Even after they had freed the gig it had been a massive undertaking to get the thing back to Sarento. Sabatine and her detachment had spent the night on the unnamed island and in the morning had commandeered the surface effect transport to ship the gig back to the base. Both plasma thrusters had been irreparably damaged in the crash and in digging the thing out of the mud bank and nothing short of a drydock rebuilt was going to make them serviceable. The captain of the freighter had not been best pleased to have his vessel repurposed in such a fashion but a handful of florins and the not so subtle hint of a dozen spacers looking bored and menacing had convinced him of the need to do his duty to the Republic. The had just minutes ago landed the gig and were about to turn the whole mess over to the base establishment when a circling aircar, an RCN vehicle by virtue of the fact that civilian air cars were prohibited on Sarento on pain of shoot down, a right the RCN had famously exercised a few years ago, subsequently quelling the locals enthusiasm for aviation.

It wasn’t until the officer in command of the small party called out to them that she recognized Kaiden Caladwarden. Her face froze in a set expression and the spacers around her tensed, hands going for weapons concealed in their slops without fully understanding what had startled their usual unflappable Lieutenant. After a moment, everyone relaxed, the vast majority of officers in the RCN were of the Cinnabar aristocracy, and that was a small enough club that officers with difficult pasts, political and personal were bound to run into each other sooner or later. Still Sabatine had hoped never to run into Kaiden again. She hadn’t seen him since that night, the last year in the academy when their six month long relationship had imploded messily in a screaming match that had woken the barracks provosts and nearly ended in a reprimand for both of them. One of Sabatine’s friends had dared her to break into Kaiden’s personal files. It had been a lark not really meant to be taken seriously but having already had rather more brandy then was wise Sabatine had agreed. She had uncovered evidence, messages sent and received of another woman, an aristocrat named Monika Rolfe who was one of the Clients of the Caladwrden family. Kaiden had admitted it when she confronted him, telling her that it had been early in the relationship and they had both been very drunk, he had brushed the girl of as politely as he could after the fact. Sabatine had not taken it well and had made the information public, arousing a minor scandal that might well have resulted in a duel if both the patair famili hadn’t quashed the matter in no uncertain terms. She hadn’t seen nor spoken to Kaiden since. Worse, although they had been in the same year, his name, first alphabetically, meant that he outranked her on date of commission. What in the Hells was he doing here? Sabatine did her best to smooth the grimace off her face and stiffened to attention, a comical site with her clothes caked in sweat and mud and her the cleanest of her men. The spacers, filthy and disheveled as she also stiffened to a posture of attention that would have given an academy drill instructor a stroke.

“Lieutenant Caladwarden,” she said formally, doing her best not to snap. She felt her skin prickle with the shock of adrenaline, it made her feel cold and her voice, already cold chilled by degrees.

“We recovered the Commodore’s gig from a crash on Islet 14 sir,” she told him stiffly.