“Do it, Malcolm,” Kale said. “I made you a promise, and now you get to make sure it’s kept.”
“Graves,” Luxarn said, breathless. “Whatever he has on you, I know you care for my boy. Shoot the Ringer bastard, and we’ll forget about all of this.”
Muted gunshots echoed outside in the hall, followed by screaming. There was a thud against the door, and somehow I doubted it was Kale’s single guard mowing down Cogents and security officers. They’d break in soon.
“You did it once already,” Kale said. “You saw my people beneath the Quarantine. You saw what he did to us. Your daughter gave everything to help, now you can do the same for her.”
“Thirty years, Graves,” Luxarn said. “Don’t throw it all away!”
Zhaff’s cold finger wrapped my artificial ankle and squeezed. He slowly drew himself to his knees, every part of him shaking.
“Family…” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Right, Zhaff?”
“Malcolm, end this!” Luxarn screamed.
For months now, I’d allowed the Ringers to use me in the name of protecting my daughter. I let them force my finger around the trigger so I could end the life of a man who didn’t deserve it and feed their lies. But even I had my limits. Luxarn earned plenty of pain for how ruthlessly he’d played his corporate game. He’d earned it for how he’d treated Zhaff. But no man deserved to watch those he loved be taken from them. If anybody should have understood that, it was Kale.
“Make him feel our pain!” Kale yelled.
So, I did. I lifted my gun, screamed, and fired. The back of Luxarn’s head blew open, splattering blood and brains all over the wall.
“No!” Kale screamed.
He lunged to catch Luxarn’s body, then stared into his eyes as the very glimmer of life fled them.
Luxarn Pervenio, the man who took control of the ring after the Great Reunion, used his riches to build a corporate machine the likes of which humanity had never seen. His relentless dedication to advancing humanity at any cost helped set up the foundation of our interplanetary civilization. And now he was dead.
Zhaff rose to his full height before me. He grabbed my arm to pull himself upright, but I let him, until his fingers wrapped around my throat. I stared into the face of death incarnate—of my friend Zhaff turned into a monster. I knew now that neither of us was getting off Undina alive.
“I trusted you…” he wheezed.
“I know.” I craned my neck so his hand fit easier. I didn’t fight it as he began to squeeze. “He should have done what’s right and let you go.” I imagined Zhaff as a child, being beaten by his classmates for being different. That was the reason his father pulled him out, created the Cogent Initiative, and turned him into a killing machine.
But the Zhaff I knew wouldn’t have let life destroy him. Maybe, with someone better than Luxarn caring for him, he might have wound up using his brain to help an investor like Basaam change the world. Perhaps if I’d turned my daughter over to the USF, she’d been the head of some hospital somewhere saving lives.
“I should’ve too,” I grated. Even broken as he was, Zhaff’s grip was strong as iron. I let my gun fall from my grip and whispered, “Do it.”
Twenty-One
Kale
I watched the life drain from Luxarn Pervenio’s eyes. I thought the sight of the man who’d spent a lifetime grinding my people under his heel dying would make me smile. I thought it’d make me feel something.
It didn’t.
Luxarn’s cold body slumped onto the floor, dipped in a pool of his own blood and excrement. I whipped around and saw Malcolm being choked by Luxarn’s son. A twitch of regret plagued his features as his air was cut off. He looked like he’d aged years since he loaded me into the sleep pod and presented me to his former employer.
“He was supposed to watch just like I had to!” I roared. I charged across the room and smashed Zhaff across the side of his half-metallic head with all my might. The Cogent somehow remained choking Malcolm even as he fell unconscious, dragging the defiant collector to the ground with him. I pried Zhaff’s cold fingers off Malcolm’s throat, leaving him gasping for air. Then I aimed my pistol right between Malcolm’s eyes.
“Do you know what you’ve done!” I screamed.
“The right thing, for once,” Malcolm said, coughing.
“I should kill you right here.”
