“Are they gonna pick us up on the scanners?” Jace asked. The Luna Wrath’s own scanners were still recalibrating after the hyperspace jump, but the other starships travelling to the surface had arrived well before. Their scanners might be active.

  “Perhaps,” said Kinfild. “The better question is: will they do anything about it?”

  “If they’re Brakamen scavengers, they might,” Jace said.

  Lessa leaned out the side of her seat and stuck her head out into the cockpit. “Should I get on the guns? We can test out the new card Jace and I made?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Kinfild. “The Brakamen have starships from all over the galaxy, and they’ll be summoning sect members from all hundreds of different sectors. Even if they pick up on us, they won’t do anything about it. If we got through the torpedo net, that should be proof enough of our permission to be here.”

  “So they think,” Jace said. But it was sound logic.

  The small scavenger fleet began descending through the atmosphere of Ifskar. They headed toward an island that probably would’ve been about the size of England, but with massive swaths of tide-pool land along its coasts. As the planet spun, the island sank into the mild lighting of the evening boundary, and a few lit-up stilt cities shone to life along the coast.

  The stilt cities were vast complexes of wood and steel. When the Luna Wrath burst through a layer of clouds, only a few kilometers behind the scavenger fleet, they approached the largest stilt-city on the island. Its core was a mountain of steel and glass towers with rounded peaks, but overall, it was more like a fried egg—if the white was a vast expanse of cobbled-together wood and scrap houses with walkways between them.

  Neon signs shone in every alleyway and every crevice, and a swarm of repeller-cars hovered overhead, zipping from place-to-place. Smoke and smog turned yellow in the setting sun, before disappearing altogether as the sun dipped below the horizon.

  Waves sloshed over the beach. What had previously been a many-mile wide band of tidal pools and sandbars became deep ocean, with only a distant bar of coast in the distance.

  “Big tidal shift,” Jace remarked.

  “Big moon,” said Lessa, pointing to the southern horizon, where an orb of reddish-orange stone rose over the horizon. It wasn’t exactly the shade of the sun, nor as bright, but it was much bigger than the sun, and nearly occupied half the sky when it rose. It doused everything in a faint orange glow, like it was all torchlit.

  The scavenger fleet descended toward a large landing platform near the northern edge of the city. The frigate settled down on massive landing struts, and its weight shook the entire city. A boom rattled through the Luna Wrath’s cockpit glass as the frigate’s repellers shut off and its thrusters flared out. Its two smokestacks were enough to double the pollution over the city, and the cloud of ash turned the rest of its escort ships into glowing halos as they settled down around it.

  “I don’t suppose we can land there,” Jace muttered.

  “Not unless you want to explain to a bunch of angry scavengers why we took up valuable room on their landing platform,” said Kinfild.

  “There has to be another spaceport somewhere,” Lessa said. “This is a big city, and it clearly existed before the scavengers got here.”

  “But if we land at a civilian spaceport, the scavengers will be suspicious,” Jace warned. “If they’ve shut off the system, civilians shouldn’t be leaving or arriving.” He leaned forward in his seat. “Where would a freighter land? We’ll have to bluff our way in.”

  “If this was a mining planet, there would be a larger cargo port,” Kinfild explained. “I’d bet any money that the scavengers have taken it over.”

  “Not a great place to land either, then.”

  “Like you said,” Lessa chirped, “we’ll bluff our way in.”

  Jace leaned back in his seat and tried to think of a cover story. They’d need scavengers’ ponchos to truly blend in, and he kicked himself for not thinking to pick one up from Braka, when there’d been plenty of dead scavengers to grab ponchos from, but he’d been too busy running and trying to stay alive.

  “Kinfild,” Jace said, “you can’t go in with Crimson Table robes. I’ll go out first and investigate, see if I can steal some uniforms, and then we can come up with a plan.”

  The Luna Wrath approached the northern side of the city, and, near the frigate’s massive landing platform, approached a separate spaceport. It was a massive, stilt-suspended wharf with steel piers reaching out across the waves. Individual landing pads, each about the size of a light freighter like the Wrath, hung beneath each of the piers. Perfect for offloading mining debris and unprocessed ore into hopper ships, but not great for accommodating the Wrath’s tall tail fin or smokestack.

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  But it was just far enough away from the massive landing platform, and it was still at the edge of the city. They shouldn’t attract too much attention.

  The Wrath skimmed over the waves, then pulled up and settled down on one of the landing platforms, its tail fin nearly brushing the pier above. It just fit in.

  “What were they mining on a planet whose surface is mostly water?” Jace asked. “Must’ve been pretty valuable, ‘cause I doubt it’d have been easy.”

  “Not valuable enough for the Starrealm or anyone else to step in,” Kinfild said. “If it was critical to the war effort, no one would’ve let the scavengers take it over.”

  “Stoutsteel?” Jace asked.

  “Too important for starships,” said Kinfild.

  “Plus, you rarely find it in the ground like that,” Lessa said. “Back home, if we ever forged anything out of metal, we’d have to make the stoutsteel ourselves with Aes-infused char. It’s rare to find it in the ground.”

