“Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“The quicker we can get off this rock the better.”
We followed Gareth out into the hangar, where the rest of my guards waited beneath the shadow of the Cora for Madame Venta’s two hotheaded sons. Captain Barnes and the rest of his Red Wing unit stood guard at the hangar’s entry. There was only one way in or out, and all that stood between us and them were some scattered empty containers and crates.
Rin nudged me. “You are aware this is probably a trap, right?” she said.
“Should we take bets?” Gareth signed.
“It was too easy getting them to agree to meet here. We’ll have two Earther corps right on top of us. If they partner up, we won’t be able to hold them off, even with that trick up your sleeve.”
“It’s simple,” I said. “Madame Venta either needs Basaam more than she thinks I need Aria, or somebody is leaving here in a body bag.”
Gareth slapped his pulse rifle. “Won’t be us.”
“Sure as Saturn’s Rings won’t be,” Rin said, her sanitary mask wriggling as she licked her scars beneath.
“We’re here to get Aria back,” I said. “That’s all.”
“I know. It’s a shame letting Basaam go after all the work we did to get here, though.”
“We’ve been over this. It’s too risky for Aria going back on the deal. And like Basaam said, unless we steal his research, he’s useless to our timetable.”
“If he isn’t lying.”
“We’ll find another way, Rin. We always do.”
“Easier than breaking into the Pervenio Station prison for Cora and the others,” Gareth signed.
Rin nodded. “Just a long way to travel to return empty-handed.”
“Making Madame Venta and the USF sweat isn’t nothing,” I said. “Thanks to Aria, we’ve accomplished both.”
“Those tubby mudstompers are always sweating.” She snickered, and Gareth joined her. Then she wiped her own sweat-drenched brow. “Speaking of, I don’t know how much longer I can stand being near these neutral engines.”
I glanced from side to side. Altogether, twelve Titanborn were healthy enough to fight if it came to it, including me, Rin, and Gareth. Two of our dead lay in the cargo hold along with our bound hostages, two were captured alongside Aria, and another could no longer weather the injuries he suffered in the bombing and manned the Cora’s cockpit instead. Per my request, they had the engines primed, even though the hangar’s outer airlock was closed and the room wasn’t sealed off or pressurized. A heavily fineable offense, I was told, due to concerns over radioactive pollution. I hoped the Cora’s advanced tech was alien enough for both the Red Wing and Venta officers not to notice.
We all wore our weapons and armor, even the helmets. I wasn’t going to take any chances. There was no reason to feign pleasantries during a prisoner exchange. My people were ready to do whatever I asked of them. Willing to die. Our revolution boasted no greater consequence. Instead of scraping and stealing from each other in the Lowers to survive, we stood shoulder to shoulder in the name of Titan and, like Gareth said, a cause worth fighting for.
Restless shadows gathered outside of the entry. Captain Barnes spoke with someone unseen.
“I want you watching for anything,” Rin addressed our people. “If any of them even attempts to make a move on Lord Trass, end them.”
I switched on the com-link in my ear. “Engines ready?”
“Yes, sir,” one of the Titanborn in the cockpit replied. “On your command.”
A wave of Venta blue flooded through the entry. Jamaru Venta’s young sons strode out in front, swagger in their gait. Like nothing could touch them. At least three dozen security officers were with them, pulse rifles in hand. Just behind Karl, a slender woman was being prodded along with a bag over her head. I recognized her dress from earlier, though now it was stained with blood and ratty. One Titanborn body each was slung over the shoulders of the duster-wearing Venta collectors on either side of her.
My hands squeezed into fists.
“If they harmed your child,” Rin said, fuming.
I didn’t answer. Nobody else spoke a word until Karl, Fern, and their line of officers was no more than ten meters away from us. I could almost feel the air thicken with tension like fresh broth being stirred. We were outnumbered more than two to one, though we had the benefit of the Cora’s landing gear for coverage. Red Wing officers waited at the hangar entrance behind them as well. It was impossible to know if I could count on them for support. When it came down to honoring their agreement for “Ringers” or starting a corporate feud, I had a feeling I knew who they’d pick.
