2.  After Anna returns to the Builder's Forge, the captain orders it to fly directly to City 4's airport/spaceflight center over the objections of Friend Steele of Unit 73 who now is by himself with the rest of his team killed by hostile creatures, Steele gets told to back off since Unit 73 has gotten good people killed on one of their secret errands once again and the Forge 'isn't going to rush back home quietly to cover your mistakes!'.  Once they land, the captain and most of the officers leave with Friend Steele in custody to notify City 4 officials and radio Soulforge back on the Thief homeworld what has happened and why they have unexpectedly shown up there (the route mainly used in interplanetary travel by the mechanists is by Precursor gateways (similar to those you see on Stargate) or crude copies built by the Mechanists which use large amounts of energy-these gateways have enabled the Mechanists to bring large amounts of men and material to the 4th planet where they have built a huge steampunk/bladerunner type city. 

Left at the airport with the rest of the crew, Anna knows U73 is trying to get access to 'forbidden worlds' the Precursors cut off contact from in ancient times, leaving various samples of life in statis around the broken gates to show what to expect there.  She has conveniently 'forgotten' to tell Friend Steele about the crystal shard he was looking for, suspecting rightly it had something to do with U73's agenda.  Knowing the only way to stop U73's latest clandestine screw-up is to get a powerful high official on her side and expose the whole affair, she speaks to a number of other Mechanists asking 'innocent' questions about who is in charge and what City 4 is like-she finds out about the 'Old Man' the head of City 4's ruling synod with a reputation for hating Unit 73 and actively seeking to surpess any and all of U73 operations in the space program.  She also finds out that her old army unit she served with in the Battle of Murkbell is stationed in the City-that gives her a convenient excuse to get to City 4 by saying she just want's to "meet up with old friends."  

The Airport officer agrees to let her go visit the City since there had been no orders yet regarding what the Builder's Forge crew is to be up to while the officers are away-but before he gives her a pass-she has to run a series of errands for him since he is short handed at the moment- the tasks consist of doing various things, taking tools and parts to maintenance personnel, hauling Benny's drunk self from the bar to lockup, etc: in the process she gets outside and runs across some security guys loading troops and bots onto antigravity hovercraft, they have a brief conversation about their mission to go into the valley where the creatures are to finish off any survivors (apparently they are poorly adapted for the cold dry environment and would die off from cold and hunger soon-but there are science teams and workers scattered beyond the City walls doing various projects and they don't want anybody to get eaten).  She wishes them good luck and moves on.

Also at the end of her errands she meets up with an old friend, Friend Kevin who was stuck in hazard storage area-Anna's task was to get through some ventilation ducts to take a new keyboard for the big electric hatchways which had shorted out, trapping Kevin by himself in the storage area.  When she gets there Kevin begins working on the door and seeing they are alone in the section begins to express his concerns about various aspects of the Order's doctrines and claims that the scriptures they are taught as mechanists have been quietly rewritten over time (the new heads of the Mechanist Order do that to cover up how crazy Karras really was).  When Anna expresses doubts, he tells her to go to the big library at the Main Temple in City 4 when things settle down (a huge cathedral on another world with Eastern Orthodox chants, lots of neon lights and images of heroes and saints of the Order-at least that how it was going to be..)

Finishing her tasks she gets a pass to hop the electric train to City 4 which goes through several miles of red dunes and rocky hills under the open skies...



