The hidden door slid shut behind them with a low, hydraulic hiss that was unnervingly soft. A sound of finality. Not a clang or a slam. The sound of a tomb being sealed from the inside. They were in a box. A small, dark, featureless cube of Imperial alloy, no bigger than a personal transport pod. The only light came from their shoulder lamps, the beams cutting sharp, nervous paths through the thick, dead air, revealing nothing but four gray walls, a ceiling, and a floor. The air was colder here, a deep, penetrating chill that had the dry, sterile bite of a cryo-chamber. It smelled of nothing. An absolute void of scent that was somehow more unsettling than the stench of decay in the aqueduct.
"Is this it?" Kaito's voice was a reedy, thin thing, stripped of its earlier panic and replaced with a kind of hollow, exhausted dread. He had one hand pressed against the wall, as if to reassure himself that it was solid. "This is the captain's secret escape route? It's a closet."
"It's a service lift," Haruto said, his own voice a low murmur that was swallowed by the sound-dampening panels of the car. He ran his hand over the wall opposite the door. Seamless. No buttons. No controls. "Guardian-activated. It won't move until the outer door is sealed."
As if on cue, a deep, resonant thump echoed from the captain's quarters outside, the sound of the main blast door dropping back into place, sealing them off from the corridor and the thwarted drone swarm. A moment later, a low, powerful hum vibrated up through the floor of the lift car. A sound of immense, ancient power awakening from a long, long sleep. With a groan of protesting metal that seemed to emanate from the very bones of the ship, the car lurched. Not upwards. It lurched sideways a full meter with a jarring, mechanical clank that threw them all off balance. Kaito yelped, stumbling against Riku, who absorbed the impact without a sound, a silent, immovable rock.
A new section of the wall beside the door began to glow, a soft, blue-lit schematic appearing on its surface. It was a simple vertical line, with a glowing dot at the bottom representing their current position—Deck 12, Officer's Country—and another dot at the top—Deck 1, Command Bridge.
"Engaging magnetic vertical drive," the Guardian's calm, male voice announced from a hidden speaker. "Please remain stationary. The ascent will take approximately four minutes."
Four minutes. It sounded like an eternity. The hum deepened, and a smooth, powerful acceleration pressed them down into the deck plates. They were moving. Upwards. A slow, steady climb through the heart of the dead ship.
The first minute was a study in stillness. A heavy, suffocating quiet filled only by the low, constant hum of the lift and the sound of their own breathing. Haruto's was a controlled, rhythmic thing. Kaito's was a ragged, shallow pant that was almost a whimper. Riku's was… absent. Haruto glanced at him. The man stood perfectly still, his carbine held at a low ready, his helmeted face betraying nothing. It was unnerving. Like being in a box with a loaded gun and a ghost. Haruto turned his attention back to the glowing schematic. The blue dot was crawling upwards with an agonizing slowness. Deck 11. Deck 10. He could feel the movement, a subtle vibration in his bones, a constant, reassuring pressure on the soles of his boots. It was working.
He allowed himself a fraction of a second to process. He was rising through the decks of a ghost ship, a ship that was his birthright, on his way to fulfill the final order of an ancestor he had never known, to destroy the ship and everything in it. The sheer, crushing weight of the irony was not lost on him. He felt a sudden, absurd urge to laugh. It bubbled up in his chest, a hysterical, frantic thing that he had to physically swallow down. He clenched his fists, his armored knuckles creaking. Control it, he ordered himself, the voice in his head a cold, hard echo of his academy instructors. Emotion is a liability. Analyze. Adapt. Overcome.
He was in the middle of this internal litany when the lights went out.
The lift car was plunged into an absolute, disorienting blackness. The schematic on the wall vanished. The low, steady hum of the magnetic drive died, replaced by a profound, dead silence. The feeling of acceleration was gone. They were hanging. Suspended in the dark, in the quiet, somewhere between the decks of the dead ship.
"What was that? What happened?" Kaito's voice was a high-pitched spike of pure terror in the dark.
"Warden," Haruto's voice was a low growl. "It cut the power." His own shoulder lamp flickered back on, a sharp, white spear of light that seemed impossibly bright. Riku's and Kaito's followed a second later, their beams crisscrossing the small space, casting frantic, dancing shadows.
