Where did it all go wrong?

  Sigemar ‘The Tower’ Volff couldn’t curb the questions tumbling through his head. Had he not been strong enough, smart enough, careful enough? After everything he’d fought for, suffered for—how did it come to this?

  Thirty years ago he was nothing: a nameless mercenary, bitter, alone. Violence was his being. His fate seemed inescapable—an unmarked grave in a forgotten field. But then he was saved. The Expeditioners Union found him, freed him from his anger, made him one of their own without question. He saw the riches of life, of kinship, and he paid it forward. With coin and with blood he paid. He struggled, he climbed, and in time he was a new man. Now he was a captain, a company owner, a leader. He had a ship, a crew of his own: good people, thirteen strong, sharp and skilled and loyal to a fault. They were his friends, his family. He would do anything for them. He would die for them. He would kill for them.

  Where did it all go wrong?

  It started so small—a pirate attack, a pricey repair. But events tumbled like so many dominoes: a reliable client passing onto the Dream, a bad harvest kicking up prices, the corporations seizing all the good sites for themselves. One by one they stacked, and soon Siegmar was left with little more than hope to get by. And then their one way out, a big job with a big payday, slipped between his fingers—cancelled, all because Verloren went and froze the docks—because one four-man team had the gall to steal from them.

  “Captain?” Fleeting words floated into Siegmar’s ears—obscured and muffled by his thoughts. He paid them no attention.

  Was he doing the right thing?

  It felt like he had no choice. If those Verloren blowhards were inviting the Expeditioners to tag along on their journey, then he had a responsibility to his team to join them. At his orders, they were heading north—same as some twenty other Union ships. They would link up with the Verloren armada east of Fort Schirm, and if the Angels were kind they would all get to share in the riches of the Dead City. This was his last chance. But with their supplies strained and the money gone, could they even make it? The lower decks had no idea of their troubles; Siegmar and his officers had foregone their own pay to keep things afloat, while the rest worked away, none the wiser. But he couldn’t keep it up forever. Soon, he’d be forced to do something drastic.

  “Captain Volff!” Naila called into his ear once more.

  Siegmar’s eyes fluttered. He sat upright in his captain’s chair, crashing back into the present. Looking around him, he took a second to orient himself. He gazed out over the bridge, over his officers, and the lifeless plains rolling underneath the wheels of the Lost Harmony.

  “Sorry,” said Siegmar, brushing back his thick, graying dreadlocks. “What were you saying?”

  His first officer approached his chair, her face buried in a thick stack of papers barely contained by a fraying clipboard. She flipped through the pages, skimming the report a second time.

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  “I crunched those numbers you wanted,” Naila said, habitually running her hand across her scars and the missing tip of her ear. “Yeah, looks like going down to a skeleton crew still wasn’t enough. At the rate we’re going we’ll be out of provisions before we even reach the staging grounds.”

  Siegmar hissed the air from his lungs. It was just as he’d feared.

  “We’ll have to start rationing,” he grumbled. “We can’t afford to get left behind.”

  Naila grimaced at the suggestion. “I just hope it’ll be enough.”

  Siegmar scowled. “Dez’s crew had to pull one stupid stunt, and now we all gotta go crawlin’ to the corps,” he rumbled, gripping the leather arm of his chair tightly with his massive, meaty fingers. He vented out a bitter breath. “This gods-damned voyage. Ama-Lasria had better be worth it.”

  “You’re tellin’ me. I’m gonna miss Reily’s seventh for this one,” Naila sighed, trying to stave off the guilt. She stared out at the passing landscape, her mind plainly drifting to her two young boys and her patient saint of a husband.

  Siegmar considered telling her she was once again being too hard on herself, but decided against it—she never listened anyway.

  “There’s also the Union election,” he added.

  The mere mention of the upcoming vote spun Naila’s eyeballs around in their sockets. “Gods, I can’t stand the thought of Kastillon suckin’ up to the corps for another term. What’s crazy to me is so many of the others don’t see a problem with it.” She scrunched her face as a thought entered her mind. “Say, you think he made this deal with Verloren specifically to get some of us outta town?”

  Siegmar huffed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that was part of it. I just hope Branich can sway enough folks on his own.”

  “Coming up on Greyspire,” announced Dieter from the driver’s seat at the front of the bridge. “We’ll be at the pass in a couple hours.”

  “Understood,” acknowledged Siegmar. He turned back towards his first officer. “Even if we ration, we need to come up with some scratch in order to restock at the Fort. Do we have any duplicate stores we can sell, or—”

  “Uh, Captain,” Dieter interrupted as the Lost Harmony rounded the hills. “I’m seeing a ship off the starboard bow. Looks like it might be one of ours.” He pointed towards a small, red landship parked in the clearing at the base of the cliffs, glinting in the afternoon sun.

  “One of ours?” Siegmar stood and marched over to the window, grabbing a pair of long-range binoculars as he went. “Who the hell would be out this way?” he asked aloud, raising the lenses to his eyes.

  Siegmar’s mouth fell open. Shimmering in the distance was a Ziedler Motors ship—very distinctly a Zuferra model—and he only knew one team that rode on that kind of landship.

  “…Well I’ll be damned…” he muttered loudly.

  Naila squinted out the window, shielding her eyes from the sun. “What? What is it?” she asked, unable to see the ship clearly.

  Siegmar lowered the binoculars, his eyes narrowing. “It’s the runaways.”

  “Ooh,” said Naila, breaking into a devilish chuckle. “Ooh-hoohoo—Whadya know about that…” She glanced over at her captain. “How much was that bounty again?”

  “Hmm…” Siegmar grunted pensively.

  Dieter slowed the ship and turned in his seat. “Orders, Captain?” he asked.

  Siegmar stared out towards the fugitive landship and the settlement above it. Somewhere up there was the crew of the Redland Runner, mucking about in Greyspire for some reason. Whatever they were up to, they had nowhere to run, and storming their position would be child’s play.

  Maybe, at long last, a stroke of luck had come his way.