Dear Father,

I write to you to inform you that a Rebellion against the Empire has broken out on New Concordia and potentially the entire Eastern Cross. Imperial forces on New Concordia have been completely destroyed. All loyalists on the planet have been captured or killed. I believe that the Rebels lack the genetic codes to access the PEA network.

I have with me Solae Falia, a Marquissa and the sole survivor of the Falia family. The rebels are hunting her for her genetic codes but we have managed to get off planet. I do not know who to trust other than you but depend on you to help me to do my duty.

Solae and I are betrothed. I do not know if we will survive for this to be of import to anyone but ourselves but if I should perish and she should live I will depend on your honor to do all in your power to protect and support her.

Rene Quentain - Acting Captain General for New Concordia - Imperial Marine Corp

It was a cold and clinical letter Rene thought but even those few paragraphs had taken him the better part of an hour to assemble. His father was not a man to be swayed by emotion and everything depended on him taking the message seriously and acting accordingly. The message would need to be updated as they gathered more information but for the moment it would have to do. Rene didn’t know where or how they would find a PEA to get it out but taking even a small step made him feel better. With the a click he downloaded the message to a small memory chip and slipped it into his pocket.

“Mistress Solae is awaiting you in the cargo area,” Mia whispered with breathless anticipation. Rene started at the interjection. Some part of his mind had expected Solae to sleep until they reached the end of the jump, although now that he thought about it consciously there was no reason that should be so. The jump chronometer spun downwards like an hourglass counting off the hours and minutes until they dropped back into real space. The air temperature had already begun to increase by a slight but noticeable amount. Friction from the tiny proportion of the ship that interfaced with the material universe had begun to stress the cooling system. That was one of the normal limiters for jumps. Vessels that operated in hard vacuum could only handle waste heat by a slow process of radiation, or by dipping into an atmosphere or passing through another substrate, like a nebula to gain an assist from convection. In that regard bigger ships were actually able to jump further than smaller ones, their large surface areas allowing a more efficient radiation of waste heat.  The fact that the Bonaventure was already heating up suggested that the drives could use a tune up, a task for which Rene didn’t even pretend to be qualified. Well if it were a perfect universe many things would have been different. 

He found Solae in the cargo hold as Mia had promised. She was in the process of prying open an access panel that probably hadn’t been opened in their lifetimes. With a sudden snap the rust and void frozen seam gave and the panel crashed open in a cloud of dust. Stars above how had the vessel kept functioning for so long without even the pretense of maintenance. Solae peered inside the panel, evidently she either knew what she was doing or Mia had told her what to look for. Watching the stunning noblewoman work was a surreal experience, like watching a sculpture by one of the Masters come to life and start cleaning a floor. Rene suddenly remembered what it had been like for him when he had found himself in the Marines, exposed to a world of physical labour he had, until that point, only a theoretical knowledge of.

“Feels strange dosen’t it,” he said as he crossed the deck grating to where she stood.

“I didn’t think I’d ever get used to having to do things like this myself. I used to say to myself that I was the first Du Quentain to do anything useful in the last three hundred years.”