“Sorry kid. That’s mercocite. Worth a pretty penny back in the Core, but you won’t find a buyer here, and you’ll be fleeced on the Rim.”

  “Why, what’s it do?” Heath looked down at their dungeon prize, nestled as it was on a black velvet tray. It had been late when they returned from their triumphant delve, but his first stop the next morning was the local appraiser.

  “It makes screens better. Higher resolution, impossible to break, better visualizations for non standard data packets. Every big ship in the Core has this stuff all over. But most of the pieces that get pulled out of dungeons end up in an Enchanter’s workshop. They can make a lot of great stuff out of one of these bad boys. A lot of visual Augments will use them as well. I’ve heard a few alchemists claim they can make a potion that embeds the effects directly into the eyes, but I’ve never met someone who drank one.”

  “All of that sounds useful.” Heath said hopefully. “Expensive.”

  “It is,” the appraiser agreed, scratching at a chest-length ginger beard. “But only if you have money to spend.”

  “What about using it?” Heath asked. “You said most people send it to an enchanter, but it can be useful for a ship, right?”

  “Sure. You’ll get more for it if you hold on for a while and find a good buyer though.”

  “Thanks for the help. What do I owe you?” Heath said. He appreciated the advice but he knew some things the appraiser didn’t. Like a ship that could grow the resources poured into her.

  “On the house. I get levels like you wouldn’t believe out here, with all the new stuff the combat crews pulled in. I’m not charging for rank-one dungeon loot.”

  After some more back and forth, Heath accepted the gift and left, already sending messages to the rest of his crew to meet back up for lunch.

  “Well? Are we going to be wealthy beyond our wildest dreams?” Copperfield asked, sitting down with a loaded tray. Lunch today was more experiments with local crops, bowls of rice and native beans, the purple flecks of foraged herbs speckled throughout the entire meal.

  “No one is wealthy beyond your wildest dreams,” Heath answered. “I’ll explain when everyone’s here.”

  It only took a few more minutes for the rest of the crew to gather up their own lunch and join Heath and Copperfield at the table. Emerald was staring into their bowl like they were facing down a dungeon beast. Which Heath suspected wasn’t too far off from reality when it came to the fronds that he had skipped in his own meal.

  “We have two options as I see it,” he began. “Option one: Hold onto the loot until we find a buyer, which we can’t rely on with our normal routes. Not terrible, but not great. Option two: we use it ourselves.”

  “Ooh. What does it do? Blasteroid could use a laser attachment.”

  “No. That’s not a name for a gun,” Copperfield said between mouthfuls.

  Heath ignored the well-worn argument. “Well, I guess there are a bunch of ways to make it into something cool, but for us, the best option would be to let the Loon absorb it. She could use it to make all of our stations easier to work with.”

  “Oh.” She would never complain out loud, but Jenny Mae was a big fan of adventure stories. That their reward after conquering the odds and reaching the pinnacle of rank one would be used to make their everyday tasks a little easier was probably a disappointment to the rancher-turned-Administrator.

  They all were a little let down, if slumped shoulders and carefully blank expressions were anything to go by. Which is why they were having this discussion at the mess hall and not the bridge.

  “But, the Loon is a special ship.” About as close as he could get to referencing just how special in mixed company. “I have no doubt it will be worth it.”

  “The Wandering Loon has seen us through a great deal, but has not yet reaped any of the rewards. As you once implied, it is honorable to give Loot to the member of the team that can make use of it.”

  Heath hadn’t expected any of the crew to really object, but Ekaterina’s argument went a long way to smoothing it over. After lunch, it was agreed, they would present the Loon with the spoils of their progress.

  ********

  “I am grateful beyond measure to have such a generous crew. I heartily accept. I must admit, when you first brought it on board, I felt the mercocite register in what I understand to be my Class instincts. Indicating that it could be of use. But I did not dare hope I might be able to absorb it myself.”

  “That’s great Loon. Does it need to go in the argo matrix?”

  “No, I don’t believe so, just let me…”

  The Loon’s voice faded as Heath felt something through their latent connection. A quivering of potential power.

  The mercocite melted.

  From where it sat on Heath’s console, the mana-saturated material appeared to dissolve into nothing. With his Captain’s class he could see the truth. Every viewscreen on the Loon, from the bridge, to the cargo bay, got a little nugget of power. Even better, he could tell that his gamble had paid off. The Loon was absorbing the material the same way Heath crystalized a new Skill. It would be able to grow.

  **********

  Heath took over manual controls as he brought the Loon in for a landing. Standard maneuvering without obstacles was well within her capabilities, more so now that the System was improving the Loon’s control, but Heath didn’t want to let his skills rust. The Loon had done a lot of soul-searching and determined that there wouldn’t be a day she was entirely self-sufficient. That was the promise of the bond between a Captain and a Ship, both needed each other to reach their full potential, and Heath was perfectly okay with that.

