John’s burly arm wrapped the back of my neck, and he led me to another cart in need of loading.
“What’s your name, kid?” he asked.
“Ka…” I sputtered over my own name. Growing up in the Lowers, you get used to feeling uncomfortable any time an Earther is close enough to grab your throat. “Kale Drayton.”
“We have a tradition on board the Piccolo, Kale.”
“Yeah?”
He glanced over at his cronies, suppressing a grin. “Yeah. The last Ringer who arrives for duty has to pick up the harvesting canisters.”
John’s buddies knocked a stack of cylindrical containers off their rack. They clanked along the metal floor, the sound filling the hangar. I felt my heart drop further and further with every impact until they stopped rolling.
“What in Earth’s name is going on over there!” the captain shouted.
“Sorry, cap,” John answered. “New guy’s still getting up to speed. I’ll sort him out.” John then glanced up at me, that same grin smeared across his face. I stood two heads taller than him, but I’d never felt so small. “Whoops,” he said. “We push off in thirty. You better get started.”
My blood started to boil. My fingers dug into my palm as they curled into fists.
“What’s wrong, boy?” he asked. “Your puny Ringers muscles too tired to do some lifting?”
“Kid looks like he wants to punch ya,” one of his buddies said.
“Oh, please do it. I’ve been itching to snap a skelly’s neck like a twig.”
Anyone from the Lowers knew two things. Never trust an Earther, and never pick a fight with one unless you’ve got backup. Not a single one of the other Ringers on the crew came to my aid, even Desmond. A few gave us a passing glance, but nothing more.
I didn’t care. I was young and stupid, and angry that I got caught stealing for the wrong man and forced to work on a rusty old ship. My arm tensed as I prepared to take my best shot—I’d only get one before I’d have to bolt—and then I saw something that paralyzed me.
A young woman strolled down the ramp of the ship. Hybrid by the look of her, with curves no Ringer should have and hair so blonde it looked silver. Maybe I’d just never seen a woman beyond the dim, flickering lights of the Lowers, but she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
“That’s what I thought,” John said. “Get to work, Ringer.” He brushed by, he and his friends all cackling. They nudged some of the canisters with their feet on the way by to move them even further from the rack.
The woman stopped by the mess and knelt to help me. I was so taken aback by her, I let her lift the thing before I remembered to rush over and help her.
“I’ve got it,” I said. I held out my arms, but the woman walked by and hauled the thing to the rack herself.
“They’re jerks, but you’ll get used to them,” she said. All the tension in my muscles melted away as the sound of her soft, calming voice washed over me.
I’m not even sure my response was in English. She pretended not to notice.
“I’ll get the rest. It’s fine,” I managed to utter. “My mess.”
“First day?” she said.
I nodded.
“Sometimes, with them, it’s best to just keep your mouth shut and your head down,” she said. “You’ll do fine.”
She started ambling away toward the captain, when I blurted out, “What’s your name?” My voice cracked halfway through. If my mother heard the way I cursed at myself inwardly for sounding so stupid, she’d have had a heart attack.
The woman turned back, her hair swishing over her slender shoulder. The tiniest inkling of a smile touched her thin lips. “Cora,” she said. “I’m the navigator.”
I wiped the tear from my cheek and tried to force myself to think about something else, anything else. That day seemed so meaningless at the time, but I’d been thinking back to the first time I met Cora more and more since she died. Not just seeing her for the first time, but what she’d said.
She truly believed we could ignore the way Earthers treated us, like one day they’d wake up and see the light. Beat them with kindness. She believed it because she was a better person than anyone left on Titan or Earth. It broke my heart every time I remembered the day she died to know how wrong she was.
I squeezed my eyelids shut and pressed my head into the pillow, desperately trying to sleep. After a few minutes of silence, my thumb found the key to set the recording of Luxarn’s and Sodervall’s fateful discussion to play again. As it did, I pulled up the only image I had of Cora—a grainy, overhead view from within the cell she was condemned to right before Director Sodervall spaced her simply because she wasn’t one of them. Her face obscured by blood, tears, and messy hair; her arms and legs covered in bruises.
