Free Desperate Times (Lost Planet Warriors Book 1) by K. McLaughlin

they make of how we were sailing now? It was something of a Scylla and Charybdis moment. Too far one way, and the ship would be destroyed by the sun. Too far the other and we'd never pick up enough particles to destroy the Skree mothership, which would also result in my ship's destruction. I needed to sail the middle path.
    We were closing on the sun. Thirty seconds until we entered the corona. Or didn't.
    "Kara, anything?"
    No reply.
    "We can still pull away," Tim offered. "Just continue the jump, get clear of the fighting and then work our way back to Earth."
    That wasn't an acceptable option, although I couldn't easily explain why. This was about more than just Earth now. Bran was counting on me. I knew he would be there, waiting. I knew that he would trap the Skree, draw them in, position them just where I'd asked him to. Without really knowing why I was so sure, I had faith in him.
    I wasn't going to let him down. We would be there at the time I'd promised.
    I tapped the control console, entering tiny little corrections based on my mental model. Kara and Aeron hadn't managed to synch the systems yet, so it was up to me.
    "Heat building up on the outer hull," Tim warned.
    "Are we within tolerances?" I asked.
    "Barely."
    The ship groaned and shook as the engines labored to keep us on course through the high gravity near the sun. For a long moment I wasn't sure we were going to make it after all.
    And then we were through. In one side and out the other, cleanly through the corona. I wouldn't be able to see how close we'd managed to come to the sun until after we exited jump and I got a proper data downlink, but I had the feeling I'd squeezed it a bit close. Almost too close. But we were through.
    "Heat level is dropping," Time said, sighing with relief. "That was cutting it close."
    "Shit, Tim. I don't think anyone's ever come that close and lived to talk about it," I said.
    "True, that," he replied with a smile. "Good thing our shitty navigation systems have someone good running them."
    That wasn't going to be enough to target the destination coordinates properly. We needed those Cymtarran nav systems. Damn it, where was Kara? Their computer systems couldn't be so radically different from ours that she couldn't hack some sort of connection by now? I knew shit about making computers talk to each other. That was her genius, and I was usually happy to leave her to it. But we were fast running out of time.
    The bridge doors snapped open. I turned to see an excited Kara rushing across the deck toward me. She was holding a big boxy thing in both hands, wires trailing from it.
    "Got it!" she said.
    "I can see that," I replied. "The question is, what is it?"
    "Shush, you," she said. Then she plunked the device down on the floor next to my console.
    "It's my shuttle's navigation computer," Aeron said from the doorway. He looked horrified. "She ripped it out."
    "Wasn't enough time to write code connecting the systems," she explained. "So I detached it and brought it up here. And it still works!"
    She tapped the screen, and it came alive, showing the ship's current location in our solar system with a level of detail I'd never seen before. Somehow, the Cymtarrans were able to achieve much more precise location coordinates even while in jump space.
    "I'm impressed, Kara," I said, peering at the numbers on the screen. They were alarming, and I could feel new knots forming in my back. "Am I reading this right? Are we that much off course?"
    She looked down over the device. "Shit."
    My fingers flew over the control console, tapping new course adjustments into my control systems. All the while I was trying to watch the real time responses of my corrections on the Cymtarran nav computer. It wasn't easy to make sense of both systems at the same time. But unless I acted quickly we were going to exit jump a million kilometers away from the target.
    "All hands, strap in," I said into the intercom. "This is about to get bumpy."
    Kara grabbed