“Go ahead. I said I’d help you deal with Luxarn, but you didn’t say anything about this. He was already beaten. I don’t care what he’s done, nobody deserves to watch their child die. You should know that better than anybody. You’re going to be a father, for Earth’s sake!”
I pressed the barrel of my gun against his forehead, my finger itching to pull the trigger. Luxarn had made so many of us watch our families wither away in quarantine, unable to help them. I’d watched the footage of Cora dying at Luxarn’s orders a thousand times, listened to him give them a thousand times more. Now he was dead, but he would never experience what we did. That crushing pain. I knew that was why I barely felt a thing as I watched the life flee his body.
Then I heard the commotion outside the door of his office. My guard had given his life, and now Luxarn’s servants were preparing to breach the entry and take me down. Maybe I was going to die on Undina, but I refused to give Luxarn the satisfaction. Even in death.
“You’re lucky I still need you, Collector,” I said, pulling the gun away. He barely seemed relieved not to die. “Get up. We’re getting out of here.”
“He didn’t have to know what happened,” Malcolm growled, a harsh edge entering his tone.
“He deserved the truth,” I replied.
“Not from you.”
“Protecting your child is nothing to be ashamed of. He sent his to die in the name of credits.”
Malcolm snatched his pulse pistol off the floor and leveled his aim at me. A film of tears glazed his eyes in a way I hadn’t seen before. I knew he wasn’t going to shoot.
“Zhaff was a good kid,” he said. “His death didn’t deserve to be used as a weapon.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it.” I pointed at Luxarn’s slumped body, the blood continuing to pool beneath it. “We made a deal, Collector. You get me in to kill Luxarn and out, and she walks.”
“Yeah, well, me killing Zhaff in front of his father so you could prove a point didn’t really figure into that.”
“Consider us even for you taking Luxarn from me. Now you want Zhaff dead, you’re free to take care of him. Then you’re going to get me out of here.”
He looked like he wanted to explode. He bit his lip, and his free hand squeezed so tight his knuckles went as white as a Titanborn’s. He jumped to his feet, rushed over to Zhaff’s unconscious body, and aimed at his head. He stared down at him, hand quaking, but he never fired.
“We don’t have all day, Malcolm,” I said. “They’re coming.”
His hand shook harder and harder, and then his gun-arm fell to his side. “We made you into this, Luxarn and me,” he said. “But you’re alive. I shouldn’t get to choose where your story ends.” He crouched and whispered something in Zhaff’s ear.
“I won’t ask again, Malcolm,” I said.
He glared up at me, then he exhaled through his teeth. “I can’t do it.”
“That’s your choice, then. I doubt he’ll get off of here alive anyway.”
“He tends to surprise you.”
“Good for him. Now let’s go, Collector. Think of Aria.”
“Right, I need to get you out,” he said, simmering. “Sure, why not. I’ve already come this far; why not keep helping a murderous psychopath who can’t deal with a broken heart? What’s a few more dead Cogents?”
Malcolm turned and positioned himself in front of the door, a mad look in his eye. Someone banged on it from the outside.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Don’t worry!” Malcolm announced to whoever was on the other side of the door. “We’re coming ou
t now.” He reared his artificial leg back with no warning and kicked the door with all his might. A group of Cogents was crushed against the wall on the other side. It partially missed one of them, squishing her arm only, but Malcolm plugged her between the eyes without hesitation.
“Let’s go,” he growled back at me. He moved into the corridor so fast that I had no choice but to follow. Another Cogent waited around the next corner.
“Malcolm Graves,” the young man said. “What is happening?”
Malcolm blew the Cogent away without a second’s hesitation. He passed a medical office, and a Cogent hiding inside wised up and shot Malcolm in the thigh. The force sent him into the wall hard, but his artificial leg absorbed the blast with barely a scratch. Malcolm rolled over and put a bullet through the shooter’s eye lens. He was like a force of nature. A doctor inside squealed, but Malcolm shoved her onto the bed for her own safety.
“Keep up, kid,” he glanced back at me and said.
