Once the ship was back in alignment, Neil turned on the radar and had Lonney do a sweep of the area to make sure there would be no more surprises. Once AVLN got back to him in a timely fashion, he gave an attractive yet pleased laugh. Sayeeda wouldn't have seen, but he smiled happily, looking like the cat that got the cream. "Nothing like fucking someone up to make your day better, eh Lonney?"

"I wouldn't ken, lad. Not seen a scrap before."

"Well get used it, that's an order."

"Aye!"

"I take it you have some space combat experience? Perhaps gained in some military?" Sayeeda asked from the gunport, her voice deceptively mild.

"Not really," he admitted without flair, shifting gears in the ship so they'd get out of here a bit faster. "Most of my military experience was planet side. I piloted a Valkyrie Mech I made during the rebellion." He decided he'd kick back and relax a bit, putting his hands behind his head as he thought back to Fortus those years ago. He'd been gone three years but sometimes he couldn't tell if it seemed like yesterday or a lifetime ago.

"I was doing great until a few...complication arose, and we lost the war. It was after that I learned space flight. Had a Varidian pilot show me the ropes in his rich benefactor's hanger while I fixed a few of the ships in there. Of course, the lord didn't enjoy knowing I was taking his ships out for joy rides and I had to make a swift exit. But I'm used to swift exits by now, so it wasn't any huge deal."

He suddenly realized he was thirsty, and seeing as they had a minute left before they could set up the R.I.P. drive he decided to remedy the situation. "I'mma get a drink, you want a drink?" He asked her. "Lonney, you want a drink?"

"I don'-"

"Don't answer that."
@Penny

The imagery of the pirate cruiser shattering played on repeat on Sayeeda's terminal. It was grainy on the inferior sensors but a degree of computer sharpening made it almost too smooth so she kept the raw feed. Her skin tingled with unspent adrenaline from the short engagement and her anger began to fade as she watched the video recycle.

"Well lets try not to fire missiles when the guns will do the job, the ammunition is cheaper to replace, we need to start thinking in terms of running at a profit." There was a tendency among troops particularly beyond their supply lines to conserve ordnance against future need. At its worst that sort of thinking could lead to a position being overrun for want of a few grenades.

"We don't have a logistic section that is going to replace this stuff and we might need to sell some rounds for ready cash as it is." That was true, they were going to need to lay in some spare parts for the more critical systems too so that they were on hand when things started to break down.

"Exiting grav shadow Capt'm," the AI chirruped. Junebug shook her head a the tortured accent. She clicked a few keys on her virtual keyboard and began the calculations. Star ships traveled by means of the RIP tides, a shifting wash of energy that interpenetrated the universe in ways astrophysicists still didn't understand. The RIP eddied and surged in patterns that were theoretically predictable in the same way that the water particles of a waterfall were. It was technically possible to forecast the tides but the complexity of the system but the sheer volume of data dwarfed any reasonable attempt to do so. To muddy matters still further RIP space did not rotate as the milky way did, so the galaxy literally rotated past while one was in the RIP and contending with its currents and eddies. Sayeeda had heard the the RIP had once been as still as tidal pool, sometime thousands of years in the past, but she didn’t know if that was a fact or just some of the pseudoscience which routinely cropped up around the RIP. She did know that cadets who were assigned to Starside Logistics at the academy had the highest rate of suicide, allegedly brought on by stresses of trying to factor so many obscure variables into some sort of coherent strategic thinking.

Using the rip was a matter of inserting a ship into RIP space via a quantum tunneling drive, riding the current for a certain amount of time in the siderial universe and then dropping out again, using a combination of spin, the galaxy's rotation, and RIP currents to draw your vessel to its location and then tunneling out again. It wasn’t a precise science and it was dangerous but if you were careful and lucky it made interstellar travel possible. Humans, and other space faring races, had partially solved the problem of predictability by the time tested method of reconnaissance. Most systems that had any kind of trading system, even pirate nests, usually kept a central database which collated observations of the RIP from incoming ships. Up to date nav data made it much easier to predict the tides, at least in a localized area. A second measure was to keep jumps short. Although it was technically possible to make a RIP jump across the galaxy it was far safer to make small hops from system to system, picking up fresh nav data as one went. It was impossible to predict the ocean but with enough data you might be able to handle a small bay.

