyrnian Bubble and even involving itself in Flower Wars, where it often plays the role of the aggressor fleet. Now a mother of two adopted kids and one of the most powerful persons in Smyrnia-Silesia, Soloviova has engaged in the first steps of a process of state-building, which may see her Recyclers recognised as an actual mercenary republic within the anarchist bubble.

There are, however, doubts about her true role in Smyrnia. The two-year gap in her resume remains unexplained, and the few archives that may be of interest regarding how she even reached the Smyrnian bubble with half the solar system on her heels have been mercilessly censored by the Open Hand. It is rare for the USRE to leave such dangerous individuals free: many criminals fled to the Smyrnian bubble, only to find out that it was no shelter against the stratosoldiers tasked with bringing them back home. That Soloviova was never threatened by the USRE in any capacity is troubling, to say the least, and birthed the popular conspiracy theory that she is, in fact, a communist asset, recruited to weaken the meta-queen and provide intelligence on the corsair community.

I have, however, a better hypothesis. Ever since Soloviova became independent, the flow of Sequence contraband into the Smyrnian system died out completely, thus preventing its inhabitants from experimenting further with non-human technology.

I thus strongly suspect Soloviova to be a covert Algorab agent.

Character illustration from a stock archive by PO-Art.