Rene slipped out of bed, reluctantly leaving the warmth of Solae’s body behind. It felt bizzarley surreal, like a weird dream in which you get what you want but it is all twisted up with your fears. He carefully pulled the covers over Solae, the recycled air of the Bonaventure was not cold, but it was cool and dry compared to the sweltering tropic sunlight of New Concordia. For a moment he gazed at her face, it was still luminous in its perfection despite the hard few days behind them, the losses and the pain she had to be feeling.

“I will get you back safe,” he vowed quietly to himself, “by the Stars I will.”

No living spacecraft was every truly silent. Thousands of systems from complex navigational processor to simple fluid pumps thrummed and throb beneath bulkheads and access plates. Rene rifled through the possession of the former owner with millitary organisation, first he swept all the trash up, piling old food, machine parts he judged beyond repair and anything else he judged to be useless into the aft airlock. Given the filthy state of the place, that ended up being about as much as the airlock could hold. He wiped at his brow sweating from his exertions. It wasn’t really safe t vent the airlock while they were in jump, the carefully computed jump state was a fragile thing and ejecting a bunch of matter moving in excess of the speed of light was at best foolish and at worst deadly. Resolving to do it the moment they returned to the sidereal universe, Rene began to empty boxes, chests and personal effects from the dead crewmans quarters. It was not alot to rave about. Dirty clothing mostly jumpsuits stained with grease and other unfamiliar but equally soiled civilian garb, a few personal keepsakes, tablet computers and porno holos of unlikely and imaginative subjects. A few weapons, pistols mostly and a sawed off mob gun that Rene wasn’t sure would function without putting the user at more risk than the target. There was food, mostly dried stuff that would last forever and an electrolyte replacement mix that seemed to have crystalized into sedimentary rock. 

In the cockpit he found a small and poorly concealed safe. Though it had a numeric keypad, Mia was able to over ride it with trivial ease using security cam footage to recreate the key sequence. Rene punched in the alpha numeric code and worked the release lever. Inside he found a hand full of Imperial Soledii, coins with wire rims in integral diffraction gratings which held their value. Each world struck its own currency under imperial auspices and coins varied slightly in shape and design from world to world. It wasnt a fortune, maybe the equivalent of half a year of Rene’s salary, but it had the attraction of being available and more or less untraceable.

The starscape shimmered as Rene sat down at the pilots station. Though he was glad for the sudden lull it also made him uneasy. The plan he and Solae had settled on was vague. They either needed to reach a PEA and transmit their warning, or win their way back into loyalist space. The didn’t even know where saftey might lay. The rebellion was clearly wider than New Concordia, possibly sector wide in scope. If that were the case they would need to pass through the central jump point at Casta Mirandila, the only system close enough to the coreward reaches to make a safe jump. Gulfs of interstellar space were transversable so long as there were large gravitational bodies linking them via gravitic distortion. While it was theoretically possible to jump from anywhere to anywhere, the practical mathematical and power requirements restricted routes to known and charted points. Dedicated exploration vessels could make longer jumps but they were rare and expensive, especially when astronomical data was easily attainable to plot new routes. If the rebellion was sector wide, they would certainly have seized Casta Mirandila in the opening moments, interdicting traffic through the vital jump point to stop the spread of the news. Rene wasn’t a naval officer but he wasn’t fool enough to think they could run the blockade in a tramp freighter.

That left the PEAs. Panopontus was too minor a world to warrant such an installation but it was as good a place as any to gather information. Enemy forces on New Condorida would certainly mount a pursuit but they had no way of knowing where the Bonaventure was headed once it entered jump space. The selection had been random and thus difficult to predict and Rene doubted there were enough rebel vessels on New Concordia to cover all the possible options.

“Mia is their any data on Panopontus in the ships computer?” he asked after a desulotory attempt to find the information himself.

“Pilotage data only Master Quentain,” Mia whispered, her tone implying that this meant their were wonderous and sensual discoveries to be made. The marine shook his head wryly. The AI was almost a friend but he doubted he would ever get used to it.

“No visuals or transaction data?” he pressed.

“According to the diagnostics most of my eyes are blindfolded,” she confided breathilly. Rene frowned as he pulled up the pilotage data, a series of meaningless vectors punctuated by a radio landing beacon frequency. Not a lot of use, he doubted either he or Solae wanted to land wherever the Bonaventure's previous crew had done business. 

“Your eyes? You mean the external visual sensors?” he asked frowning, Mia was used to interpreting data from a wide variety of sensors, why should she have a preference for optical?

“Yes, there are no records of scheduled maintence,” she went on, a little sulkily. Rene cracked open one of the protein bars he had bought from the plantation and put it in his mouth. It tasted like sawdust and beef stock but he chewed with stoic determination.

“When we get on the ground I can take a look,” he offered. The chronometer wound down with the majesty of an hour glass, twelve hours till the broke out of jumpspace. After that they wouln’t be able to reenter until their positronic load rebalanced, four or five hours at the earliest. If there were rebel warships in orbit, it would require fast talking and no little luck to get past them. Rene watched the star scape for another minute before admitting to himself he was stalling. Reluctantly he set down the protein bar and thumbed the console live.

[i]Dear Father, I write to you….[/i]