Sayeeda keyed in the parameters to the computer and the ships navicomp began to chuckle mechanically as its processors, the most powerful in the human universe, began to crunch the numbers to develop a safe travel solution. The process might only take minutes between two well traveled systems but the rarely visited jungle world added a level of complexity. The computer threw up an ETA, estimating the time to solution to be ten minutes for a rough solution, with improvements thereafter.

“Ok, Ten minutes till jump off,” she said with a satisfied click of her keyboard.

“Booster, do we have anything onboard appropriate to toast our maiden voyage?”

@POOHEAD189

"Roight. We got some liquor in the cold compartment back in the number 2 hold. Near tha life suppo' systems."

Neil was at this point near the main cargo bay, and when he heard AVLN give the news of where it was, he spun without hesitation and headed toward where he believed the wires fed to the life support. He felt the rumble of the engines as he grew closer, and there was little in this universe more comforting to Neil than the thrum of a ship. Particularly once it entered hyperspace, and he was very anxious to see how this ship sounded in 10 minutes. Each ship had a different voice, after all.

"Got a tad trigger happy," he admitted when he found to compartment. Neil undid the latch and opened it up, the cold rushing out and giving his skin goosebumps. Inside was more liquor than he had initially suspected. Seems Gorlan's lackey's had stocked it up but hadn't had the chance to unload their treats. Not that Neil was complaining. He hadn't had any of the drink since he'd been on Fortus. "Odd that a single pirate got that cocky, even if I've met a few." A few that were that stupid, he meant.

He lifted up one of the bottles as he spoke, and grinned. It was a minute later when Neil found himself in the main hold on the circular cushioned bench that rolled around a desk where crew members would either dine together, arm wrestle, play cards, what have you. He'd found a few unbroken glasses in the sectional drawer built into the wall, and placed two drinking glasses down and kicked back on one side, the bottle of liquor in the center.

Briefly, he wondered if Sayeeda planned on them gunrunning or bounty hunting around a neighboring system, and thought not for the first time if he should inform her of Saxon. Well, maybe he would. But later. Right now they had a job to do, and he was also attached to the ship already. She might boot him off without thinking, even if that meant she was stranded on some backwater planet with a prize she couldn't deliver back to Gorlan.
@Penny

Junebug drank of the liquor in a single hit and then poured herself another glass. It was harsh and had an aftertaste that reminded her of olives. She supposed she, knew she, had drunk worse in the past, industrial alcohol cut with water from the transmission lines of starships and fighting vehicles as often as not and this, at least, compared favorably.

"Well lesson learned I suppose," she said, feeling expansive and relaxed as the adrenaline of moments before fled her system. The question was a good one though. It was risky behavior which had cost the pirate his ship and his life and risk takers were not typically ship captains for long.

"It is possible," she said, sipping the glass of liquor this time rather than gulping it.

"That one of Gorlan's rivals tried to put us out of commission. They might not know the score but it is never a bad choice to put the boot in when you can. Sayeeda knew that from personal experience of course. When you were a woman, especially on the less civilized words, you needed to hit hard and keep hitting until people learned some manners. She wondered if they would be dodging the mans many enemies for the entire length of this job. She supposed that if it were easy then he wouldn't have needed to give up half a ship for it.

"We need to find a way to make some ready cash too, else we are going to be dependent on Gorlan even after the job is done."

@POOHEAD189

Neil raised an eyebrow in surprise at Sayeeda downing her glass in one go. He'd not seen her fight yet, but from her mannerisms, the way she aimed, and how she drank...She was a hard woman. He lucked out, he thought to himself. Most captains wouldn't be so casual yet still commanded the respect she seemed to (or were as hot). He obliged and followed her example, downing his glass in one shot and feeling his sinuses clear in a satisfying way.

"Ah," he breathed, enjoying the punch of the flavor. "Yeah that's me, chock full of a good idea." Neil poured more into his glass. Once she mentioned they might need to go back to Gorlan, he shook his head. "Don't worry. Plenty of bounties to get or shipments to run. Hell, we could piss a few pirates off at us, and once they decide to go after the Highlander we could blow them up and scavenge what's left of their ships. After the way we worked together back there, I think we'll do ok in ship to ship combat."

