"Well, if they are hassling me its only a matter of time before they start hasling you, probably planned on coming over here after they were done with me," she pointed out. Obviously, they were done with everything now, unless the priests were better informed than Sabatine believed they were.

"Maybe Gorm will learn a lesson and let it go," she offered by way of an olive branch. Tiber snorted.

"Yeah and maybe I'll marry the Empress and move to Rome," he grumbled.

"You are too tall for her," Sabatine remarked off handedly, earning an arched eyebrow. Sabatine sipped her drink but didn't elaborate. She hadn't yet advanced as far as a plan but as he spoke an inkling of one began to grow in her mind.

"How many tools do you think you can fit into say... six cubic meters?" she asked.

The answer, it turned out, was a considerable number. Considerable enough that the grasshopper sport flier wallowed dangerously as Sabatine lowered it towards the coral atol. The flier was a twin turbofan model, poorly balanced for hauling gear the four hundred clicks from the mainland. She boosted power and nosed down to compensate, the fans throwing up a wall of lime dust. She vivffed the fan to carry them out of the dust and set down with a crunch. She popped the hatch, letting in the salty iodine tang of the sea.

"This is the place?" Tiber yelled. Sabatine made a guesture to the lagoon at the center of the atol. The water was a cool cerullean blue but there was a dark shadow at the center, barely visible. Sabatine jumped down, boots crunching into the coral. She walked to the edge of the water. It was perhaps twenty meters down, large and vaugley arrow head shaped. 

"A Vigilae 220 D assault shuttle," she told him, "lost during the Imperial pull out twenty years ago."

"Sabby..." Tiber began, "she is going to be a rusted bunch of bolts by now." 

"Assault gunboats are heavily sealed against atmo way worse than the bottom of a lagoon," she explained. There had been cases of them operating in ammonia rich atmospheres for months. She knew of at least one case where a gunboat had been excavated from beneath the sand after more than a decade and been airbone with little more than a tune up.

"Surface level electronics will be toast probably, but the bones will be good," she assured him.

"Which means that the two of us just have to raise it from the bottom of the ocean," Tiber said skeptically.

"Exactly!"