“It really works,” Basaam marveled.
“Quiet!” One of my men smacked him.
I stood and made my way to the controls. “Aria,” I said. “Are you all right flying?”
“We forced her to take two g-stims,” one of my men said. “One for each of them.”
She regarded me, tears filling her eyes, then looked to her injured father. “You have to help him, Kale,” she said. “Please.”
“Keep pace with Undina,” I ordered. “If you do exactly as I say, we’ll help. You two can leave together and be done with us.”
“That wasn’t the deal,” Malcolm groaned. “Luxarn dies; she gets out. Nothing in between.”
“And now you’ll get to join her, Collector.” I laid my hand on Aria’s shoulder, but she squirmed out from under it. Even after everything, watching her reject me made my chest go tight. I fought so long defending her, pretending she understood our plight.
“Just fly, Aria,” I growled.
“Coms are open to the USF Assembly, Lord Trass,” one of my men said.
The face of Talos Gaveren, Voice of the Assembly, appeared on the center control panel. Others ran frantically around the room behind him, but the old man tried his best to seem composed. His lips parted as he prepared to speak, but I beat him to it.
“Luxarn Pervenio is dead,” I said. “By now, you’ll have realized the activity of the Undina Mining Facility is not natural. Utilizing the Fusion Pulse Engine invented by Basaam Venta for your Ark announcement ceremony today, we have affected its orbit. In a few hours, it will slam directly into New London.”
Talos swallowed hard. “What do you want, Mr. Trass?”
“I want what we asked for on Mars. You will demand the full retreat of the PerVenta fleet back to Jupiter, along with the captives we so graciously handed over to them. Then you will formally sign over the properties of the Ring to the Children of Titan, with no ancillary conditions. No matter whose possession they are under.”
“Mr. Trass, you have to understand. There are dozens of companies we will have to contact to gain legal permissions. It could take days. Weeks.”
“Do as we ask, and the asteroid will miss your capital. Fail to meet our demands and you, and all the millions around New London, will know M-Day again. This will be our only conversation until you transmit the contracts. Goodbye, Earther.”
I ended the transmission, and Basaam Venta immediately lunged at me.
“This isn’t what they were made for, you lunatic!” he screamed. My men grabbed him before he could hit me, and slammed him to the floor. “This is insanity!”
“Get him out of here,” I ordered. They obliged, and as they carried the flailing Earther out of the room, I heard Malcolm cackle.
“They’ve been preparing for another meteorite for centuries,” he said. “They’re going to blow Undina out the sky. Luxarn already hollowed her out for them with his mining. It’ll be a cinch.”
My men went to silence him, but I stopped them. “Do you ever feel like things happen for a reason, Malcolm?” I asked. “That this vessel, designed by the most brilliant visionary your people ever had, fell into our hands? And that you, for so many reasons, drove Aria to us, the most gifted pilot I’ve ever met?”
“Lord Trass,” the Titanborn behind Aria said. “They didn’t waste any time. They’ve targeted Undina with the full complement of their thermonuclear anti-meteor arsenal on Luna. It’s enough to reduce Undina to pebbles before it hits.”
“Earthers.” I sighed. “Always in a rush. Aria, take us on a full burn ahead of Undina. Use everything. Shoot their missiles down on approach so that they have no choice but to free us.”
“No,” Aria said, incensed. “No, I won’t.”
“You will.” I drew my pulse pistol and aimed it at the top of Malcolm’s head. “If any of those missiles get through, your father dies. If they don’t, like I said, you’ll both walk out of this together. This is what you brought us to Mars for, Aria. Well get everything we wanted, and then you can be done with us like you wanted.”
“I didn’t want it like this.”
“Then you didn’t want peace at all!”
“I’m not worth it, Aria,” Malcolm said. “Shoot the damn engine off of that rock and end this.”
“Destroy the missiles, or I’ll make him suffer like an Earther deserves.” I knelt and wrapped my armored fingers around Malcolm’s throat. As I did, I pressed my pistol into his wound. He writhed beneath me, but now I had my armor on, and putting the Earther in his place was even easier.
