Chapter 8 - The Derelict

The Man pulled, and his spinner flywheel sang. He pulled harder, and the note rose an octave. He pulled, and leaned to the right as the shell rocked below him. He pulled nine times more, and the sum made twelve. He pulled, and counted the beetle-roots of She Crawled in Stars with Elder Bugs. He pulled, and curled back to the catch to pull again.

The Man felt the ache in his legs as they pressed the heel plate. He felt the ache in his arms as they drew back the oar to his chest. He felt the sharper ache of his lungs, unable to gather enough air in the recovery. He felt his empty stomach’s pangs.

The Man concentrated on the staticky radio voices.

Dano: “…not what I’ve said. But you can’t hate your way to happiness.”

Ma: “Dano, don’t mistake me. I agree entirely. But our listeners do not.”

Dano: “I know, Ma. I think we’re on the same side. I wouldn’t say our listeners are on the opposite side. I’m not sure how to put it…”

Nikon: “We were ‘misunderstood’. Eh? That fits.”

Ma: “Tears! Tears! Look at me; I’m misunderstood and lonely!”

Nikon, laughing: “Well, godship means being misunderstood.”

Ma: “And lonely.”

Nikon: “Right.”

Ma: “‘Misunderstood’ feels pitiful.”

Dano: “How about this; we’re ‘misinformed’ . Listen now listeners; we’re giving our two rings about war. But we’ve never fought. We don’t know all the… gritty details. We haven’t seen the eyes of a warrior lying against the gunwales, him having just beaten a Nakadanan servicer to death with a stunner. We don’t have that experience.”

Ma: “And we’re not condemning you.”

Dano: “Well, I think WE THINK the conflict itself is wrong.”

Ma: “Right. But Dano, the problem is that our Leeges listeners think we’re making individual judgments on soldiers.”

Dano: “No, no, no. No judgements on them. Most are conscripted, are they not?”

Ma: “Uhh, Nikon, can I get a question check? Telekles conscripts, but do the other kingdoms?”

Nikon: “Sure!”

Laughter Ma: “Thanks for the report.”

Dano: “My point was; lots of our seamen and warriors don’t choose to sail to Nakadana. They…”

The Man’s arms went suddenly slack. He curled toward the catch with a lax spine. When he pulled again, his spine did the work. His pull had little force. The flywheel rhythm dropped to a pitiful hum.

The Man let the oar go. It slithered from his grasp and slunk to the catch hole. The Man kept the sliding seat moving; stretching and bending his legs so that they didn’t go stiff. He bent forward and gasped for air. He swung his arms to relieve the muscular burn. The Phaen, sitting by the spinning room curtain, tilted its beak at The Man’s unusual pause.

The shell rocked again to the side. The Man gripped the seat and stopped himself from falling. He was still getting accustomed to the wilder motion. The Wind wasn’t even strong tonight, but without its ballast the shell swung in all but the faintest zephyr.

The constant side-to-side was just another discomfort. The Man struggled with new ones now. The blisters on his burned hands had vanished, replaced by body-wide muscle pain. Worse yet was the lack of energy. Last evening The Man had pulled only seven hours. He’d rolled only a hundred kilometers. Tonight was half over; The Man hadn’t gone fifty.

The Man had fuel enough for the shell, that wasn’t the problem. The Engi provided a near endless supply of burnable material. Plants swelled along its icy banks.

The Man had managed to spear a Staegon too, two days ago. Last night he’d bagged a larger, vicious Rhok. These birds gave him a fresh supply of feathers - for burning or insulating - and a steady supply of meat.

But The Man’s stomach wanted no meat. No matter that The Man had devoured a leg of Rhok before spinning; his stomach rumbled all the same. His stomach wanted carbohydrates: sugar, fruit, grains. Of grain stew he’d long run out, and the last empty jar of birdworms lay somewhere in the sea, far below and days behind. The Man now ate only the crudest kind of food.

And he’d used all his vitamin tablets.

