“Wait!” Basaam blurted. “What do you want with me? You release us, and I promise I can make it worth your while. Weapons tech. That’s what you’re after, right? For your war.”
I raised a hand to halt Gareth. “Pervenio left us all the weapons we need,” I said. “All I need are your fusion drives.”
“Fusion pulse engines,” he corrected, the word trailing off at the end as if he’d spoke purely out of impulse.
I bit my lip. “I need you to construct an operational version for me on Titan.”
“B…but I can’t,” he stammered.
Rim seized him. “Why not?”
“The technology is still too volatile to be used on any vessel smaller than the Ark we’re designing! You’d blow yourself to pieces. As a registered doctor, I cannot be party to that, no matter how poorly you treat me.”
“It isn’t your concern what we’re using them for,” I said.
“Regardless, I have none of my research. She broke my hand-terminal in my room, and even that isn’t enough. Have you somehow transmitted my research from Martelle Station over Europa to Titan? Captured all my assistants? How do you expect me to build anything from scratch?”
My features darkened. “You’ll find a way.”
“In a few years, perhaps. But I’ve been working on this tech for almost a decade. Even my memory isn’t that prodigious.”
“That’s too long,” I said.
“You’re lying,” Rin snapped at Basaam.
“I’m not!” he answered. “Starting from scratch, in a new lab, with new technicians? I’ll be lucky if I ever get it working.”
“You’ll do what we ask, or your friends here will have a difficult time enjoying their vacation.”
“How dare you threaten them!” he yelled, spit dribbling down his beard. The shrill tone of his voice rendered his attempt at intimidation laughable.
“What is it with you Earthers?” Rin asked. “One woman isn’t enough?”
Gareth playfully smacked Basaam in the back of the head, then signed, “What. He’s not your type, Rin?”
“I wasn’t born on Earth,” Basaam said.
“Well, you’re fat enough to have been,” Rin said. The insult made him huff. “Lord Trass has given his orders. You all enjoy your sleep. Hopefully, after our long, long flight, you’ll have a change of heart.”
She waved Gareth to take him.
“You’re asking the impossible! See reason, Mr. Trass!” Basaam and the two women kicked and squirmed, screaming at the top of their lungs for help until they disappeared around the corner. Rin turned to me and scratched her scarred jaw through her mask.
“The Cora is ready for departure when you are,” she said. “Everything is loaded up.”
“Not everything,” I said.
“Oh, right. Where is our former doctor?”
“Coming. She had some affairs to see to before she leaves Mars behind for good.”
“Well, she’s late.”
“She worked hard to organize all this, Rin. You weren’t in there. To see everything unravel… her own people dismissing us like common protestors. I know you don’t think she cares.”
“But she’s late. You realize who we have in our cabin, right, Kale? He’s the most vital cog in Venta Co. right now besides his clan-sister. We got lucky the bombing distracted everyone enough to snatch him easy, but if Aria doesn’t hurry, our luck will run out.”
“Lord Trass,” one of my guards interrupted us from the base of the cargo ramp.
“What!” I growled.
“Y… you need to come immediately.”
My heated glare lingered on Rin a few seconds longer, then we followed him out into the hangar. Captain Barnes waited by the gate, holding a hand-terminal. The room’s temperature was to his kind’s preference, yet sweat matted his hair to his forehead.
“Mr. Trass,” Barnes said anxiously. “May I?” He held out the screen, refusing to cross the gate threshold without my permission.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s Madame Venta, sir. She filed an urgent request to speak with you.”
“About what?”
“Spit it out!” Rin hissed.
“Ask her yourself.” Barnes handed me the device, then quickly retreated.
I took a moment to compose myself before rotating the screen to face me. Madame Venta’s smug face was right in the center, hair pulled into a tight bun like she was about to tend a garden.
“Mr. Trass,” she said, smiling. “Just when I thought we could be friends.”
“We’re preparing to leave, Madame, so make it quick.”
