Zara Koor is a Corellian and a pilot. (It might seem redundant, but there are Corellians who never learn to fly anything faster than a landspeeder. A few Corellians, anyway.) Naturally gifted with a tolerance for acceleration and an acute spatial sense, and daring enough to accept the heavy cybernetic implantation necessary to be a truly elite pilot, Zara zipped through the Academy and flew fighters for the Republic during the war. Then, one day, Zara had an attack of Acute Catastrophic Cybernetic Rejection Syndrome (ACCRS). Though the Corellian luck held--she was flying patrol in a hyperoxygenated cockpit*, keeping her brain alive long enough for the medical team to remove her cybernetics--it still caused brain damage, manifesting in a permanent case of the shakes. In theory, it's curable--with cybernetics. Given a medical discharge, Zara drifted away from the Core, and from a war in which she no longer had any stake. She may well have been the best pilot on Aysemius, competing for the title with her friend and business partner, Karthad. When the pension deposits stopped coming, for reasons about which Zara couldn't be bothered to care, she was already established enough that it presented no hardship. Zara seemed content to be the principal pilot of tiny Canton's tiny motor pool (two speeder bikes and one landspeeder), and to tell the occasional "no shit, there I was" story over drinks. If you caught her at just the right state of inebriation, she might be have been persuaded to show you the medal the Navy awards fighter aces--the only memento of Lieutenant Koor that still exists. Then the strange ship crashed in the mountains. Little did Zara and her friends know that providing aid to the unconscious pilot would infect their world with a terrifying new strain of TCV, and send the survivors back into space, first to save their own lives, and then to seek revenge.

*Why do you think Star Wars space fighters explode in huge fireballs?