The story
Sunder, as the Drift tells it.
The salvage desert. Sunder has two suns: a white one and a small red one the clans call the Debtor, because it follows the other everywhere. In the Ledger Wars, the cartels parked their dreadnoughts in Sunder's orbit. When the cartels went bankrupt, nobody paid for station-keeping, and the dreadnoughts came down one by one over years, each one as its orbit ran out. Their wrecks lie across the dunes like the bones of animals too big to have lived.
Who lives there. Scavenger clans live inside the wrecks and strip them plate by plate. They sail the dunes on wind-sailed sand-skiffs, and they talk between wrecks by heliograph, flashing mirrors from wreck to wreck in daylight. At night, caravans of armoured cargo-beasts cross the open sand between clans, loaded with salvage.
The post. The Spine is the relay welded to a fallen cruiser's spine. The flame is welded in bead onto the spine plating, and caravan drivers touch it for luck on the way past.
The keeper. Tamsin Rook is a young salvage-clan mechanic and the youngest Lamplighter in the Drift. When a post needs a part, Sunder probably has it somewhere in a wreck, and Tamsin knows which wreck. She is the reason half the posts still have working gear.
What lives there. Scrap lizards nest in the hull plating and sun themselves on hot metal. They scatter at a footstep and come back when it's gone.
