Iron Vanguard

Into the Sovereign

Chapter 5 Into the Sovereign

The silence of the void was absolute, broken only by the sound of my own breathing echoing inside my helmet. I hauled myself along the mechanical tether, my gloved hands gripping the braided steel line as the massive, ruined hull of the Iron Sovereign loomed larger with every pull. Up close, the ancient carrier looked less like a ship and more like a floating mountain of jagged metal, its armor plating peeled back in great, rusted ribbons from explosions that had cooled half a century ago.

Behind me, Jaxx kicked off from the airlock of the Ares Prime, his heavy cybernetic frame moving with surprising grace across the line. His rifle was slung tightly across his back, the magnetized locking mechanism keeping it secure against his environment suit.

"Keep your eyes open, Peter," Lyra’s voice crackled through the short-range comms, accompanied by a heavy layer of static from the background radiation of the debris field. "I’m tracking your telemetry, but the closer you get to that carrier, the more the iron deposits are going to degrade our signal. If you lose comms, you're on your own."

"Understood, Lyra," I replied, my boots finally making contact with the buckled hull of the dead giant. I activated the magnetic clamps in my soles, a reassuring click vibrating through my shins as I locked onto the metal surface. "We’re entering through the primary breach over the secondary hangar bay. Jaxx, watch the edges. That metal is sharp enough to slice through an EV suit like paper."

"Copy that," Jaxx muttered, landing beside me with a dull thud that I felt through the deck plates rather than heard. "This place gives me the creeps. It feels like we’re walking into a graveyard."

"We are," I said.

We slipped through the jagged tear in the ship's skin, stepping into the pitch-black interior of the secondary hangar bay. I clicked on my shoulder-mounted floodlights, cutting two bright beams of white light through the darkness. The beams illuminated a frozen wasteland of ancient warfare. Shattered starfighters sat chained to the deck, their cockpits smashed and their wings snapped like twigs. Frozen drops of hydraulic fluid and shattered glass floated in the zero-gravity air, glinting like tiny diamonds in the glare of our lights.

We moved deeper into the ship, navigating through narrow maintenance corridors and past heavy blast doors that had been blown off their hinges. The structural integrity of the Iron Sovereign was worse than I had anticipated. Every few minutes, a low, groaning vibration would ripple through the metal beneath our feet—the sound of the ship’s skeleton shifting under the gravitational pull of the nearby asteroids.

"Engineering should be another three decks down," I said, consulting the holographic map projected on the inside of my visor. "The primary plasma distribution hub is located right below the main reactor room. If fortune favors us, the backup relay banks will still be intact."

"Fortune hasn't exactly been our co-pilot lately, Peter," Jaxx said, his optical eye clicking as he scanned the shadows ahead. "Hey, look at the bulkheads. Those aren't blast marks from plasma fire."

I paused, sweeping my light across the walls of the corridor. He was right. The metal plates were covered in deep, jagged gouges, long trenches torn into the reinforced titanium as if a massive, mechanical beast had clawed its way through the hall.

"Kinetic drills," I murmured, a cold knot forming in my stomach. "This wasn't done during the war. Someone boarded this ship after it was abandoned."

"Scavengers?" Jaxx asked, his hand drifting down to the grip of his rifle.

"Maybe. Or the automated defense systems Jaxx warned us about," I said, picking up the pace. "We need to get those relays and get out of here. Fast."

We reached the central elevator shaft, a yawning black chasm that dropped down into the bowels of the ship. With the power grid completely dead, the elevator car sat crumpled at the very bottom of the shaft. I hooked my line to a secure structural beam and slipped over the edge, sliding down into the darkness with Jaxx right behind me.

The air grew colder as we descended, the ambient temperature dropping well below freezing. When my boots finally touched the floor of the engineering deck, my floodlights caught a massive, vaulted chamber. In the center sat the main reactor, a towering sphere of lead and steel that once powered a crew of three thousand souls. Now, it was just a cold, hollow shell.

"There’s the distribution hub," Jaxx said, pointing his light toward a massive console bristling with thick, braided cables and heavy copper switches.

I approached the hub, pulling a portable plasma torch from my utility belt. The casing of the relay bank was old, covered in a thick layer of dust and frozen moisture, but beneath the grime, the heavy-duty alloy junctions looked intact. "Lyra, we found the hub. The relays are the old Model-Four configurations, but the core matrices look identical to the ones on the Ares Prime."

The radio hummed with heavy static before her voice cut through. "That’s... news, Peter. If you can get... three of them out... I can adapt the grid. Hurry... sensors are picking up... spike in..."

The radio cut out completely, dissolving into a wall of white noise.

"Lyra? Come in," I said, tapping the side of my helmet. Nothing. "The interference is too thick down here. Jaxx, give me a hand with this casing."

Jaxx stepped up, using his cybernetic arm to prize the heavy metal faceplate off the console while I used the plasma torch to cut through the ancient locking bolts. Sparks rained down in the zero-gravity environment, drifting away like dying embers. I reached into the smoking interior of the hub, carefully disconnecting the first massive alloy relay. It was heavy, a solid brick of superconductive material that would save our ship.

"That's one," I said, securing it in my salvage pack. "Two more to go."

As I leaned in to cut the second relay free, a sharp, metallic click echoed through the chamber. It didn't come from my torch, and it didn't come from Jaxx. It came from the shadows behind the reactor core.

Jaxx snapped his rifle up, his floodlight illuminating the darkness. "Peter, we’ve got movement."

Out from the shadows crawled a nightmare of ancient engineering. It was a quadrupedal defense drone, easily the size of a ground transport vehicle, its chassis built from heavy, unpainted iron plates. It had no face, only a single, rotating optical sensor that glowed with a sickly, yellow light. Its front limbs were tipped with massive kinetic drills—the very tools that had carved the trenches into the bulkheads upstairs.

The drone's optical sensor locked onto us, flashing an angry, vibrant red. A mechanical groan vibrated through the floor as its internal systems powered up after fifty years of sleep.

"I guess the security system just woke up," Jaxx growled, pulling the trigger on his rifle.

A bolt of blue plasma slammed into the drone's forward armor, scorching the iron but failing to pierce the thick plating. The machine roared, a high-pitched screech of metal on metal, and lunged forward across the zero-gravity chamber straight toward us.