  He landed on their patch of purple grass with only a light thud. “Space flight test three, how’d we do Loon?”

  “The patch has integrated so fully, I can no longer tell where the seam is exactly. In fact, I believe that section of the hull is slightly stronger than the rest, based on tensile warp readings.”

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  “Emerald, what did you get?”

  “About the same. Smooth as silk.”

  “What about the engine Loon? We took it through its paces out there.”

  “Operating at peak efficiency Captain. Expected residual build up after such extreme maneuvering, but time, and an application of your Skill, will be sufficient attention.”

  “Great. One more test flight tomorrow and we can declare fully operational.”

  “What is there left to test?” Ekaterina asked from the weapons console. They had fired a few shots off into space but there wasn’t a whole lot for her to do on these exercises.

  “Well. I’d like to jump. There’s a gate three hours out, which is supposed to be mostly clear on the other side.”

  “I see.”

  “Wait,” Jenny Mae said. “Mostly clear?”

  “That’s right. A few drones have gone in and readings said the area around the gate should be okay. But no one has cleared the other side yet.”

  The bridge crew turned to look at him, while the faint sounds of Copperfield storing Betsy filtered through the silence. It was deserved. Heath had gone back and forth on the necessity for the final test flight. Especially when their only options were nearby and unexplored, or most of a week out to the far reaches of the system. He’d even argued with the Loon about whether or not she was ready. But he couldn’t pass up the chance.

  “We’re on the Edge,” Heath said in an attempt to explain. From Emerald’s nod, they understood his point, but the women on his crew were still looking at him like he had three heads.

  “The Edge,” he repeated. “Past civilization, where the Life Seeds are still active and terraforming, where the argo can change on a whim. We’ve been hanging out at the base, but we can’t leave without looking out there, can we?”

  Ekaterina wasn’t convinced but Jenny Mae was all in. A cultural thing, he guessed. Every kid on the Rim dreamed of being an explorer, seeing what was out past everything else. Just like kids in the Core probably dreamed of being Knights and Sorcerers, delving deep into the Firmament or the Kreshian Starfield.

  Months of travel, life or death combat. It had been a long road to get here, and as much as it scared him, Heath knew it was like delving. He had to try it while he was afraid, or it would forever become a higher and higher wall to climb over. And with as much trouble as his crew seemed to attract, it would be a long time before he made it back out here. By that point, Frontier System D4245 might be well on its way to a proper colony.

  The next day they left before breakfast, dooming the crew to energy sludge in place of a proper Chef-prepared meal. Ekaterina and Copperfield were loud in their dissent to the decision, but Heath was more philosophical about it. The sludge wasn’t that terrible and they needed to reacclimate before they set off.

  Soon. In his bones and in his Class, Heath could feel them reaching the end of their stop. They weren’t dungeon farmers, they weren’t pure explorers. They were spacers – mostly – and it was time to move on.

  “All crew prepare for jump in five, four, three, two, one.”

  The dampeners were fully, blessedly operational. Not that he expected different but he would never take it for granted again when their trip through the tear in space was so smooth he could barely feel it as they slipped out of one star system and into another.

  “View screen, please.”

  The perfect sheet of thin crystal winked on. The effects of the merocite were small, but noticeable. In the level of detail and vibrancy of the colors, it was almost like seeing with his own eyes, just from a distance far greater than he could achieve on his own.

  “Oh,” came Jenny Mae’s soft voice.

  “It’s…” Ekaterina started to speak before trailing off at the sight.

  Copperfield didn’t bother saying anything, just sprinted towards the cargo hold and Betsy. Heath thought about following and grabbing a vac suit of his own. Not acceptable for a Captain in an unsubjugated system, but he was seriously considering an exception to standard operating procedure.

  “Not bad at all, kid.” Depressed Emerald. Cynical Emerald. Emerald of the thousand sighs. Even they sounded thrilled with what the Loon was showing on screen.

  There were no planets. But plenty of systems had no planets, or planets that weren’t worth the effort to terraform until imperial populations demanded space. Despite the lack, this unnamed system was far from empty.

  Gargantuan reefs of coral curved around the star in arcs of magenta, violet, electric blue, and sunshine yellow. Some were locked in orbit, the areas facing the nearby star glittering with mana barriers, reflecting the light through and around to the darker edges, where deep caverns of shadow lingered. Most of the cracks and crevices were large enough for the Loon to fly through without a care in the world.

  A few of the megacolonies looked too fragile to withstand the kinds of forces at play, but the delicate webs of red stood strong as the reef they were attached to rotated like a windmill. Heath realized that was exactly what it was, only it was aetherized argo being caught instead of wind, the colonies using energy to add mana to the protective clouds.

