Jax Malik

mother: Jethyn Malik, blockade runner

younger brother: Jakin Malik

ship: the Mynock (a parasite, but good at evading attack)

When Jax was 15, the authorities caught up with her mother running
supplies to the victims of an unjust war.  Realizing they had little
chance of escape, and that it was she the troopers wanted, Jethyn
ordered Jax back to the ship with her baby brother, to take off while
Jethyn "held them off".

Jax and Jakin made it out, barely.  Jethyn was summarily executed at dawn.

Jax had been flying with her mother her whole life, and moved to make
contact with her mother's employers in order to continue the work.  But
the well-meaning souls who felt perfectly fine paying a battle-hardened
runner to do their dangerous and illegal but well-intentioned dirty work
could not bring themselves to put a 15-year-old girl in the same position
-- even if she needed the money, and it was all she knew how to do.

Feeling at least somewhat responsible for the fate of the children's
mother, her former employers offered to take in Jax and Jakin and care
for them in their desert compound.  But the thought of life out of the
sky made Jax's shoulderblades itch; she had the ship, and she was 
determined to keep it flying.  

For nearly year she made a go of it, scraping together a scant few messenger
and courier gigs, and selling off their meager possessions one by one 
to keep a little food in their bellies.  But eventually there was nothing
left to sell but the ship, herself, or her brother, and so Jax made a hard
choice:  she took Jakin back to the compound for fostering, took off for
one of the besieged rim planets, and joined their militia for the paycheck,
the skills it would give her, and (when she bothered to think about it)
because she thought it was the right thing to do.

By the time the siege broke, she'd made enough contacts and impressed
enough people with her own skills that she was ready to take up her
mother's mantle as a freelance blockade runner.  She returned for
her brother -- to find the compound deserted and partially razed by
fire.  There was no sign of her brother, nor of what had become of
the former inhabitants.

That was 15 years ago.

Jax continues to make her living as a courier and sometime smuggler of
information, small cargo, and the occasional discreet passenger.  She
rarely stays in one place for very long -- but everywhere she goes, she
looks for signs of the little brother she lost.