Lost Star

  INTERSTELLAR SERVICE &

  DISCIPLINE:

  LOST STAR

  Morgan Hawke

  www.loose-id.com

  Warning

  This e-book contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language and may be considered offensive to some readers. Loose Id® e-books are for sale to adults ONLY, as defined by the laws of the country in which you made your purchase. Please store your files wisely, where they cannot be accessed by under-aged readers.

  Interstellar Service & Discipline: Lost Star

  Morgan Hawke

  This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by

  Loose Id LLC

  870 Market St, Suite 1201

  San Francisco CA 94102-2907

  www.loose-id.com

  Copyright © March 2009 by Morgan Hawke

  All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission from Loose Id LLC. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ISBN 978-1-59632-615-6

  Available in Adobe PDF, HTML, MobiPocket, and MS Reader

  Printed in the United States of America

  Editor: Jana J. Hanson

  Cover Artist: April Martinez

  Publisher’s Note

  Although the author defines all of the Skeldhi words used in this story, we have included a detailed list of Skeldhi words in an appendix at the end of the book.

  — Loowis

  Chapter One

  “Look, you rusting pile of antique junk! I’m trying to save your ass here! Let me in!”

  Aubrey grabbed his throat, gasping for breath, and choked. The air on the freighter’s subengineering deck was thick and foul with smoke from melted metal and fused wiring. “Morris! Are you listening to me?” He slammed his bruised fist against the control console, nearly knocking over the small light he’d rigged. Most of the lights had gone out in the first hit from the marauders. He didn’t want to think about how close they had come to losing all life support too.

  “I hear you, tech-engineer.” The ship’s tired and masculine mind-voice shimmered with a touch of annoyance across the wire jacked into the back of Aubrey’s skull. “You do not have clearance for access. You are not the nav-pilot.”

  Aubrey fought to calm his beating heart, not that his heart was listening. “Morris, your nav-pilot is dead. He’s dead with everyone else that was on your bridge during that first volley. If you don’t let me in, we’ll be boarded, and you’ll be torn apart for scrap!”

  “I am already…scrap.” Crushing depression and electronic interference colored the electronic mind-voice.

  “I know you’re old, Fate, damn you! But you’re not dead yet!” Aubrey scrubbed a hand through what little hair he had left, nearly dislodging the jack in the back of his skull.

  Damned military-issue buzz cut freaking itched. He leaned over the panel. “Morris, please! Let me in! There isn’t anybody else with an array to talk to you, and I’m not fucking ready to die!” His breath hitched. Fate, he hadn’t even reached the legal age to drink. He closed his stinging eyes and took a deep breath. “And neither are the rest of the men on this ship. If you want to die, then fine, die! But let me save the ones who want to live first!”

  Anger flickered deep in the ship’s sentience.

  Aubrey held his breath. Apparently, his comment about letting the crew die had pissed the ship off. That was good, very good. There was still a chance. If he could get 2

  Morgan Hawke

  access to the ship’s controls, he could use the freighter’s fully functional pulse cannons to clear a hole and try for a jump. If the ship didn’t kill him with a power burst instead.

  Information slammed into his skull to become sight, sound, taste, smell…and pain, hideous, wrenching pain. Aubrey gasped and dropped to his knees. The ship was in agony. There were gaping holes all over the hull. Wounds that bled air, water, and bodies… Bodies of people he knew.

  Sheer stubborn will and deep terror forced him back up onto his feet. He ignored the itch of tears streaking down his smoke-smeared face and threw every code he had into the ship’s controls, grabbing for anything that still worked.

  He found everybody still breathing and began opening doors, making safe passages for the crew to get deeper into the ship where he could do something about maintaining life support.

  At the same time, he activated the pulse cannons and aimed them at the corsair closing in on the starboard side. He knew that at this close range, he was going to damage the freighter more, but he could not afford to let the marauders board. They were only a small freighter with no military personnel capable of defending them, none still alive anyway. Once the marauders got in, the game was over. They were utterly defenseless.

  Aubrey smiled grimly and opened fire.

  The pulse cannons burned a surgically precise hole right through the attacking ship’s engineering core. The sensors delivered a low casualty rating from the other ship, but all maneuver controls were off-line.

  The attacking ship veered off course, diving right under them.

  Aubrey shouted in triumph. “That’s right, you stupid-assed shit-heels! The body manning these cannons actually knows what to fucking hit!” Abruptly, he lost clear sight of the second corsair. The ship’s sensors were going out on the keel. They were in deep trouble if he didn’t get them back in view.

  Information trickled in from the remaining corsair. It was a sentience-to-sentience communication. It was meant to be hidden from the nav-pilot.

  Aubrey smiled grimly. If he’d had a piloting array he would have missed it, but he didn’t. He had a programming array. His ability to interpret the ship’s complete interior and exterior data was somewhat limited, nothing compared to the 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.

