The dock slept in sections never all at once. Sodium lights flickered along the waterline, painting the harbor in sickly amber and black.
Cargo cranes stood frozen like gallows. Farther out, half-swallowed by mist, the battleship loomed. It was officially decommissioned. Officially empty of crowd.
It wasn't at all.
From a rented skiff rocking beyond the restricted buoy line, a reporter steadied herself against the cold.
Her camera drone hovered low, optics strained, unable to pierce the ship's shadow. She spoke anyway, voice tight, practiced for years.
"—confirming now. The vessel is the Battleship of the North Werpol Cargo. Naval registry still lists it as mothballed but sources say it's been secretly commandeered by a rogue admiral believed missing for over a year."
"The forward magazine and helicopter hangar," she continued, "have allegedly been converted into an industrial-scale narcotics facility. Methamphetamine and a fentanyl. It is a illegal production on a level never seen afloat."
She glanced at her tablet, jaw set. "The ship's reactors are being used to power synthesis arrays. Desalination systems; normally reserved for crew survival are repurposed to generate chemical precursors. Entire supply chains, condensed into steel and armor. Cops also found documents and statement from people about them creating illegal products from human bones and flesh."
The drone caught a flicker. Light boomed briefly from a sealed vent before vanishing.
"Authorities believe the operation has been active for months," she said. "Distribution routes remain unknown but Lower Strato clinics have reported unprecedented spikes in synthetic opioid contamination."
Her breath fogged the air. "What makes this situation volatile is not just the scale but the isolation. A warship is built to endure sieges."
The camera shifted slightly, framing the ship's silhouette against the mist. It looked like a continent adrift, patient, amusing.
"There are unconfirmed reports" she said carefully, "that an Agent has already been deployed."
She paused, listening to something only she could hear.
"Just that they were inserted quietly, without authorization channels. Which suggests the situation is already beyond containment."
The reporter lowered her voice. "If that Agent fails to catch them… this ship doesn't just poison the city."
She looked upwards at the foggy sky,
"It becomes a weapon to cause numerous diseases and deaths."
....
Inside the Vanguard, scrubbers rerouted to favor production over people.
The helicopter hangar had become a cavern of steel platforms and jury-rigged machinery, vats glowing a sick blue beneath dangling work lights. Pipes snaked across the deck like exposed veins.
Admiral Ferguson stood above it all on a raised command dais, hands clasped behind his back. His uniform was immaculate, medals polished to a cruel shine.
He watched his empire function with the patience of a man certain the world had already lost.
Children sat pressed together behind a mesh barrier, silent, eyes too old for their faces. No one explained anything to them. That was part of the design. That was the humiliation they were facing for days nonstop.
Men who resisted were singled out. Forced to kneel. Made to scrub chemical spills with bare hands while crews laughed and placed bets on who would collapse first.
Ferguson leaned toward one of his lieutenants. "Order is a resource." he said calmly. "Scarcity makes it valuable but it also matters who is bearing it."
A woman stumbled under the weight of a crate meant for two people. A guard shoved her upright and pointed at the empty room smiling like devils.
Those were the options. The reactors hummed louder as another batch began processing, the ship itself complicit.
The admiral smiled faintly, gazing over the forced industry he'd carved from a warship. Outside, the mist hid the Vanguard from the city.
Above the maintenance room, where the ship's skin thinned into overlapping plates and riveted seams,
Henry Ford sat cross-legged on a beam that wasn't meant to hold weight. It held him anyway.
He hummed softly, an old tune with no clear origin, the kind you sing when no one taught you the words. His voice barely carried, lost beneath the churn of reactors and the metallic breathing of the Vanguard.
A brown shirt clung to him, faded and practical, wrapped almost completely by a white cloak wound around his shoulders and torso like a habit or a warning. It fluttered slightly with each vibration of the hull.
Below him, people were suffering and waiting for him to rescue...
Henry's black hair fell neatly into place no matter how little he cared for it, styled by habit rather than vanity.
He swung his foot once, twice, keeping time with the song, as if this were a rooftop back home instead of a stolen warship turned into a factory of misery.
...And here he is singing an ancient note.
He stopped singing mid-note.
"Oh," he murmured, smiling faintly. "Right, the mission."
Sighing suggested reluctance and Henry Ford had long since learned that reluctance didn't change outcomes.
Henry walked to a narrow observation window set into the maintenance wall. It was smeared with grime, meant for inspections that no longer happened. He leaned in and peered through.
The hangar opened beneath him like a wound.
Machines, guards, prisoners reduced to functions. Ferguson's empire laid bare in steel and sound.
Henry watched without judgment, his reflection overlapped the scene merely impossible to place.
"So that is how you people chose to live." he thought absentmindedly. N strange warmth stirred in his chest.
He adjusted the wrap of his cloak, fingers steady. "Alright," he whispered to no one at all. "I see the problem."
Guards were very alert when alarms rang.
During routine, they rotted. Henry waited for routine perfected into arrogance.
Shift overlap came first—two teams assuming the other was watching. Then synchronized machinery cycles, ship humming like a self-satisfied animal as if.
Automated diagnostics rolled in one after another, clean and confident.
That was the moment. When systems insisted nothing was wrong, humans stopped looking. To Henry, certainty wasn't reassurance. It was camouflage.
The reactor's low thrum deepened for half a second every cycle. Henry stepped only then. A vent pressure release sighed through the ducts; he rushed with it, cloak brushing metal as air rushed past.
Conveyor belts clanked in predictable intervals, steel teeth biting steel. He crossed open ground in those sounds, freezing when the rhythm inhaled, advancing when it exhaled.
He slipped through a maintenance hatch as coolant pumps kicked on, sealing it behind him with a touch timed to the hiss. Inside, narrow corridors folded like intestines, lit in sterile blues and greens. He walked them as if he belonged.
Then he decided to be noticed.
A guard paused near a junction when a shadow passed where no one should be.
Another swore when his boots clicked once—just once—without a voice. Down the hall, a maintenance light flickered three times, then steadied.
"Did you see that?" one muttered. Henry smiled, gentle and thin. He rerouted a status display so it lagged by half a second.
Whispered into an intercom line, syncing it perfectly with the reactor's pulse.
Someone laughed nervously. "Ship is haunted." a thug joked.
Henry left a footprint in condensation that vanished before anyone could point. He tapped a bulkhead exactly when a distant door slammed, letting the sound travel wrong.
Diabolical wasn't cruelty. It was precision.
By the time the guards started arguing, ghost or glitch—Henry was already inside the ship's bones, moving deeper while confidence curdled into doubt.
And doubt, he knew, killed vigilance faster than fear ever could.