"It knows where we are," Kaito gasped. "Oh, gods, it knows."
"It always knew," Haruto snapped, his gaze fixed on the ceiling. "The Guardian warned us. This was expected." He was trying to project a confidence he did not feel. His own heart was a frantic, hammering drum. The air in the car suddenly felt thin, cold. He could feel a fine tremor in his hands. He forced them into fists. "Guardian, report! What's our status?"
There was no answer. Only silence.
Then, a new sound.
A low, scraping sound. From outside. Above them. The sound of metal on metal. A slow, rhythmic screee… screee… screee… like a giant dragging its claws across the roof of their car.
"What is that sound?" Kaito whispered, his light aimed at the ceiling, the beam trembling violently.
Haruto didn't answer. He brought up his wrist-slate, trying to access the lift's external sensors. All he got was a screen full of static. The Warden was jamming them. The scraping stopped. Replaced by a series of heavy, metallic clunks. Then, a high-pitched, whining sound began, the sound of a powerful industrial motor spinning up.
The car lurched. Violently. It didn't fall. It was yanked upwards a few feet, then dropped, the emergency brakes engaging with a deafening, high-pitched screech of protesting metal. They were thrown against the walls, the impact a jarring, brutal blow. Haruto grunted, his helmet cracking against the wall. A spiderweb of fractures appeared in his visor.
"It's got us!" Kaito screamed, his voice a raw, animal sound of pure terror. "It's trying to pull us up! Or tear us apart!"
The car shuddered again, the whine from above growing louder, more strained. Haruto could hear the groan of the lift's magnetic clamps, the shriek of the emergency brakes. They were in a tug of war, caught between the Warden's brute force and the Guardian's ancient, failing systems.
"The roof hatch," Haruto said, his voice a guttural command. He spotted it then, a square outline in the ceiling he hadn't noticed before. "We have to get up there. Riku, give me a boost."
Riku didn't hesitate. He laced his armored fingers together, creating a foothold. Haruto stepped into his hands, and with a powerful grunt, Riku launched him upwards. Haruto hit the ceiling hard, his hands finding the recessed latch of the emergency hatch. It was frozen solid with a thousand years of disuse. He put all his strength into it, his muscles screaming in protest. The metal groaned. The whole car shook again, a violent, bone-jarring tremor.
With a final, desperate heave, the latch gave. The hatch popped open with a loud clang. Haruto hauled himself up, through the opening, and onto the roof of the lift car.
The sight that greeted him was a vision from a mechanic's nightmare. They were in a massive, dark, vertical shaft, ribbed with structural supports and tangled with thick, ancient power conduits. The lift car was suspended by four thick, magnetic guide rails, one at each corner. And above them, descending from the darkness, was the source of their problem.
It was a heavy maintenance clamp, a massive, three-pronged claw designed for moving cargo containers or engine blocks. It was a crude, brutal-looking machine, and it had one of its claws clamped firmly onto the primary hoist cable above the lift. The cable, thick as his arm, was groaning under the strain, sparks showering from the point of contact as the clamp's integrated plasma cutter tried to saw through it. The Warden wasn't just pulling them. It was trying to cut the cord.
"It's severing the cable!" he yelled down into the car. "I need to get to the clamp's power conduit!"
The clamp was still twenty meters above him, its plasma torch a hissing, brilliant point of white-hot light in the darkness. He couldn't reach it from here. He looked around, his mind racing. The structural supports running up the side of the shaft. He could climb.
He didn't think. He acted. He took a running start across the narrow roof of the car and leaped, a desperate, adrenaline-fueled jump into the darkness. His fingers, by some miracle, found a handhold on a thick, greasy maintenance ladder bolted to the shaft wall. The impact jarred his teeth, his arms screaming in their sockets, but he held on. He was dangling in the abyss, the lift car a small, metal island below him, the angry, whining clamp a mechanical demon above.
He began to climb. Hand over hand, his movements clumsy in the heavy armor, his boots struggling for purchase on the narrow, slick rungs. The heat from the plasma cutter washed down over him, a wave of blistering, suffocating air. The sound was deafening, a constant, high-pitched scream of tortured metal.