The Man rested at the catch. He crossed his arms, set his elbows atop his knees, and breathed deep. Sweat fell from his beard and forehead in fat drops onto the spinner rail. The air inside the shell was warm - the furnace growled the vents - but The Man’s soaked silk lay cold against his spine.

The Man looked to the window. He plucked a texel-cloth rag from the loose floor feathers and wiped frosty condensation from the glass.

After crossing the barren glass of the frontier for tenday after tenday, the view of the Engi still distracted The Man with its variety. Every long look through the window presented new plant or geography. Last night, The Man had watched a wide sheet of pure blue ice slide past his window - a surface like that of a lake, but vertical, and covered in small plants which curved toward his window like rib bones. Earlier this evening, he’d seen a frosty slope patterned by emerald auroral ribbons.

The frozen ice and dirt had receded now to a hundred meters’ distance. Long, scraggly strands of deeper black spotted the slope. Those were seaweed-shaped plants called Wodga. They were uncommon on the frontier, but flourished on the Engi.

Between The Man and the packed ice, the sky lay wide and clear. The striation ran in a shallow S-shape along this star-spackled lake. The Man followed the metal S-curve. His eyes moved languorously along its path. Each passing second, a different star twinkled upon his pupils.

The Man bristled and stiffened. He sat up. Ignoring the cold on his hand, he wiped the window with a bare palm. He leaned and stared at a point in the distance.

Half a kilometer away the striation left the lake. It ran into a narrow river of clear sky, with shallow banks of pack ice sloping gradually on either side.

Between the banks, at the mouth of the river, there seemed to be a box lying over the track. With his bare eyes and at that distance, The Man could just distinguish its dark shape from the background of space. It looked, however, like a large cuboid - straight lines and angular edges forming a perfect shape.

And on the glass sky, the Wind carved no straight, angular, perfect shapes.

Nikon: “In reality, we’re all grieved by the sinking of the Onides’ Labor.”

Ma: “Obviously yes. So that all of our listeners are clear; we don’t speak easily about spinners and warriors lost.”

Dano: “Mostly I think we’re angry. None of us wanted our swift ships to fall to Nakadanan Puncturers.”

Nikon: “Right.”

Dano: “I think all of us plan on donating to our Stellars after the broadcast.”

Nikon: “Yep.”

Ma: “Yes, same. Donations for the slain, or the drowned. Or even those still alive, facing the Justicers of Nakadanan law.”

Dano: “I had pushed that thought away. It’s so unnecessary that all…”

The Man twisted the antenna wheel, and static replaced the chatter. The Phaen raised its head from its pile of rope. It crooned in protest.

The Man walked back across his study to the broad window. The Phaen crooned louder, but a growl from The Man shut its beak.

In the silence, The Man seemed to brood. He sank to his stiff wooden chair, facing the window, but with head bent and brow creased.

The Man snatched his binoculars again. He set the lenses on the box shape at the river mouth.

It was a multiship, no doubt. A sleek frigate by its narrow width. It dangled from the striation by a full set of eight tracks. All eight looked unbroken. No doubt the tracks were based upon triple-weave lastiwire cabling; standard track cable for any Leeges multiship made in the last century; meant to endure weights far greater than a four megagram frigate. It would take a mighty Wind even to nudge such a vessel. The Man doubted that even the Puga could knock such a ship against the glass, as it so easily had his refurbished shell. Like a sleek, metal railroad tie hovering just below the stars, there was hideous pioneering spirit in the multiship. It was an intricate, artificial craft. It hung defiant against the nature of the glass.

Not successfully defiant, The Man saw; not completely. Through his binoculars, The Man could see the frigate’s surface. A crust of blue and white covered the ordinary matte metal. It made the multiship glow in the starlight.

The oblong metal box and the tracks from which it hung were entirely coated in rime.

The Man could make out a contour beneath the crust. It was a loading door, he knew, on the end of the multiship facing The Man’s shell.

