Sabatine swirled her own beer and took another pull. It was a potent brew, though she knew Tiber ruminations had more to do with the fact that he had seen a workshop he had sunk months into trashed. She thought of her fruit trees and her dam and washed the sour taste out of her mouth with the malty brew.

"I'm from Caledon," she said after a minute. "My ancestors came out from Rome three generations back and we have been their ever since." Caledon was a prosperous, if low tech world on the edge of settled space. Roman civilization coexisted uneasily with a barbarian people of earlier waves of settlement, known as the Pact, and with pirates and cut throats who made the sector their base for constant raiding. Sabatine had cut her teeth dropping assault teams onto pirate held worlds or asteroids.

"When Mercedes convinced old Grundark to march on Earth, we all pulled up stumps and went, three entire legions. Pact must have swarmed all over the place soon as we left. Three generations of work gone," she mused sourly, gazing out at her orchards. She wondered if the same thing were about to happen here in microcosm. Not for the first time she wondered if she should have just bowed her neck and paid, but that was foolish. Ketcharch Grom had systematically ground the people of the province into poverty, save for a few favorites who competed for his table scraps. 

"Maybe I'm just fighting because that is what I know," she continued, finishing the bottle in a long pull. "Which I suppose is as good a reason as any." She tossed the bottle overhand so that it bounced off a plastic partition and into a bin for washing and later reuse.

"You should rack out, I'll take first watch."

____________________

Morning came bright and early. Sabatine rose before dawn and went through her usual routine of watering plants, washing and packing Opal fruit and carefully adding lime to the soil to keep the alkalinity in balance. After a breakfast of nut bread and opal fruit preserve along with coffee imported from one of the Earth-likes at considerable expense, they lifted the assault boat and brought it down in the woods to the rear of the property, covering it as best the could with an old roll of cam film that was still in one of the storage lockers. The martime smell had faded significantly, but had been replaced with the tang of bleach to an unpleasant extent. The air filters badly needed replacement and Sabatine didn't dare run them out for the sake of getting rid of a bad smell and a slight stinging in the eyes. That task completed they hiked along the river to the damn, then up to the house.

"This isn't exactly subtle," Tiber said as they climbed onto the atv that had belonged to the now deceased goons. Tiber who, evidently, had experience driving such vehicles sat in the front while Sabatine sat behind him, obliged to grip his waist to avoid falling off as they bumped down the rough track she had cut to the local road. A couple of piles of gravel, taller than two men sat by the road, waiting to be spread across the dirt path as the first step to making it a bit more traversable. 

"I doubt we are going to do too much that is subtle today," Sabatine called over the wine of the electric engine as they joined the main road. This was a true Roman road, set into the ground and sealed with plasticizer. Despite being over sixty years old, the light traffic meant it looked almost new after the recent reigns.