Titan's Son: (Children of Titan Book 2)

by Rhett C. Bruno

  The Sunfire—if that was really where I was—had a layout like the Piccolo’s. It made sense, considering they would’ve been manufactured around the same year, based on the reports about the crash. I spotted remnants of Pervenio logos all over the walls, though the ones that weren’t entirely tarnished appeared to have been aggressively scratched away.

  I passed a door with char-marks surrounding the frame. A heap of spare parts and scraps blockaded it, with no way through without a wrecking ball. Then I reached the ship’s central corridor, where my path split. To my right, toward the engines, it was dark as a Titanian night. To my left, the lighting was barely functional, the fixtures seeming like they’d been through numerous rounds of makeshift repairs. Down a way, in that direction, the command deck’s entrance remained wide open, glowing like a beacon.

  I headed toward it. I didn’t feel afraid, though I’d spent so long being in a state of alarm that I wasn’t sure if I still remembered what normal anxiety felt like. I did know that my head was starting to feel clearer and that my every stride was being fueled by anger.

  Once I was only a few meters outside, I spotted the attackers of the Piccolo. They weren’t carrying guns or wearing dark visors. They weren’t signing or distorting their voices as they plotted their next sinister move. The three of them lounged around a command deck, not unlike the Piccolo’s, chatting like nothing was wrong. Rin sat on one side, chomping on the last bits of a ration bar. She had to use the right side of her mouth so crumbs didn’t spill through the gap in her left cheek.

  Another attacker sat at the navigation console. That too was reminiscent of the Piccolo’s, though like the rest of the ship, it had clearly borne more than its fair share of crude repairs. The middle-aged navigator’s face wasn’t disfigured like Rin’s, but he had a densely bearded chin.

  Knotted black hair fell to his shoulders, and it was obvious it hadn’t been properly washed in a long, long time. A blithe smirk crossed his face as he noticed me approaching.

  To his right sat both the grimmest and oldest of the trio. His lips drew a straight line, accentuated by his long jaw. He had to be pushing fifty and had already lost every strand of his hair. Wrinkles creased his soaring forehead, so deep that they seemed to belong on an Earther’s face. In fact, I realized that all three of them were wrinkled more thoroughly than most Ringers of their ages, the result of being stuck in g conditions pushing Earth’s for a long time, I guessed. But how long? The Sunfire’s supposed crash had occurred three years earlier.

  “There he is!” the navigator exclaimed once I entered the room. “Thought you’d never wake up after the scare we gave you, kid.”

  Something about his comment pushed me over the edge. Perhaps it was the way he said it, like the universe was one big punch line. Perhaps it was seeing them all relaxing like their worlds hadn’t changed. More likely, it was a combination of everything.

  I charged at him, hand reared back to crack him across the jaw, but I was clumsy in my new suit, and he easily evaded the blow. Rin and the grim Ringer grabbed hold of me just before my fist crashed through the navigation console. The three of us stumbled backward, with only me falling onto my ass, while they held my torso upright.

  “Whoa, now!” The navigator chuckled. He snapped right back into his lounging position and carefree expression. “Someone angry?”

  Curses shot out of my mouth so fast, I’m not even sure what I said. I lunged at him from my knees, but Rin didn’t allow me to get far.

  “Shut it, Hayes!” she snapped. In person, her voice sounded even stranger, with the hole in her face clearly affecting her speech. I could hear the soft, watery clicking of her tongue against her gums after every hard consonant. “Or do I have to remind you of your first day after the captain went?”

  Hayes scowled, shook his head, and crossed his arms.

  “Thought so,” Rin said. “Now go get Kale something to eat.”

  “Rini,” he protested.

  Rin’s glare bored through him. It made the grimace Captain Saunders wore when he was irritated seem like a smile. “That’s an order.”

  Hayes hopped to his feet and performed an embellished bow. “My lady,” he said before sauntering around us.

  “You’ll have to excuse Hayes,” Rin said. “So many years away from home have corroded his manners, if he ever had them.”