Because of them, that was all I had to remember her by. Nothing else.
Four
Malcolm
Coming up on sixty years of living, I wasn’t ever going to get used to my new leg. It wasn’t the moving it part. That was relatively easy as long as I avoided strenuous situations. After a week in the depths of Undina, I was a relative pro at zipping around in straight lines. Dr. Aurora had me walking a few miles on a simulated Earth-G treadmill every day, pushing me like a drillmaster. That was followed by exhaustive physical therapy on my lower body to try and rekindle all the sensations I once enjoyed. The cantankerous old bat was utterly immune to my charms.
What really freaked me out about the limb was the void every time I woke up. I found myself tapping the plated thigh just to make sure the leg was there, because other than a slight pinch on my hip when I willed any part of the artificial limb to move, I felt nothing. I’d even found that I couldn’t look at the thing when I operated it. It made my skin crawl, like a neighbor I didn’t like but was forced to tolerate had latched on to me, or like a partner, like Zhaff.
Whiskey would’ve helped a ton. My prison guard—doctor—didn’t allow any. Not that there was any. I was in the clandestine training facility of the Cogent Initiative, where mentally troubled, illegitimate children with defects like Zhaff had were provided a chance to make a difference.
Mr. Pervenio insisted I stay until the doc gave me a clean bill of health, so I shared all my time with the Cogents. They weren’t ones for conversation, so mostly I watched them train. Not that there was anything else to do. No bars, not even a viewscreen to watch a show or a newsfeed on. Their instructors claimed Mr. Pervenio didn’t want them distracted by the turmoil in Sol, but instead to prepare their minds and bodies to end it.
So they trained. Every second they weren’t sleeping. Martial arts, aptitude exams, physiognomy, psychology, weaponry—anything to sculpt them into perfect shadow agents. It put a whole lot into perspective about Zhaff, starting with making me feel like an idiot for ever thinking I could compete with him. Sure, I had instinct from thirty years on the job, but I’d be better off sitting in front of a screen telling them what to do than trying to keep up.
That seemed like the foremost responsibility of a director—like what Luxarn planned to make me. So, one day after giving up on my own exercise, I limped into the firing range. My new leg could go for an eternity, but the wrinkled one I had left over was weaker than ever after months being under for space travel and treatment. Painkillers dulled the soreness, but then I could hardly feel the pinch of moving the synth leg. There was no winning.
Varus, the youngest Cogent out of the three dozen or so in the facility, was honing his aim. Like Zhaff, he couldn’t be much older than fifteen or sixteen, only he was squatter and built like a hovercar. Born on Earth by the looks of it. Like Zhaff had, I wondered what fresh horror he’d endured at the hands of kids who didn’t understand him to wind up here.
His yellow eye lens was fixed down the sight of a pulse pistol. He kept his other exposed eye closed.
An instructor decked out in Pervenio gear leaned on the wall next to the shooting range console. He was older than the Cogent, though not by much. He couldn’
t even grow a beard, and it sure as hell didn’t look like he’d ever seen a real firefight. He operated the controls like a tired dockworker, directing holographic targets in the shape of men to dart around the far side of the room like a flock of frenetic hummingbirds.
The Cogent fell into a perfect stance and fired calculated shots into the head of every target, whether they were close or far. One clip, two clips. A chart on the instructor’s console provided the stats, and there wasn’t a single miss. On the last round of the third clip, the instructor sent a target as far as possible down the long, rocky passage. Sixty meters easy. Varus lined it up a second longer than usual, fired, and plunked it right through the center of the forehead.
“Nice shot,” I remarked.
He turned to me, and without a shred of emotion, said, “I was off by three centimeters.” Then he returned to shooting.
