To Rene’s surprise, the act of sharing food with the Syshin seemed to do more to reassure the aliens of their benefactors good intentions than even the rescue had done. Whether this was an effect of Syshin cultural norms or something to do with their recent slavery was impossible to judge. Things settled into a routine over the next several days. Rene instructed others in the use of small arms, though in truth the range was too short to be of much use for rifles. Neither the Syshin or Rosaria had much natural talent for the business and their improvement was slow. Solae began to teach them the basics of Syshi, though judging from the expressions Yarue and Dasin made when they tried to pronounce the silabant sounds they were as unimpressed with the human’s progress as Rene was with their marksmanship. Even Solae frequently concealed a smile when Rene’s lack of tonal control radically changed the meaning of a word.


The two nobles discussed their plans in private after the arbitrary ships night began. Talking over points and sharing their frustrations between bouts of lovemaking in their cabin. Most pleasant were the discussions in which they talked of what the future might look like after the rebellion was put down. Those discussions inevitably assumed they both survived and that they emerged victorious, big variables by anyone's accounting, but they were human after all.  The Empress’ largess had changed things radically for both of them and though Rene’s status remained somewhat uncertain, he couldn’t help but hope that he would be a more suitable mate for Solae after the dust settled. He knew that she didn’t care if he was nothing but a common soldier and, perhaps selfishly, he accepted that sacrifice if it meant they could be together, but he didn’t want to condemn her to a lifetime of sneers and innuendo that such a match would bring. Always the discussions worked themselves around to the same point. They just didn’t have enough information to know that would happen.

“Completion,” Rene announced as the Bonaventure’s jump drives cut out, the familiar starfield solidifying in front of the main viewport. Ranal Pandi was the closest Kalderi system to the human territory of the Eastern Cross, but even so it had been a considerable reach for the jump drives. Rene’s console showed yellow warning lights, indicating that the MacMillan count was well above the safe range, though not yet into the red. Almost immediately the number began to tick downward as exposure to the stable super-quantum universe began to normalize the effects of the jump. Yarue and Dasin had proven to be a considerable asset over the past few days, performing considerable maintenance on the ship. Neither of them were engineers, but both had more hands on experience with starships than Rene did and they were much better able to understand the instructions Mia provided.

Ranal Pindi was a spectacular system. A bright white star orbited a black hole at the systems center. Streamers of burning gas millions of miles long flowed from the star to its hungry neighbor like a celestial ribbon dance. The blackhole would eventually devour the star, though the timescale was so long that there would be little noticeable effect for the next billion years. The system had a half dozen planets, several gas giants and a pair of terrestrial worlds. One of the rocky worlds was uninhabitable, its proximity to the sun bathing it in radiation levels that would be lethal to Humans or Kalderi in a matter of moments, even if the temperatures, regularly close to 800 centigrade, wouldn’t have flash ignited their flesh. The second world was Ranal Pindi itself, temperate and well within the habitable range for humans though the air was somewhat drier than would have been ideal. There were no records to show whether it was naturally occurring or if the Kalderi had terraformed it but the biota was decidedly alien to human norms. Human traders were not permitted on Ranal Pindi itself, but one of the moons was reserved for what limited exchanges were made. Even there the human accessible sector was rather rigidly controlled by the Kalderi.

“They are hailing us,” Rene announced as his communications board lit up. There were only two vessels other than the Bonaventure on the sensors. A pair of Kalderi warships that orbited the planet, each one about a hundred thousand miles above the planet’s poles. The Bonaventure’s optics weren’t good enough to provide good imagery at this range, but Mia was able to sharpen the images considerably as well as to use stock footage of other Kalderi ships to fill in the blanks. Although of a size, neither ship bore much resemblance to the other. They were both of a tonnage that was somewhere between a destroyer and a cruiser in human terms, though their shining gold plated hulls and jewel like protrusions ended any closer comparison than that.

“I am patching them through Duchess,” Rene announced formally to Solae before mouthing the words ‘good luck’ and activating the comm circuit.