The massive cargo bay doors of the Royal dirigible Vanguard IV groaned open with an ear-splitting high-pressure hiss, admitting a howling, bone-dry blast of white-hot desert air. Two thousand feet below the armored gondola, the jagged expanse of Sector 8 Rift Fringe stretched toward the horizon like the desiccated carcass of an ancient giant beast. The landscape was a nightmarish patchwork of blinding white salt flats, rust-red dark rock fissures. The crumbling, skeletal silhouettes of pre-Cataclysm heavy-duty towers half-buried beneath shifting radioactive dunes.
Arthur Vance stood at the edge of the deployment ramp. His gloved fingers gripped the heavy nylon guide straps of the overhead crane. The desert wind whipped the hem of his sand-camo combat duster against his boots. It carried the sharp, bitter-salt burn of skin-burning salts and the clear copper tang of high-thickness sky aether. Through his Monocle Taxonomy Loupe (Mk. IV), the sky was not the familiar pale quartz of Aethelgard. But a sickly, irradiated amber, laced with shifting magnetic auroras where the Rift boundary leaked raw cosmic heat wave into the lower troposphere.
Behind him in the shaking cargo bay, Toby Mallow stood white-knuckled beside Titus’s cargo harness. His flight goggles strapped was tight over his eyes. He grabbed their portable tracking data receiver like a lifeline. “Sky aether is reading sixty-five parts per million, Arthur! That’s Zone Three Rift Fringe! If a normal human breathes this air without a potassium iodide filter for six hours, their thyroid will swell up like a melon, and…