He finished his next glass after a few hardy sips. The young man might be slim, but he had a tough constitution. Many men who'd fought him in the war hand to hand found out he was much tougher than he looked, even if he lacked a bit of discipline. "Hunting Xenos, selling scraps, transporting refugees, finding new places to colonize for companies looking to expand..." He let his voice trail off as he allowed the idea to fill her head.

"We can do whatever we want. 'Long as we got this ship and both of us working to our strengths. I say just take along whatever job is closest." Neil ran a hand through his thick hair and fell back onto the cushioned back of the bench, leisurely sipping his third glass. "I'd start thinking on what we could do for fun around here."

He let his own thought drift. "Other than building shit."
@Penny

"Well..." Sayeeda began drawing the word out as she finished the last of her liqour.

"I suppose the first thing we can do is crawl over every inch of this ship and make sure Gorlan didn't decide to plant any tracking devices." There was no practical way to track a ship once it left the sidereal universe for the tumult of RIP space. Even standard communications between planets required physical couriers but it wasn't out of the question to have placed a radio transmitter that would send a message to a ground based confederate and that was particularly true in the case where Gorlan knew which planet they were headed for.

"We have a solution Cap'm!" the AI chirruped in its increasingly irritating accent.

"Alright, lets prep for entry," Sayeeda replied. Entering RIP space was always accompanied by a variety of unpleasant and unfortunate pshycophysical ailments which worsened over long voyages.

@POOHEAD189

"...I need to loosen you up, somehow." Neil said, kicking his feet off the table and shifting his weight so his body swung to land feet first on the ground. "Let's get to it, Lonney."

"Aye, mate!"

Neil hopped up onto the chair in the cockpit and undid the sublight engines before prepping the ship for Hyperspace. He made sure the Hyperdrive was powered up, and he was confident it was, he grinned. "Let's punch it." he said to Lonney, drawing the words out. Of course, getting into a tide was much more complicated than just that, and Neil needed to wait for the exact right moment to set the ship off. Even with the advanced hull of this ship, if he started the R.I.P. drive at the wrong time, they would end up slicing through asteroids or being ripped apart by the chaotic energies of space-time.

He decided to check the files of the ship as they waiting, poking and seeing if there was any kind of music they could be playing. Not that he thought he'd find any he knew of. There were at least 73 million kinds of music out there. Maybe there was a search system...

The beacon went off, and even if it hadn't, Neil could feel the ship catching the drift with the engines.

"Aaaand now." He pushed the lever forward, and the seemingly stationary ship suddenly elongated in the phenomenon known as 'warp-motion' and the Highlander was thrust into one of the tides of the immaterium in the span of a second. Stars suddenly warped before his eyes, and then the physical space outside of the cockpit was no longer visible. Instead, one could see deep, cascading blue and purple colors billowing and lapping at the ship, and an elongated tunnel before him piercing through the colors. He suddenly felt queasy and with a sense of vertigo, but it would pass shortly.

Now, as long as no Warp Krakens or Void Sharks appeared in this realm of R.I.P. space, they were safe from all harm except prolonged exposure to Hyperspace. That was fairly bad for one's health, mental and physical. He hoped Sayeeda didn't have any kind of sickness, either. Being stuck on one ship with the same air for long periods of time was bad when one was sick, even with the filtration systems of the life support. Luckily, the journey to two systems away only took a day, maybe less.
@Penny

Junebug had the sudden and unpleasant sensation that her skin was being slowly peeled from her body with laser scalpels. She didn't quite scream, having learned from long experience to expect the worst when inserting into the RIP. There had been rare cases of people suffering psychological breaks although Sayeeda had always felt that the RIP was a trigger for an underlying condition rather than a cause in and of itself. As quickly as the sensation assailed her it dropped away and she shivered and drew a deep breath, relieved to be past an unavoidable unpleasantness. Unavoidable, only if she wanted to keep traveling the stars of course.

Outside the viewpoint the infinite light and energy of the RIP blazed and streaked past as the currents took hold of the ship. She took a moment to savor the vista, her first as captain of her very own ship. For a moment she didn't care about credits and just started in wonder at the blazing majesty of this strange other universe.

"A'reckon about 38 hours to calculated jump point," the ships AI brogued, breaking the moment and Sayeeda looked around the bridge, Neil did not seem to have suffered any ill effects from the insertion. There really was nothing to do now but wait. She unfastened her harnass and stood up and stretched.

