Touching the carrier's hull was like touching history, cold and dead. The Adamantite alloy was smoother than anything Isaac had fabricated, its surface still bearing the ghostly, faint scars of whatever cataclysm had felled the behemoth. It lay on its side, a dead leviathan half-buried in the mountain's scree, its upper decks ripped open to the sickly sky.
The immediate area was a charnel house of fallen Colossi and dissolving Gloom matter. The silence after the last titan's fall was profound, broken only by the hiss of cooling metal, the groan of settling wreckage, and the rhythmic thump of the Catapult's final, desultory smoke rounds landing a kilometer away, maintaining the shroud.
Isaac, remotely linked through the Sergeant's sensor feed in the lead Legionnaire, issued crisp orders. "Secure the perimeter. E-001, bring the Pioneer unit up. We need to find a way in. I want a defensible entry point established in the next hour. Ghost, continue wide patrol. Catapult, stand by for counter-battery fire if anything pops up."
The infantry fanned out, securing the immediate ground. The Pioneer, E-001, clanked forward, its sensor arms extended, scanning the massive hull. It identified a breach on the lower flank, near what would have been the vehicle bay doors—a tear in the metal big enough to drive a Legionnaire through, edged with strange, crystalline corrosion.
"This appears to be a primary ingress point," the Sergeant reported, its voice clear over the link despite the distance. "Signs of sustained Gloom-energy erosion, not impact damage. The corruption may have eaten its way in from the Nexus side."
That was concerning. If the Gloom had been inside, the carrier could be a nest. But it was also the only viable entrance.
"Send in Scout S-001. Full stealth. Map the immediate interior. If it's clear, we establish Beachhead Alpha just inside."
S-001, its cloaking field engaged, slipped through the jagged tear like a shadow. Its feed showed a scene of frozen catastrophe. The interior was a cross-section of a city. Deck plates were vertical walls. Corridors ran up and down like chutes. Machinery and equipment were frozen in mid-collapse, fused together by centuries of entropy and the Gloom's corrosive touch. But there was no movement. No heat signatures beyond ambient. The air was dead still, thick with ancient dust and the ozone-rot smell of failed systems.
"It's clear for fifty meters in," S-001 whispered. "Atmosphere is inert but breathable with filters. No hostiles detected."
"Establish Beachhead Alpha. E-001, move in and set up portable lights, atmosphere scrubbers, and a comms relay. We're going in."
For the next six hours, the Bastion forces performed an intricate ballet of occupation. The Pioneer unit set up a humming, well-lit pocket of order just inside the breach—a bubble of clean air and light in the carcass of the dead ship. The two Legionnaires parked outside, their guns covering the approaches. Infantry squads began to carefully explore outward from the beachhead, mapping in three dimensions.
Isaac remained in the Bastion's command nexus, but his awareness was split across a dozen feeds. The scale of the carrier was daunting. Initial schematics, pulled from the Bastion's own fragmented archives, identified this section as Secondary Armory & Logistics Support. If intact, it could hold anything from personal armor to vehicle parts to ammunition—all of it centuries more advanced than his current tech.
The first discovery was made by a Grenadier team. Behind a sealed, but manually forced, pressure door, they found a storage vault. The door's locking mechanism was a melted ruin, likely by the same energy that breached the hull. Inside, the racks were not empty.
They held crates. Standardized, alloy containers marked with Bastion runes for "Infantry Weapon Systems – Advanced." Using cutting tools, they cracked one open. Inside, nestled in inert gel, were ten sleek, rifle-like weapons with under-barrel projectors and integrated multi-spectral scopes. Bastion-pattern Assault Systems.
Artifact Recovered: BAS-7 'Legion' Rifle (x10). Status: Dormant. Power Cores: Depleted. Compatible with Standardized Energy Cells.
These weren't Lascutters. These were the next generation—likely the standard armament of the Bastion's troops at the Fall. The potential for his infantry was revolutionary.
But as they ventured deeper, the signs of the Gloom's past presence grew. Strange, resin-like growths coated walls in patches. Petrified, crystalline remains of what might have been Gloomspawn were found fused to the deck in some corridors. The carrier hadn't just been crashed; it had been infected, and then perhaps purged by the system's final failsafes, or simply drained of life when the local corruption focus shifted to the mountain Nexus.
The Sergeant, analyzing the patterns, offered a theory. "The evidence suggests the carrier was brought down by internal corruption, likely a Gloom incursion through a compromised shield or a possessed crew member. It crash-landed here. The Gloom then used it as a… nutrient source, leaching materials and energy for centuries, eventually birthing the Colossi as its defenders. What we are reclaiming is the desiccated husk."
It was a grim thought. They were looting a corpse that had been fed on by the very enemy they fought.
Then, the discovery that changed everything. A Scout team, probing a downward-sloping corridor marked "Primary Data Vault & Strategic Command," found the door not just sealed, but encased in a shell of pure, black crystal—Gloo mformation at its most dense and stable. It was a cyst, sealing the heart of the ship.
E-001 analyzed it. "The crystal is incredibly hard, resistant to thermal and kinetic attack. However, it is a perfect energy conductor. A focused, high-intensity energy discharge of the correct frequency could shatter its internal matrix."
They had the tool. The Lascutter, derived from Bastion tech, operated on a similar frequency band.
"Bring up every Lascutter we have," Isaac ordered. "Set them to a unified, resonant frequency. We're burning our way in."
It took twelve Lascutters, all the Militia and Grenadiers could muster, aimed at a single point on the crystal cyst. On Isaac's mark, they fired. Twelve beams of coherent orange light merged into one blinding lance. The black crystal didn't melt; it vibrated, a high-pitched shriek filling the corridor. Cracks spiderwebbed from the point of impact, glowing with internal stress.
With a sound like a giant pane of glass breaking, the cyst shattered inward, collapsing into a million harmless, dark shards.
Beyond was a small, circular chamber, pristine. In its center, on a pedestal, hovered a perfect, silvery dodecahedron—a Strategic Data Core. And on a rack along the wall stood five suits of armor, far more advanced than anything he'd seen. Sleek, full-coverage powered armor, with integrated thruster packs and sensor suites. Bastion Combat Exoskeletons, Mark IX "Paladin" class.
But it was the core that drew his gaze. As the Sergeant's unit approached, the core activated, projecting a life-sized hologram of a man in a Bastion commander's uniform, his face drawn with fatigue and grim resolve.
"If you are seeing this," the recording began, the voice etched with static and despair, "then the Resolute Will has fallen, and you are either salvage crew… or the next generation. This core contains the full tactical and strategic records of the 7th Legion, schematics up to Tier-4 technology, and… the last transmission from High Command. The Gloom is not an enemy. It is a symptom. A weapon unleashed in a war between realities. We were not the first. Secure this data. Rebuild. Do not make our final mistake."
The hologram flickered and died.
In the silence of the vault, Isaac felt the weight of centuries and galaxies settle on his shoulders. He had unsealed a vault of power. And with it, a legacy of failure and a warning that redefined the war.
He had come for salvage. He had found a inheritance. And a prophecy.