Rene felt a pleasant warmth in his flesh as he awoke, almost unconsciously his fingers found the soft curve of Solae’s hip, gathering her supple flesh as she moaned sleepily. With gentle firmness he rolled her over onto her back and kissed at her belly button, eliciting a giggle before working his way up her midriff and over her breasts, with teasing kisses..His dog tags trailed along in the wake of his lips until he had the noblewoman pinned beneath him. Given the fact that they had spent the last few days in a combination of frantic action and heart stopping terror, it probably made more sense to rest, but what was sensible and what was desirable were two very different things. A soft chime sounded from the PA system and the lights came on. Rene froze atop Solae before Mia’s voice announced.

“I am sorry Lady Solae, but we will be completing our jump in just over seven minutes.” The AI did sound sorry, which given her programming, was probably as close to true as it could be. Solae giggled and lay a hand against Rene’s cheek for a moment, before he reluctantly rolled off and grabbed for a wash cloth quickly freshening himself as best he could without an actual shower. The wound on his side was healed in a plug of rough scar tissue, medically acceptable if aesthetically ugly, that the medical computer rated at no risk of reopening. If and when he had the time he would submit to the cosmetic treatment that would erase the scar but that was beyond the ability of the medical facilities on a tramp freighter and not a particularly good use of his time.   He grabbed a set of spacers clothing, shapeless gray trousers and tunic and pulled them on. The clothes were among Ten’s gifts were typical of the thoughtful analytical criminal.  Rene snapped his combat boots on and stood to kiss Solae lingerly.

“I’ll see you on the bridge,” he told her before stepping out to allow her to clean and dress in private.

“Extracting,” Rene said as he keyed the end of the jump sequence. The starfield outside the main viewpoint, a confused dance of lights, suddenly resolved itself into the familiar patterns of the white speckled black. Solae, Rosaria and the two Syshin were present. Solae was needed to pilot the ship but the other three were simply there to experience the novelty of arriving in a new system. Rosaria had probably never been of Zatis and Yarue and Dasin had made their journeys in the holds of ships and probably under sedation besides.

The experience was less romantic than might have been imagined. Particular as H-21-68 was not an inhabited system like Zatis or New Concordia. Rene had selected it, more or less at random as a transit point between Zatis and Kaledori space. They would remain here only long enough to allow the quantum state of the ship to hetrogenoize. Starships traveled between the stars by a function of quantum superposition, exploiting the ability of a particle to be in two places at the same time to exceed the speed of light by stuttering through a series of trillions upon trillions of superpositions. The process was so marginally efficient as to almost defy computation, but even a fraction of ‘instantaneous’ was enough to allow ships to bridge the unimaginable voids between stars. A side effect of the process was quantum homogenization, the tendency of particles acted upon by the drives to assume the same quantum state. Left unchecked this could eventually lead to a variety of unpleasant results, that started at sudden uncontrolled fusion reactions and moved rapidly downhill from there. Rene checked the scopes. The particle counter registered the MacMillan particles, a useful indicator of quantum destabilization, at about 0.5 percent. A reasonably safe number for a ship of this size and craft. 

“Are we supposed to see something?” Yarue asked. Rene shook his head.

“There is nothing to see,” Rene explained.

“This system has a pair of gas giants and a neutron star, there are a few asteroid belts but nothing that is economical for anyone to bother mining.”

“There is a contact in orbit of H-21-68 dash 2,” Mia interrupted in a throaty purr. Rene punched at his keyboard bringing up the readings on the sensor board. Although it wasn’t rational he had the sudden terrified feeling that they had fallen into a trap set by Duke Tan. That was not the case. The sensors showed an aged freighter, four or five times the size of the Bonaventure in a wide orbit of the second gas giant. Mia had identified it by an automated distress beacon. There were no power readings of any kind, and the sensors painted it as void cold. Rene bought up the beacon’s transmission on one of the communications screens.

**Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, this is Free Trader Corsica, our drives are inoperable and we cannot maneuver, requesting immediate assistance.** The message looped from there repeating over and over as long as the battery in the emergency transmitter held out.

“Can we help them?” Rosaria asked, glancing between Solae and Rene. The two nobles exchanged looks.

“According to the transmission log, this distress call is over sixty years old,” Rene explained, highlighting the date in the header information cascading over the console. Civilian ships usually avoided uninhabited system for exactly this reason. Navigationally one gravity well was as good as another, but the fear of mechanical failure with no one to come to the rescue was enough to keep most people on well traveled paths. 

“So they left the ship?” Rosaria asked in puzzlement. Rene sighed and shook his head. While it was possible a ship that size had a lifeboat, there was no way the crew had escaped and left the ship to circle this gasball for the past six decades.

“More likely they ran out of food and air,” Rene told her.

“According to the scopes the ship is cold with no life readings, there is no chance there is anyone left alive, just an emergency beacon broadcasting, probably hooked up to a solar array to keep it live.” Rosaria blanched at the thought.

“So what are we going to do?” she asked, her face a little frightened.

“Well after we have some breakfast, hopefully prepared by someone other than me, we are going to go down to the hold and I am going to start teaching you all how to use small arms. After that Solae and our new friends are going to teach us some Syshi, by that time we should have normalized our Macs enough to be ready to jump out of here.”