The Forgotten Cores

Chapter 11: The Traitor's Apprentice

The young boy blinked against the light of Kael’s lantern, his face pale and tear-stained. "L-Lyra? I thought you were dead. I thought the ship blew up."

Lyra sprinted across the icy floor, catching the younger boy in a tight embrace that caught him completely off guard. "Jax! How are you here? How did you escape the Enforcers?"

"I... I didn't," Jax stammered, his lower lip trembling as he looked past Lyra at Kael, his eyes widening in fear at the sight of the disgraced captain's weapon. "They caught me right after I re-routed the secondary grid. They dragged me to a command transport. But... but I didn't tell them anything, Lyra! I swear! I didn't tell them where you went!"

Kael didn't lower his pistol. His military eyes narrowed, scanning the dark rafters of the hangar above them. "If they caught you, kid, how are you standing in a dead sector miles away from Ironhook? Enforcer transports don't just lose their prisoners."

"They didn't lose me," Jax whispered, his voice dropping to a terrified whimper. "They sent me."

A cold dread flooded Lyra's veins. She slowly stepped back from Jax, looking down at his oversized insulated coat.

"Jax... what did they do to you?"

With trembling hands, Jax pulled open the heavy layers of his canvas coat. Strapped to his chest was a small, sleek brass device pulsing with a rhythmic, high-frequency blue light. It wasn't an explosive. It was a long-range Aetherial beacon.

"They said... they said if I didn't bring the beacon close to your ship, they would drop Sector 4 into the old world," Jax cried, the tears freezing on his cheeks. "They have my family, Lyra. They have everyone. The High Commander... he told me you were terrorists who were trying to destroy the city’s foundations. I didn't know what to do!"

The high-pitched hum of the beacon grew sharper, the blue light shifting from a steady pulse to a frantic strobe. It was a homing frequency, cutting through the atmospheric interference of the Sunken Spires like a flare in the dark.

"How long has that thing been active, Jax?" Lyra asked, her mechanical instinct temporarily fighting back the panic in her chest. She reached toward the brass casing, her fingers tracing the lock-seams. "Tell me you just turned it on."

"Since I hit the perimeter bridge," Jax sobbed, flinching away. "Don't touch it! They told me if anyone tries to tamper with the casing, the thermite failsafe will ignite. It'll burn right through me, Lyra!"

Kael took three rapid steps forward, his boots crunching loudly on the black ice. He gripped Jax by the shoulder, his eyes darting to the structural glass ceiling of the ancient airship hangar. "The perimeter bridge is less than two knots away. At standard fleet cruising speed, an interceptor squadron would cover that distance in less than ninety seconds."

"Which means they're already overhead," Lyra said, her voice dropping into a hard, focused calm.

She looked at Jax's terrified eyes, then down at the intricate brass weave of the Enforcer beacon. It was a standard-issue military tracking array, the kind she had seen on old supply manifests back in Ironhook. The High District didn't design these things from scratch; they used the same basic logic gates for all their security hardware.

"Kael, give me your small torque-driver and a copper dampening rod," Lyra ordered, dropping to her knees in front of Jax.

"Lyra, you heard the kid, it’s got a thermite core," Kael warned, though his hand was already moving to his tool belt. He pulled out a sleek, pressurized driver and a thin cylinder of uninsulated copper wire, handing them down to her. "If your hand slips, we lose the kid and the hangar."

"My hand doesn't slip," Lyra snapped. "Jax, look at me. Look at my eyes, don't look down. Remember the pressure valves back in Sector 4? Remember how we used to bleed the steam lines by counting to four between each twist?"

Jax nodded miserably, his chest heaving under the heavy canvas coat. "Y-yes."

"Good. We're going to do the same thing here. I'm going to bypass the primary sensor lead, but to do it, I need you to hold your breath on the count of three. If you move, the magnetic balance shifts."

She aligned the torque-driver with the microscopic seam on the beacon’s upper plate. The blue light cast long, skeletal shadows across their faces.

One. She applied pressure, feeling the tiny brass tumblers inside the lock click into place.

Two. She slipped the copper dampening rod through the side ventilation mesh, grounding the internal capacitor before the tamper sensor could register the drop in voltage.

Three.

Jax froze, holding his breath so tightly his face turned red. Lyra twisted her wrist. A sharp, metallic clack echoed through the silent hangar. The blinding blue light of the beacon sputtered, shifted to a dull, dying amber, and then went completely dark.

For a brief second, the only sound in the cavernous space was Jax’s ragged gasp as he collapsed forward into Lyra's arms, weeping quietly against her grease-stained shoulder plates.

"Good job, kid," Kael muttered, lowering his pistol slightly. "But don't get comfortable. Dropping a beacon signal isn't like deleting a map coordinate. To the fleet commander up there, a sudden blackout is just as good as a target lock. They know exactly which tower we're in."

As if on cue, a low, rhythmic thumping began to vibrate through the frozen stone walls of the hangar. It wasn't the sound of engines yet—it was the deep, atmospheric displacement of heavy-lift hull stabilizers pushing down through the upper mist.

"Out! Get out of the hangar now!" Kael roared, lunging forward and grabbing Lyra by the arm, dragging her back toward the boarding ramp of the blockade runner. "The sky is about to fall!"

But before their boots could even clear the first step of the metal ramp, the world above them turned to fire.