“You kids have forgotten the value of a good conversation. One day I’ll teach you how to play the game.”
“Is that really why you called?”
“I know who you have.” Her pleasant tone quickly eroded. “I don’t know why, and I don’t care, but I’m giving you one chance to hand him over. I’ll consider it a rash act of impulse because of how the summit went, or because you fear his new engines may one day render Saturn’s gases obsolete. We can continue on as we were.”
I didn’t provide Rin the luxury of a look, though I knew her expression was probably saying “I told you so.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” I addressed Madame Venta.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that,” she said.
Madame Venta handed the device to her son Fern, who cackled like a maniac as he crossed the room. He spun the camera around so that I could see a woman, shackled to a wall naked but for the pendant hanging from her neck. Not just a woman—Aria. The mop of auburn hair atop her head gave it away first, rumpled by her captors, then the pendant hanging from her neck. She wasn’t bleeding or bruised, but she lurched when she saw me, her limber figure arching toward the camera as she struggled to pull herself free.
“Kale!” she screamed. “Don’t listen to anything she says!” The rest of her words were muffled when Karl Venta slapped his hand over her mouth. She tried to bite it, but he cursed and slapped her before getting a tighter grip.
Madame Venta took the camera back. “You know, after I found out about Basaam, I found myself wondering how to possibly get to you when it seems you won’t listen to anybody. Then I caught an early glimpse at a story cover featuring the little show you two put on outside the USF elevator, and it hit me.”
“What’s she talking about, Kale?” Rin asked.
I ignored her. “If you hurt her,” I said, seething.
“I have a hard time damaging something so fair.” She moved to Aria’s side and ran the tip of her finger down her neck and over her breasts. Aria squirmed. “But sometimes, exceptions have to be made.”
“Get your filthy hands off her!”
“Give me Basaam!” Madame Venta snarled. She grabbed Aria by the throat and shoved her face into the screen. “It is only out of respect for her former service to me that she still has all her fingers.”
“I warned you, Kale,” Rin whispered. “I told you we needed to leave.”
“Let Aria go!” I demanded. “Or I swear to you—”
“That you’ll what?” Madame Venta scoffed. “That you’ll fucking what? You’re in way over your head, boy. Give me Basaam, and she’ll be returned in one piece. You have five minutes to decide; otherwise, I might start cutting things off.” Madame Venta rubbed Aria’s slightly swollen stomach, a bump still so subtle it was only visible while she was naked. “Or out.”
The feed cut out just as Aria was able to squeeze a shriek through Karl’s fingers. Without intending to, my strong grip cracked the screen of the device.
“You should have kept her by your side,” Rin said crossly, but as my breathing started to hasten, her stance softened. She laid a hand on my shoulder. “I know you’re close to her, but we can’t risk everything for one offworlder. The Cora is faster than any ship they’ve got. We should leave now while Red Wing Company still backs us.”
I couldn’t get words out. I c
ould hardly breathe.
“If you’re right about her, she’d be happy to give herself for our cause,” Rin continued. “Besides, that Earther bitch is all talk. They have history. She’s one of the agents who Rylah first contacted for us years ago to set up supply exchanges with Venta Co. Madame Venta won’t just kill her. She’ll keep using her to get Basaam back until we don’t need the fat slob anymore.”
“She has my son!” I bellowed.
“What are you talking about?”
I clutched my chest, trying my best to steady my breathing. Rin wrapped her hand around my back to support me but was flung away as I punched the wall of the hangar as hard as I could. The bang nearly made Captain Barnes jump out of his armor, and Gareth immediately bounded down from the Cora to see what was wrong.
“My son...” I whispered. “Aria has him.”
“What are you saying?” Rin clutched my face and stared deep into my eyes.
“Rin, listen to me. Aria is carrying him. The heir to Titan.”
“Why… why didn’t I…” She stumbled backward. I’d never seen her appear so flabbergasted by anything. If Gareth hadn’t arrived in time to brace her, she might have collapsed.