"Well, it seems we have two days to kill."

@POOHEAD189

Neil hopped out of his chair as well, stretching as she did. If Junebug noticed, Neil was quite flexible with his stretching. He bent himself an impressive amount backwards, before pushing off the wall and raising his hands above his head to complete another stretch, giving a grunt. "Welp, time to kill some time, eh Captain?" He asked her, giving a smirk and a subtle wink as he strode past her into the cockpit access corridor and out into the main corridor.

He let out a breath, his cheeks filling up with air beforehand. The wires on the walls seemed very much intact and in order, though it looked oddly enough like a type IV ship rather than most Freighters being a V model. It made him wonder just how the engines of the sublight variety were wired, and he shrugged when he realized there was nothing better to do.

He guessd he could play cards or get drunk with the Captain, or both. But maybe they should save that for later. He had a feeling if he beat her, or if the drink led to other things, she'd hit him after the fact either way. Maybe they could have some fun after the first mission, or maybe cards were good after this. But for now, he was curious on the ship.

The charming young pilot made his way into the sub-optimal engine corridor, and then found himself within the hatch. Kneeling down, he opened up the panel where a large number of the wires lined on the walls met and coalesced into what to the untrained eye appeared to be a mess of strings. Neil turned on the comms. "Hey Captain. Can I call you Junebug or does it have to be Captain? Also do me a favor, and stay in the cockpit if you can. I need you to tell me if a certain light turns on up on the display. It'll be the sub-light beacon, but don't worry it's not starting in warp space."
@Penny

"You can call me Junebug," she replied, wondering briefly where the pilot had heard the sobriquet. She hoped over to the console and looked over the power readings.

"Eeeeeverybody does," she concluded before nodding at the cockpit lights to indicate that she was on it. Junebug was no stranger to maintenance chores, crewmen almost always helped repair damaged vehicles in the line unless it was a major rear echelon rebuild. Andor had believed in keeping his peoples skills mixed or else he just didn't believe in paying for any more pogues than he could afford, perhaps both motivations played a role.

The telltale blinked off.

"Lights out," she said through the open commo circuit and slipped on her commo helmet.

"Haven't got much experience on ship maintainence," she said to fill the silence.

"I'm better with integrated hardware and the fusion bottle assembly though. ALot of that gear looks like standard Frizian stuff. We used alot of the ground based analogues back in the Armored."

@POOHEAD189

"And why is that?" He asked her, referring to everyone calling her Junebug. "Sayeeda's got this sexy, warrior feel to it. Junebug is a lot more quaint, though not in a bad way. On Fortus you had to earn a nickname, which is why I'm curious." It didn't take him long to get the moniker 'Firestorm,' really. He just needed to be himself.

As soon as the light blinked off in the cockpit, Neil himself blinked at the electrical spark that sudden surged in front of him. "Oh, so you're that kind of deal..." he said, delving deeper into the engine further. As she spoke to him, he actually did a good job of listening while he was busy fixing up the sub-light drive, something most mechanic-men had a very difficult time going about with their undivided attention.

"The Armored?" He asked, putting emphasis on the last word. She was either an infantry soldier in an armored division, or she was a driver, or perhaps even a mech pilot like himself. Though he had mentioned the latter before and she never showed any recognition, so it probably wasn't the case. Still he was very curious on the matter. "What did you do there? Other than being a heart-breaker...and an arm-breaker."

The light blinked on in front of the Captain not 10 seconds later.
@Penny

In spite of her self Junebug couldn't help smile at the pilots continued banter. It was the kind of thing that wore a person down.

"I was a trooper in Andor's Armored, a heavy mechanized regiment, hover tanks and fighting vehicles," she explained as she clicked through a number of readouts on the console, idly checking the ships databases.

"I was a vehicle commander, although I saw plenty of dismounted service too, we all did from time to time," she went on. That was the gods honest truth. The armored had had two companies of infantry mounted on fast moving personal skimmers but there were never enough ground ponders to go around.

"As for Junebug... We were moving the regiment onto Hagira but the place didn't have port worth shit so we were all split up over small landing fields rather than one big list. My platoon, six skimmers, and maybe 30-35 effectives, were on board the Samothrace. The Sammy was an old bucket but we had used her before and we knew the crew. On the way down we took some hits." Sayeeda remembered the sound of the hull ringing like all the bells in the universe as hyper velocity slugs had gutted half her engines in a single racking burst, the crashing of equipment as the ship augured into a barely controlled crash.