“Do it!” I bellowed.
“Fine!” Aria answered. “But I swear, this is it. I thought your people were worth helping. I thought you were worth it... but you’re just as bad as they are.”
She threw our engines into full burn, zipping over Undina. Based on Basaam’s calculations, the Fusion Pulse Engine provided such powerful thrust using controlled nuclear explosions, it’d eventually be moving well beyond our ability to catch up, but Undina was massive in comparison, even for a relatively small asteroid. Engines had been used to generate faster spins for asteroid colonies to help with pseudo-gravity, but never to literally alter their trajectory at such a measure. Undina being almost entirely excavated by miners helped, but it was still incredible to see.
I raised Malcolm by the throat, planted him in one of the chairs, and locked him in. Then I held on to the back of Aria’s chair, magnetizing my boots so that the g-forces of our burn didn’t throw me around the command deck. Dozens of thin blue trails raced away from Luna, an arsenal developed specifically to keep another meteorite from hitting Earth. We knew about it thanks to data found on Pervenio Station after we took over, and we also knew that the warheads, while immensely powerful, had been developed before the Great Reunion ever happened. They were intended to neutralize a rogue asteroid by using a drill on the tip to burrow into the crust before detonating, but they weren’t prepared to stop an asteroid from being hurled at Earth on purpose, or a ship like the Cora.
“How do I operate the weapons systems?” the Titanborn who took the copilot’s chair asked.
Aria smacked his hands. “I’ll handle it.” The sudden movement made her wince and grab at her bulging stomach. I couldn’t imagine that handling these g-forces while in her condition was easy, even with g-stims in her system, but we needed her. Our son’s future needed her, just this last time.
“Let her,” I ordered.
The Titanborn leaned back, and Aria transferred all controls to her station. Her fingers darted across the screens with such grace, it was as if she were dancing. The Cora raced up over Undina, the rocky surface rushing beneath us. Aria targeted the first wave of thermo-nukes and hit one with a missile. It detonated in a flash of blue so dazzling, I had to shield my eyes, taking any other nukes in the vicinity with it.
The Cora quickly spiraled downward, the viewport coming within meters of scraped Undina as we escaped the glowing cloud of plasma from the explosion. Then Aria whipped us back around and took aim at another wave. All the vastness of space and her targeting abilities made it seem small. She was shooting only using scanners, no visual of the nukes—blind.
The warheads came from silos all over Luna, so they were staggered. Aria wove us in and out of nuclear shockwaves, just barely scraping by, with Undina barreling onward in our wake. With every nuke she disabled, she was forced to push the Cora faster. Basaam’s engine had Undina accelerating exponentially.
We reached the same orbital range around Earth as the moon, closing fast. Aria fired all the Cora’s missiles in a perfect line, detonating them to form a wall of shrapnel. A handful of nukes got caught in it, releasing a destructive wave of energy like I’d never seen. She whipped the Cora downward, pushing our engines to their max.
Even my magnetized boots and armor couldn’t hold, and I slid back across the floor. I nearly crushed Malcolm on my way toward thumping into the wall. Then Aria leveled us off, skirting beneath the wave of atomic death.
Two warheads continued their path toward Undina, closing fast. Aria’s fingers trembled now as she worked the targeting array. I could hear her breathing heavily. She got a lock and fired. The missile clipped one in its engine and sent it sputtering on the wrong path, but she missed the other. A last-minute spray of flak wasn’t enough to stop it. It struck Undina, burrowing through the surface before a brilliant flash of blue blew a chunk off the asteroid.
Aria held her breath as we watched the newly-hewn miniature asteroid spin off into the void. It was a sizable portion of Undina, but the rest of it remained intact, and now more warheads en route. It had enough mass left to level New London and nearly every settlement along the planet’s Euro String out toward Old Russia.
“That’s all of them,” Aria exhaled.
