A long silence hung for a few moments over that pronouncement as the two lovers considered the threat which had swept up over the sector while they had been out of contact. Bel'sian looked at Bouradine and nodded.

"If you will agree to speak for us your Grace, then we shall return with you," the merchant responded gravely.

The conference continued for a few minutes more, both Bouradine and Bel'sian seemed to accept that they would be returning to Ranal Pindi. The fact that Bel'sian wasn't objecting too strongly suggested she at least held on to hope that Solae would be able to make good on her promise not to separate them. That was good, Rene would have been willing to stun both of them and bring them back as prisoners if that was what it took to complete Solae's mission, but he was pleased it hadn't come to that. He realized that Solae had deliberately led with their problem and then moved on to Duke Tan, probably in a deliberate attempt to make their own personal problems look small and thus encourage compliance. If that was the case, then it certainly seemed to have had the desired effect.

"How did the soldier come to be here?" Bel'sian asked as the discussion turned more general. Rene, who had been pondering that himself suddenly recalled the data chip he had retrieved from the escape pod. In the confusion of the mudslide and the chaotic aftermath he had truthfully forgotten all about it. 

"This probably has the answer, but I haven't had a chance to review it yet," Rene said more for Solae's benefit than the two lovers. She gave him a nod and continued to speak with Bel'sian as he crossed to the rooms small terminal and sat down, inserting the chip into the reader. A challenge appeared and Rene entered the last access code he had been given. The computer prompted him for a retinal scan and he complied. The words Lt. Colonel Renard Quentain flashed onto the screen followed by 'Access Granted'. He frowned surprised that the record had his current rank, that made the information on the chip very new, days old at best. Three options appeared. A locked dispatch addressed to Her Grace of the Eastern Cross - Solae Falia and a similar though now unlocked communication to himself. The third file was what he actually expected to find, the black box recording of an Imperial Navy Destroyer designated the Gwyidion Kay. He hesitated momentarily, unsure as to whether he should immediately pass the message on to Solae. He glanced over his shoulder and found her still speaking to Bouradine and decided to wait. Resisting the urge to open his own communication he tapped the icon for the black box. Data began to spew over the screen. Rene engaged an active sound canceltion field by flicking a switch.

"Mia this is starship vector data, can you compress it to a visual for me and run all bridge commands and communicaitons as a crawl below?" he asked. To his mild surprise the screen immediately flickered into the view from a ship dropping out of of a jump. Handsome crew men stood at their posts silently and a holodrama actress in a naval uniform stood on the bridge command lecturn, her name tape reading Ap'Gwyn. Rene shook off his momentary disorientation. He shouldn't be surprised that the AI was not only about to carry out a complex instruction but also made it as sexy as possible.

"Mia please use historical footage of Captain Ap'Gwyn, if you have access to it," he said dryly. The picture shimmered into that of a severe woman with a hawk nose and dark piercing eyes. She was in her early forties with prematurely graying temples. 

"Contact!" one of the sensor operators shouted and a red pulse flickered on a command screen. He tapped a few keys. The blackbox data showed that the ships had just jumped into the Dunbarton system. The first of the twin systems which formed the chokepoint into the Eastern Cross. Even in Mia's dumbing down of the flight recorder data there was alot to keep track of.

"Thirty light craft in close to the primary," the sensor operator reported.

"Mia please display their sensor data in standard fleet format as a sidebar," Rene instructed. A plot position indicator appeared beside the action on the bridge. It showed a swarm of contacts into the system, clustered around sole habitable world in the system. Like all such worlds there was considerable orbital infrastructure, designed to support in coming shiping that was stressed by the long, low Q graident, jumps, and to provide a base for the Fleet should they need to defend the area. Judging from the Gwyidion Kay's sensors, that was just what Duke Tan's fleet of light pirate chasers was doing, attempting to block the Fleet from entering the Eastern Cross. Only that wasn't going to work. the Gwydion Kay was a modern destroyer, and according to the sensors she was in company with two other ships of similar build, the Halifax and the Song of Ostri. Rene had no formal naval training, but he had spent long nights listening to his father and his cronies talking about naval matters, thirty retrofitted freighters weren't going to be able to stop a trio of state of the art warships.

