[JAFisher44]

Indeed.

Kiran's vessel was built to be crewed by a minimum of three people. Kiran was able to bypass this little limitation by the use of DNI or direct neural interface. Kiran's head was a mess of the most advanced computer technology available. He could interface with almost any computer system he came across. Some, like the central core of his ship were quite nice to work with.

When interfaced, his ship was like an extension of his own body. It's sensor arrays were his senses, its thrusters his legs. It was not unlike flying through empty space. Likely this would all be over as soon as he made orbit.

Granted, a little disorderly conduct and a few murders probably wouldn't warrant a cap ship, but the orbital guard was likely tracking his position right now and dispatching several cutters to intercept him. For certain, the cutters would not be able to match his craft for speed or acceleration. The down side of this is that it is on account of the mass of all the weapons and ammunition they were pushing that he wasn't.

So, if Kiran wanted to live, and he most certainly did, all he had to do, was somehow not be where all those cutters tracked him to. This of course was not as easy as it sounds. Kiran's only chance wasn't much of a chance at all, and if any of the officers on any of those cutters was worth the pay of a recruit deckhand they would see through his ruse in no time flat.

Still, he had to try. The plan started with a freighter he had been tracking since he took off. It's escape vector was near enough to his that if he pulled off the fanciest flying of his life he could probably ghost it without dying.

Of course he was being actively tracked by those cutters. This meant that he would have to somehow convince them that he was maintaining his current trajectory. Hopefully they were lazy. Hopefully they were ignoring the really expensive batteries of sensors at their disposal. Hopefully they were just tracking the huge beacon of his thrust.

It only took about five minutes of fevered work to configure a drone to mimic the important sensor readings of his thrust. Unfortunately there was no way that it could mimic any of the other things it would need to if those damn officers were doing their jobs right.

The timing went off perfect, and Kiran cut his thrust in perfect timing with the launch of the drone. It continued at the same speed and trajectory he had occupied only seconds before. Now in free fall, his ship howled and screamed as he tried his best to maneuver toward the freighter screaming up below him.

Kiran's ship was not, by any stretch of the imagination, aerodynamic. It was not meant to glide in an atmosphere. Any sort of maneuverability it usually had was acheived through brute force thrust. Right now, he could certainly not afford any of that, it would draw too much attention. For now all he had was air brakes and a computer that could do really good physics calculations. He hoped they didn't notice the god awful turbulence he was kicking up.

Now he had to take a chance, there was no way he could actually intercept the freighter without using thrust. Hopefully the drone had moved far enough away for them not to notice. A few long seconds of hard burn and now Kiran was moving parallel to a freighter twenty times his size, about a meter apart. This was too close for most sensors to distinguish. Of course it would be all for nothing if anybody did their job right at any point. Now all he could do was wait and see how things played out.

Slowly, Kiran edged his ship closer to his newfound travel partner and winced as the magnetic grapels attached with a loud clang. Undoubtedly someone on the freighter noticed that, and now they would be running diagnostics. It wouldn't take them long to find out that they were pulling a significant extra mass. By now, if everything went right the cutters would be watching a drone burn by where they expected Kiran's ship. Klaxons would be sounding. Calls would be going out to orbital control, sensor logs would be parsed. If everything worked. If not cutters would be waiting for the freighter as it left the atmosphere. Even so it would only take minutes for them to find where he had gone to. Hopefully it would be long enough for him to get out of weapons range.

Kiran felt things smooth out as the freighter cleared the atmosphere. He listened carefully to the commercial band hoping for the impossible.

"Merchant Vessel," His computer translated the feed "Alter your trajectory to the following course and prepare for inspection."

The string of profanity that followed probably had a stronger heat signature than Kiran's ship at full burn. Kiran tried to figure his odds against four cutters, which is what his sensors told him he was up against.

"What does it matter?" he muttered to himself. At this point his only choice was to run and hope for the best. No way he could fight them. He would have to hope that his armor held out.

Mentally he keyed a sequence he was loathe to use, and groaned as about 30 gravities of thrust overloaded his inertial dampers. At max acceleration it would take about a minute for him to move out of range of the guns that would, undoubtedly, do their best to end him. Awareness faded to black as the horrible force of acceleration pulled the blood from his brain.

'Well, at least I won't feel the end.' the thought flitted through his mind just before he blacked out.