I couldn’t help but grin. He was all Zhaff, with none of the personality I’d squeezed out of him. I thought back to Zhaff on our first job, standing among the ruins of an ancient Earth city while a Ringer terrorist held me at gunpoint. He would’ve let the man kill me if it had meant a chance at taking him in alive like our mission entailed. By the end of our short time together, I’d like to think he would’ve seen the value in bending the rules to keep his partner alive.
Maybe I did have something to teach, or maybe I just missed the kid.
“Shut it off,” I said to the instructor. He glared at me, but I didn’t waver, and eventually, he did as I asked. He knew exactly who I was. A part of me felt like we’d met before—maybe he was a collector once who couldn’t hack it—but my aging brain was getting fuzzy when it came to stray faces.
“What is it now, Graves?” he grumbled.
I ignored him and placed a hand on Varus’s shoulder. The Cogent’s head whipped around, his single exposed eye somehow equally inexpressive and intimidating.
“It isn’t always as easy as pulling the trigger,” I said to him.
“Is there another way to fire this pulse pistol?” he asked, voice as stale as Zhaff’s was.
Again, I smirked. “No, what I mean is… Do you want to kill me?”
“I do not.”
“Good.” I patted him on the back and strolled out into the shooting aisle. I went about twenty meters and then turned toward him. “Instructor, position a target right behind me.”
The instructor went to key the commands, then paused. His lip twisted. “Maybe I should ask Doct—”
“I’m fine. Just do it.”
He didn’t look happy but obliged. I noticed the cerulean glow of a holographic target on the back of my arm.
“Now, the target behind me has me hostage,” I addressed Varus.
“He does not,” Varus said.
“Pretend. He’s your target, but he has a gun on me, and I’m upper-level Pervenio management.” He opened his mouth to reply, but I stopped him. “I know. Just imagine it. You’re left with two choices. He either escapes with a valuable hostage, or you risk taking the shot. What do you do?”
Varus eyed his instructor, who offered little more than a shrug. “I contact my primary handler and inquire how to proceed,” he stated.
“There’s no time. The man he has is your handler, and you’re in a dead zone. Hell, imagine I’m Luxarn Pervenio himself. I see how well you shoot with nothing in the way, but can you make that shot? With everything on the line. Can you?”
“Yes,” Varus said.
He raised his pulse pistol, and in that split second between him aiming and squeezing the trigger, my mind transported me back to Titan. Zhaff had my daughter in his clutches, so I pulled a gun on him. His weapon was up by the time my shot hit him but not quickly enough. His helmet snapped back before he crumpled to the ground in a heap of twisted limbs.
The vision caused me to reel, and Varus’s shot struck my shoulder. I was lucky they were only using flathead training bullets, but the force was still enough to knock me back on my ass. His black-clad figure ran to me, yellow eye-lens glinting. I had to shake my head a few times to remind myself who it really was. Shave a boy’s head, cover one eye, and make him pale from lack of sunlight—they all start to look the same.
“You moved into the path of the bullet,” he stated categorically as he hauled me to my feet. “You are in need of medical assistance.”
“I’m fine!” I shrugged him off and stumbled toward the wall. I leaned on it to gather myself and steady my breathing and heart rate. Thirty years on the job, never once had a gun pointed in my direction made me cower. I didn’t have nightmares. Like any collector with the stomach to stay in the game, I placed all the traumatic, dreadful things I’d seen deep in my brain, buried beneath a well of liquor.
Damn, I needed a drink.
“Malcolm,” someone whispered to me. I didn’t answer. “Malcolm.”
“What!” I snapped. I turned to see Dr. Aurora. Varus and the instructor were already back at the firing station, watching me. “Oh, Doc, it’s you.”
“Are you all right?”
I exhaled. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just needed a breather.” I’m sure my expression betrayed my words, since her craggy brow furrowed. All her tests and prodding, I wonder if she knew what I’d only just discovered. That it didn’t matter whether or not I even wanted to stay in my line of work for Mr. Pervenio—I was done. That a collector who can’t escape the specters of his past always is.