  “All the years around you, beautiful!” he shouted back, his voice echoing through the vacant corridor outside.

  “Years?” I asked.

  “I’m sure you have questions,” Rin said. “As long as you promise not to break apart the command deck if we let you go, I’ll answer whatever I can.”

  “You won’t space me?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  I nodded, then realized my head was covered by a bulbous helmet and she was at my side. I bowed my entire torso forward instead.

  They heaved me to my feet and set me into one of the chairs wrapping the command deck. Rin sat across from me in the one Hayes had vacated. Like her voice, her face was somewhat different than it’d been through the video feed. There was a warmth to her eyes, the kind someone bears when they see a friend or loved one after a long absence. It caught me so off guard that my desire to grab her by the throat and demand the truth was stunted.

  “By Trass, you’ve grown,” she said. “You look just like him.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “You really don’t remember? I guess your mother did all she could to get rid of us.”

  My mind started racing, wondering how long Rin had been watching me, trying to think of all the times I might’ve felt someone lingering in the shadows to my side. I was at a loss for words. I studied her now that my eyes were feeling better and tried to picture her without the scars mutilating half of her face.

  And that was when I remembered...

  I was barely four years old, tall for my age, even for a Ringer. My head reached my mother’s chest. I stood beside her, gazing up at her inquisitively. Tears filled her eyes, accompanying a look of conviction on her face that as a child I mistook to be purely sorrow.

  Few areas of the Darien Uppers existed that were as dark as the world below, where we came from. We were in one of them. A morgue, a funeral home—it was a little bit of both. It was the Darien Hall of Ashes—where Ringers went to say goodbye to their loved ones. It was essentially a long, low hallway lined in stark panels, with a series of glass-topped tubes poking out along the exterior side.

  Earthers traditionally buried their fallen in caskets beneath the ground, whether it was on their homeworld, or Mars, or some asteroid somewhere. My people released the ashes of their burned dead into the winds of Titan. We’d done it that way since the days of Trass’s first settlers.

  My mother held a transparent, spherical container filled with what looked like dust. I was too young to understand that it was all that remained of my father.

  “Kale, come here,” she said to me.

  I shuffled forward. Six extraction tubes lined the wall, and a few other families were clustered beside them. I knew from watching them that I was supposed to be sad. They sobbed as they passed around their crystalline spheres and whispered to them.

  “Here.” She handed me the container. It was as light as a helium balloon and slightly pliable.

  “I thought you said he’d be here,” I said.

  She kneeled and looked me straight in the eyes. A sanitary mask covered half of her face, but she was still young, with not a strand of gray in her hair. “He’s in there now, Kale. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but he’s gone.”

  “Does that mean... he’s dead?”

  She nodded solemnly. “Yes. He’s going to be a part of Titan now, and it’s your job to get him there.” She opened the lid of the tube and gestured to the vessel in my hands.

  I rotated the sphere, watching ashes tumble. My eyes were pressed up against it, wondering how they were any different from the dust that gathered daily
in the hollows of the Lowers.

  “So I won’t see him anymore?” I asked.

  “No, Kale, not anymore. But he’ll always be looking after you. I know he wished...” She paused, having to gather her breath and wipe her eyes before she could continue. “I know he wished he could’ve seen you one last time, but he...he couldn’t.”

  “But he said he would be there for my birthday!” I protested. “He promised!”

  “Well, he won’t!” she snapped.

  I doubt it was her intention to make me cry, but I did anyway. She wrapped her arms around my head and drew me close, kissing me on the forehead until it was raw.

  “He’s gone, sweetheart, okay?” she whispered. Her lips were trembling. “I know it’s hard, but we just have to say goodbye.”

  “I don’t want to,” I sniveled.

  “Some things are out of our hands.” She took the sphere from me and raised it toward the ceiling. Then she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “We surrender this soul unto the winds of Titan. May he forever watch over those chosen by Trass.”

