Rene opened his mouth to object, but an arched eyebrow from Solae was enough to quell the impulse. Obediently he touched a series of holographic key and brought up the piloting display. Like all Marines Rene had been around enough landing craft to know the basics, but his instructors had been careful to keep him away from any specialty training that might have offered him a chance to distinguish himself. The Marines might technically have been a new life, but that didn’t make them immune to the political pressures that wanted Rene to remain as inconsequential as possible. Fortunately, while the Bonaventure was an ill maintained ship, even the clunkiest tramp freighter had a sophisticated software suite, that included a training mode. The training suite allowed Rene to control the ship as an auxiliary, the computer accepting his inputs only when they didn’t clash with Solae’s.

“Ok, I have a space yard within about fifty kilometers of the main administrative complex that is cheap and nasty enough for a boat like this,” Rene said, transmitting the coordinates to Solae’s terminal. Almost at once the Bonaventure thrummed as Solae fed power to the thrusters and eased them down into the atmosphere. It was far smoother than their previous decent, Zatis not only lacked an active hurricane, it also possessed only the thinest of atmospheres. The early stages of terraforming had been begun only decades ago, and even under the best circumstances the process could take nearly a century to complete. They were descending towards the darkside of the planet and so Rene could see the soft phosphorescence of the shallow seas that teemed with genetically engineered microbial life that slowly broke down the carbon dioxide into water and oxygen and strung the spare carbon together into precursor organics and fixed harmful elements like sulfur into thin layers of rock. It was unusual that a world was settled before terraforming, as the process, particularly at the early stages, could be very energetic, but Zatis was an unusual world in many regards. Even now, its atmosphere was breathable, but so thin that no one could stand it for long without a respirator to concentrate oxygen. Rather than deal with the atmosphere, the denizens of that world had constructed vast domes of modular hexagonal crystal, that kept processed air under pressure. Without the central direction of the Empire to give it form, the process had been haphazard and the domes bulged and twisted like cancerous growths, wherever this entrepreneur or that had tried to add a little extra space.  The panels were originally clear but grit blown in the air had tarnished the majority of the panels, particularly those in the poorer areas and they were frequently all but opaque for lack of maintenance.  

Air traffic buzzed through all levels of the stratosphere as they descended towards the largest of the domed cities. Fortunately the landing fee Rene had agreed to pay at the space yard covered access to local navigational aids which mapped the progress of all the aircraft. Without roads, or other surface transport, all intercourse between the cities had to be conducted via aircraft, of which there were a dizzying array. Rene didn't doubt that the small air cars and jets had much more to worry about from the freighter and its blazing plasma thrusters then they did from the few tons of an aircraft colliding with them, but he would just as soon not put that belief to the test, particularly not when they were trying to be inconspicuous. 

Solae guided them down towards the Lysin Yard, the name of the landing area they had rented a space from. In order to avoid opening the domes, the space yards clustered around the edge of the irregular domes, like the white of an egg with a particularly massive yoke, or perhaps the red inflammation ringing a boil that was about to burst. Solae, whose prior experience had been under much more adverse circumstances, bought them in with hardly a wobble. Rene mirrored her action on his own console, though his corrections were too quick and too large for the mass of the ship and the program frequently canceled his maneuvers. As they got closer to the ground he fought down his frustration and tried to think of it more like shooting, calming his breathing and deliberately waiting an extra few heartbeats before making corrections. This seemed to improve his performance, but the ship still took Solae’s commands the vast majority of the time. He was so engrossed in the exercise that when the landing skids settled onto the concrete it came as something of a surprise.

Lysin Yard was perhaps ten acres of open concrete, dotted with outbuildings and maintenance shops. The concrete itself was burned and scarred from thousands of starship landings,those areas that were not charred black, shone with an opalescence of spilled hydrocarbons. Unhealthy vapors rose from the shimmering spills in a way that wouldn’t have happened in a true atmosphere. Two other ships shared the landing space with them. Both were larger the the Bonaventure but were equally dilapidated. One of the behemoths had a large section of hull plating removed, exposing her innards, though no repairmen currently seemed to be attending the ship. The other was being unloaded by a team of men in respirators to allow them to breath. They had formed a daisy chain and were unloading sacks of what might have been rice or flour, passing them man to man before depositing them on a big aircusion truck for eventual transhipment. Both ships were attached to a large corrugated iron building that abutted the side of the dome by long umbilicals of rubberized white fabric on steel rings. The material might once have been white, but was so stained and so frequently patched that it resembled disruptive camouflage. The umbilicals tethered to the airlocks of the ships, allowing passengers and crew to go back and forth to dome without having to don respirators.

“Well, on the plus side, it seems vanishingly unlikely anyone is here to arrest us,” Rene joked as he surveyed the situation. While it was possible that men could be waiting inside, it seemed unlikely that even professional actors could continue to unload the freighter with the bored nonchalance the ground crew was managing if that kind of excitement were in the offing. A man in a protective suit emerged from the terminal building and shouted something at one of the men unloading sacks. The laborer looked up, nodded and then grabbed a second man who seemed to be taking a break. Together they began to extend a third umbilical, manhandling it towards the Bonaventure’s forward airlock.

“Well, time to meet the locals…”