Greetings!
I itch with the need to put EVE into fiction. Hope you enjoy this one. Thanks for reading!
"Yue... YUE!!!"
Basz was the last crew member left. Yue had waited for him in her pod on the wormhole that day, but he never returned. She had presumed her dear friend dead — or worse, still in the hands of Troviel.
"Argh, GEROFF!"
Dissy chuckled and pinched Yue on the arm, bringing her back into reality.
"What you doin’ on the deck there, ya drone! You were meant to come swap me for my break an hour ago!"
Dissy was a good friend and also a criminal capsuleer like Yue. It was common to find criminals living low-key in stations away from their warrants and bounties. They preferred to hide in stations rather than pilot in space — for obvious reasons.
Yue had taken refuge in a station near Jita and found herself a job in one of the bars. It had been habitual for her to take a break from space when coming close to death. However, time had healed as much as it could, and Yue was becoming restless again.
"I'm comin’, I'm coming!"
Yue picked herself up and brushed the dust from her nightsuit.
Ugh, this is grim... it’s about time I got me back on a ship.
She fumbled around looking for her boots and belongings.
Yue’s station accommodation was small — more suited to being storage or utility space. The quarters consisted of a bunk and two lockers; cramped and dusty. Holes in the air conditioning filters would blow dust right into Yue’s quarters — you could wipe the floor with your finger and see the line clearly. The heavy metal walls were gunmetal grey, and it all felt like the inside of a small logging container. The cabins were shared between two, and the workers’ accommodation didn’t even have portholes to see out of the station. It was far from the luxuries of Lise’s life.
Dissy stood at the door watching Yue attempting to get herself together. He chuckled.
"Heh heh. Wulphi’s lookin’. BLK have some contracts they need filled again if you’re that intent. You’ll have to clean the glasses and replace the barrels before any of that nonsense though. I stood your post — I didn’t do your chores!"
Yue paused, looking up from her boots with her only good eye.
"And how d’ya expect me to get there?! Or work there? You know Amarr would just gun me down!"
BLK were a small but sophisticated industrial group residing in Amarrian space. Dissy leaned against the doorframe, smirking. The faint glint of gold from his Amarrian identification tag reflected the dim light of the room.
"That’s where you’re wrong," he said. "BLK have friends. Friends who can make people disappear. Even in Amarr."
Yue snorted, fastening her boots.
"Disappear? You mean like Basz did?"
The smirk faded. "Careful," he said quietly. "Some ghosts don’t stay buried."
The silence hung like a weight between them. The faint hum of the station’s life support filled the room — the same endless drone that made station life feel like living inside a beast’s belly. Yue finally stood, brushing the wrinkles from her jacket and grabbing the datapad from the locker.
"Fine," she muttered. "If I’m goin’ back to space, I’m not doin’ it as some scrub hauler. Your BLK got a ship in this contract?... Something that can take a few hits if I run into trouble."
Troviel laughed, shaking his head.
"You’ll be lucky if they give you a hull with working thrusters. But sure. I’ll make the call."
It took three days and a mountain of forged credentials, but somehow, Yue found herself sitting in the cargo bay of a transport bound for the Sarum Family Assembly Plant — BLK’s headquarters. Her identity was scrubbed, her biometric markers looped with an artificial signature, and her capsuleer tag buried under layers of false data. The smuggling crew didn’t talk much. They didn’t need to. Everyone knew what kind of trouble came from getting caught moving an outlaw into Imperial space.
The ship dropped out of warp just outside the glimmering gold of the Amarr-built station. Even through the ship’s narrow viewport, the sight made Yue’s chest tighten. The place was everything she had lost — civilization, order, the illusion of safety. She’d traded all of that for the dark silence of lawless space.
Wulphi was BLK’s representative — a clean-cut Amarrian in a dark robe. He greeted her in a private hangar. His voice was smooth, practiced, detached.
"Yue. I’ve heard the stories. You’ve got the kind of experience we can use — and the kind of reputation we can’t afford to be seen with. Fortunately, we specialize in discretion."
He motioned toward a small frigate resting under the hangar lights. Its hull was matte black, segmented like a serpent’s scales, and the BLK insignia was barely visible under the carbon coating.
"Consider this your test," he continued. "We need rare manufacturing components found only in Sansha’s Nation. Our usual haulers won’t go near it. You, however... you don’t have much to lose."
Yue smiled thinly. "You make it sound like a favor."
The man’s lips twitched. "If you make it back, it will be."
Smuggling her back out of Amarr space was a delicate ballet of false transponders, decoy cargo, and forged routes. BLK’s logistics team worked in silence, moving her from ship to ship under the radar of CONCORD and the Imperial Navy. By the time she reached Kor-Azor, her nerves were raw, her palms slick with sweat.
"This is as far as we can take you," came the voice of the BLK coordinator through comms. "Beyond this point, you’re on your own. No safety nets. No rescue. Just ghosts and shadows."
Yue stared out into the void ahead — the distant shimmer of the Stain region, where Sansha’s Nation waited. The thought of it sent a shiver down her spine, but it also woke something inside her. That old thrill. The itch she’d been trying to ignore ever since she crawled out of her escape pod for the last time.
She sealed her pod, feeling the capsule fluid rise around her body. Her neural link snapped into place — that electric rush of becoming more than human again. The frigate came alive beneath her fingertips.
With a flick of her mind, Yue engaged the warp drive. The stars stretched into lines of light — and then, she was gone.
Far behind her, BLK’s comms officer watched her transponder fade from their scopes. He turned to Dissy, who stood in silence at the viewport.
"Think she’ll make it?"
Dissy’s jaw tightened. "She’s Yue," he said quietly. "If the Sansha don’t get her... the ghosts will."
To be continued…