"When we hit the ground we knew the Nationals would get to us days before anyone from the regiment could. So we started to get ready to pull out. The crew of the Sammie were pretty torn up about it. The Nationals didn't have a good rep for dealing with prisoners and we couldn't take everyone on our few vehicles. It took 10 hours just to get the bastard things out of the holds with the hatches all buckled like that." It had been work, even using thermite and cutting charges to blast the worst of the hatches off. Most of the vehicles were hardly serviceable and needed most of their fans replaced.

"We got to drinking, once night came us and the Sammies and talking about defending the ship. It was a bloody stupid thing to even suggest but we were all to tired for a route march across the swamps and so with every jar that hit the bar we swore we would remain." She trailed off shaking her head at the questionable decision making powers of a much younger Junebug Cyckali.

"So we dug in," she said, putting her feet up on the console.

"Next morning the Nationales showed up with half a regiment of their militia. A ragged bunch but fanatical and better suited to the swampy terrain than we were. Some general comes out and starts screaming at us to surrender. I told him that we were fine where we were and he just went insane, screaming about how he was going to snuff us all out like junebugs. Then they came at us then, some real human wave shit and it was dicey as hell." In her minds eye Sayeeda could remember running through the halls of the Sammi, her hands burned from firing her over heated weapon continuously, fragments of a grenade lodged in her arm.

"We held out for the better part of a day but we screwed for sure. There were only about ten of us left when the old man got a flying column up onto a plateu about a thousand clicks west and scratched our backs with rocket howitzers. That broke the Nattys for sure." Not many of the nationals had survived the rain of glass fiber shrapnel that Colonel Andor had reigned down on them while Sayeeda's troopers had huddled inside the hull of the Sammie. She remembered carpets of dead when she climbed out of the smoking ruin.

"Anyway after that people started calling me Junebug, I guess as kind of a joke, but it stuck."

@POOHEAD189

Neil was impressed to say the least. The way she spoke in general on matters, and how she talked about a military engagement. He thought on how he would have enjoyed someone like that fighting by his side on Fortus, no offense to those who did. He remembered his comrades relatively fondly, a few in particular, he knew. His best friend J.K. had been executed at the end of the war, which had been one of the few things that had happened in his life he considered terrible. Though it still didn't stack up to when his love had been killed too. But he didn't even want to think of that.

"I have a feeling we're going to get into some situations like that at some point, if we don't die first." He said to her, his bare hands redirecting cords and flowing power into far more vital areas. He let out a deep throated 'he-e-e-ell yessss' on instinct once he found the XLR cord, and directed it toward the main power core on the LB side rather than the RB side, and suddenly the light began to glow on the console next to Junebug's feet.

Once he was done, he hadn't realized they'd been talking for many minutes. Sweat beaded down his forehead, and he wiped it with the back of his arm. Next thing he knew, he was leaning against the wall and taking a short break. He really could not wait to see the surprise on Sayeeda's almond eyes once the ship started flying circles around even Longsword fighters if he fixed this the way he believed he did.

"I think Fortus would have done a lot better with Mercs like your company. The Valks took over most main engagements there. Though there were plenty of more conventional armies and armor. They were more for defense, though." He explained. "I did a few espionage missions, too, believe it or not. With just a sidearm. But there was something about making your own war machine and...using it to beat up other war machines that just spoke to me, you know?"

He continued the thought. "Bug guns too...and explosions. Also tricking people." He breathed in. "I think I have a problem?" Neil voiced, speaking more to himself than Sayeeda. "Do me a favor and keep a rein on me. Wait, no don't do that. I mean do it a little, I just...I'll leave that to your discretion." He told her. The entire tirade there, he had a bewildered look on his face. That is, before he shook it away, his thick hair waving.

"Anyway, want to get a drink? We can play CaAaArds."
@Penny

Sayeeda watched the holographic inlay of her card flicker to the two of swords and stabilize. It was an indifferent hand all told, perhaps she would win the round but it would depend heavily on what Neil and drawn in the last randomization. She made a point of frowning slightly at the card, although truthfully it was fairly in offensive. Sayeeda really preferred games where there were partners to play off but no one made it through a decade in the millitary without picking up all sorts of games. Sidereal was a fairly standard game in which one manipulated the trump suit by playing certain combinations. There was an element of card counting to it but the real trick was to keep the opponent guessing as to what your actual endgame was.

