"I will be damnned," Rene declared as he examined the sensor read outs flipping through screens from optic to microwave imagery. It had taken them nearly three hours to reach the orbit of HK-421, an unavoidable delay given the total lack of astronomical data they had on the system before they terminated their jump in its vicinity. The sensors were currently gathering all sorts of information which, in the happy world of Rene's mind, he would one day include in the mother of all after action reports to Navy Office on Capella. HK-421 had a half dozen planets in its system, three of which were gas giants. The inner three worlds were too close to the sun to be habitable, little more than radiation drenched rocks but the fourth gas giant was ringed with a consetelation of moons. Many of these were simply large asteroids but one of them was a planetoid four fifths the size of New Concordia, it might have been the largest 'moon' in the Imperial astrological database, though the records available on the Bonaventure were to scant to be sure. In any event there was little doubt it was the world they were looking for. It not only possessed what the sensors reported as breathable, if argon rich, atmosphere but its two large continents were submerged in shallow oceans that had a slightly rosy color to them. Greenish vegetation started a ways inland and swept up onto impressive mountain ranges that attested to active volcanism. None of that, while remarkable enough, were what drew Rene's exclamation.

"Trouble?" Yarue asked, waking from the Syshin equivalent of a doze and taking the entire situation in at a blink. Rene shook his head to calm the Syshin as Solae and Rosaria, drawn by the same stimulus climbed up into the cockpit. They had prepared a meal and had been engaged in what Rene took to be Kalderi lessons. Happy as he had been to watch his beloved follow her passion for linguistics, it had ben his duty to man the controls and sensors. Well, oversee Mia's automatic control at least.

"No, no trouble," Rene explained, touching a control to remote his own console onto the main screen. The hologram formed, displaying a picture of the rotating world in something close to its natural colors. Informational tags sprang out of it at various points, though the data they referenced wasn't displayed unless Rene or another operator called them up.

"I had expected a Kalderi world, or perhaps something like Zatis, environmental domes maintained by smugglers and free traders," he explained.

"This isn't only breathable," he went on, opening one of the informational tags to display an image the Bonaventure's optics had captured on their first orbit. A window opened to display a ruined city on a grid pattern around an alpine lake. The image had been considerably sharpened from the crude optics the freighter possessed but it was obviously a human city. The buildings were graceful and stately in their ruin, tumbled white marble and other materials rather than the rude industrial landscapes which passed for cities on most colonial worlds.

"It is human," he concluded, shaking his head in wonderment.

"But its all ruined, and we are outside the Empire. It can't be a human world," Rosaria interjected. Not for the first time, Rene wondered at what kind of education the girl had received under Alayla Thorne's harsh administration. He supposed that history hadn't been given much emphasis.

"This is pre-Imperial," Rene told her with the certainty of someone who had been dragged to many pre-collapse museums by his tutors over the years. 

"You can tell by the architecture, and by the atmosphere," he told her, touching another symbol which brought up a chormatograph which analyzed the air from the refracted sunlight. It was a standard mix of oxygen and nitregon combined with argon and several other impurities.

"Pre collapse terraforming was crude by our standards," Rene explained. He didn't bother to go into the details of genetically tailored generations of bacteria which slowly converted seeded biomass into the molecules that later generations would fix as nitrogen oxygen and other such vital elements, nor the way in which celestial ice, delivered in the form of blown out asteroids was applied to provide the necessary water. Rosaria could learn those things if she wished, but the minutia wasn't important in itself.

"They dropped rods of tungsten on the poles to vaporize polar ice," Rene explained, even now the froze poles were unusually circular from the procedure and trace amounts of radioactivity, far to weak to be dangerous, still lingered in the atmosphere. 

"So why wasn't it resettled?" Rosaria asked, clearly uninterested in how humans dead a thousand years had approached the task of making dead planets live. Rene made a guesture that was intended to indicate the direction in which they had come.

"Records from the collapse are pretty thin on the ground," Rene explained. Most computerized records had failed in the intervening centuries, save for a few places like Capella where enough technology had remained to curate the barest fraction of humanities first sojurn into the stars. Even there a tremendous amount of data had been corrupted or lost due to lack of maintenance, as food became a more important preoccupation than information collation. 

"We probably lost the information then, and because of the Kalderi and the Jeweled Armada, exploration close to the border has been prohibited by Imperial policy for hundreds of years." That begged the question of how Bouradine had discovered the place. There were no indication of human habitation now whatever the situation had been a thousand years ago. Starvation or pestilence might have carried those isolated colonists off, or perhaps they had fled their homes, worried that the Kalderi would turn their eye on them next. 

"Electro Magnetic signatures," Mia broke in, sounding regretful at having to interrupt Rene. A pair of red dots sprang up on the holographic projection of a world.

"Well," Rene said recognizing the distinctive features of an escape pods small fusion reactor in the read outs.

"Shall we see who is home?"