Paid in Full

A miners' ferry has been boarded on the pit road by an armed bounty cutter—the Receipt, one of Odila Kray's ships. Six miners are being dragged across in chains while the cutter's mate reads off an old warrant, ignoring the ferry captain's shouts that their release papers are valid.

The six captives are freed miners from Camp Four led by an Ursine foreman named Osric Aldis. Their release papers are genuine—their arrest warrants expired three years ago. "A corrupt pit clerk sells Kray old warrants for pennies," Aldis explains. "She drags us back, and the mine intake pays by the head without checking dates." In irons on your deck, the cutter's mate confesses that Kray is careening her flagship in a coastal crystal grotto guarded by a second picket cutter.

Shadowing the Receipt leads you to the Pit Four intake platform—a cliffside timber dock with a holding cage, a pay desk, and a two-gun battery overhead. You watch the pit clerk pay Kray's crew by the head for the six chained miners without glancing at their release papers. Soon the Receipt will cast off to rejoin Kray.

Kray's grotto is a deep split in the crystal cliff glowing with blue light. Her flagship, the Paid in Full, rests inside for repairs while a picket cutter guards the entrance. Kray hails you with a booming voice before you even enter range: "Another bounty hunter! Listen well: I have forty warrants left and too few ships. Sail with me for a third of the profits—or take a purse heavier than the Guild's bounty right now and toss that poster overboard."

The entire settlement of Camp Four turns out to cheer as the six miners walk down your boarding ramp. An old tunnel scout sketches on your map with a piece of charcoal. "There's a back passage into Kray's grotto—a dry crystal fissure wide enough for a steady helm. Her picket ship only guards the main entrance."

With the cliff battery silenced and the Receipt fleeing north, the terrified pit clerk cowers under his desk. The six freed miners break open the cage and hand you the intake register: forty-three freed workers sold back into slavery by Odila Kray over two years, every single entry countersigned with the initials of the deputy governor.

The Paid in Full surrenders, her bow already sinking into the clouds. Odila Kray stands on her splintered quarterdeck, lowering an unfired pistol. "Your poster pays double for me alive, Captain, so you'd better get me off this sinking deck." Below her feet, trapped prisoners are hammering on the cargo hatch—and down the coast, a crowded miners' ferry is racing toward the grotto.

Kray pays in cash and smiles like a loan shark. "Now you're in my records too, Captain. I like knowing where my silver sleeps." Three miles down the coast, your lookout spots her picket cutter shadowing you from astern, logging your heading. A slaver who sells freed men won't hesitate to sell out a bribed captain.

At the Guild hall, Kray's wanted poster hangs right between two bounties she posted herself. The Guild agent signs for her like a crate of cargo. "Brought in alive—the masters will be pleased. A public trial looks much better than a nameboard." Even in chains, Kray calmly surveys the room, counting the exits.

The Guild agent inspects the gilded nameboard on his counter—PAID IN FULL, with a cannonball hole through the center. "The poster offered full pay alive, half for proof of death." He doesn't sound disappointed; a dead slaver can't testify about which officials bought her captives.

Half the miners aboard the Camp Four ferry have their own names recorded in Kray's slaver logs. Convening a makeshift court on the mining platform, they sentence Kray to work the Camp Four crystal seam at a fair wage until she has repaid all forty-three people she kidnapped. Then the miners offer you first pick of the salvage from her wrecked brig.