"Hail them," Ap'Gwyn was saying. Rene fast forwarded through thirty minutes of exhanges, during which Tan's forces, first plead innocent, then claimed that the destroyers had been misled by false orders, then started making threats, all the while both fleets accelerated towards each other, Tan's slowly, Ap'Gwyn hard enough that the crew had to strap in. The black box didn't contain a copy of Ap'Gwyn's orders but clearly they had been sent with the understanding that Tan's forces were hostile. At about a light second's distance, Ap'Gwyn ordered her flotilla to open fire. Mia's simulation lacked the gut rattling immediacy of heavy torpedos being launched at twenty G acceleration, or the spine shivering crack of railguns punching projectiles down range at noticeable fractions of light speed. Rene frowned as three of Tan's warships vanished from his plot, destroyed by fire from the flotilla before they were even in range.

"Incoming," a sensor operator reported, his computer generated voice lacking any emotion whatever. Rene watched as hundreds of missles ripped from the enemy fleet in a ragged volley. To maintain that fire rate they had to be mounting them externally, a dangerous practice often used by pirates and others who didn't plan on being in a situation where the enemy might strike first. Ap'Gwyn reacted in text book fashion, altering course and drawing up and away from the ecliptic of the system, assisted by the gravity of a nearby gas giant. Point defence batteries opened up, spewing tungsten pellets in glowing streams, ripping appart incoming missles with computational precision. Even with the massive barrage the destroyers, working together should be able to ...

"Contact," the sensor operator reported in the same bored mechancial voice. Rene, who had just seen another two score of icons appear at practically knife range couldn't help but imagine the mans terrified scream. Another fleet, larger than the decoys that Tan had stationed where the navy expected them, had been hiding in the upper reaches of the gas giant. Missles streaked up out of the gas at almost point blank range. Ap'Gwyn's face, recorded by the bridge cameras and thus accurate among so much of Mia's fabrication, never moved from its set expression. The woman must have zero-g lubricant for blood. It should have been over right then, the destroyers were committed and at such speed now that altering course was all but impossible but Ap'Gwyn nodded as though she were in a tactics exercise in a class room rather than fighting for her life.

"Adjust course to one zero, six three, niner zero," she ordered calmly. Rene boggled as without a moments hesitation the naval officer dove her little fleet straight into the gas giants upper atmosphere, plunging through the enemy formation like three knives, slipping under then initial ballistic courses of incoming enemy missiles. The weapons would wheel around and come back, but that would take valuable seconds. In the meantime the naval units spat death in long glowing tracers picked out by gas, their heavy weapons meant to support battleships ripping  the ambushing force to glowing rags within a handful of heartbeats. The tactical read outs displayed twenty three of Tan's ships obliterated within a few seconds as the destroyer flotilla plunged past them in a perfect zero deflection attack. 

Burning gas erupted into a blazing halo across the bridge view port as the velocity of the Gwydion Kay's long acceleration ignited the gas that contacted it. The effect of the dive was two fold, gravity added to the speed of the maneuver, helping to wrench the ships out of position, and the friction of the not quite void slowed them unpredictably. All the while the point defense systems hammered at incoming from two different directions. By now the guns would be white hot, starting to seize as replacement barrels were rotated into place. The Halifax vanished from the sensor read outs, Rene winced a moment before the log reported - ISN Halifax destroyed. He could easily imagine the hit blasting appart the destroyers engines and hurling it against the thicker lower atmosphere like an egg against concrete.

