Rene felt fear and regret coil in his guts. From the moment he finished speaking he realised that Solae wasn’t going to relent. Though she was as beautiful as a Sorrentian sunrise, there was a steel in her that he should have anticipated. What she proposed to do would put her in danger, not just here, although that was certainly possible, but when the reached Imperial space again. The thought of her being cut down by the same faceless assassins who had cut down Amellia filled him with an icy dread that tasted acid at the back of his throat.

“Solae…” he trailed off uncertain of how to go on. Of course she couldn’t let it go, he thought of her rage at the injustice done to the Syshin, at her determination to help them. But this meant more to her, she was willing to risk her own life to help ease his pain, to lift the burden of injustice from him. Love swelled inside of him like sunlight though a cloudy sky, brushing back the shadows of the past that his retelling had conjured. The fear was still there, opening these doors was dangerous beyond belief, but Solae knew that as well as he did.

“I don’t know what it would mean,” Rene admitted in a hoarse voice.

“Whoever did it might believe they have gotten away with it, they might not even be watching,” he went on. Rene didn’t really believe that, but it was possible that he needed it to be some dark conspiracy to justify what he been through. Maybe Solae was right and there was something that could be discovered. In any case the records they accessed out here would be archival, with communications down until the PEAs were unlocked by authorized users like Solae, word couldn’t get out of the Eastern Cross. Word could get in though, historical words at least. A little flicker of hope stirred inside of him. Of course once communications were restored …

“Solae, I love you,” Rene said earnestly. He reached out and took her hand, hoping he imagined the moments hesitation.

“Thirty seconds till transition,” Mia purred as though announcing she was almost in paradise. Rene cast a glance at the speaker but returned his gaze to Solae.

“If anything were to happen to you because of me I couldn’t live with myself.” The thought of the black depression that had seized him after Amellia’s death was nothing. Solae had come from nowhere a bolt of sunlight into his dreary existence, as dazzling as the stars. His love for her burned hot inside of him, and he was surer of it than any other fact in the universe. Amellia had been his first love but they had been children really swathed in tales of romance and the courtly games of the palace. What he had found with Solae was real and true, a fact that an older, more battered, but certainly wiser Rene recognized.

“Ten seconds,” Mia said with a breathless urgency. Rene pulled Solae close to him feeling her warm beating heart against his. He leaned in to kiss her as though by that act he could explain to her all the turmoil in his mind and…

The universe exploded. A billion billion Solae’s flew into a billion billion shards, like a stained glass window collapsing from a great height. Rene felt the flexing rip of reality all around him as the shards flew away in all directions like a dazzling mosaic painted by a mad man. Vertigo and claustrophobia screamed at his lizard brain to get down and jump up, leading to a sort of staggering tetanic convulsion that drove his head against the back of the bulk head. The jolt of pain reverberated for a moment and then the shards flew back together as though the whole scene played in reverse. He gasped as he came out of it. Entering jump space was always an unpleasant experience, though Rene would be the  first to admit that this one was particularly unpleasant. You never got used to it, though veteran spacers grew better at dealing with the phenomenon.  Jump space, the alien interstices between the quantum states of the human universe, was theoretically no different than regular existence but Rene knew that after a few days psychological problems would begin to develop. Crews that stayed under too long had been known to be driven completely insane. Marines jumped for short hops wherever possible.

“Solae… Solae are you ok?” he groaned.