  “Probably some sort of luxury item, like Aes-infused depth-truffles or fossilized anachrondrites,” Kinfild muttered. He shut off the starship’s thrusters. “But now’s not the time. They’ll be sending ground crew to check on us soon, and without convincing scavenger garb, we’ll be in trouble.”

  Jace unbuckled his crash harness and jumped up, then hoisted up his Whistling Blade and backpack. “Be back in a flash. Hopefully not literally.” But, knowing hyperspace, he might actually end up flashing back onto the platform.

  He ran back through the starship and pulled a lever on the wall. The door folded outward with a hiss and clunked onto the landing platform. Keeping a hand on the hilt of his Whistling Blade, he stepped out onto the pad.

  It was still empty. The entire pad had no room for anyone to stand, really, save for a few feet on either side of the starship for him to walk around. He slipped around the Wrath’s bow, then ran to a ladder. It led up to the pier above.

  He climbed the ladder most of the way, then stopped just high enough that his head poked out above the walkway. The pier was entirely empty, except for a stack of crates and a worker kyborg with a broom, sweeping the walkway clean with broad brushstrokes.

  Jace hauled himself all the way up and swung his legs over, then ran down the pier until he reached the stack of crates, where he ducked down and hid. The kyborg didn’t mind him—it wasn’t temperamental like Aur-Six had been.

  Now that he had four Foundation Pillars, he could host four technique cards, but he only had three main combat cards. Still, he kept the node-draining card inside his pillars in case he needed it. The accumulator nodes were in his backpack, as well, and he could pick them out and drain them in an emergency.

  Nothing was on cooldown. If he needed, he could use both techniques, reset, then use both techniques again with the buff the reset card granted him. Deploying five cards in a row. Almost like he was a proper Wielder.

  He peered out around the side of the stack of crates. At the end of the pier was the enormous steel wharf, then the rest of the cargo port beyond. It was a complex of concrete and glass, with large doorways out onto each pier. Inside them were dark, vacant warehouses with unused repeller-carts of stone and dirt in them. Whatever they were mining here, it hadn’t been processed yet.

  Steady yellow light shone from within a bay two piers to the left, though. If there was anyone guarding the port, they’d be there.

  Jace ran along the pier, keeping his steps as soft as he could while moving quickly. A few clangs rang out across the spaceport, but the crashing waves of the rising tide were louder. They drowned his steps out.

  When he reached the main complex of the cargo port, he pressed his back against the wall, keeping out of view, then inched along the wharf toward the open cargo port door. The light spilled out in a stable, steady beam, and he didn’t dare step into it without a plan.

  But first, he stopped and observed.

  Leaning back, he caught slices of the scene within the warehouse. A cluster of five or six [Level 10 Scavengers] sat around a glowing heat-lamp, holding bowls of food and talking softly amongst themselves. It looked to be some sort of rice with steamed vegetables and braised meat shredded overtop. They ate with a pair of knives each, which was only effective when they used them like chopsticks.

  They were the closest to the entrance. Beyond them was a procession of [Level 4] or [Level 5] workers, who carried crates around. They wore plain beige overalls, and most had some state of facial hair growth, whether it was a beard or mustache. There were a few gray-skinned men, each a few heads taller than Jace, and a couple of skinny men with fox ears and bushy tails.

  A pair of scavengers oversaw them, snapping orders and commands. One was a regular [Level 11 Scavenger] but the other was a [Level 42 Aes Wielder – Soul-Circle Opening – Twelfth Stage].

  The Wielder was well-built, but he was young—he only looked about twenty, no older than Jace. He wore a teal poncho with rune-lines down its back, and he carried a Whistling Blade at his hip. His long brown black flowed down his back, and his skin was a shade of pale magenta.

  “Snap to it!” he clapped his hands at one of the lowly workers, and the force let off a shockwave that made Jace’s skin prickle from all the way back at the doorway. “We need these containers cleared out by the end of the week! Dungeon loot is coming up, and my father will have my head if we don’t have room to store it!”

  The workers hauled the boxes off to a shelf near the edge and stacked them up into an unmanageable heap.

  “Young Master Neikir…” a worker panted. “We’re working as fast as we can, but sir…with all due respect, we cannot move the entire fossilstock overnight.”

  “I don’t care if you have to dump them in the sea,” the Wielder snapped. “If they’re in the way, we can’t have them.”

  “If we dump them, we’ll lose an entire years’ worth of mining produce.” The worker put his box down, then wiped sweat off his brow and leaned against it, panting. “The entire city will lose out on a season’s worth of income…”

  “That’s not the Brakamen’s problem, now is it?” the Wielder—Neikir—snapped. “You’re not questioning the authority of the Brakamen sect heir, are you? Shall I call my father and tell him you’ve been misbehaving, or…perhaps I shall punish the lowly workers myself? No one would know.”

  “Sir…” The worker bowed his head submissively, then picked up his crate and continued working.

  Jace ducked back into cover and pressed his back against the wall.

  “Well,” he whispered to himself. “You found the uniforms.”