The ice didn't crack; it screamed.
The White Raven was no longer a ship; it was a silver bullet fired into the heart of the glacier. Its forward thermal-lance—a rotating cone of superheated tungsten—glowed cherry-red, vaporizing the ice in front of it instantly.
Inside the bridge, the sound was a continuous, teeth-rattling GRIND.
"Depth: Two miles," Isolde shouted over the roar of the drill. She stood at the helm, wrestling with the controls. "We're in the Deep Pack now. The ice here is harder than steel."
Julian stood at the front viewport. To anyone else, it was just a wall of swirling white steam and darkness. To him, it was a map of agony.
He kept his hand on the glass. The Black-Iron ring was warm, reacting to the intense friction outside, but he pushed his senses past it.
"Left," Julian commanded, his voice flat. "Five degrees port. There's a pocket of liquid methane ahead. If we hit it, we explode."
Isolde didn't question him. She spun the wheel hard. The ship groaned, banking into the solid ice wall, carving a new tunnel.
"You're a handy sonar, Vane," Skid muttered from the engineering station, checking a pressure gauge that was dangerously high. "But if this hull breaches, we'll be crushed into ice cubes before we even drown."
"We won't breach," Julian said. "The Titan is close. I can feel the vibration."
It wasn't a heartbeat anymore. It was a tremor. A low, constant shivering that permeated the ice. The Titan wasn't just sleeping; it was freezing to death.
One Hour Later.
The grinding stopped. The thermal-lance spun down, hissing as it cooled.
"We're here," Isolde whispered. "Kill the lights."
The bridge went dark. Through the steam clearing in front of the viewport, a vast cavern appeared. It wasn't natural. It had been melted out of the ice by the radiant heat of the massive object occupying it.
The Left Leg of the Glacial Sovereign.
It was a pillar of white ceramic and silver plating, thick as a skyscraper, disappearing up into the darkness of the ice ceiling. It was covered in thick layers of frost, like a mountain that had been forgotten.
But it wasn't pristine.
Drilled into the Titan's shin-plate were massive rusted pipes. They pulsed with a sickly, neon-blue light, sucking the glowing "Frost-Aether" out of the machine and pumping it upward toward the prison.
"Look at that," Lyra breathed, stepping up to the glass. "They're bleeding it dry."
"It's an I.V. drip in reverse," Skid said, disgusted. "They're harvesting its blood to power their heaters."
"Suit up," Julian said, turning from the window. "We go out there. We find a data-port or a nerve cluster. And I wake it up."
The EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity)
The airlock hissed open. The cold that rushed in was absolute—absolute zero, or close enough to kill a man in minutes without protection.
They wore thermal-suits provided by Isolde's crew—thick, insulated leather with Aether-heated linings and rebreather masks. Julian's crystal hand glowed beneath his glove, a personal heater.
They rappelled down from the White Raven, landing on the uneven ice floor of the cavern.
Gravity here felt strange. Heavy. The mass of the Titan distorted the pull.
"Watch your step," Isolde warned, her voice crackling over the comms. She carried a heavy harpoon gun. "The heat from the Titan melts the ice, but the cold freezes it back instantly. It's slippery."
They crunched across the cavern floor toward the massive leg.
As they got closer, Julian saw the scale of the damage. The pipes drilled into the leg weren't just metal; they were barbed. They were designed to cause pain.
"Why?" Julian whispered.
"Pain keeps the adrenaline spiking," Skid said, scanning the pipes with her multi-tool. "Or whatever the machine equivalent is. High stress increases the energy output of the Aether."
Julian reached out and touched the Titan's armor.
COLD.
A wave of despair hit him. It wasn't his despair. It was the machine's. A centuries-long nightmare of being eaten alive by parasites.
Help me... Cold... So cold...
Julian gritted his teeth. "I hear you," he whispered.
He found a seam in the armor plating, near the ankle joint. It was welded shut with ice and rust.
"I need access to the internal network," Julian said. "Lyra, Skid, cover me. This is going to be loud."
He placed his crystal hand on the seam. He didn't use the ring dampener. He needed full power.
Open.
He sent a pulse of Heat. Not fire, but molecular agitation.
The ice flashed into steam. The rust flaked away. The metal groaned and popped.
CLANG.
A service hatch blew open, pressurized air venting out with a scream.
"We're in," Julian said.
Suddenly, a red light swept over them from above.
Movement Detected. Sector 4-Leg.
High up on the leg, clamped to the extraction pipes, small maintenance drones woke up. They looked like metal spiders with welding torches for eyes. Cryo-Spiders.
"We tripped the alarm!" Skid yelled.
"They're maintenance bots," Isolde racked the slide of her harpoon gun. "They fix leaks. And right now, we're the leak."
The spiders dropped from the pipes, landing on the ice with metallic skitters. Their torches ignited with blue flame.
"Get inside!" Lyra ordered, raising her rifle. "We'll hold them off!"
"No," Julian said. "We all go inside. We fight inside."
He grabbed the hatch rim and pulled himself into the Titan's leg. The others followed, tumbling into the dark, cramped crawlspace between the outer armor and the inner hydraulics.
Inside, it was a maze of freezing metal and humming cables.
"They're following us!" Isolde shouted, firing a harpoon back through the hatch. It skewered a spider, pinning it to the bulkhead.
"Let them come," Julian said, turning to face the darkness of the tunnel leading up the leg.
He looked at the cables running along the wall. They were pulsing with blue light—the stolen Aether being pumped up to the prison.
"We're not just going to wake it up," Julian said, his voice cold. "We're going to reverse the flow."
He grabbed a thick cable with his crystal hand.
"Upstairs," he pointed upward. "To the prison. We're going to turn their fuel source into a bomb."