Chapter Text
The Plaguelands were quiet.
Too quiet.
Just kidding, they were a normal amount of quiet, Shiro just couldn’t pass up the joke.
He stood at the precipice between the greater Cosmodrome and the Plaguelands, keeping his eyes peeled for any signs of trouble. From that height, up atop a crumbling wall, he could see for miles in every direction. Even more if he used his sniper rifle. If anything was off, he would know.
Luckily, there was nothing off. If his latest intel was right, it should stay that way. Lord Saladin and Shiro had worked hard to seal up the Plaguelands’ more conventional entrances, so... he’d be kinda pissed if the Fallen turned the place into a rave joint while he was gone.
“Go to the Plaguelands and find a dead Ghost by the Tanker,” Lord Saladin told him in their earlier call. “While you’re there, check around for any leftover Devils activity.”
A pretty straight forward request. No explanation as to why he was doing this, but that didn’t matter much. By his tone, Shiro could tell there was no arguing--not that he wanted to, one did not simply 'argue' with Lord Saladin--so he just gave a 'yes sir' and got on with it. With no fuss or muss, he gathered up his things, gave Cayde-6 a call, then set off along his merry way. Working for Lord Saladin had always was much more enjoyable than the work he was doing on Nessus anyways.
Looking out at the land around him, seeing no movement but swaying plants, hearing no sounds but that of the howling winds, Shiro couldn't help but think about just how much has changed in the span of one year. The SIVA replication chamber was destroyed, putting a multi-centuries old threat to rest. The House of Devils was disbanded and integrated into one great big House of Dusk. Now that the allure of a shiny new nanite to splice with was gone, and most of the Cosmodrome's tech had been picked over, the Fallen didn’t have a good reason to be out in these parts anymore. There weren't even Guardians around, since Commander Zavala put a quarantine order over it. Just as an extra precaution of course, just in case the Young Wolves didn't do the job as thoroughly as Shiro was positive they did.
The right people at the right time really can change so much, if they put in the right amount of effort.
SIVA still marred the land like an infection, its thick red veiny wires snaking their way out of the ground, gripping onto anything it could sink its roots into. Even with it rendered utterly useless, the sight would still make Shiro hold his breath, if he had any to hold. The eerie environment made him feel like something was going to pop out at any moment, bringing some new kind of body horror to haunt his dreams...
Shiro-4 took a step forward, and plunged downward towards red hell.
The Cosmodrome could be described just another ghost town, if you ignored the Hive infestation.
The Plaguelands though? That description felt far too literal for comfort.
The ghost towns he visited as a younger man were relics from the past where he could only imagine what they were like in their heyday. They were like an incomplete puzzle, and the reference picture was long lost, but if you put enough pieces together you could sort of get the right idea. Ghost towns made Shiro feel a lot of different things. Wonder at what once was. Resolve to get it back. Excitement for what might someday be. Mournful for all that was lost and would never be known again. Lots of things.
The Plaguelands, however, were different. A bright future was hard to imagine when the dark past was visible at every step.
Could a place be haunted, even when no spirits walked its grounds? Shiro thought it could, although he never liked to think on it for long. Sometimes just looking around at the aftermath would pull forth images in his mind— even shouts and screams. Sounds of gunfire, imaginings of what the battle must have been like—
Saladin and Tyra’s stories got to him more than he’d care to admit. They gave him just enough information to put that puzzle fully together and imagine exactly what went down. The rest of the information he got from the SIVA nodes just made it worse. A Guardian was a Guardian, no matter the era. That’s what made it so easy to put himself in their shoes.
No sense in dwelling though. There was work to be done. He summoned his sparrow and got on with it.
Shiro expertly thread his way through dilapidated buildings and multicolored shipping containers along the way. He nearly got caught up in some of those damn wires though, threaded together so tightly that the almost looked like muscle. Gross.
The Fallen House of Devils never seemed to care how their actions affected the land. They broke into the chambers where SIVA had been contained for hundreds of years, and allowed it to spread all over the place. Encouraged it, even. For something that was originally engineered to help humanity, SIVA sure acted like a parasite or invasive species when not controlled properly. And dear sweet Light, the Devils did not control it properly. It’s like they didn’t even care what it did, so long as it was helping them.
‘Helping’ had a pretty specific meaning in this circumstance. A lot of Fallen houses had splicer sects. To put it simply, they were divisions where the members were big into body modifications that helped them interact with technology. The Devils were a step above all the rest though; they were just crazy enough to not care what there was to lose. After knowing that SIVA had been enough to wipe out the Iron Lords in one day, they still went after it’s rumored glory. All it took was to hear about a nanite meant to terraform barren planets into booming colonies, they decided, ‘Oh! Let’s go shove that into our bodies! THAT will surely make us strong enough to do whatever we want’.
He began to close in on the shipping yard, which meant the tanker was nearly in sight. This was where the fighting began. Hundreds of frames controlled by Rasputin, gunning down friends who fought for their hopes and dreams of reclaiming a world on the brink.
