Kyra Volkov
Born to a Japanese mother and a Ukrainian father who flew a test that killed him. Volkov entered the Company with a file longer than most pilots twice her age and a clearance she does not discuss over dinner. (She is Ukrainian, if anyone asks. People assume.)
Kyra Volkov was raised in Kyiv and Osaka and, for the three years between the accident and her emancipation, at her mother's sister's house in Queens. Her father — Oleksandr Volkov, Ukrainian Air Force, seconded to Company flight testing — died in a 2032 incident involving a prototype his engineering team had advised against flying. The report was sealed. Kyra was eleven.
She graduated from the Company's elite flight program at twenty-three, top of her cohort, with a classified sidebar that made the Company offer her a different career than the one she had trained for. She took it. She will not tell you what she did for the next seven years. The clearance she earned doing it is on her file in a field that does not print.
On the Rømer she is Carter's second, the crew's most reliable hands on weapons and close-quarters systems, and the only one who can land a shuttle under fire. She does not discuss her father. She does not discuss the Company. She flies.
