Yosef stood over the cryoberth, subvocalizing while fiddling with a beaded necklace of sorts. A theologian might have identified his occupation as praying, which is what it was, but unfortunately, he was the only one on board. They'd been in jump for half an hour now, and all of the emergencies have been dealt with. They were no longer leaking air, the ship's systems which took hits have been patched up enough to get them through the week, work mostly done by Sai Marte.

"How is Sanders?" the agent asked, striding into the common room.

"Frozen," Yosef replied, stowing the beads reluctantly. "He was still breathing when we put him on ice."

"Good. That means he'll probably keep until we hit Dostoevsky, provided the power doesn't fail."

"Wouldn't that also mean that we die?"

"Oh, yes. If power fails, the jump bubble collapses and we get eaten by jumpspace," the agent shrugged. "Hard to say what really happens when something goes wrong during jump. People just don't come back. The rare few who do just suffer catastrophic dislocation – the jump bubble doesn't actually fail during transit, but there are anomalies in the jump drive's function, which can be taken as a hint that you'd better start thinking what you're going to do when you come out two parsecs from the nearest star system and with no fuel for another jump."

"You sound like you speak from experience, mister Arthur," Yosef noted.

"I do indeed. I have had the complete lack of pleasure to misjump non-catastrophically once, and I hope never to repeat the experience."

"You've survived and became enriched by the experience, I expect. Speaking of survival. I've noticed that you neglected to bring a respirator when we the run of our lives back there on Caldos. Yet you didn't seem to hold your breath, or be otherwise negatively affected."

Arthur smiled. "I have many talents, and even more secrets," he said. "Anyway. The ship will keep, there's little reason to keep watch on the bridge until the expected jump exit nears. I'm going to catch a nap, because I haven't slept in thirty hours. Good night."

The imperial agent went off, briefly appraising the available staterooms before choosing the vacant one, and retiring.

"It's probably a lung implant, sir," said Sai Marte, exiting engineering. Her face was coated with grease, adding to the marks of abuse.

"Oh. That makes sense. Do you think he's otherwise enhanced?"

"Can't say, sir. I would need to perform a number of full-body scans to determine with reasonable certainty the complete list of modifications he may have."

"Well, let's not dwell on that." Yosef paused. "Do you think he's trustworthy, Ms. Marte?"

"I... I don't know, sir. He did break us out of prison."

"That is a considerable point in his favour, and will let me sleep at night, at least. I wish Kaarin didn't get shot. It's funny." Yosef chuckled softly. "I've known him for a week at best, and still would have liked his appraisal of our new friend."

"He is the Captain. He's the leader, sir," said Sai Marte.

"I guess he is that. Right now he's a popsicle, I'm afraid, and we'll have to deal without him. Think we can do that?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Good, good. Let's follow the agent's lead and get some shut-eye. I don't know about you, but I'll be well-pleased to sleep on something that wasn't designed to inflict discomfort while technically fitting the bare requirements to be a place of rest. Good night, Ms. Marte."

"Good night, sir."

ooo

"I've been meaning to ask, Mr. Arthur," preambled Yosef. "What is it that you think we are supposed to do now?"

The three of them were sitting in the common area, around breakfast. Shipboard meals tended to be prepackaged, ready-to-eat affairs prepared with the aid of a microwave cooker. The 'Imminent Misjump' was no exception in this regard, the meals the trio ate consisting of warmed-over nutrient paste, dry crackers and optionally stim, favored by Arthur and Yosef, or water, favored by Sai.

"Whatever you were supposed to do, obviously," the agent said. "You were sent to get aid for your government to stop a conquering warlord from turning the Sindalian main into his personal playground. I suggest you continue with that mission. Since we're going to Dostoevsky, you can ask the government there, and the Imperial forces stationed to protect the research base."

"It won't hurt, no. But I think you're also holding out on us."

"Me?" Arthur looked perfectly surprised and innocent.

"You're an Imperial agent who operated until recently in the heart of the Mycian empire, whose high echelons were apparently contacted by the Lord Admiral's forerunners – that's what I inferred from my interrogation. Too many specific questions, too many slipped details we ourselves did not know and therefore couldn't tell them. What do you know of him?"

The imperial agent stared at Yosef in silence for nearly a minute before he decided to reply.

"The Lord Admiral is the issue of the Duchess of Mora. That particular Imperial vassal realm is governed according to an enatic succession scheme – only females may inherit the duchy. Other titles are handed out as the Duchess sees fit, but substantially also follow a daughters-first line of inheritance. This is quite unusual, and only practiced in that region of space."