The Man lowered the binoculars. He leaned back in the chair. Frozen tracks meant The Man couldn’t simply slide over the frigate’s roof. Had they been in order, the crew of that vessel could have decoupled their tracks, two or three at a time, and let his shell roll past above them.

The Man had thought himself the first explorer in this Engi. He’d expected no men or multiships when entering this wild sky.

He still expected no men. The coat of ice on the multiship not only formed a barrier between The Man and whatever lay beyond, but boded ill for the state of the crew.

The Man had already engaged the braking system on his tracks. His shell hung motionless from the striation, and The Man brooded within it. He stared at the multiship’s distant, frozen figure. His own vessel swayed beneath his chair. The static of the radio filled his ears. He heard The Phaen stirring anxiously at his back.

But, brooding was not The Man’s way. He stood and hooked the binocular strap on a drawer knob of his desk.

The Man figured he should drive up to the multiship door. He would knock. Just in case.

Before setting out, The Man gave the radio wheel a quick turn. The voices came in again - garbled, but clear enough to satisfy the Phaen. It laid its bone colored beak upon the coils of rope and closed its vertical blue eyes.

The Man knocked on the loading bay door. He leaned out from his shell’s ovoid tip, with a length of taut rope between his waist and a pole of the Wind sail. The Man brought up the butt of his coilspear. He banged it three times more on the ice covering the door.

A crack spiderwebbed through the ice. The Man stepped carefully back across the slick shell roof, retreating to the Wind sail. The ice held, the crack stopped.

The Man raised his coilspear to fire, when the sheet suddenly collapsed. The ice exploded off the door and fell in a fragment rain. It bombarded the nose of his shell. The door appeared to have been left unbolted, for it fell open with the broken ice. The flat sheet of metal swung down by the hinges at its base. Its top edge struck the shell surface, hitting just above the curving study window. The door blow produced a sound like a metal barrel dropped to a stone courtyard. It reverberated through the shell and up The Man’s legs, making the feathers on his collar quiver.

The Man peered into the opening while he waited for the shell to stop swaying. His eyes were conditioned to the dark night sky, but the multiship hallway appeared as a black water well. The ambient starlight fell into the hall at an angle. It lit just the entrance - ice crusted metal walls and floor. Then the slanted light simply stopped, as though a velvet curtain hung over the inside.

The Man had brought a light. He slung his coilspear around to his back. He unclipped the crank lantern from his belt and gave the handle a few turns. Electric yellow light spilled from the lens. It burned away the velvet darkness shrouding the multiship corridor.

The Man saw now that this entry ran only a short way. It ended in a T-intersection. The square walls seemed somehow uncanny to The Man, himself accustomed to the shell’s curved corridors.

Off of the flat, square surfaces, the lantern light glimmered. Ice had stolen the heat from this frigate. It hung as enormous fangs from the ceiling. Along the walls it formed great struts. Across the floor - grated metal tiles, with black plates spaced every few meters - it formed one smooth, crystal surface.

When the shell had ceased swaying, The Man stepped cautiously forward onto the multiship hatch. It formed a drawbridge to the inside. As he entered the frozen corridor, the Wind buffeting his hood fell quiet.

The Man pulled his leather mask down with a mitt. The cold nipped at his nose. He breathed in. Even at the entrance the air held a stale taint.

“Hello?” The Man called into the hall. The icy walls stole his word in a fast-fading echo.

Cranking at his lantern and holding it forth, The Man stepped fully into the multiship. As he rounded the corner of the T-intersection, darkness folded in on all sides. His lantern carved a dull cone of yellow in the gloom.

The Man came around another sharp corner. His light fell on a wooden door, latched and frozen. The door stood ajar by a sliver. The Man tried pushing it further. The ice held it fixed. He slammed it with a shoulder, and the old wooden boards splintered under the blow.

With strikes from the butt of his coilspear The Man broke open a larger hole. Ice and wood fragments spilled onto the glassy floor. When the hole was wide enough, The Man stepped over the splintered remains.

