A Starborn! Jessica had never seen such a creature in the flesh before. Aliens were, as a rule, unlikely to interface with humans. Differences in biology, diet and metabolic requirements meant that competition between species was rare. Methane breathers were not particularly interested in earth type planets which were as lethal to them as volcanic sulpur worlds were to humans, but their were exceptions. Jess watched with further amazement as the strange pet which seemed to have been frozen with the alien also thawed out.

“Well I’ll be buggered,” Jess muttered. 

“Not be my last I asked,” one of her crew complained. Jess stuck her tongue out at the spacer and turned back to the reheated slave.

“Captain, we got a problem,” Jacobis called, pointing out beyond the lifeboats containment field. To where another pirate was manhandling what was pretty clearly a frozen corpse.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Jess cursed pulling a printed flimsy from a pouch on her suit. The picture was grainy and from a poor angle, but the identification with the frozen cadaver was clear. Jess felt her heart sink, there wasn’t any doubt that this was Fevere Shin, the insane explorer who was rumored to know the route to the fabled treasure of Kadith Shaw. Shaw had been one of the early explorers who charted this region of space and its treasure house of ancient and vanished alien technology. His writings, now considered to be largely fanciful, had sparked the first tech rush, in which humans and other species, having finally found something worth fighting over, had flocked to the newly named Nexus. Much of what Shaw had described had turned out to be based in fact, but some of his most outlandish claims, claims of technology which would grant magical powers, or of great crystal engines which could turn back time, were considered to be ravings. At least they had until Fevere had shown up in Saint John’s Port having been miraculously healed of a missing arm. Unfortunately it seemed that whatever Fevere had known had died with him when Hegemony rail cannons had gutted the slave ship, puncturing his cryo tube.

“Shit,” Jess repeated on more time with feeling and then sat back looking defeated. Finally she turned to the slave, apparently one of the few who had avoided a flash freeze when the light speed projectiles had smashed the hull of the ship open and sent a sleet of metal and burning gas through the hold.
 
“Well the good new is, my name is Jessica Scarlett and I’m no slaver, hung my fair shair of them for the Hedge the truth be told. The bad news is, the people who are coming to pick me up, are probably going to kill when we cant deliver the contents of a dead mans brain,” she sighed.
[@SporkoBug]