Madame Venta’s sons stopped and regarded me, grins spreading across their rosy faces. They wore formal attire, as if this was any other meeting, and no weapons either. Their men would handle things for them. That was how it worked for corporate leaders—give an order and let their servants drop the hammer.
I leveled a glower in their direction but held my tongue. The silence had me starting to itch.
“I didn’t think we’d get the pleasure of seeing each other again, Mr. Trass,” Karl Venta said finally.
“Quite a pleasure,” Fern remarked.
“On with it,” I said sharply. “We don’t need to drag this out.”
Karl snapped his fingers. Two officers stepped forward and dropped the corpses of the Titanborn guards I’d sent down to Old Dome with Aria. Each had a hole in his head. More men dead because of me.
“You son of a bitch!” Rin yelled. She lurched at them, but I held her back. I could hear Gareth’s rifle rattling against his armor on the other side of me.
“Forgive the state of your men,” Karl said, still grinning.
“Madame Venta promised they’d be returned to us,” I said.
“And they are. Unfortunately, they died long before we made this arrangement, but now you can return their bodies to Titan to do whatever it is you people do with your dead. Call it recompense for all of the unnecessary trouble you’ve cost us after we were gracious enough to arrange that summit.”
“Screw this, Kale,” Rin bristled. I raised a hand to quiet her.
“You admit to murdering two of my people and expect me to ignore it?” I said.
Karl rolled his eyes. “And you’re innocent? There were Venta properties on the Ring too. You Ringers think you can take whatever you like. Something goes wrong, you just slap a band-aid on it and say sorry. You’re like children throwing a tantrum.”
“Big bad Pervenio was so mean,” Fern mocked.
“Watch your mouth!” Rin hissed. “Mommy isn’t here to watch over you now, is she?”
He glanced back toward his platoon of officers. They may as well have been foaming at the mouths. “No,” he said. “No, she’s not.”
“If you want the blood of thousands on your hands, then by all means, go back on her word,” I said. Karl’s lips straightened, but he didn’t reply. “Like I thought.”
“Where’s Basaam?” barked Fern.
“Waiting for you to take that hood off and prove that’s the ambassador,” I said.
Karl stepped back and took his sweet time wrapping his hand around Aria’s lower back. She winced. “What, you didn’t memorize every one of her curves?” he asked. “I know my mother did.”
“Get your filthy hands off of her!” Rin shouted.
“Touch her like that again, and you’ll get exactly what you want,” I said, deepening my tone as much as I could. “Except my men have been instructed to aim at your and your brother’s heads first. No matter what happens, you won’t make it out alive.”
The notion that Basaam was less important to them than I’d suspected was beginning to creep into my thoughts. Karl was obviously trying to provoke us into breaking the ceasefire and acting as the villains Sol so desperately wanted us to be. I quickly surveyed the room to see if there were any hidden cameras I’d missed that might bear witness if that happened. A security feed was posted a
bove the entry watching over the hangar, though it had a Red Wing logo on the side. Was this their trap all along?
Karl grumbled something under his breath, then finally removed Aria’s hood. Her hair was disheveled, like wildfire. Black circles wreathed her eyes all the way around. She didn’t appear wounded, though. Once her eyes adjusted to the light, she fixed them firmly on the floor, tears welling in the corners.
“There,” Karl said. “Quite the catch, this one. From nameless sewer rat to our mother’s ripe whore, to yours.”
“The only whore here is you, mudstomper!” Rin shouted. “Selling your souls for whatever you fancy until you tire of it.”
Even Gareth signed an insult.
If not for the circumstances, I would’ve been pleased to hear my aunt finally treating Aria like one of our own; however, I knew it was only because of what she held in her belly. But Madame Venta’s whore? Was that how Aria earned the clout to be supported by Venta Co. in her efforts to cure my people? I couldn’t stop thinking about what else we didn’t know about her, even though I knew I had to focus.