He came onto an upper-area catwalk in a large room. He shone his lantern down over gearworks, pipes, levers and pistons. This was a multiship’s heart chamber. The catwalk on which The Man stood circled half the chamber. Two coal furnaces ran up through the walk on one of the metal walls. A stairwell led down to those furnaces, engines, and two other doors besides. On the other end of the catwalk, another doorway gave access to upper levels of the multiship.

All of these doors were opened. To The Man - accustomed to one corridor and few chambers - the paths ahead felt labyrinthine.

Arcing his light across the space, that man saw that everything, every piston and lever and surface, lay under ice. Ice crusted the grated catwalk to form one smooth, slick sheet of ground. Ice locked the machinery. The ubiquitous cold of the sky had stolen into this vessel long ago. The Man would find no crew here. They were gone. Or dead.

The Man descended to the lower level. He examined the controlling levers and buttons attached to the engines. He walked over to the two coal stoves which would have given life to the wreck. They were empty. The nearby coal supply was empty too.

The Man left the engine room. He passed through one of the frozen-open doors on the lower level. He tied the leather mask back over his face as he went; he wouldn’t need his voice in here. Silence and stillness were regulars in this space. The frigate held perfectly still underfoot, unlike the swaying shell. The constant voice of the Wind - a moan, a howl, piercing wails - shied from this place. Only the tiny whirring of his lantern crank and his cleated steps on the ice-metal floor broke the silence.

The Man found the multiship’s cargo bay. It was twice as large as The Man’s and dense with supplies. Ropes, boards, and steel support beams partitioned off the long, low room into compartments. All the supplies sat atop wooden pallets, except for the ballast-stone blocks. Arcing his lantern, The Man saw only small stacks of such blocks. The multiship needed very little ballast to hold it down. The iron and steel metals of man were heavier than shell metal.

Aside from ballast, The Man’s lantern glinted on crusted crates, boxes, and barrels. He stepped up to one and scraped the frost. Burned onto the wood were the words:

FRONTLINE SHP. CO.

From Hyllas, Leeges

Case No 67452

Silk

The Man searched around the space until he found a nailing hammer dangling from a rope on one of the support beams. He used the hammer to crack the ice and loosen the nails on the crate. Inside he found exactly what the words advertised; tightly folded and packed sheets of silk, fabric for mending and making. The Man took two folded sheets and set them by the exit.

The Man went from crate to crate and barrel to barrel. He examined the contents of each. When he found something useful, The Man took it. He found nails, screws, springs, pipes, and other spare parts for his furnace and spinner. He found an entire barrel full of grain stew in potato sacks. It was a hundred kilos of dried grain, at least. He found vitamin tablets too, and mango jerky, and jars of prunes. He found a reel of lastiwire. The Man found a set of curved wooden boards which he thought could be fashioned into a better seat for his spinner - one to cup him securely when the Wind blew. He found a long, open box marked as ‘Agastrophos’. It was the name of an old coilspear model. The box was empty.

When The Man had collected all the extra supplies he wanted and piled them at the door, he set out to explore the rest of the vessel.

The air seemed to turn fouler. It smelled of frozen ruin; not decomposition, but as if The Man were inhaling the last dry, chalky gasp of the vessel’s crew. Every time The Man exhaled, the smoke it produced in the cold air, escaping around his leather mask, seemed like recycled grave-breath.

The Man’s tread brought him to the galley. He cast his light forth once more. It fell over a long, rectangular room, lined in preparation tables and ovens. A multicandle ran along one wall. He tried lighting the source wick, but the oil had run out or frozen.

The Man rifled through each of the upper cabinet sets spaced throughout the room. The doors were iced shut, so he smashed them open with the nailing hammer. The cabinets held cooking- and silver-ware. Behind one smashed door with a keylock, The Man found a kettle and fine tea set, as well as two red-painted tin boxes full of sachets. He grabbed an empty potato sack from a nearby hook, beat it against the counter to break the frost, and stuffed the kettle, tea set, and tin boxes inside.