"So tell me about these mechs, Valk's you called them?" she asked both in genuine interest and in a effort to distrub his concentration. THe first rule of poker was to get people talking about things they were excited about and she figured it was a pretty fair tactic here.

"We went up against mechs a Forzaged once, tricky bastards, too small to use seeker warheads but armored against the light antipersonnel stuff the redlegs used." Terrain had played a factor too, Forzaged had many small canyons and water courses that made armor difficult to maneuver and were a haven for small lightly armored mechs. THe solution as Sayeeda remembered it was to flush them into kill zones using fuel air mixes. The mobility of mechs meant that their anti artillery capabilities were necessarily slight.

"You were in a national or planetary army I take it?"

@POOHEAD189

Neil's hand was pretty good, he thought. He had twin seven of swords, a royal council, as well as a governor and governess. But he wasn't about to underestimate this girl sitting in front of him. Then again, it might be fun to throw in the towel. He did like to mix things up a bit, and gauging Sayeeda's reactions to winning or losing would help him in the future. But for now, he'd just go with how he felt, and he didn't feel like throwing in the towel just yet.

"Yep," he said, drawing one of the cards electronically, playing one of his seven of swords onto the table. "Valkyries, named after the Professor of the same name...Surname." Neil couldn't think of the good doctor's first name. "Made a stepping stone in the science of mechs. Made them much easier with far more... human-like movements than most. Most were varied. I made mine myself, with a bunch of extra parts I found 'round the military junkyard I worked at."

He listened to her experiences, and he let out a chuckle. "Those were light ones. Really tricky to fight, even for mid-sized like mine was." He explained. "I was in the Ordo Sanctus. It was a rebel factions on Fortus, wanting more independence from the upper class, though honestly you could see the value of being on either side. I joined Ordo because they were for freedom, and they allowed me some freedoms too. Managed to get the rank of Valk sergeant, after a few successful infantryman and Valk missions. Took out a few other similar sized mechs at the Battle of Fordhaven. No big deal."

He shrugged, with a very arrogant air about him. It was obviously joking arrogance, but he played it well. "Got promoted, continued to fight. One thing led to another...had to flee the planet." When he lost his seven of swords, he placed down a royal council, something he doubted Sayeeda could beat.

"Few years later, contact told me about a ship that could be bid on for a steal. Got there, found out I was serving under some chick named Sayeeda. We'll see how that goes. Aaaand..." He let out a chuckle when he won the next hand, but the game wasn't over yet.
@Penny

Junebug frowned at the hand, she had hoped to win the trick but she was pleased to have found where the Royal Council was. Andor's Armored had seen alot of action in the ten years Sayeeda had served with them. Protracted periods of peace are not good a mercenaries bottom line. More often than not she had fought for the side of nobles and oligarchs against other rival houses, although she had done her share of suppressing rebellions and crushing insurgencies. War did not have a moral component to her, it was a business deal, and talk about freedom and other such abstracts made her subtlety uncomfortable.

"Well it certainly seems like you have seen your share of action," she said judiciously before laying down a string of pentacles to take the next three tricks and switch the trump back to swords. It was difficult for her to gauge what such experience meant as combat quality varied a great deal among what she thought of as indigenous units, or indgies. Most recruits for the Armored came from experienced local personell who had an interest and an aptitude, or like Sayeeda from academies from a handful of more developed worlds.

"Well I for one hope there isn't any shooting, any more shooting I should say, on this particular run." Prince of Swords, Hierophant, Queen of Swords.

"Although from what I've little of hear there isn't much chance of that." Sayeeda had seen alot of worlds run by self styled strongmen and they usually tended towards a bunch of drunken thugs swaggering around with too much weaponry and not enough discipline and if there was a civil war going on that would be doubly true.