"Understood. Agnatic, I believe, is common, as are male-preference laws," said Yosef, showing some familiarity with matters of royal succession.

"Correct. So Peter of Mora, firstborn of Her Excellency the Duchess of Mora was set from birth to inherit nothing."

"But he wouldn't accept that, I assume," Yosef guessed.

"Also correct. The details of his early life are sketchy, due to the most recent Paliquean Miner Revolt, the third I believe. He got posted as an administrator there and worked his way up the management of ducal interests there. Sometime later, for reasons unclear, he left his family there and went off to be a spacer on a free trader's ship – this we have adequate records of. He completed a couple of tours, before going into the business himself, buying his mother's yacht and hiring a motley band of cutthroats, vagabonds and other criminals, in order to try his hand at getting rich quick."

"Piracy?" Sai took interest.

"Actually, no. That's one of the interesting parts. He apparently made a killing trading in the Trin and Glisten subsectors, radioactives and other rare elements. According to our records, he never once did anything remotely criminal during that time."

"It must have been quite a feat, with the crew you described him having," Yosef raised a couple of eyebrows.

"Assuming our data is accurate, not spotty and not doctored. In any case, this is where it gets interesting. The miner revolt blows up, and the miners issue a bounty on his head, since he's the duchess' son and also part of the corporate government they're rebelling against – a decent hostage to barter for getting out of the whole rebellion alive, as opposed to slaughtered by Imperial response."

"Did they catch him?"

"Oh, they tried. They tried hard. He destroyed seven ships on three separate occasions, and the bounty went up every time. Our regional representative marked him as a person of greater interest around that time. Lord Peter, upon learning what was happening, which was actually months after the incident that started the insurgency on Palique – you know, normal stuff, what with interstellar travel times – but he dropped everything and raced back home."

"Why would- oh! His family, yes, I can see why now."

"You're a quick learner. If circumstances were different, I might have offered you a job in the Intelligence service."

"No, thank you, I already have a calling, and a vocation. I would also rather stay out of being occupationally required to violate the laws of morality. You were saying that the Lord Admiral raced home to rescue his wife and children?"

"Indeed. Well, he got there, smashed his way in through the miner blockade and got his dependents off the world. I believe that at this time, he also swapped his ship to a prize he'd captured while defending himself from bounty hunters. Again, Paliquean records are almost non-existent of the event. He did hire some additional crew for the larger vessel, and allegedly went off to request aid from his mother at Mora. But..."

"But?"

"We lost track of him entirely there. It took him nine months to reach Mora."

"Mora is six parsecs away from Palique," said Sai, looking the information up on her datapad.

"Correct. He resurfaced on our radar nine months later, being inspected by customs at Jewell."

"Where is that, Ms. Marte?"

"Jewell is approximately thirty parsecs from Mora, spinward and coreward. It's on the Consulate border, sir."

"The marine who interrogated him got a story about a misjump from him. It seems vaguely likely, but it would make his particular anomalous leap the farthest is recorded history. He allegedly ended up deep in Zhodani territory and managed to return to Imperial space by hook or crook. Of course, this story was so fantastic that a more thorough check was done. Turned out he's taken in Imperial refugees on his way back, including a former researcher accused of treason and a known felon – both of whom misjumped into Consulate space; a likely story. The data is classified even for me – I don't have anything but the authenticity hashes – but somehow, he extracted leniency from the judge. They only got turned over to him and exiled from the planet."

"Treason against the Imperium merits a local exile?"

"Again, the details are on a need-to-know basis only. If I don't need to know, you sure as hell don't need to know. Anyways, the official information is that they've found some alien technology on board his ship, which was by then heavily modified. He said that they'd encountered an unidentified vessel in deep space, destroyed it, and pillaged it for parts. Lacking technical expertise, the inspection party let that slide."

"That would be the Ancient technology he is rumoured to have? What did he do next?"

"He made a series of quick jumps to Mora, to find the Duchess absent. On the way, he acquired a used two-thousand ton freighter. We believe it was in Rhylanor, but the erraticness of his behaviour made his moves hard to predict and track. He spent quite some time investigating and using his charms to find her location just rimward of Palique. You see, the Third Paliquean Miner Revolt was still ongoing. The miners used subterfuge to disable an Imperial cruiser sent to guard the planet and were slowly working their way through the subterranean habitats."

"It's a wonder these events don't penetrate the public awareness. I have never heard of Palique, or its revolts before now."