“It wasn’t planned, but it’s the truth,” I said.
We’d found out shortly before the raid on Director Lawrence and the Luxury Cruiser. Being illegitimate meant she didn’t get the Birth Control medications distributed to USF citizens without reproduction clearance.
I wasn’t lying to Rin; her getting pregnant wasn’t intended, but little with Aria ever was. I could still remember her face when she called me from the new Hayes Memorial Hospital to tell me about the tests she’d run on herself. It took me a few minutes to formulate words, but her—it was like her whole life had changed. Like the piece she’d been missing had come back to her.
In that moment, our occasionally nightly fling when both of us wanted to feel something became so much more. She started wanting to talk about things, and I did my best to open up—to see her, and not the woman Pervenio took from me. I wasn’t sure if it’d been working until now that she was taken. All I could think about was getting her back, how she’d walked before the USF Assembly and stood up for us when so few would.
“You didn’t tell me?” Rin asked.
“Would you have told you?” I replied.
She shook her head slowly.
“Now you know why I need to get her back,” I said. “We’ll find another way to get Basaam’s tech or build something else. We’ve got the fuel.”
She continued to stare blankly at me.
“Remember all that we went through just to save your sister?” I said, desperate to convince her.
“Stop.” Rin dropped to one knee and lowered her head. “Just tell me what to do, Lord Trass.”
Sixteen
Malcolm
Aria’s captors hauled her through the main entrance of Venta Co.’s central office tower. Since it was located at the heart of New Beijing under the loftiest portion of the dome, it was the tallest structure. The tapering cylinder rose like a layered wedding cake with too many levels to count. A series of terraces wrapped every few floors, until the top one wasn’t big enough to house more than a single office—Madame Jamaru Venta’s office. Verdant green leaves and brilliant flowers draped over the railings of each terrace, the glass enclosure reflecting the flora all the way up. From the right angle, the entire tower seemed to be one giant plant with the blue, interlocked V’s of their emblem beaming down from the highest point.
All my time as a collector, Venta was a shade behind Pervenio Corp in every facet. You wouldn’t know it looking at their headquarters. Even Luxarn Pervenio wouldn’t build something so ostentatious. The Hanging Gardens of New Beijing, that was what people called it, like it was some sort of world wonder.
I entered a quaint café nestled at the base of the dome-scraper across the street. The sweet aroma of leftover pastries filled my nostrils. The crust probably wasn’t the real stuff, but my grumbling stomach hadn’t ingested anything but alcohol for over twenty-four hours. I bought something stale with a layer of frosting to help it go down, and a strong coffee to keep me awake. A few other civilians around my age sat throughout the place, too old to follow the blinking lights and music toward the real nightlife below, but with too much on their minds to sleep. Living past your warranty does that to a man.
I parked my ass at one of the tables by the window and stared at Venta Tower. A smattering of lights glowed through windows here and there, employees hard at work in the middle of the night. Poor saps. The rest of the city’s illumination derived from the countless ads festooning every other tower’s enclosure. Venta’s was the only one without them, as if the only thing they needed to publicize was how hard their employees worked.
I watched silently, sipping on coffee that could pass for melted rat shit and forcing down a pastry so manufactured even I could notice the fakeness. There were far better places to get a bite in New Beijing, but only for people who hadn’t spent all their credits chasing a Three Messiah’s Herald who wanted to be found.
Lights suddenly flashed on in Madame Venta’s office up top, which meant my greatest fear was realized. That lady devil was personally involved with taking Aria. The talking heads on news feed behind the café’s counter droned on about how poorly the summit between Kale and the USF had gone. No official details were released yet, but I had a roiling feeling in my gut that this was political.
Madame Venta had always been deliberate. Luxarn Pervenio could manipulate with the best of them, tugging strings from the shadows like a puppet master. She didn’t play games or bluff, which meant that when she grabbed Titan’s bastard ambassador off the street in public, she probably had her reasons.
“What the hell did you do, Kale?” I whispered to myself.