@POOHEAD189

"You could say I'm well traveled," he admitted, losing his next card to a clever maneuver by Sayeeda. He blew out a sigh, flapping the bangs above his eyes. "But the same could be said of you, I guess." His dark eyes looked her up and down from behind the cards. The tight muscles, long legs, the marks and scars from battle and the slight lines along her face. Neil had seen a lot more than most in his time on Fortus and in space, but Sayeeda might have experienced more than him. Neil just didn't let things get to him, but he knew that he wasn't the wisest or most experience person around. There was always someone better.

"You and I both know that kind of planet we're going to...there's going to be some discharging firearms." He said, losing a second card. Neil blinked, bewildered at how this girl was getting the better of him again. Maybe he hadn't played as much of this game as he'd initially thought. He shrugged. "Doesn't bother me too much. Just hope our target doesn't get popped before we make it there, or Gideon forbid, has been killed already."

As Sayeeda played her next hand, Neil stretched and wriggled into a better position in the cushioned bench. "I don't think Gorlan'll feel too generous or kindly to us if that happens. Then again, if we steal the ship from him, that'll just be one more rich man I pissed off, and you likely as well." He laughed, and his thoughts drifted to the world they were going to. Who they would likely face.

"I would say I might sympathize with the rebels on Savran, being one myself. But then again, who isn't rebelling these days?" He thought aloud, hearing more than enough news on the grapevine about world after world falling to anarchy or bloodthirsty despots, or even finding liberty only to be invaded and killed by Xenos. Neil took a sip of his drink, savoring the flavor before playing both the Governer and the Governess, confident he had this game in the bag now.
@Penny

"It is my experience," Junebug said quietly as she lay down her mediocre cards, conceeding the game, "that one dung beetle is much the same as another. I doubt the rebels will be any more sweetness and light than the government will be a poster child for good administration."

"And that is game."

____________________________________________________________________________________

Junebug felt as though all of her bones had been replaced with ravenous tape worms. She gritted her teeth for a moment and then snapped back into focus as the Highlander fell out of the RIP. The relief was immediate not just for the transition but for the constant low level pshycic strain, something you only felt as its absence. Crews who were in the RIP too long could go jump crazy, breaking down without any physical sign of trauma. Junebug had once been under for nine days during the Felukan Emergency and had found a trooper cleaning a weapon with bloodied fingers from so many hundreds or thousands of repetitions of the task.

With reversion to real space came sensor data and they boards of Sayeeda's console lit up as meaningful data played across the ships exterior receptors for the first time in two days.

"Sixty-Three light minutes out," she said as the distance to Savran appeared on the read out. At this range it was only a slightly brighter star than the surrounding star field but the computer was able to locate it and measure the relative intensity of the sun. Sixty minutes was an improbably good jump and certainly the result of luck rather than good judgement. Even naval units rarely made a light hour on a jump of the distance they had made, and certainly not without better RIP charts than had been available to the Highlander.

"Booster, calculate a secondary jump to within two million sidereal miles of the planet," she instructed the AI as she continued to pour over the sudden glut of data.

"Aye Capt'm," the ship responded, "I dinnae mind sayin that normal protocol would be to burn in, it wil take but a wee fave 'ours." Sayeeda blinked her mind taking a moment to parse the response.

"Yes but I want to get us in the habit of making a secondary jump, this way we will be in system before the light of our arrival reaches anyone in orbit and... blood and ashes why am I explaining things to a microchip, just calculate the damn jump will you?" she said exasperatedly.

Savran appeared to have relatively little shipping, a half dozen small merchantmen and maybe as many intra-system asteroid miners, stripping the mineral dense asteroids of minerals for manufacturing or export. Two of the signals were broadcasting an active beacon, which was unusual and she bought the data up with a touch of a finger to the holographic screen.

"This is interesting," she said to Neil, importing her display into the upper quadrant of his in much the same way that she might have imported a gunnery screen from a subbordinate in action.

"Two Imperial Destroyers, Windhoven and Z-49," she identified. The destroyers were powerful warships, nearly 200 meters long and with a crew of nearly a hundred spacers. In theory anyway, spacers were much harder to come by than one might imagine. Either one of them could have swatted the Highlander out of existence without difficulty. She wondered what the Imperium was doing here in this backwater. The Terran Imperium had been a great power in the galaxy nearly seventy five years ago before its leader, the Unifier had been assassinated but its power base had largely been carved up by the noble families of various worlds and clusters in the intervening decades. There was still a rump of bureaucrats and administrators trying to keep the entity going but their influence shrank with every self made king, duke and warlord who carved off his own fiefdom from the corpse of the Empire.

