Sabatine sucked in a breath as she pulled on the flight yoke and lifted them up and away from the burning wreckage. The blue of the sky seemed to drain away in whisps as they moved up out of the atmosphere. The old rush was still there, just like the first time when she had lifted out of Caledon after she was enlisted. At the time she had expected to be a line soldier, relatively few Caledon's had the aptitude for flying that the Evocatii looked for, a mark of the relatively low level of technology on that hardy frontier world as much as anything she had since discovered. Whatever their arcane tests had found she was glad of it flying, particularly super orbital flying, always thrilled her. 

"Breaking atmo," she reported, opening her mouth and exhaling. It sounded like a sigh of relief, but in reality it was a pilots precaution against sudden depressurization. Hardy or not, this boat had been at the bottom of the ocean for a decade and there was no telling if the seals would hold the air in once they were put to hard vacuum. At least if there was no air in your lung you could escape injury long enough to don a helmet. Fortunately, the seals held and she waggled the wings of the assault boat in the traditional test that all was well. Most of the lights on her control panel remained, green, though a few were amber and even red. Nothing vital, though some of the more advanced avionics was obviously toast. Salt water was hell on exterior sensors and it had been a minor miracle that the bullets and feed hoppers which had fed Tiber's guns had worked.

"Next stop," she declared, "anywhere but here."

For a moment she thought bitterly about her now destroyed orchard, then she flicked back the metal saftey cage and punched the jump button. Rainbow light exploded across the canopy as the little assault boat went supra-luminal, launching it into the Via Stellaris.