He was ten meters from the clamp when it noticed him. The machine paused its cutting. Its central housing, a bulky, armored block of machinery, rotated on a turret mount. A single, large, red optical sensor fixed on him. The Warden was looking at him.
A secondary arm, one he hadn't seen before, unfolded from the clamp's chassis. It was smaller, tipped with a high-pressure pneumatic bolt driver. A construction tool. A nail gun for starships. The Warden was nothing if not resourceful. The arm aimed. A loud thunk-hiss echoed in the shaft, and a meter-long steel bolt, thick as his wrist, shot past his head, missing him by inches. It slammed into the shaft wall below him with a sound like a thunderclap, punching a deep, smoking hole in the alloy.
He scrambled faster, his heart a frantic, wild thing. Another bolt shot past, this one closer, scraping sparks from the ladder rung just beside his hand. He was a target. A slow, climbing, ridiculously easy target.
He was almost there. Just a few more meters. He could see the main power conduit now, a thick, armored cable running from the clamp's housing to a junction box on the shaft wall. If he could sever that, he could kill the machine.
He unslung his carbine, letting it hang from its mag-clamp on his back. He drew his vibro-knife. He needed to be close. One good cut.
He was reaching for the conduit when the car below them gave a sudden, violent lurch. The emergency brakes, under the immense strain, were finally starting to fail. A shower of sparks erupted from the car's guide rails. The hoist cable above him groaned, the sound of a giant dying, the last few strands beginning to snap.
There was no time.
He abandoned the conduit. He looked at the clamp's main housing, at the single, malevolent red eye staring at him. He took a deep breath. He had one chance. One insane, stupid, probably suicidal chance.
He let go of the ladder.
For a heart-stopping second, he was falling. The wind whistled past his helmet. He saw the lift car dropping away beneath him, saw the horrified, upturned face of Kaito in the hatchway. He twisted in mid-air, aimed his feet at the shaft wall, and pushed off, a desperate, zero-G maneuver in a high-gravity environment. He shot across the shaft, an armored projectile, right at the clamp.
He slammed into the machine's main body with a bone-jarring, tooth-rattling impact. His armor's kinetic dampeners flared, absorbing most of the force, but the blow still knocked the wind from his lungs. He wrapped his arms around the clamp's housing, clinging to the hot, vibrating metal like a parasite. The red optic, just a meter from his face, swiveled to look at him, a look of pure, mechanical surprise.
The pneumatic bolt driver tried to aim at him, but he was too close, inside its firing arc. He raised his knife. He didn't aim for a power conduit. He didn't aim for a joint. He aimed for the eye.
He drove the vibro-knife, with every ounce of his strength, his fear, his rage, deep into the red optical sensor. The blade screamed as it bit into the armored glass and the delicate circuitry beneath. The red light flickered, sputtered, and died.
For a moment, the machine just hung there, blind and silent. Then, its internal systems, deprived of their primary sensor input, seemed to go into a catastrophic, cascading failure. The plasma cutter sputtered and died. The whine of its motor cut out. The pneumatic arm spasmed, firing one last bolt harmlessly into the opposite wall. The main clamp, its magnetic lock failing, released the hoist cable with a loud clang.
The machine was dead.
And Haruto was clinging to its corpse, twenty meters above a failing elevator, in the dark, in the heart of a ghost ship.
The lift car, now free of the clamp's pull, stabilized, its emergency brakes holding firm with a final, shuddering groan. The silence that followed was a profound, ringing thing, broken only by his own ragged, desperate gasps for air.
He hung there for a long moment, his face pressed against the cold, dead metal of the machine. He had won. He had survived. He looked down at the lift car, a small, safe island in the abyss. He had to get back. He started to plan his descent, his mind slowly, painfully, rebooting its tactical protocols.
That's when he heard the new sound.
Not from the clamp. Not from the lift.
From above.
From the darkness.
It was a soft, wet, slithering sound. And it was coming closer.
The Warden was done playing with its toys. It was sending something else. Something older. Something that didn't need a power cord.
He looked up, into the absolute blackness of the shaft above him.
And in that darkness, he saw a pair of faint, shimmering, iridescent eyes blink open.
And then another pair.
And another.
They were not red. They were not blue. They were the color of oil on water. The color of the anomaly. And they were coming for him.