“Mr. Pervenio is requesting to meet with you immediately,” she said. She presented my worn duster as well as my beloved long-barreled F-3000 pulse pistol, collector issued. She’d joined me on more missions than I could remember.
“About?” I asked. I lifted the pistol and spun it around. It had a few new scrapes and blemishes from what had happened on Titan, but the old girl was in as good a shape as ever. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed her until she was back in my hand, like a long-lost friend.
“In my last report, I informed him you are back in satisfactory health. He would like to discuss the future of your employment.”
“I can’t wait,” I droned.
Maybe Dr. Aurora was just eager to get rid of me and return to helping people who actually needed it. I took my belongings and followed her out, offering Varus a nod of encouragement on my way. I’m not sure he needed it. He didn’t look in the least bit rattled. Zhaff never had either, even right before the moment I put him down like a rebel offworlder.
Dr. Aurora left me alone outside Mr. Pervenio’s office in the deepest sanctum of the concealed facility. I straightened the creases of my worn duster and used the reflection in the shiny door to make sure all my effects were in order. Pistol hanging neatly, hair combed, beard trimmed. The doc even let me shave. There was nothing I could do about the new gray hairs on the top of my head or my deepened wrinkles, but at least I’d walk into my last meeting as a collector looking the part.
Nobody waited to greet me. There weren’t even officers posted outside to keep Luxarn safe. The only noise came from a small white room behind me, in which the Cogent Varus was now restrained to a reclined chair. I could tell it was him by his stocky build. A VR visor was strapped over his eyes, and who knows what was playing on it because the usually staid young man squirmed from side to side.
“Welcome, Malcolm Graves,” said a robotic voice. “Please, make yourself comfortable. Mr. Pervenio was delayed and will arrive shortly.”
I turned, startled, to see the very same service bot Luxarn Pervenio had flaunted my first time meeting him floating out of his office to receive me. The bulbous orb of metal and limbs was bizarre as ever. Its single oculus lined up with my eyes, gave them a scan, and then it allowed me inside.
Apparently, Luxarn had found a purpose for his service bot prototypes that everyday drones couldn’t really perform. Certified butler. I stepped in, and unlike the last time I entered his office, all the nerves of meeting with my employer had vanished. The bot didn’t follow.
His office on Undina was a far cry from his auth
entic-wood-clad one with a view of Saturn on Pervenio Station. It was swankier than the Cogent living and training chambers, but more in the way of what you’d expect the manager of an asteroid mine to have. Which made sense, considering that to the outside world, that was all Undina really was. Even I hadn’t known that buried deep in its crust was a training and research facility with the capability of installing the cybernetic marvel I now called my leg. It was no wonder Director Sodervall had been so irritated half-a-year back after I ravaged one of its mining sectors and risked exposing it to scrutiny.
I surveyed the room. A polished desk was centered in the back, with nothing on it but a console and Zhaff’s cracked eye lens. Some scrapped service bots, which Luxarn had apparently been tinkering with, lay along the floor. A painting of a beach on pre-Meteorite Earth hung on the otherwise blank wall behind his desk. I headed straight for the cabinets sunken into one side, searching for some of that fine whiskey he had the last time we spoke. Nothing.
“What are we, in a Three Messiahs church?” I mumbled.
I rummaged through the last drawer, and right before my hand came up empty, the holographic viewscreen display of Luxarn’s console caught my attention. One of the USF news feeds played on low volume, talking heads discussing the latest in Sol affairs.
“Pervenio Corp is dead,” said a newswoman positioned in front of an all-too-perfect New London skyline shot. “The interplanetary giant we’ve known since the rebuilding of civilization is gone. Buried.”
“How many corporations have we seen rise and fall?” a Pervenio Director named Barret Ulnor countered. I knew him by appearances, though he never handled offworld affairs. He ran the company’s tree farming branch on Earth, and stood amidst one of the massive spaces before a wall of green leaves. From what I recalled, he was a buffoon—had to be to get stuck stationed on Earth.
Titan's Rise: (Children of Titan Book 3) Page 6