She laid off the throttle, and I immediately got up and rushed forward. I craned my neck to look through the viewport at Earth, now front and center. The clouds coating its surface grew in detail. String-like settlements running across portions of the planet that remained above the ocean were now thin black lines extending for hundreds of kilometers. After the Meteorite, that was how Earthers built their cities, in long stretches rather than clumps so that they were safe from single explosions. Safety from extinction drove everything they did.
The largest protuberance in the Euro String was the city of New London, where the USF Assembly and so many other corporate headquarters sat. And if I could look down and see them now, it meant that all the millions of people gathered for celebration could look up and see Undina crashing toward them like a fireball. It meant that they feared judgment again.
Twenty-Two
Malcolm
As I watched from my position at the back of the command deck, I couldn’t help but be impressed with a man I’d grown to hate. Kale Trass was an insufferable freedom fighter with a weak constitution who couldn’t see beyond his own nose to know what he already had. Yet he’d played his hand perfectly all the same.
He’d traveled to Mars to give a face to the rebellion and kidnap the genius they needed. He used Aria, Rylah, Orson Fring, me, and so many others to get exactly what he wanted, to fuel his people’s anger or stoke Earth’s fear. Maybe I’d lost a ton of blood and was disappointed he’d forced me off Undina alive, but a man like me, who’d spent his life chasing rebels, had to admire his relentlessness and curse myself for ever thinking his aunt was in control.
I remembered what I’d said to her once about kids like him getting creative when they go bad, and I knew this plot had his brokenhearted fingerprints all over it.
“Anything from the USF?” Kale asked.
“A transmission started coming through the moment the last warhead went offline,” Aria said reluctantly. She slowly synced the video message to the main screen.
“You win, Mr. Trass,” Talo said, looking like he was ready to faint. “I’ve transmitted signed documents satisfying your demands, and I’ll be dealing with the blowback until I die. The Ring belongs to you now, provided you divert the current course of Undina. I hope you do well with it alone. Goodbye, Mr. Trass. This is the last time Earth will ever deal with you.”
As soon as the message ended, I clapped. Everyone turned to me so fast it was like I’d set off a bomb. “Well played,” I said. “My whole life, I never saw Earth or the major corps blink, and you made them shit themselves in less than an hour.”
“How do I divert it?” Aria asked, clearly eager to move on with the subject.
Kale didn’t answer. He leaned toward the viewport, hands squeezing the backs of the seats on either side of him. Big, beautiful Earth hovered in the center. It’d been exactly a year now since I’d been there, the last M-Day when the Children of Titan made their existence known beyond their own world by blowing up a train platform in New London and robbing a hospital. They’d come far in a short time. Now Undina raced through space toward the very same city, a trail of blinding light at its back.
“You don’t,” Kale said, emotionless. Hearing his response made my heart feel like it’d plunged out of my chest. Again, it could’ve been the bullet wound, but I felt empty.
“What are you talking about?” Aria asked.
“Plot a course for Titan,” Kale said. “We’re going home.”
“You made a deal to divert Undina.”
“And now they’ll learn how worthless deals with them truly are as they spend the next century recovering.”
“They gave you want you wanted!” Aria went to shove him, but Kale grabbed her arm and squeezed. That snapped me out of a spell of lightheadedness, though, I couldn’t manage much more than to sit up.
“Do you really think a signature makes Titan ours?” Kale asked. “They’ll be back for us tomorrow, using trade and credits for leverage. They’ll do what Earthers do, manipulate and corrupt. No, this M-Day will change everything. They take us seriously now, but after this is over, they will fear us. It won’t matter if the deal is ruined, because they won’t be able to touch us. They’ll be stuck rebuilding their civilization for decades. Until our son is ruling over the Ring. That is how we win. Not with signed papers.”
If there is one thing I’ve learned about rebels, the moment they’re proficient enough to get you to respect them, they show their true colors. The moment you think they have an actual vision, they reveal their narcissism. Unable to fit in with the way the world works, they try to write it in their own image.