“Excuse me?” a fossil of a man asked from the table behind me.
I disregarded him and went to take another sip of coffee. I swallowed a small mouthful before I pictured the blood of Aria’s guards staining my whiskey and lost my appetite. I’d been part of a number of corporate feuds, and that was an act of war as far as I was concerned. If Venta did something like that to Pervenio in its heyday, that was when collectors would start being sent out to take shots until everyone’s lust for vengeance was satiated, and we could return to our uneasy economic alliances as if nothing had happened.
My real question was this: Was taking Aria meant to send a message to Kale for something he’d done or was she a trading chip? I couldn’t stomach either option. Leaving Aria’s life in the hands of a terrorist who fancied himself king wasn’t in the cards. I’d seen his people shoot at her right after she saved one of their lives back on Titan. If it came to it, I was sure they’d leave her behind if it suited their needs in a heartbeat.
So I needed to get to her first, which meant I needed to break into a building as secure as the USF Assembly. A double layer of guard posts stood within the front entrance, filled with heavily armed officers. Security drones whizzed around each terrace, keeping 360-degree watch along with cameras. Not that I was in any condition to climb a tower anyway.
I sighed and glanced down at my pulse pistol. I could offer its service back to Luxarn in exchange for help, though I doubted he would risk angering Madame Venta for my daughter, who he didn’t even know existed. As far as Sol was concerned, Aria was just another illegitimate offworlder. I spent a lot of energy keeping her a secret throughout my days as a collector so I wouldn’t get slapped for infringing USF regulations. If I told Luxarn the truth now all these years later, I doubted he’d care, but he might find out she was there on Titan that day. That we were the reason for Zhaff’s condition.
No, it was too risky. I had to go about this alone. Sneaking in wasn’t possible, but I could bull-rush them. Take out the guards out front, grab one hostage, and hop straight onto the elevator before anyone knew what hit them. I had the element of surprise on my side.
I stood, closed my eyes,
and downed the swill the shop called coffee. Then I stormed out the front door and straight for the Venta Tower front entrance. My whole body was exhausted, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to last much longer, and I had Luxarn’s cybernetic gift to keep me upright.
The officers in the entry were too lost in conversation to notice me coming. Like anybody would. They might’ve been expecting reprisal from a Titanborn, but not from a wrinkled old wretch like me. They’d ask who I was once I was close enough, I’d tell them what I used to be, then they’d hesitate to contact Luxarn Pervenio for formality’s sake, and I’d grab one. All I had to do was provide Aria a chance to run, and whatever happened to me, well, I’d died once already.
I lowered my hand until it grazed the handle of my pulse pistol. My trusty companion. The sensation again brought me flashbacks of when I’d shot Zhaff on Titan, his eye lens glinting right before his head snapped back. I hadn’t fired it since. Hell, I wasn’t sure if I still could. Maybe that was the reason I’d spared Herald Jeremiah. Not because it was the right decision, but because I lacked the gumption to make the wrong one anymore.
It didn’t matter.
I unstrapped my holster and threaded my finger through the trigger guard. I’d pull it, even if it took two hands to apply the pressure. I had to.
Darkness suddenly fell over my eyes. Before I knew what hit me, my arms were wrenched behind my back, my gun stolen, and I was pulled forcefully to the side. I tried to gain a grip on the street using my artificial leg, but I was disoriented and being dragged backward had me at the wrong angle.
Dammit, Malcolm! That’s rule number one on a job. Never be so tired that you can only focus straight ahead. Someone had come up right behind me and bagged my head. Not someone. Two voices chattered back and forth.
Just breathe, I told myself. Figure out who this is. Kidnapping wasn’t Venta Co.’s MO. Double tap to the back of the head, that was what those two collectors would do to me if I wound up on their list. I glanced down to see the boots of my captors. They were worn and discolored, like they’d spent too much time wading through sewers.
Titan's Rise: (Children of Titan Book 3) Page 22