Shiro slowed his sparrow to a halt just shy of yet another stack of shipping containers, and took the whole sight in. The Ghost was somewhere around here... He wasn’t sure if the Iron Lord died inside the tanker, or outside of it. The ship was massive, if he had to search the whole thing, that could take days...
Bullet spray. That’s what he had to keep his eyes peeled for, he knew that this guy died fighting hundreds of frames, even after he ran out of bullets. So really, Shiro just had to look for old, rusted over bullet spray. He could move past anything that looked fresh enough to have happened in the past few years, and speed the process up that way.
… But the tanker was still massive.
“You know I can scan around to help you out, right?” Suzume asked, floating somewhere beside him.
Shiro must’ve frozen at some point while taking in his surroundings. Whoops. Got too caught up in his own thoughts. “Right. That would help a lot, thank you.”
“Yeah, no problem”
He pulled Trespasser from its holster, and started forging the path, looking for any potentially viable zones while his Ghost occasionally lit up the area with the soft blue glow of her scans.
—————
It felt like hours of searching. This was almost worse than a needle in a haystack situation--the two ended up splitting apart to cover more ground. Shiro could patrol inside the ship, while Suzume could scan the outside. If the Iron Lord did die outside, his Ghost would be covered in years of dirt by now. If it was inside, there was a larger chance of it being visible. Having said that, Shiro could hardly ever be so lucky.
Shiro's mind wandered as he traipsed about the interior of the rusting and rotting ship. What use could there be for this Ghost? What was the Iron Lord who belonged to it like? Just what was this battle like all those years ago? What--
Shiro snaped back to present when he kicked a loose screw, causing an echo that could be heard across this whole corridor of the ship.
Freeze. Listen. Wait.
....Nothing. Just crashes of ocean waves, and occasional creaks of old metal settling. Shiro relaxed. He really needed to trust his own reports more, he was the one who finalized the one that declared the Devil's presence in the Plaguelands was gone. A little more faith couldn’t hurt.
“Shiro, I think I’ve got something over here,” Suzume alerted him through their neurolink.
“Really? That’s great, can I have a waypoint?”
A waypoint appeared in his vision, guiding him out of the ship. It wasn’t even that far from where they started, what luck was that? ...Well, good luck for them at least. Probably incredibly poor luck for the Iron Lord.
When he arrived, Suzume was floating over a patch of dirt beside yet another stack of shipping containers. “Where is it?”
“I believe I got a faint reading of a dead Ghost directly under this area?” She did an extra scan of the area, just to be sure she was right. “Yes. Directly down, but I'm detecting a lot of inorganic material between us and them.”
“So we dig then.” That was workable. They could dig down. He looked back to his Ghost. “We got a shovel in there?"
She spun her shell, having a sheepish energy about her. “ We left it on Nessus.”
Shrio sighed heavily, leaning his head back to look at the sky... He could hardly be so lucky. “Of course we did. Hands for the dirt, and we pull out a sniper for touching anything with SIVA on it.”
Suzume bobbed her shell in approval “Alright, I’ll keep an eye out while you dig.”
“Thank you." Then without further ado, Shiro-4 dropped down on his knees and began to dig.
—————
The digging took longer than the search itself, even after Shiro got the foresight to break off a piece of steel to use as a makeshift shovel. He needed to be careful while he dug--if he shoved it in too harshly, he risked breaking the Ghost before he even saw it. That wouldn’t do. He was sure Saladin wanted it intact, and Shiro never wanted to disappoint him. So, with much care he sifted through several hundreds of years of dirt and rocks and Fallen junk....Mostly just dirt. Until it wasn’t.
At one point he found a whole dead frame under there with threads of SIVA laced through its joints. After a great deal of time and effort, he managed to lift it out using the steel… only to find another one directly underneath it.
Hell.
It was okay, Shiro could be patient. This was a favor for Lord Saladin. For him, Shiro would fight any battle. Run any distance. If he said jump, Shiro would ask how high. If he said dig out a bunch of SIVA infected frames, he wouldn't even ask how many. He would do anything Saladin asked of him, so long as it was in the old man's best interests.
And so in this case, he did in fact dig out a bunch of SIVA infected frames. He worked so diligently, taking painstaking care as to not touch a single one of them with any part of his body. He worked so long that the sun had long since set and stars filled the sky before he was even half way done.
Shiro thought about many things as he worked, but most of all, he thought about the Iron Lord. The one Ghost he was searching for. The one who managed to send waves of electricity through these frames, scarring them and the SIVA that still clung to this day. The one who somehow after all these years of being dead seemed to stick out in Lord Saladin’s mind.
He knew this couldn’t have been one of the main ones he always spoke of, the members of the inner circle. All of them died in the chamber. So who…
His sheet was met with a soft clink of metal.
Softer than the sounds any of the frames produced.