  The structures themselves would have been enough to make the trip worthwhile, but they were only the beginning.

  An eel the size of a train slithered out from a dark hole. Heath would have missed it, the rocky exterior scales a perfect camouflage, if not for the Loon gently highlighting the movement on the display. One heartbeat it gently undulated through space, the next, it flashed forward, cracking down on a nearby organism Heath was mentally labeling ‘crab’. The building-sized crawler had the claws of a crustacean, and a dozen pairs of eye stalks waving on its back. None of which saved it from the predator.

  They kept watching. Not all the fauna was large enough to see on their screen, but what he saw was right out of a fantasy vid. Creatures that could exist on aetherized argo, and the mana it generated, were common. The Trellis was a notorious example. But this was beyond anything he had seen or heard of.

  Heath had gone to school. He knew how the Life Seeds worked in theory. Carrying the catalyst for life-supporting terraforming out into the wide reaches of space. Most simply continued on forever, momentum carrying them into out into the void, never to be recovered. A few would impact a planet, tweaking things to make them useful and safe. Rarely, a handful of times a generation or so, a Life Seed would strike a dungeon.

  That had to be what happened here. The ecosystem was too complex, too utterly impossible to be anything else.

  For the first time in a long while, Heath remembered why he wanted to be a Spacer in the first place. Not running after levels so that they could fight off anyone who attacked. Not to keep from getting taken advantage of from the higher ranks. Not to pull more wealth out of dungeons they passed by.

  This was the pure joy of seeing something entirely, incredibly unique. “One day,” Heath announced into the hushed silence. “One day, we are coming back and I am going to add some of that coral to my dirt collection.”

  That broke the awed calm and let in the flood. None of them could stop talking about what they saw, pointing out new creatures or shiny fragments, or a million other things as they passed by the screen.

  “That, there!” It was the most animated Heath had seen Emerald in ages. He followed their pointing and saw what was so exciting.

  One of the shelves of coral was moving. Leaving the rest and striking out in a way gravity would never allow. Then his eyes and brain adjusted to what he was seeing. It was a turtle, or close enough. A city-sized turtle with a lambent shell encrusted with embedded coral pieces. And some other things, glittering and giving off plumes of smoke.

  “Let’s get closer!” Copperfield had made it outside, and was jumping around on the Loon’s hull and begging to get a chance to explore in person.

  “No way. Those are rank-three and -four animals. We are staying over here and watching,” Heath answered.

  He ignored the litany of protests and enjoyed the moment.

  An hour later, they had looked their fill from the relative safety next to the gate. Strapped in, the Loon counted them down and brought them back through to the relatively normal world of Frontier System D4245.

  “When we’re rank three, we have to come back and explore.” Jenny Mae was saying. She dove into a description of the route she had plotted based on what little they could see of one of the ‘planet-reefs’ as they had dubbed them.

  Heath listened along but didn’t interrupt. It was not normal for spacers to stay with the first crew they signed on with. Or any crew, as he’d been reminded by Raquel and the others. Definitely not normal to be talking about another 50-100 levels in the future and making plans. And there was nothing in the universe that would make Heath discourage it. They were his friends, his new burgeoning family. The crew of the Wandering Loon didn’t have to be normal.

  He turned to watch Ekaterina, their newest and most tenuous member. If she was uncomfortable with the discussion, she had the rare moment of grace not to say anything.

  When he went to sleep that night, Heath realized he hadn’t stopped smiling for hours.

  *********

  Heath stood in the entrance to the cargo bay, facing Jeremiah on the other side of the hatch.

  “Everything is secured and ready to go.”

  “Glad to hear it, kid. You have the manifests? Need to make sure the good stuff gets to the right people back in civilization.”

  “We do.”

  “Perfect. Smooth skies, kid.”

  When the guild leader reached out to shake Heath’s hand, a burst of mana came along with it. The energy sank into him and the ship surrounding him, filling Heath with a burning desire to set off into the next adventure. A blessing Skill, a good option for a classer tasked with wrangling explorers.

  With no more ado, Jeremiah turned and walked back to the center of town, the busy man’s strides eating the distance with a movement Skill Heath didn’t recognize. For his part, the Captain returned to the bridge.

  There he found his crew, ready and waiting.

  “Course?”

  “Plotted and ready to go! Shorter than the way out here too.”

  “Thank the Traveler. Scans?”

  “Normal.” Emerald turned to look at Heath with the faintest smile on their normally gloomy face.

  “Ship systems?”

  “All good,” Copperfield replied.

  “Weapons?”

  “Functional.”

  Heath leaned forward and grabbed the good luck charm, spinning it in his hands. “Take us out, Loon.”

  “Aye Captain. All crew prepare for departure. Time to atmosphere exit, ten minutes. Time to jump. Seven hours, twenty minutes.”

  And they were off.