“There are millions of people down there, and you’re just going to wipe them out?” I asked. “Innocent people. Good people.” And Zhaff, I didn’t say out loud. I’d left him behind for a chance to live his life, and thanks to Kale, he’d die anyway. Death indeed did follow in his wake.
I’d never cared a smidge for the rabble of Earth, but it was a collector’s job, more than anything, to ensure they could live peacefully. The Amissum clan-family was down there, a few kilometers outside New London—that group of hardworking factory laborers I was born into before I ran to seek better things. They probably didn’t know enough about Ringers to even care about looking down on them.
“Kale, don’t do this,” Aria begged. “I know I hurt you, but I’ve seen the good in you. I fell in love with that man. None of that was fake.”
“You think this is about you?” Kale asked as he continued to stare at Earth. “Everyone always thinks it’s about them.”
I remembered how the Pervenio directors always looked after striking a solid deal or weaseling their way out of trouble thanks to a collector’s talents. Like they were conquering heroes. Kale seemed neither proud nor solemn. He was relieved. I knew now, going back, that when Rylah came to my cell, I should have told them to stop and keep playing along in Kale’s fantasy. Sure, he was always a deluded Ringer no thanks to his aunt, but Aria leaving him hadn’t just broken his heart… it broke him.
“It’s already done,” he said. “Basaam knew. There is no way to communicate with the engine. The energy discharged in every pulse causes too much interference. Undina can’t stop, and it can’t turn.”
“No… no!” Aria lunged for him and pounded on his chest plate. “I should have strangled you with your bed sheets, you fucking coward! They were all right about you. You are a monster!”
Kale’s men went to stop her, but he ordered them to back down. I tried again to stand, but a firm hand on my shoulder sent me back into my seat without a fuss. I barely had enough energy left to keep my eyes open.
“I’m going to stop this. You need to be stopped.” Aria sat back down, took control of the ship, and banked around so hard, it threw everyone off balance. She raced back toward the rear of Undina, making sure to keep the Cora corkscrewing so that nobody could keep their bearings.
“Let her,” Kale instructed his men.
Aria targeted the pulsing engine stalk latched to the back of Undina and fired everything the Cora had left in her arsenal. Even if she knocked it out, the asteroid wouldn’t stop. All she could hope would be that a few fusion pulses after it was knocked
loose of its anchor in the rock redirected it into the planets vast ocean. The planet had already been half-drowned three hundred years prior, and Earthers were smart enough to resettle far from the new coastlines along high elevations.
It was a smart move by my daughter, a rash move, but futile. The plasma emitted by the engines nuclear propulsion vaporized every missile before even coming close to the surface. When Aria realized that, along with the rest of us, her jaw dropped and the Cora stopped spinning. One of Kale’s men immediately grabbed her and yanked her out of the seat.
“No!” she howled. She reached back and ripped the man’s sidearm out of its holster. Every rifle in the command deck swung to aim at her, I called out for her to stop, and that was when she did the unthinkable. Something she probably learned from the Children of Titan after so long at their side. She turned the gun on herself, aiming right through her belly button at Kale’s son.
“Get your hands off me!” She shook free and backed slowly across the command deck, toward me. “I swear, if you don’t stop it, I’ll blow us both to hell.”
“Aria, it’s too late.” Kale took a hard step toward her, but she fired once into the ceiling to stop him and then returned to aiming.
Kale raised his arms to get his men to lower their weapons, then took a different approach. He bit back his anger and tried to console her. “This is how we change Sol, Aria,” he said softly. By Earth, the crazy kid really meant it too.
“By killing millions?” she replied.
“To ensure that millions of Titanborn will be born in control of their own lives for generations.”
“If you do this, they don’t deserve it.”
“How many of us died in the Ringer Plague so Pervenio Corp could own the Ring? And he and his father let it happen. He told me himself. What do you think they’ll try next?”
I snickered, and one of his men promptly wrapped a hand around my throat as if they’d forgotten I was there. “You’re really going to lie to her while I’m right here?” I asked.
Titan's Fury: A Science Fiction Thriller (Children of Titan Book 4) Page 28