  She lowered the sphere into the tube. It slid in perfectly without falling all the way through. “From ice to ashes,” she said. Then she struck a command on a nearby control panel, and the sphere was sucked through the dense Darien enclosure toward a tiny pinpoint of light. I didn’t know how the process worked at the time, but it would emerge into the sky and rise through the thick atmosphere of Titan. Once it reached a high enough altitude, the change in pressure would cause it to pop like a balloon, sprinkling the ashes into the clouds.

  My mom stepped back, her hands still trembling out in front of her as if she’d just accomplished some incredible feat. Her thousand-meter stare was aimed at the tube.

  “Where did it go?” I asked.

  “Into the sky,” she said. She leaned over and clasped her hands over mine. “Your father loved you, Kale. He may not have known how to show it well, but he did. He wanted you to promise something after he was gone. It’s very important.”

  I nodded hesitantly.

  “Remember him always, but never be like him,” she said. “Ever. Do you understand?”

  I searched the room, unsure of what to say. My father and I weren’t very close, though that was only because I didn’t see him much before he was gone. My mom said it was because he worked late into the nights thieving and conning—doing whatever it took to scrape by in the Lowers. On the rare occasions he’d visit us in our hollow, I’d get so excited that I couldn’t turn off my smile.

  My mother always sat in the corner, observing quietly as he performed magic tricks with ration bars for me or as we watched the newsfeeds on our tiny view-screen. After a few hours, he’d be gone, and then it’d be weeks, sometimes months before I saw him again... until the day she told me he was shot while trying to rob a wealthy Earther.

  “Okay, Kale?” my mother repeated, grabbing me by the jaw to regain my attention.

  “O...okay,” I stuttered.

  “Good. You’re being so strong, Kale.” She smiled through her tears and planted a kiss on my cheek. “Now, my boss let me have some lettuce from the gardens to take home tonight. How does that sound? I think we could both use it.”

  My eyes lit up. “Real lettuce?”

  “Yup. The real thing.”

  I bobbed my head enthusiastically, and she gave me one last kiss before we started off. I can’t recall whether either of us looked back toward the tube my dad’s remnants were slurped through, but when we reached the exit, a woman stood in our way. Rin, minus the burns.

  She was strange to me even as a child. The skin on her youthful face was smooth and unmarred, but her eyes brimmed with ire.

  “This isn’t right, Kat!” Rin said, taking no effort to mask her resentment. “Kale is his son too.”

  “I didn’t make this decision alone,” my mom answered.

  “Like Alann would’ve said no to you?”

  My mom grabbed Rin by the collar. “I won’t risk him being discovered,” she whispered sternly.

  “You’ll toss him aside just like that, then? You learned well from that Earther master of yours, didn’t you?”

  My mom slapped Rin across the face so hard that the skin on her pale cheek went red on the side where one day it would no longer exist. Rin didn’t back away.

  “I’ll always love your brother, but I have to do what’s best for our boy,” my mom said. “It’s no life for him.”

  “And what about what he wants?”

  “The decision’s been made, so honor it and stay away from my son!” She grabbed my hand and pulled. “Let’s go, Kale.”

  “You’re a coward, Kat!” Rin hollered. “Always will be!”

  My mother ignored her and tugged me even harder, but I stared back at the woman, at Rin, who watched us with revulsion until we’d vanished into the crowds of Darien.

  Their exchange meant little to me as a child. I’d barely understood what I was doing in the Hall of Ashes. But now, as I stared at Rin’s disfigured face, I didn’t need her to say it for me to realize what she was.

  “You’re…” I began.

  “Your aunt,” she finished for me. “Your mother told you your father died trying to rob an Earther when you were four.” She scratched a patch of shiny burn scars on her upper cheek before her piercing gaze shifted to look straight at my face. “She lied. You are more than you know, Kale Drayton.”

  FIFTEEN

  “My dad’s alive?” I asked, hardly able to believe the words escaping my mouth.

  The half of Rin’s lips that weren’t deformed drooped into a frown. “He was... until roughly two months ago on Earth, when he gave his life distracting a collector on M-day so we might have a chance at more than just surviving.”

