Rayvius was suspicious about this assignment from the beginning. First, he was being sent to a Feudal World. His skills there would be next to worthless. And he knew he was going to the surface, because the files he received with his orders included maps of the planet's surface. Then, he had to go undercover. He picked his usual assumed identity: bounty hunters. It wasn't as glamorous as their usual Rogue Trader monikers, but they were sorely lacking the one thing they needed to pull that off: a ship. That was the next issue he had with the mission. They had to travel there in an Imperial Navy transport. Usually they could hire a Rogue Trader to transport them. These were all rather small complaints compared to the big ones. The two big ones. The first was the encrypted files he was told to deliver to his master. Despite all his attempts and despite orders not to open them, he simply couldn't. And there was little he couldn't do with a cogitator. It all seemed too suspicious, and he was in the business of suspicion.

The other major issue was that he was going to die.

The [i]Kestrel of Luggnum[/i] was going down, and he didn't know how, and neither did he have the time to find an interface port to find out. He was just shoved aboard the Life-pod and spat out into space. And then that didn't last much longer either, because the life-pod started falling towards the surface of the planet. He strapped himself into the pilot's chair and interfaced with the pod's nav-computer.

“Do you know how to fly this thing?” someone said.

“No, but it can't hurt to try.” Ray was horrified to see that the life-pod was landing right in the center of a giant lake, the South Sea, as the nav-computer helpfully displayed. However, he looked closer to see that they were actually landing on an island. Ray felt a wave of relief, then growing worry. How were they supposed to get off an island?

And then they landed.

---

Ray awoke some unknown time later. He quickly checked his internal chronometer built into his augmentic eye and saw that only a few seconds had passed. He groaned, partially in relief, but mostly in pain. “Hey, is anyone alive back there?”