The Man left the galley. He’d still found no cause for the multiship’s state. The halls seemed simply to have been abandoned. The doors all lay open, for reasons The Man couldn’t guess. Bountiful supplies waited in the hold and the cupboards. True, the great coal-box in the engine room had been empty, but burnable wood was plentiful in the form of pallets and furniture.

For whatever reason, it seemed the crew had left their vessel to the ice. Now, as The Man stepped down another hall, each touch of his boot on the floor reverberated in the frozen metal, and made piles of frosty dust slip from the wall sconces.

Turning another sharp corner, The Man sent forth his yellow cone. The light ran down a long corridor. The whirring of the lantern echoed off of door-lined walls. These were officers’ quarters, The Man knew.

He stepped to the nearest door and broke its ice with his coilspear. Inside was a small private space, little more than a bunk and desk. On the wall was a painting, The Innerstar. It depicted a bright mushroom of light turning rivers, mountains, and fields to ash, under a sooty sky. The Man pulled his mitt off and touched the painting. He felt from the smooth surface that the image was a cheap reproduction on canvas, and it had no frame besides. The Man left the painting on the wall and exited the room.

The Man walked a little farther down the hall. His electric cone finally found the end. It showed the landing of a descending stairway. The Man guessed that would lead to the helm of the vessel.

But, between that end of the hall and the landing lay a sundered wall of barbwire. The tangled metal ropes sprawled over the floor. The Man stepped slowly closer. He ignored the other doors, as well as the wild impulse to draw his coilspear. He bent and freed one of the broken wires from floor ice. It looked as though the metal had stretched until it snapped, as though a weighty object had been pushed through the wire wall.

The Man had knelt upon one of the black floor tiles. The tile was glass, designed after shell metal, and meant to keep heat. It functioned as a warm place to stand when the multiship furnaces ran low. Only now they ran not at all, and the cold floor stole heat through The Man’s bent knee.

The Man stood. He stopped grinding the lantern. He listened. He heard only his own breath behind the leather mask.

The lantern began to dim. The Man resumed turning at the handle and stepped past the torn barbwire. As he turned down the stairs, each step cast an angle shadow upon the frosted step beneath. With each booted footfall, the frost atop these shelves fractured, and the cracking ice reverberated through the halls.

At the bottom of the stairs The Man turned a corner and entered a lower hall. To his right, a pair of wooden doors dangled from their hinges. Splintered wood lay frozen-over upon the floor.

The Man stepped past the broken door. He entered the multiship’s helm.

The Man found the room similar to his study in several ways. A great glass window dominated the opposite wall. Normally it gave a grand view of the frigate’s forward direction. Right now, the thick ice layering the outside left it nearly opaque; only a paltry sum of starlight shone through. There was no wheel for steering as existed on ships that plied the liquid seas. One wheel did perch on a metal control panel beside the door - for adjusting the radio antenna, The Man knew. Another panel on the opposite wall, with a vocal cone and a dozen switches, allowed an operator to issue orders for different rooms in the multiship.

Normally, the walls were lined in bookcases, upon which charts and logbooks would have been stored. Normally, rows of desks and chairs faced the window. The captains, and their lieutenants, and the cartographers and navigators; they would look upon the sky, charting their course and documenting findings and weather patterns.

The bookcases, however, weren’t arrayed against the walls. They lay upon the floor. Most were splintered. The desks did not face the window. They lay on their sides. Their wood-brown tops faced the doorway in a broken semicircle.

Behind the barricade the dead men lay.

None still bore an ounce of flesh. They were skeletons wrapped in the fragments of their clothes. Though the bones of many were scattered across the floor, The Man guessed there were a dozen men here. - for this multiship, a skeleton crew.

Among the bones lay the shelves’ scattered books. Among the bones also, lay weapons. The Man saw two hatchets, coilspears (Agastrophoses, the same from the crate in the hold), and beside one crumpled mass, the pointed spring-head and long black shaft of a bullet hammer.

