Mara Velez

Her name is Mara Sato-Velez, although almost nobody who knows her well uses the whole thing. On manifests she is usually M. Velez. In dockside bars, freight offices, and among people who prefer not to have their names written down, she is simply Velez. Very rarely, when she gets dolled up and puts on the dress and makeup, when she's on the hunt for a night of companionship with no strings attached, she's Mara.

She pilots an aging but heavily modified independent freighter called the Second Chance. Its registry says it is a commercial courier. Its cargo holds tell a more complicated story.

Velez isn't a murderer, pirate, or gangster. Most of her crimes come from a stubborn belief that laws are negotiable, borders are artificial, and anything can be cargo if somebody is willing to pay enough to move it. Her legal problem is less that everyone wants her and more that she has accumulated warrants across a patchwork of jurisdictions that don’t necessarily recognize one another’s laws. In some places she is a smuggler, in others, a thief, saboteur, trafficker in prohibited technology, fugitive transporter, or suspected terrorist accomplice. A few governments would quietly give her a medal for the exact act another government wants to imprison her for.

The shipboard database aboard the Second Chance maintains a continuously updated “No Land Zones” file, but her current legal status is strange rather than catastrophic. She has warrants in several jurisdictions, fines in dozens more, and at least three governments that would like to question her. But she also has legitimate freight contracts, friends in port authorities, favors owed by powerful people, and a reputation for delivering cargo when respectable pilots won't.

Her personal rule is simple:

No slaves. No trafficking people. No jobs where the cargo doesn't know it's cargo.

Everything else is negotiable.

And that is probably why, despite a criminal record long enough to occupy several screens, Mara Sato-Vélez still thinks of herself as an independent freight pilot who occasionally has disagreements with customs law rather than a pirate or smuggler.