“Well, Trass,” Karl said, regaining my full attention. Now wasn’t the time to let doubts nest in my head and fester. “If you do tire of her, I’m sure Mother would pay a pretty credit to get her back. Sewer trash never goes rotten. And they’re wild, friend. Like rabid dogs.”
“We’ll take her how she is,” I affirmed.
“Your loss.” He clutched Aria by the arm and tugged her forward. “Send down Basaam, and the whore is yours.”
Aria finally mustered the courage to look up at me, and I saw in her eyes a torrent of rage and shame. For a moment, all my reservations about her withered away like ashes to a breeze. I knew I was making the right decision helping her. Earth would pay for all it had done to my people, but for now, I needed Aria back. No Earther corps was going to take anything I cared about from me ever again.
I waved back toward the Cora’s cargo bay. Two Titanborn immediately ran in and returned with our three captives. I’d removed their hoods earlier to save the time, but scraps of cloth were shoved into each of their mouths to silence the grating racket of their protests.
“As soon as she walks, they walk,” I said.
Rin tapped her rifle and aimed at Basaam. “I see anything off, the first slug goes through his profitable brain.”
“Basaam!” Karl yelled. “Clan-brother. Are you injured?” Basaam gawked at Rin, then shook his head fervently. “Got anything strapped to you? Earth knows these Ringers love their bombs.” Again, Basaam shook his head. “All right, Trass. You’re lucky my mother was feeling generous today. You’ve held up your end. Here she comes.”
An explosion suddenly rocked the wall of the hangar to our right, causing anyone on that side of the room to stagger. Basaam’s streetwalking girlfriend dashed forward in a panic, and just as she passed by me, a bullet splattered her brains. One of my people panicked and returned fire, shredding Karl Venta’s kneecap. Gareth tackled me off the ramp. Rin lunged, grabbed Basaam and his clan-sister, and flung them back onto the Cora before they could escape.
Eighteen
Malcolm
Varus led me to the rest of his unit. He had a squadron of six Cogents, burrowed away in the New Beijing Redline. It wasn’t difficult getting into the cramped tunnels, with city security looking for worse offenders than squatters. We slipped in through an exhaust vent in an Old Dome alley.
Rusty barrels filled with fires illuminated the congested tube, surrounded by the poor and the depraved under hung tarps. Most didn’t even notice our peculiar group going by, too strung out on synthahol or foundry salts or whatever other new synthetics were all the rage. Redline cars rumbled by, shattering bottles that had rolled onto the tracks. I even heard the faint and distant cries of some piece of sewer trash who was too drunk to stay against the outer walls and keep out of their way.
“We are beneath the spaceport now,” Varus said as we reached a point where the single tunnel branched into three larger ones. We left the bonfires of the homeless behind, and I would’ve traded anything on me for a pair of spotters. It was pitch black.
I leaned against the wall to catch my breath. The effects of coffee and the adrenaline from being kidnapped were beginning to wear off. My human leg felt the ache of exhaustion, and my eyelids felt like they had ten-pound weights strapped to the lashes.
“This service passage leads directly beneath the main terminal,” Varus said. “It is locked, but we should be able to break through.” Varus’s eye lens projected a beam of light to help me see. He slid aside an unconscious bearded man and knelt in front of a sealed hatch so thick it looked like it was designed for a spaceship. He held a hand-terminal up to the hatch’s control panel, which bore an operation screen so fuzzy I couldn’t read anything on it. I wasn’t even sure it still worked.
I didn’t have the time or patience to wait. I nudged Varus out of the way and kicked the hinge as hard as I could with my artificial leg. It caved, and a few more kicks busted it enough for the hatch to pop out. I was left gasping for breath.
“A much more efficient use of time,” Varus acknowledged. He and the other Cogents grabbed the edge of a half-meter-thick slab of metal and yanked until it open wide enough for them to squeeze through.
