The Ice-Hauler Boreas groaned as it hit the upper atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon. Inside the dark hold, the magnetic clamps holding the five mechs finally hissed open.
"Drop in five... four... three..." Luke's voice was strained, distorted by the violet feedback in his headset.
"DROP!"
The floor of the hauler fell away. The five mechs plummeted into the orange, opaque soup of Titan's atmosphere. Instantly, the "Cold-Iron" silence was replaced by a screaming gale. Titan's air was thick, heavy, and freezing—a nitrogen-methane mix that battered the training mechs like hammers.
"I can't see the ground!" Jax roared, his Brawler mech tumbling through a cloud of liquid methane. "The sensors are blind! I'm flying into a wall of orange mud!"
"Follow my signal!" Luke commanded. His eyes weren't on the HUD. They were closed. He was "seeing" the magnetic ley-lines of the moon, the veins of the Prometheus Lab's buried servers calling out to the oil in his blood. "Zane, stay on my left thruster! Sloane, Mira—tighten the formation! We're hitting the thermosphere!"
Flashback: The Siege of Titan (30 Years Ago)
The orange sky wasn't filled with methane clouds then—it was filled with fire.
A younger, unscarred Harry Hampton sat in the cockpit of a primitive, clunky Vanguard-Zero. Beside him, a Corporal named Miller was screaming into the comms as their squad was torn apart by the first wave of the Drealius.
"They're coming out of the ground, Harry!" Miller shrieked.
Harry didn't blink. He watched as a massive obsidian spire erupted from the methane ice, impaling a United Sol dropship. This was the day the world changed. This was the day the "Black Oil" was first unleashed on human soldiers.
Harry had been ordered to retreat, to leave the wounded behind. Instead, he had disengaged his safety locks, dove into the obsidian-tainted fog, and pulled three squads out of the "Harvest" zone by hand.
It was here, in the shadow of the Prometheus Spire, that Harry had first looked into the "Eye" of a Shard and realized it wasn't a machine. It was a mirror. He had seen the faces of his fallen friends staring back from the black glass. He hadn't just fought a war on Titan; he had buried his soul there.
The Descent: The Present
"Zane! The wind is tearing my heat-shield!" Sloane's voice broke the flashback, pulling Luke back to the present.
Her mech was spiraling. The methane storms of Titan were notoriously volatile, and her lighter scout-mech was being tossed like a leaf.
"I've got you!" Zane roared. He pushed his thrusters to the limit, the blue flame turning a sickly green as it reacted with the methane air. He slammed his mech into Sloane's, his magnetic grapples locking onto her frame.
The two mechs tumbled through the clouds, a chaotic dance of metal and sparks.
"Luke! We're coming in too fast!" Mira shouted. "The landing zone is a jagged ridge! We're going to shatter on impact!"
"...The sea... Luke... trust the sea..." the voice in Luke's head whispered.
"Change of plans!" Luke shouted. "Aim for the dark patch at 240 degrees! It's a methane lake! We're going to use the liquid to slow our descent!"
"Are you crazy?" Jax yelled. "The pressure will crush the cockpits!"
"Do it or die!" Luke replied, diving headfirst into the pitch-black liquid horizon.
The Impact
The five mechs hit the Kraken Mare—a vast sea of liquid methane—at three hundred kilometers per hour. The sound was like a mountain collapsing. The orange darkness swallowed them whole, the freezing liquid instantly siphoning the heat from their engines.
They sank into the depths, the pressure hulls of their training mechs groaning under the weight of the alien sea.
"Everyone... report," Luke gasped, his HUD flickering red with a dozen "Critical Pressure" warnings.
"Alive," Zane grunted. "Still here," Mira whispered. "I think I broke a tooth," Jax groaned. "My father is going to have a heart attack," Sloane breathed, her voice filled with a strange, terrified thrill.
As they settled on the silty bottom of the methane sea, Luke looked through his external cameras. There, glowing with a faint, sickly violet light at the bottom of the trench, was the Prometheus Core.
It wasn't a lab. It was a cathedral of obsidian, built exactly like the Home-Hive they had seen in the General's logs.
"We're here," Luke said, his hand glowing through his flight suit. "And Dad was right. They never stopped the Harvest. They just moved it under the ice."