“I know a command when I hear one,” Rene said with a ghost of a smile. He stood up and scooped Solae up in his arms carrying her like the newlywed she was to the small captain’s cabin they shared. Unfortunately, and probably much to Mia’s electronic disappointment, he couldn’t join her and settled instead for laying her down and sharing a lingering kiss with his betrothed. While she might not have been happy about being ordered to bed by her computer, Rene waited until she succumbed to what must have been exhaustion. All nobles possessed superior physiques but the athleticism favored by males was less pronounced in females who made concessions for the sake of an aesthetic of beauty that didn’t run to chiseled musculature. Rene wondered if one day the ruling classes might become a different species from the rest of humanity, biologically speaking. Geneticists claimed that this wouldn’t be the case, as nothing was actually added to the genome, merely that certain traits, which had already existed in the gene pool, were hyper emphasised. To Rene that sounded like every example of natural selection he had ever heard cited. In their minds the ruling aristocrats were a different species already, even those who professed to populist leanings made it clear who they thought ought to be leading those movements. 

When Solae’s breathing had grown slow and regular, Rene reluctantly returned to the cockpit and began to review the sensor screens. In contrast to Panopontus and New Concordia, the space above Zatis was busy. With few natural resources the Zatis system might not even have been colonized, but what it lacked in material wealth it made up for with its stellar geography. The pale blue sun of the Zatis system had once been part of a binary pair, the elder of the two stars had gone supernova at some point in the distant past and collapsed to form a black hole. The young star continued to orbit it, trailing a tail of light and matter into the black hole like a long streamer circling the may pole. The supernova had sterilized the system, but the planets had been distant enough to survive destruction. 

The combination of the black hole and the dense blue star meant that the gravity shadow of Zatis was both massive, and highly distinctive. This meant that the system boasted an inordinately large number of jump points, making it a hub for commerce and, more importantly information. Once upon a time the Imperial Fleet had maintained a base in the Zatis system, as a customs point and as a convenient place to base a rapid response force in the early, dangerous days of colonization. While the fleet had been based on a moon of one of the large gas giants, the inner planet, Zatis itself, had been left uninhabited. Over the years a community had grown up there as merchants serving the fleet had built their own facilities and eventually embarked on terraforming projects though typically under massive domes rather than a complete atmosphere creation project. Eventually civil wars had stripped the naval base away from the system, leaving behind the merchants and mercenaries who found that they did just as well without any Imperial overseers and the modern polity of Zatis was born.

Rene cycled through the screens, briefly checking dozens of small freighters as well as a number of suspicious ‘private yachts’ which certainly became pirates whenever and wherever it became convenient to be so. There were also a trio of large ‘anti pirate cruisers, functionally naval vessels in the employ of the sector duke orbiting the planet. The vessels didn’t appear to be actively interfering with traffic, though they held a high guard around the world. Rene instructed Mia to passively monitor the ships while he checked the Bonaventure’s log. Conveniently, but not unsurprisingly, the Bonaventure had visited Zatis several times in the past two years. On those occasions two of the orbiting cruisers had been present, though not at the same time. It made sense that given Zatis’ importance that Duke Tan would at least want to keep an eye on the place, though this didn’t make Rene feel any better. 

With several hours of travel ahead of him Rene busied himself by going through the publically available data that he was able to access with laser or microwave links. To his lack of surprise there was no word of the Rebellion, though if one knew where to look, the ‘civil emergencies’ and ‘unexpected losses of communication’ were a little too frequent to be the result of the normal natural order of a chaotic galaxy. Nor was there anything to be found on the military nets Rene was able to detect. The Imperial Navy kept a database of sailing directions, to alert ships to local conditions, and while Rene couldn’t access the database without code authorization, he was able to determine that it hadn’t been updated in over a week. Theoretically any navy ship that jumped in system would update the database and a week was an unusually long stretch of time for a location like Zatis. Rene also knew that the Marines maintained an emergency net, mostly so that men on leave could be quickly recalled than for any really secure communication, but he didn’t dare attempt to patch into it, incase the Duke’s spies were monitoring access. It would have been a logical way to sweep up Imperial troops who missed the initial purges, as soldiers checked in to see what was going on, certainly something Rene would have done if he wasn’t aware a rebellion was breaking out.

“Incoming vessel Bonaventure, state your cargo and destination. Over.” an unfriendly voice crackled across the communications system. Rene jolted out of his research into the Zatis PEA, a topic that was surprisingly difficult using only public records, and glanced up at his communications screen. The computer identified the transmission as originating from one of the Duke’s cruisers, the thirty thousand ton City of Rheims.

“Mia is this a normal practice,” he asked quickly.

“They have interrogated each inbound ship in a similar manner Sir Rene,” Mia responded breathily. Rene felt some of the tightness of his chest relax.

“They are using a coded transmission but several of the captains of the other vessels are complaining about it,” Mia added unexpectedly. Rene frowned, it sounded almost as though Mia were bragging about how she had come by the information, an emotional response that ought to have been beyond her programming. Pushing the thought from his mind he opened the channel, wishing that Solae was here to handle the talking.

“We are inbound for Zatis, running empty,” Rene responded in what he hoped was a bored tone. He deliberately bit back the reflex to end the transmission with the word over, figuring that proper comm discipline had no place on a tramp freighter. Rene watched the range finders tick steadily downwards, uncomfortably aware that they were already within the outer limits of the warships guns.

“Running empty Bonaventure? That is no way to run a business,” the communications officer aboard the City of Rheims responded with slightly more than idle curiosity in his voice. Thinking very fast Rene pulled up the past few stops from the Bonaventure had made.

“Tell me about it Rhiemy,” Rene improvised, “We took some damage landing on Cromwell’s World, took everything we had just to get airborne again. We are going to take a real bath on this one.”

There was another pause that was probably longer in Rene’s mind than in the real universe.

“Roger that Boney, better luck next time. Rheims out.” 

Rene let out a long breath of relief, they would be in orbit within the hour. So far, so good.