As a child and even as a young man, it had never occured to Rene that he would ever need to clean anything. Menial work was, definitionally, beneath the son of a powerful aristocratic family and thus was the province of servants. The fact had not been lost on his instructors after his fall from grace, most of whom had taken every opportunity to pile such duties on to a son of privilege unexpectedly brought down to their level. Rene had borne the intended insult with the same quiet stoicism that had kept him moving following Amelia’s death, but to his own amazement he found that there was a part of him that enjoyed cleaning things. Perhaps it was a twisted reflection of his aristocratic upbringing, a desire to bring order to a chaotic universe. Maybe he should publish a paper of political theory which couched the noble classes as the janitors of the cosmos. The thought made him smile still wider.

Whatever else they had been, the former crew of the Bonaventure had been pigs. Decompression had cleared most of the loose trash but filth and the grime of years of neglect was not so easily vanquished. Rene solved the problem by bleeding steam off the fusion bottle and using a spare compressor to pressurize it and create an impromptu steam jet. They were aided too by the ships former trade as a slave ship. There were bottles of cheap general purpose antiseptic stacked in a chemical locker that had survived the venting as the Bonaventure broke atmosphere. Rene presumed that the slavers had dumped the stuff over their victims as a sort of quick and dirty decontamination. He couldn’t imagine it was very effective, but very few microbiologists worked in interstellar sex trafficking

The drain in the center hold of the ship was also an advantage. Blackish water ran down into the improvised sump as Rene methodically steamed the filth from the Captain’s cabin, the two crew bunks, and the small galley. Solae followed him, liberally applying antiseptic with an simple spray bottle that had once been used to apply lubricant. They gave it a few minutes and then went back over it with steam, sluicing the run off into the hold where it drained down to the recyclers. Rene didn’t want to think too much about the condition of the systems. They had been in good enough repair to keep the ship aloft and he had to assume they would continue to do so. The whole process made the ship smell of ionized water vapour and antiseptic, but that was a considerable improvement on human filth.

“Home sweet home,” he told Solae as he closed the valve to the hose and set it down. The galley and living quarters didn’t quite sparkle, but the improvement was remarkable. The walls were of a greyish white composite and the floor of a darker grey almost black rubber, almost hard enough to be plastic with a slight cross cut grip pattern inlaid to make them less treacherous in an emergency.  The galley was old but functional consisting of a pair of sinks and several all purpose processing stations. They were the great great great great grandparents of the sophisticated units Lord Armon had used in his kitchen, albiet grandparents from the shabby working class side you didn’t mention in polite society. Most of the equipment was long disused but Mia assured them it was operable.  There were even some supplies, mostly very unhealthy instant meals with inbuilt catalytic cookers, the kind of thing they had found half rotting on the floors when they boarded. It didn’t appear that they fed the slaves anything other than IV nutrient mix which Rene wasn’t keen to try.

There was something delightfully domestic about unpacking the crates they had bought aboard into their newly acquired home. It was simple stuff of course, cast off clothing that might more or less fit. Packets of instant soup and other dry processed food that could last a long time, some basic tools and a couple of portable computers. The cabin had a small dresser with two drawers. Rene took the bottom one and crammed in his few possessions into the drawer. He deliberately left the weapons in the crates. He didn’t want to think about killing right now. On New Concordia he had killed for the first time, he didn’t have an exact count of how many people he had shot or stabbed and that bothered him a little. Violence was not something the upper classes gloried in, at least not directly but Rene had to face the fact that he appeared to have an aptitude for it. His father had once told him you could never be great at something you didn’t love. It wasn’t a particularly comforting thought. 

“There,” Rene declared as he closed the drawer. He flashed a wild smile, fully relaxed for the first time since the Rat Trap.

“It isn’t exactly a manor, but it is ours,” he went on, making a grand gesture to take in the rather cramped cabin. Idly he wondered if they could break down the bulkhead and add the space to the cabin. Home improvement. Solae laughed and flopped onto the bed. They had stripped the dirty sheets and replaced them with some silks they had bought from the plantation. Rene suspected the Syshin who packed them had probably thought of the fine fabric as a trade good rather than bedding but he was glad not to have to sleep on the threadbare rags the captain had been using.

“Ours?” she teased, “Didn’t we steal it?” Rene grinned as Solae rested her head on her palm, her hair falling onto the greenish silk of the sheets, casually gorgeous.

“Well pursuant to regulation 122-A of the Fleet code, I as the senior military official on, or slightly above, New Concordia, am empowered to seize such resources as I deem necessary in time of war. I hereby declare this vessel and Imperial Warship,” Rene said, affecting the pompous are of a stereotypical senior officer. 

“Excuse me Master Quentain, but I know of no such regulation,” Mia said with the breathy enthusiasm of an admirer impressed by his knowledge. Rene snorted, he had made the regulation up as part of the joke, a fact that Mia had obviously missed.

“Well then I guess we stole it and it is a pirates life for me,” he said with a roll of his eye for Solae’s benefit. It was actually tempting in its way. They had a ship, they could light out for anywhere, Lucky Space or the Belvian Reaches, and try to work her. Live like tramp traders, making a living in the vast reaches of the Milky Way. Maybe they could even track down some of the trafficked Syshin, return them to their people. He and Solae could leave the politics and the war behind and start a new life. The spark, so alluring for its brief moment, sputtered out.  They both had a duty to the Stellar Empire, she couldn’t run from her rank and if he hared off into the far flung corners of space he would be a deserter. It was vanishingly unlikely that he would ever be caught and prosecuted, as far as anyone knew he was dead at the Rat Trap with the rest of his unit, but he would know. His life had been shattered by a crime he didn’t commit, but the fact that he was innocent had kept him going when all hope had seemed lost. He didn’t know how he would go on if he used his second chance to actually dishonor himself in the same way everyone believed he already was. Everyone except Solae.