  The momentary high I felt over learning about a fifteen-year-old miracle swiftly faded. My heart sank. “But I saw his ashes go to the sky and… and so did you. You were there.”

  “All a lie concocted by him and that mother of yours to keep you safe,” she said. “There’s a lot you don’t know, Kale.”

  I hopped to my feet and pointed at her chest. “And I’m supposed to believe you? I watched you murder all those people on the Piccolo.”

  The grim, silent Ringer sitting beside us rose to his feet as well. He looked like he might have ripped me apart if Rin didn’t hold her arm out in front of him.

  “‘Murder,’” she scoffed. “There isn’t a single Earther out there who wouldn’t put a bullet in your head if it meant them surviving or stuffing their wallet. The truth is that your father was a hero, and he believed in Titan. Like your mom, he didn’t want his life for you, but now he’s gone. I’ll be damned if I let you become another cog on a gas harvester. Working for them. Handing the Ring over to them, one day at a time. Believe me or don’t, but it’s time you knew exactly who you are.”

  After spending a few seconds in disbelief, I leaned back in my chair. The grim Ringer did so as well. I had no idea what to say and was grateful when Hayes reappeared behind me, allowing me some time to compose myself. He dropped a ration bar onto my lap.

  “Here you go, your highness,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “Thank you, Hayes,” Rin said. She stood. “You can have the controls back. I’d like to speak with Kale alone.”

  Hayes shimmied around us effortlessly to return to the ship’s navigation console, remarkably nimble for someone clad in a bulky suit of powered armor. He stopped in front of Rin and took her by the shoulders. “Go easy on him,” he said, smirking.

  Rin let him by without comment, but to me, she said, “Walk with me. Your muscles can use the exercise.” She nodded in the direction of the quiet Ringer. He grunted in response. Given the option of staying with him and Hayes versus going off with a woman I at least had a vague memory of, I chose the latter.

  “He doesn’t talk much, does he?” I asked after I caught up with her.

  “Gareth?” she said. “No. Our former captain made sure of that wh
en he sliced out his tongue. Used to be impossible to shut him up before that.”

  “Oh...” I instinctually rubbed my tongue against the back of my teeth to remind myself it was still there.

  “I know all of this is a lot to hear, Kale. It wasn’t fair of them to keep you in the dark.”

  I stopped. “‘A lot to hear?’ You want me to believe that my mom was lying for all of these years; that my dad, your brother, was running around Sol for my entire life and never once tried to contact me?”

  “Oh, he wanted to. And if Katrina weren’t so damn stubborn, he might’ve.”

  “Stop talking about her like that!”

  “Sorry… old habits.” She placed her hand on the back of my armor and urged me forward. “He stayed away like he was supposed to, but that doesn’t mean he forgot. Your dad was no paltry thief, Kale. You think you survived getting out of that life because you’re lucky? He was watching, every step of the way. Nobody in the Lowers would dare hurt you with him around.”

  “Are you saying he was a fence?”

  “You really have no idea?”

  “Why don’t you just tell me whatever it is you want to tell me.”

  “Soon. First, let me show you that your pretty mother is safe and sound, and then you might start trusting me a little. There’s no point in wasting my breath.”

  “That’s a good start.”

  She led me back toward the room I’d arrived in. We turned before reaching it into what I assumed had been one of the Sunfire’s rec rooms. There was a couch, its fabric covering almost entirely frayed down to the metal frame, a view-screen, and nothing else but empty space.

  “Like I said earlier, there is no way for us to contact anybody on Titan from this deep in Saturn, but Rylah was able to send an update before the plunge. She figured you might not be big on talking until you could see your mother.”

  I choked back a moan of frustration. “Who is that now?”

  “You found that hand-terminal in her office. My half-sister.”

  I recalled the stunning woman in violet back in the Foundry. I should’ve known better than to think she’d left her door wide open by accident, considering what she had hiding inside. What kind of thief was I, being played so obviously?