In the far corner by the window, The Man saw another weapon too. It was a springflare; a long, ten kilogram, twenty-centimeter-wide tube, with a spring-lever launcher, and a leather strap for carrying. Five chemical bombs sat beside it in a neat stack.

The Man ground out a moment’s charge in his lantern before setting it on a wall hook nearby. He stepped over a cracked desktop and moved among the bones. Bending over one pile of remains and examining it beneath the ice, The Man saw that its clothes were shredded, as if in struggle. The femur bone was snapped in two. Other bones had been gnawed upon. The coilspears weren’t strung with connecting lines, The Man noticed. He saw one spent shaft embedded in the underside of a desk.

After checking the remains, The Man turned to the journals and notes. He freed one from the ice, but water and frost had ruined the text. The yellowed pages either crumpled to pieces when he turned them, or were blurred and unreadable. He’d find nothing in the books; nothing about the frontier, and nothing about the crew’s destruction. Clearly there had been a struggle, but over what? Mutiny? The bones were gnawed, but The Man had seen food in the hold.

The lantern began to dim. The Man walked over and plucked it from the wall hook.

While he cranked out a light, he pondered how to get past the derelict frigate. He could try breaking up bits of wood and lighting the stoves. Eventually he might get enough heat to start the engines. Multiships of Leeges design unusually had a way to automatically decouple their striation connectors via an electric signal.

The Man thought of the ice covering the ship; infesting every pore. This metal box had floated here for decades, maybe centuries. Even Leeges vessels weren’t built to last so long in the elements. The cold made every square centimeter of machinery brittle. Any tiny piece of that machinery might have snapped as it froze, or might expand too far if it were reheated.

Besides, The Man could think of faster ways to pass the obstacle.

The Man walked over to the springflare and removed its icy coat. He slung it over his shoulder. He very carefully broke the chemical bombs free, and stowed in the potato sack with his tea set. He then went and retrieved the bullet hammer as well. He was already sweating under this heavy load of gear, but he walked over to the spear embedded in the desk. He jerked it free and smacked it against the floor to break its ice crust.

The Man was tucking the shaft in the extra ammo-harness around his own coilspear barrel, when he noticed something on its tip. The lantern was fading again. He brought the yellow cone up so that it glinted off the spear head.

Scratched into the smooth metal was one jerky-lettered word.

Anka.

The Man brought the bullet hammer down in a third overhead arc. The weapon’s head struck the multiship track, right where it fed into the axle housing. The impact triggered the coiled spring inside the head to release; the pointed tip in the hidden barrel chamber stabbed forth. The double-tap strike sent a double-tap ripple through The Man’s arms.

This third blow produced the desired effect. The point ruptured the multiship’s track. With a shattering sound of breaking glass and a squealing sound of torn metal, the track snapped. The Man backed away as ice fell from the loop, but the sundered track remained hooked on the sky. The multiship rocked.

The Man looked across the flat, metal roof. This made four tracks broken. Now only the back four held the multiship from the sky. The ship had begun to dip at her bow.

The Man figured another broken track would cause the frigate to plummet. He’d taken a risk on breaking the fourth. He had tied himself to the sail post of his own shell, just in case. But The Man preferred not to climb his way back up (again) if he could avoid it.

The Man left the bullet of the hammer unwound. He slung the weapon by a rope over his shoulder. He stepped back across the long roof of the suspended frigate. When The Man reached the edge, where the back hatch formed a drawbridge with his shell, he lowered the hammer first. The Man laid flat on his stomach, backed slowly over the edge, and dropped on his boots to the bridge below.

The Man grabbed the bullet hammer and mounted the ramp and the curve of his shell. When he reached the sail post, The Man picked up the emergency harness rope. He re-tied both himself and the hammer tightly to the pole.

The Man turned for a final look at the multiship.