"It's a tiny, isolated, utterly insignificant local uprising, compared to the size of the Imperium. Apparently, the Lord Peter never gave up on his plan of crushing the rebellion for slights against him – we have a broadcast of his on record, captured via jump-lightspeed interception-"

"It's where you jump into the path of emissions travelling at lightspeed, picking them up long after the fact, sir," Sai explained to Yosef.

"-where he indignantly berates a rebel leader for setting the initial bounty on his head to such an insultingly low value – and the equally intolerable endangerment of his family. You have to understand, all this time, our records indicate that he's making a killing doing speculative trading, acquiring resources. By the time he's at Mora, he's loaded with cash, and turns the freighter he bought into a warship. He's upgrading himself, too. Medical records we've obtained have him enhanced with more bionics, cyberware and consumer- and military-grade augments than you can shake a stick at. We're not sure if he still thinks quite the way like a pure-strain human does, with all that junk in his brain."

Sai winced. Arthur ignored her.

"He goes to Palique again. And – guess what?"

"You lose track of him again?"

"Indeed. He resurfaces at Palique without having gone to where he is logged as going. Utterly demolishes the miner fleet, nukes their asteroid bases, and begins a campaign of methodical orbital bombardment until his mother arrives with Imperial reinforcements from Nexine."

"He didn't demand the rebels surrender?"

"He did. I believe the phrase he used was, verbatim, 'Surrender now and I'll only execute your leaders.' He only transmitted this once, demanded a reply, didn't get it, and began raining death at everything the remaining Paliquean forces indicated was in the hands of the rebels."

"Interesting fellow. So what happened after the Duchess relieved him?"

"We lack that information – blocked by the ducal services. Some of the dukes are ornery fellows, objecting to being spied upon and having their own intelligence agents. He's not quite done yet topping himself in terms of what one man can accomplish."

"As if he wasn't some kind of heroic adventurer, inspiration to all small-time independent ship captains all this time?"

"Exactly. Once again, we lose track of him. He turns up on the Imperial frontier just a couple of subsectors Spinward, but our information is fragmented, incomplete and contradictory here. The best we can determine, is that he conquered the independent world of Pagaton using a combination of subterfuge, superior technology and orbital control. From there, he went on to found a short-lived polity called the 'Pagaton March'. In short order, he conquers every system in the area that the Imperium doesn't claim in one way or another – precluding a good reason to intervene – and is only stopped when the Sword Worlders object to his one-man imperialism. He is defeated five years ago, and drops off the radar until about six months ago, in the Belgardian Sojurnate, heading rimward."

"Heading here."

"That's what I know about him," Arthur concluded. "Does this change your plans in any way?"

"Well, no, but it gives us an improved psychological profile that we did not have before," Yosef said. "We knew he's madly ambitious and possessed of incredible determination, but is short-tempered and cruelly inclined towards his enemies. He obviously cares about his family, though – whatever happened to them?"

"As far as my latest information is concerned, they are still on Mora. His eldest son would be about fifteen now, the daughter about twelve, and his youngest four. Since they're under the protection of the Duchess, we don't really have direct access to them."

"I hope not. What would you do? Kidnap them and hold them hostage against him?"

"Not a bad idea, priest!" Arthur smiled.

"I'm not giving you any ideas you didn't already have. I am resolved to stop this man, but to resort to evil in order to do so is out of the question. Victory is meaningless if achieved by treachery," Yosef asserted.

The agent stood up, finished with his meal some time ago in the telling.

"We're going to have to agree to disagree on that one. The point is moot. In the meantime, practice your speeches. You and I both want your purpose to succeed. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to have something I can rarely afford – a nap."

Yosef shook his head at the Imperial, who retired to his stateroom.

"Sir?"

"Something on your mind, Ms. Marte?"

"Yes, sir. Can the Captain be healed?"

Yosef opened his mouth, then closed it again. "Good question. People don't usually survive such wounds as he received," he said honestly. "We've got him on ice – God bless him for having that thing installed – so his metabolism is slowed down enough that he might be good until the end of our voyage, and we can turn him over to a hospital. I guess it depends how advanced the medical facilities on Dostoevsky are. If they're as good as the ones we have on Tyr... it's possible. But even healthy people not always survive being cryonically frozen and then thawed. If I were a betting man, I wouldn't bet on him. Luckily, I'm a man of the cloth, so I can instead pray for his life – which I encourage you to do also."

"Yes, sir! Understood, sir!"