"Burn for extraction, and keep firing," Ap'Gwyn ordered as the two surviving ships burst from the halo of gas that formed the outer limits of the atmosphere. The sensor log reported thirty four enemy craft destroyed or crippled. A remarkable job considering the violent maneuver and the ambush. Song of Ostri reporting damage to her aft nacelles a line of text reported a moment before Ap'Gwyn's simulacrum demanded an update on the destroyer. Even though he knew it was only a simulation of events that were by now days old, Rene's guts clenched as the icon representing the Song of Ostri dropped slowly back into the cloud of oncoming ordinance. ISN Song of Ostri destroyed. The Gwydion Kay continued to accelerate away from the gas giant, by now its point defence system was begining to overheat from sustained firing, Ap'Gwyn mauvered so that her thruster plume washed directly back over the incoming projectiles, even though that wasn't the optimal course for the jump point. The dorsal and ventral PDC's blazed in short sharp bursts as the destroyer picked up speed, giving her more time to shoot down enemy incoming. Ap'Gwyn's rail guns fired back at the nearer group, ripping three more enemy ships open as easily as a child with a stick beheading a flower. Then one of the PDC's jammed. A missle struck amidships and the simulated Captain was hurled off her feet. Systems flashed red and alarms began to wail. Multiple hull breaches, system failure, fire control gone. Ap'Gwyn must have known her ship only had seconds to live as the spiteful wave of incoming missiles closed the distance.

"Abandon ship!" she called, still looking calm and unruffled. Six seconds later the display went blank with the message ISN Gwydion Kay destroyed. There was another minute of footage, appended from the life pod in which Savachev had escaped. It showed the enemy craft closing, shooting at those few life pods which had escaped in the six seconds between the Gwyidion Kay's crippling and her death. It had been pure luck that her own pod had been on the far side of the expanding ball of gas which had been the destroyer and her crew of nearly a thousand. Rene realized he was clenching his fist so hard that his nails were digging into his hand. He relaxed it only with an effort. Three thousand dead spacers. He swallowed at the lump in his throat. The waste of it all made him angry. All this so that Tan could have a slightly bigger throne. So he could feel his voice was slightly more important. Rene wanted very badly to scream, to break something and then his training kicked in and the analytical part of his mind took over. His pulse slowed gradually and he was able to think once more. End of Recording. The menu blinked back to the unopened files. He selected his own. To his surprise his father's face appeared. Alric Du Quentain looked considerably more careworn than Rene remembered. He was wearing fatigues in a grey on white Alpine Pattern. A glowing green timestamp dated the recording to a day after Solae had finally managed to use the PEA.

"Colonel," Alric began, his voice cold and without emotion.

"There has been an attempted coup on Capella," he declared without ceremony.

"The Empress is alive and safe for now but the enemy controls the orbital approaches until loyal Fleet units arrive to break the deadlock. Communications are uncertain as many of the PEA stations have been compromised. The enemy is sending out false orders to create confusion among the armed forces." Rene nodded, if the plotters couldn't stop the Empresses orders from getting through, they could at least flood the command net with false orders that would create enough confusion to delay a swift response.

"Your orders are to do what you can to keep the forces of the Traitor Alexis Tan from intervening in the wider conflict. We can prevent full scale civil war only if we can keep the enemy divided long enough to regain control. I am placing you in command of Captain Ap'Gwyn and her squadron, use them as you see fit but above all keep Duchess Falia safe. As long as Tan dosen't have her, he can't coordinate with his coconspirators." Alric's eyes flickered momentarily to something of screen and he turned and nodded decisively and said something that the microphone didn't pick up before turning back to the camera. There was a burn on the side of his fathers neck, something Rene recognized as a graze with a plasma weapon.

"I've attached what reliable intelligence I have for you to this communique," Alric continued. There was a long pause and for the first time in his life Rene thought he saw something like doubt or indecision in his fathers face.

"Renard I...," the older man began and then the moment passed.

"Good luck Colonel, Marshall Du Quentain Out." The pickup went dead. Rene sat for several seconds in silence, wondering what it was his father had hesitated over saying. Renard I love you. It might just as easily have been an instruction not to get bogged down fighting Gids but sense he might never know, Rene figured he might as well go with what he wished his father had been going to say. Almost reluctantly he dropped the cancelation field and stood up. Solae's eyes tracked over to him from her own conversation. He nodded his head in acknowledgement.

"Some matters have come up we should discuss your Grace," he said as diplomatically as he could manage.