"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]