A shot reverberated down the clean, metallic halls. Blood spurted as it clipped the top of Malcolm’s shoulder, but he didn’t go down. I fired around his hip and hit the Cogent in the leg. Malcolm finished the job. I’d never seen anyone recover from a pulse pistol shot so fast.
He wedged his artificial foot under the corpse of his most recent kill and hurled it at the shooter. It crushed the Cogent, and another one rounding the corner was knocked off his feet by the tumbling body.
Malcolm charged forward and barreled into him. By the time I caught up, he’d already shoved the Cogent against the doors of the lift out of the facility and was bashing him across the face with the butt of his gun. Once, then again, until his Earther strength had the young man’s eye lens literally sunken into his eye socket.
Malcolm turned back to me, cheek doused in red. “Go,” he rasped as he signaled the doors to open.
Zhaff appeared back down the hall, across Malcolm’s swathe of death. He dragged his broken body along the floor with his elbow, and in his grip held a pulse pistol taken from one of his fallen brethren. He had no eyes, but the first shot he took missed us by a hair before clanging against the wall. I rushed into the lift to find cover.
Malcolm didn’t move. He closed his eyes as if he hoped one of the rounds would blow out his skull. Like his job was finished. I grasped him by the back of the collar and had to push off the wall with my feet to haul his heavy body inside. The doors sealed, and somehow he remained unscathed, even though the back of the lift was riddled with holes. His legs started to give out.
I grabbed him. “Get up,” I said.
“I got you out,” he replied, panting. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Not yet.”
I slipped behind him and aimed the gun at his head. He didn’t even bother to raise his. I wasn’t sure he could. With his adrenaline waning, the wound through his shoulder had his arm hanging slack and his eyes bloodshot. Even my Ringer muscles were strong enough to keep him at bay.
“You won, kid,” he said. “Is that what you want to hear? I don’t have anything left.” All the vim fled his voice. One final push to keep me alive for her sake, and now both his body and soul were failing.
“You have her.”
“Thirty years. That’s how long I worked for that man, and I shot him. How many more have to die before your vengeance ends?”
“We don’t get to choose when it ends.”
“Tell that to the man you sent me to kill. You chose when Orson’s ended. They chose when Cora’s ended. Who’s next, kid?”
The lift opened into the Undina Mining Facility proper, and I squeezed Malcolm’s neck harder. A line of Pervenio security officers awaited us, rifles pressed against their shoulders and aimed at us.
“Step away from Mr. Graves!” their leader barked.
I ducked to make sure Malcolm’s stout body covered most of mine and held my gun firmly against his head while we slowly trod forward. A Cogent could have made the shot, but not this lot of tired officers. There wasn’t one of them that looked like he hadn’t recently woken from a nap.
“Just put down your guns and get out of here,” Malcolm grumbled. “This change has been coming a long time, and none of you are going to stop that.”
“What are you talking about?” the officer said. “Don’t move another step, or we will fire.”
“Don’t throw your lives away for him.”
“Stop!”
Bullets tore into the officers from behind. Their bodies danced like they were being worked by invisible puppeteers before they dropped, blood pooling in all the air pockets mottling the rocky floor.
“Lord Trass, are you all right?” My guards rushed over to help me with Malcolm. They tore him from my arms and checked to make sure I wasn’t wounded.
“Get your Ringer hands off me!” Malcolm snapped. One of my armored men punched him in the gut. He folded, but another kept him from going down so he could take another blow to the side of the face.
“Enough!” I ordered. “Luxarn is dead, thanks to him.”
“He’s gone?” The youngest of my guards could barely get the words out. There was a sense of relief to my guard’s tone, like when the pressure exerted from a launch off Titan suddenly gives way to weightlessness, and all the fear of burning up goes away. It was then that I knew for sure I’d made the right call to chase Luxarn, and that Rin was wrong.
“For good this time,” I said. The young man was so floored, even though the news was expected, that he dropped Malcolm. “It’s time to go.”
“What about the collector?” asked another Titanborn.
“Cuff him and bring him too.”