  Interstellar Service & Discipline: Lost Star

  3

  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 updat
es. 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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  “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.

  Interstellar Service & Discipline: Lost Star

  5

  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 of hurt. He tried to open his eyes and realized that they were already open. He’d been blinded. Someone had gotten into his internal array and turned off his eyes.

  “Good morning, tech-engineer.” The voice was masculine, richly cultured, cool, and amused.

  Aubrey blinked, but the blackness remained. “Where am I?”

  “You are on my ship. I am Moribund. I’m sure you will prove a very valuable addition to my company.”

  “Huh?” Aubrey jerked. He couldn’t move an inch. “I can’t be in your company.

  I’m penal indentured.” He scowled. He was a convict, a legal slave until he finished his sentence. The tattoo marking the data-chip in the back of his neck said so. “You have to go through the Agency penal board.”

  “The chip has already been removed.”

  Aubrey froze. No way! They exploded when tampered with. “Then how come I’m not dead?”

  “Because I have very talented staff.” Moribund chuckled right next to his ear. “Of which you may count yourself a member.”

  Aubrey flinched, and every hair on his body rose. There was something very wrong with this man. He had no clue what, but he’d learned long ago to listen to those small hairs.

  Moribund’s boot heels thumped as he walked around Aubrey’s feet to the other side of the table. Fabric rustled right next to Aubrey’s left elbow. “Shall we discuss the terms of your service?”

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  Morgan Hawke

  Aubrey sighed and relaxed on the table. There wasn’t a whole lot else he could do.

  “Sure. What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to steal ships, the same way you took mine.”

  Aubrey’s blood turned to ice. He was in the enemy’s hands. He’d known he couldn’t be anywhere else, but… But the last transmission he’d intercepted had said

  “no survivors.” Aubrey turned his sightless eyes toward Moribund. “How many survivors from my ship?”

  Moribund drew in a slow breath and released it. “You.”

  Aubrey struggled to interpret that another way and failed miserably. Him. He was the only survivor. His chest clenched, and he drew in a shuddering breath. “You killed them.”

  “Your ship did.”

  Aubrey closed his eyes to keep in the fierce ache that threatened to spill. “Damn it, Morris…” He failed. Tears leaked from his eyes.

  “I’m afraid that the ship’s sentience did not survive the act. My nav-pilot tells me that it was deliberate.”

  Aubrey stilled. Morris had committed suicide? Then the ship had remained true…but everyone that had been on him was still dead. He gasped for breath and shuddered with the sobs he refused to release. All of them…gone forever, except him.

  “Some ships are that way. You make a capture only to lose the ship in the process.

  Very wasteful.” Moribund paced at Aubrey’s side. “The best way would be to erase the crews without the ship having to do it. That way I can keep the ship-mind intact.”

  Moribund leaned close to Aubrey. “And that’s why I want you. Somehow, you succeeded in usurping not only the nav-pilot but the sentience as well, taking complete control of my ship. With your talents, I could keep the ships I capture.”

  Aubrey jerked at whatever held him to the table. “I am not killing people for you!”

  “How old are you, boy?”

  Aubrey stilled. “Why?”

  “My medic says you’re below legal age.”

  Aubrey clenched his jaw. “So?”


  “So?” Moribund’s voice dropped to a whisper. “You cannot legally walk into a bar or a brothel. I doubt you’ve even had sex yet. Are you sure you want to die before you’ve even lived?”

  Aubrey drew in a deep breath. “I will not kill people.”

  “Are you quite sure?”

  Aubrey turned to face Moribund with blind eyes. “Fuck you.” His voice vibrated with the hate that burned in his heart. “Go ahead and kill me. I belong with my murdered ship and crewmates.”

  “Very well then.” He stepped back.

  Interstellar Service & Discipline: Lost Star

  7

  Aubrey was unbuckled and hauled from the table. He hit the deck hard and groaned. Painfully tight hands jerked him up onto his knees. His wrists were pulled behind his back and cuffed. They lifted him onto his feet and practically dragged him out of medical. After a fast walk down a long hall, he was yanked to a halt.

  The mechanical sound of an airlock door opening crashed in his ears. He nearly dropped to his knees in shock. They really were going to kill him.

  He was brutally shoved sideways and fell onto a very cold floor. The bare skin of his hands tried to stick to the metal. He fisted his hands and came up on his knees listening as the airlock door closed.

  The air hissed, thinned, and chilled to razor sharpness with incredible speed. He sucked in one last breath and tried not to scream. He didn’t succeed.

  * * * * *

  Aubrey awoke curled on his side, shaking on a bare but warm deck. His mouth was full of thick, copper-flavored liquid. Blood.

  A booted foot pushed him onto his back and his cuffed hands. “Alas for your suicidal wishes, I am not inclined to let you die.” Moribund’s voice was politely regretful, but the humor behind it was blatantly obvious. “You may visit the airlock again, if you wish?”