Varus waved me along, and I paused. During my first days working with Zhaff, I had to endure constant questioning of my methods and his rattling off superfluous data. I had no idea what Luxarn told this group of Cogents, but they were so deferential, it made me uncomfortable. Almost reverential. Couldn’t they stare at my face with their shiny, yellow eye lenses and see all the lies I was holding in? That I’d put the best of them into a coma from which he was never likely to wake.
“Are you coming, Malcolm Graves?” Varus said. “Time is of the essence.”
I shook the thoughts out of my head and dragged my human leg along. He was right. This arrangement was only temporary. Extract Aria, and then Luxarn could do whatever he wanted with his Cogents. Kill Kale Trass, take back Titan—I couldn’t give two shits so long as she was safe. Yet, couldn’t I do that best as one of his directors rather than skulking through the shadows? If I was going to spend the rest of my life sitting around, why not be behind a real wooden desk?
“Malcolm Graves?”
My mind drifted in and out. I slapped myself across the face a few times to gain focus. My fingers wrapped the first step of the ladder, and I climbed. One step up the cramped passage and I knew where we were. An elevator shaft. Judging by the layer of grime wrapping every rung, nobody had bothered cleaning the place in decades either.
Mars was funny that way. It had been settled so suddenly and aggressively by corporations that layers of infrastructure wound up buried as the domes went up, one taller and wider than the next. Whatever skyscraper we were in transformed into a massive pier supporting the current spaceport.
Varus glanced down to check on me, and the light from his eye lens sliced through the blackness to provide more answers. An elevator car hung crookedly from a cluster of wilting cables, the Pervenio logo stamped on the side.
I chuckled, then coughed as I inhaled a mouthful of dust. It was almost like Luxarn had been planning this forever. That was how he knew about a route only someone who’d spent a lifetime mapping the warren of tunnels and sewers beneath New Beijing would be aware of. His father had it constructed even before his company abandoned Mars for the greener pastures around Saturn. All of Earth had thought the Pervenios were mad, going so far away and toward a people on Titan who hadn’t yet responded to any communications.
“One hundred more meters,” Varus informed me.
“Not ninety-nine?” I joked.
“Ninety-nine now.”
My smirk was concealed by the darkness. It seemed Cogents still hadn’t been trained to comprehend sarcasm. I remembered all those times Zhaff had taken one of my jokes too literally. His eye lens would stare at me, gears churning behind the glass, brain trying to make sense of whateve
r idiom I’d spouted.
My hand slipped as I went to grab the next rung. My human foot came loose with it, too sore to fight the inertia of my swing. If not for my artificial leg, I would’ve taken a plummet that even Mars’s weak gravity wouldn’t have made possible to survive, but it jammed between two rungs and allowed me to regain my bearings. A rusty bolt clattered down the shaft.
“Please hurry, Mr. Graves,” Varus called down.
“You don’t worry about me,” I panted.
My exhaustion was mounting, allowing any distraction to break my attention too easily. I decided it was best to watch my hands and feet. I concentrated on each step the little light afforded me. One hand up, second hand, push off with my fake leg. The other was too tired to do anything but maintain balance. If I had been climbing this high under Earth’s gravity, I probably would’ve had a heart attack.
By the time Varus heaved me up through a service hatch at the top, I couldn’t remember ever having been more beat in my life. Not even after months in a sleep pod traveling across the solar system. My entire body was drained, with my hands suffering from a bad case of the shakes.
I sat and squeezed my fists over and over to try and drive blood back into them. I should’ve exercised instead of spending my time on Mars shoving liquor down my gullet and napping. Maybe then I could have fought off the collectors who took Aria and avoided all of this.
“Focus, Malcolm,” I whispered to myself, banging the back of my head lightly against a column. Varus placed his hand behind my neck to stop me. He pointed up. We were in a compact structural cavity crammed with thick columns and beams transferring weight down to the buried skyscraper. The Cogents all had to crouch to fit under the low ceiling.
“Thermals spot three officers in the hangar above,” one of the Cogents whispered. “Communications signal indicates they belong to Red Wing Company.”
Titan's Rise: (Children of Titan Book 3) Page 24