It seemed lesser now. The front four of its tracks hung limp from their connectors to the striation. Those tracks and their connectors would eventually fall from the striation without the frigate’s weight to keep them tight. The Man had only to set his shell rolling.

Yet it was the cracked ice on the door and roof, not the broken connectors, which lessened the multiship. The natural glass sky had overcome this artificial invader. The sky had taken all the artifice away. The ice had shaped the multiship into another heatless feature of the Engi.

Then The Man had come. He’d cracked the door and taken the things he wanted inside. He’d left the half-cracked remnant behind, like a half-butchered beast.

The Man had earlier stowed all his spoils in the shell, except for the potato sack and the springflare. These he’d tied to the sail. Now, he pulled the Springflare free.

The Man aimed at the ship with the launcher unloaded. He gave the weapon three test windings and triggers. He had to be sure the mechanisms inside weren’t damaged from their long wait in the cold dark.

Feeling that the weapon was in working order, The Man loaded one of his five bombs. He brought up the rectangular scope of marked glass. He lined up the weapon scope to account for the arc of the bomb. He took aim at the closest multiship track. He exhaled, and squeezed. The bomb surged from the barrel. A gasping, whistling sound trailed behind.

The chemical bomb struck the track at its housing. It was not a true ‘bomb’ as heroes and villains out of myth had wielded. The moment it impacted, a fountain of blue flame erupted around the site. The flame lit the night sky. It reflected off the multiship ice, The Man’s lacquered shell, and the hard-packed Engi. The Man shielded his eyes from the sudden glow.

For a moment, the blue flame moaned loud and bright. Then the metal creaked; the last pained gasp of a dying thing. The Man watched through shielded eyes.

With a sudden sharp crack, the fifth snapped. The frigate juddered. The entire icy coating on both the multiship and all its tracks fractured; it fell away like a lobster’s shed skin.

With a drawn-out creak, the other tracks gave at once. The lastiwire lines split and sprang, up and out. One line snapped toward The Man, and he fell back onto the sail pole. The breaking lines struck the glass sky in tonal notes that sang through the windy night.

The Man watched the frigate go down. It dropped harder and faster than any seagoing vessel. The vacuum of air it left filled with a huge gasp. He followed its bright, burning descent for a bit, but stopped his eyes short of looking down.

The dead frigate took its pyre with it. After some seconds, night returned. The Man waited until his eyes adjusted. When they did, the Engi had resumed its usual atmosphere. The Man was left in an un-gentle Wind, with the cold air seeping through his clothes, and the broken multiship tracks dangling ahead.

The Man picked up his gear and started toward the rungs.

Passed further through Engi. Plant growths (primarily: Aedra, Dorren, Wodga, Olktian Cacti) spread out, but still abundant. One new species; squat, round-petaled, succulent-like, with black petals; have named it Misenus (Misenii plural).

Encountered derelict Class II frigate, second half of night. Entire ship frozen. Small crew dead. Anka seems like cause. Unable to determine extent of Engi that the ship had scouted. Gathered following supplies: Two 100m-square bolts of silk; eight boxes assorted screws/nails/bolts (A1, A2, B5, B9, C17); 7 meters small pipe, 4 meters duct pipe; springs, 17, assorted sizes/lengths; spare Pelagos-model spinner casing, band, flywheel, and footplates; 3 jars of 40 vitamin tablets each; 100 kg dried grain stew, 5kg mango jerky, 6kg prunes; one 200m reel lastiwire; 1 curved trough-board, repurposed for spinner seat; roughly 20 days’ supply burnable wood (broken pallets); 1 spare spear, 1 bullet hammer, 1 springflare with 4 rounds (1 expended).

‘No striation branch’
‘One artifact, Human; estimated 100 years old’
‘35 day burnables; 10kg Staegon flesh (lean), 5kg Staegon flesh (fat), 100 kg grain stew, 5kg mango jerky, 6 kg prunes, 120 mineral tablets’
‘6hr spin; 100km approx dist’

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