“You made a promise, Kale,” Malcolm snarled. “Remember that. You made a damn promise!”
I turned to him, grabbed the barrel of his pistol, and ripped it out of his hands. “And I intend to keep it, but you’re not going to want to miss this.” I waved more men over.
“Put a bullet in my head like a fucking man,” Malcolm said.
Another bout of curses echoed through the mines when he was seized. With my men’s powered armor on, his Earther strength was no match. They wrenched his arms behind his back and got him moving. His bullet wound had him moaning in pain, which only inspired my men to yank harder.
“The Fusion Pulse Engine has been installed,” the youngest of the Titanborn addressed me as we turned and set off through Undina’s barren tunnels. He had to raise his voice so I could hear him over Malcolm’s incessant grousing. “The rest are back on board the Cora, and we have a clear path.” Bodies were strewn haphazardly in our path, some armed like officers, others no more than miners. We couldn’t risk anybody making a bold move.
“Any complications?” I asked.
“None. Basaam’s instructions were all accurate. The coward gave in right away. It’s anchored into the asteroid’s crust just outside the hangar, and we used his equations to set it at the proper angle.”
“Tell them to begin activating the engine and open a com channel from the Cora to the USF headquarters on New London. Now.”
“Yes, Lord Trass.”
We were halfway across the station’s galley when my orders went through. A tremor shook Undina, like an earthquake, only from outside, not within. My bones chattered. Then another came, even more violent. It sent me stumbling into Malcolm and over an overturned table. My men were able to keep their balance in their armor and plucked me off him.
“What the hell was that?” Malcolm asked.
“M-Day,” I said.
Before my men grabbed him again, I watched his eyelids go wide like he’d had an epiphany. I’d wondered how long it would take him to realize that every Earther’s biggest fear was about to come true. That Basaam Venta’s Fusion Pulse Engine, invented to propel an Ark ship the size of a small asteroid across Sol, were being used to do it.
Three and a half centuries ago, a meteorite inspired Darien Trass to send thousands of Earth’s finest men and women to Titan. He intended for them to start a new civilizati
on. The most brilliant minds, free of all their worldly shackles—free to create a new paradise for man. Now a second meteorite would see my people freed from the survivors of Earth who refused to die and took that from us.
Acceleration from the engines third nuclear pulse had Malcolm’s and my unarmored bodies soaring across the lobby like we were weightless. The pressure building up around my eyes was excruciating. My men snatched us out of the air before our spines cracked against the wall.
“Sorry, Lord Trass,” the Titanborn guard who caught me said. “We have to go.”
He slung me over his shoulder and took off across the lobby. Inertia fought him every step of the way, but with powered armor and mag boots, he got me to the hangar.
The Cora’s landing gear kept her planted firmly on the floor. The group trudged toward the ramp, struggling to battle the pressure despite their suits. I’d never endured sudden acceleration at this level. Even plummeting into the depths of Saturn on that luxury cruiser couldn’t compare. I couldn’t even part my lips to speak.
Pressure around my eye sockets built to the point to where they felt like they were going to burst. I could tell we were ascending the Cora’s ramp but was slowly losing vision.
“Get him in his suit, now!”
Hands fumbled across my body. I was tilted and bent until I heard the gentle hiss of a helmet sealing around my head. By the time I could focus my vision again, I found myself seated in the back of the Cora’s command deck. Judging by the stars through the viewport, we had departed Undina and were already in space.
Aria sat at the controls, two guns aimed at her head. I glanced back and saw Malcolm sat slumped against the wall in the corridor to the sleep pod chamber, cuffed and gritting his teeth. He too was under the gun. And last, in the copilot’s chair, sat Basaam Venta, watching through the viewport for the first time as his beloved invention functioned.
A pulsating light as brilliant as the sun glowed on the back of Undina. Even though the asteroid was a furrowed sphere of rock, it was being propelled out of its orbit onto an unnatural course toward Earth like a ship accelerating faster and faster.
Titan's Fury: A Science Fiction Thriller (Children of Titan Book 4) Page 27