"I don't suppose its anything to do with us," she said after a moments consideration, "but lets give them a wide berth if they are sill in orbit when we reemerge."

@Penny

The past two days had been interesting with Sayeeda. The casual drinks and playful joke here and there aside, they acted as professionally as any crew would together. Neil had spent half the time making sure the ship was tip top when he wasn't hanging around the Junebug Captain. He would have expected she would have smacked his head once they got out of R.I.P. space, because he had been napping at the helm, admittedly. Feet on the dashboard, head back and hands behind. Only the sudden jerk of the ship broke him out of his reverie.

"I'm up," he said groggily, blinking the sleep away as Sayeeda's voice popped up on the comm. The information fed into him as if he was wide awake though, his mind like a machine when it needed to be. "Ooo, sixty-three? Couldn't have done it better myself. Well, I did do it myself. But ya know." He realized the comm had been on when he had said it, and though he didn't entirely mind, he was mainly joking with himself.

"Aigh't Captain, let's see what we got here," he replied to her assessment (and image she had sent) of the Imperial cruisers hovering above Savran. Neil sat forward and typed out a small algorithm on the Display Moniter, one of the small changes he had made to the Highlander when he had been tinkering. The Display still showed images and placements, and could be operated regularly, but now it had an upgraded sensor if you handled it correctly.

"Well would you look at that." The pilot marveled, the ships armed to the teeth with MAC guns that could wreck an asteroid half the size of Terra's moon with three shots. With all of those together? They could devastate continents, or take out another cruiser fleet, optimally.

"Wide Berth it is." He replied to her, thinking it would do well to perform such a maneuver now as well as later, though admittedly it wouldn't be hard to at the moment. While you could be thorough with either, it was a bit easier to bypass a blockade to get into a planet than it was to get out. Then again, this wasn't a blockade apparently.

Yet.

Neil set up the Sublight thrusters, easing the ship forward. On the display, Savran had the look of a green marble with swirls of darker blue coalescing around it. Of course it would still take them a bit of time to get there, and the Imperium was on its northern quandrant at the moment, so they had a free lane so far. And then it was at that moment that Neil lamented that they had an updated cloaking system. Most likely they'd be picked up on sensors once they reached the atmosphere, though losing anyone who saw them after wasn't an uncommon feat for a good pilot.

"Good thing I am here," he breathed, checking out the Acceleration Compensator Display, or ACD. "June, we'll be there in less than 20 odd minutes. After that, depending on the planet we might get a welcoming committee in the form of a few lasers and tactical nukes if they're feeling generous."
@Penny

The Highlander shuddered back into the RIP and held course for nearly three minutes before dropping once again into the universe of men and Xenos. The planet was much closer now the short distance hop having obviated days of acceleration and deceleration with the conventional engines. Almost at once Sayeeda's attack board lit up as they were painted with LIDAR and microwave targeting arrays. The comm system crackled to life on the 30 meter side band.

"Unknown vessel identify yourself," said a voice robbed of any identifiers by the signal distortion of radio. It really was much simpler to use laser or microwave but Sayeeda knew that you couldn't trust civilians to keep the fancy hardware operational. The caller was the Z-49 according to the identification code slugged to the transmission and confirmed by Junebug's own equipment. The destroyer had been spooked by their sudden extraction but luckily not fatally so.

"Z-49, this is Highlander, independent freighter out of Hodierna travelling empty, over," Sayeeda responded, her voice taking on the cool professionalism it always did in a near crisis. It would have been a hell of a thing for her first ship to get blown out from under her by a jumpy Terran gunner.

"Roger Highlander, highly suggest you are a little less precise with future jumps," the Terran communication officer came back. Sayeeda laughed with relief that she felt to the bottom of her bones.

"Roger that Z-49 that will teach me to be in so much of a hurry, Highlander out," she replied, closing the comm circuit. There was no point in claiming the jump had been direct from Hodierna as the light of their arrival out system would arrive in a little under an hour. Infact the only reason they had emerged so close to Z-49 was that their data about the ships location was nearly an hour old as well. It seemed Windhoven had landed on the planet somewhere but Junebug was unable to make it out on the sensors.

"Alright, I suppose you know where we are supposed to find this kid?"

@Penny