Lost Star

near-physical connection a nav-pilot had. On the other hand, what he did have was one of the most complete mind-to-mind connections one could get with a ship.
And he’d been a very bad boy before the Agency had caught up with him.
He intercepted the communication without even trying. At the same time, he worked feverishly to reroute power to the sensors so he could see well enough to get a nice, clean shot on the corsair dangerously close to his keel.
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His personally doctored programs read the encrypted communications with pathetic ease. Those same programs were the reason he had been arrested and penal chipped, but they continued to prove useful every now and again.
The only reason the Agency hadn’t fried his ass when they finally caught him was because he’d been underage, a minor, with no fatalities to his name. Instead, the Agency had offered him the chance to work off his sentence using his programming tech talents on whatever ship they posted him to.
It was that or a memory wipe.
He’d been grateful for the chance to keep all his hard-won codes and skills, and it had gotten him off-planet. As far as he was concerned, getting off that industrial waste of a planet had been worth being penal chipped.
The past two and a half Imperial standard years of being passed from ship to ship as a programming tech-engineer hadn’t been all that hard. The food sucked, but the work was simplistic compared to the programming stuff he’d done for sheer entertainment. The bulk of it was system updates. His mouth occasionally got him into trouble, but his rating as a minor had saved his ass from more than one disciplinary reaming. He smiled sourly. Thank the Fates for a scrawny, graceless build that made him look years younger than he actually was.
He only had six more months till the end of his sentence…and his legal majority.
Once he was free of the penal chip in the back of his skull, he had a nice, long, well-paying career ahead of him. He planned to get thoroughly drunk and thoroughly laid to celebrate his new life as a free man. If he lived that long. He sighed and focused on the coded communications being relayed.
The corsair was inquiring about damages.
Morris offered his external damage report and the fact that his nav-pilot was dead, without mentioning that they were still jump capable.
Aubrey grinned. Apparently Morris wasn’t ready to give up yet.
“Surrender. Will relocate sentience.”
He nodded. The other ship was trying to make some kind of a deal. That was pretty much expected. Obviously, they were after the ship’s experienced sentience.
There wasn’t a damned thing on this old freighter that would interest marauders. They weren’t carrying weapons.
“No survivors.”
No survivors? Aubrey sucked in a breath. But there were some seventy-odd people still breathing on this ship? He shot a line of data toward the other ship, describing his survivors.
“Cut life support.”
What? Aubrey frowned. That had to have been a misinterpretation of the coded transmission. He inserted a message into the encrypted communication. Please repeat last transmission.
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Morgan Hawke
“No survivors. Disengage all life support.”
Aubrey gasped. Son of a fucking bitch! They wanted Morris to kill every living person on this ship? He ground his teeth. Fuck that shit! Out of sheer temper, he slammed a hijack code he’d made to catch small yachts for joyrides into the ships’
connecting data stream. To get it past the preliminary firewalls, he added a doctored breaker-code and aimed the whole mess straight for their engineering console, bypassing their nav-pilot.
He’d been a very, very bad boy before the Agency nailed him.
Aubrey figured that the breaker code wouldn’t make it very far. The other craft was far more sophisticated than the yachts the code was designed for, but he figured he’d at least cause enough trouble to make a limping escape.
The other ship’s data poured into his skull. Suddenly his vision of Morris and both corsairs was crystal clear. Aubrey gasped. Holy shit! He’d actually made connection.
A stream of bitching howled across the data stream.
Aubrey choked out a laugh. There was a very pissed-off nav-pilot at the far end who had somehow found himself locked out of his own ship. Aubrey licked his dry lips and grabbed for control, telling the other ship to turn its ass around and make for jump.
It was the only thing he could think of.
The ship fought his control. He wasn’t giving it the right directives.
Grim humor colored Morris’s sentience. “Like this, boy…” Data streamed toward the other ship, bolstering Aubrey’s commands.
The other ship turned away, and their jump engines came online.
It was working? Aubrey rubbed sweat from his brow with his arm and checked his connection. It was solid. The other ship was taking his orders. Fate be damned, it was working! He threw back his head and shouted, “Take that, you rat bastards!” He hooted and punched the air, nearly knocking the cord from his skull jack. If there had been room to jump up and down, he would have done it.
Energy pulsed as folds of space unraveled and a third corsair wavered into local space nearly on their nose.
Every sensor on the ship burned white-hot, scoured by the energy backwash as space snapped back into place around the corsair catching Morris in the rebound.
Morris screamed in sensory overload.
Aubrey screamed with him. His array slammed all channels closed to protect the biological mind attached to it. The world receded to a pinprick of light at the very far end of a long black tunnel. He didn’t even feel his chin smack hard on the engineering panel or his cheek hit the crash-littered deck plates.
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Chapter Two
Aubrey gasped awake, strapped on his back to a table with the smell of antiseptic in his nose. He groaned. His entire body was one big mass