Titan's Rise: (Children of Titan Book 3)

by Rhett C. Bruno

  “I know,” I said. “I feel it.”

  “The IVs in the sleep pods should all be set to pump us with every ounce of anti-rads that came with this thing.”

  “What about Gareth? We can’t just leave him here like this.”

  “Oxygen to the ship will be off while we’re all under. His body will be right here when we wake, unspoiled just like all the others. Now let’s go.”

  “I don’t want to sleep.”

  Rin took me by the jaw. “I know, Kale, but you have to this time. Pretend it’s a long dream.”

  I bobbed my head. I didn’t have the energy to fight her. Rin rushed by us on her way to the cockpit, and I took Aria around the waist so we could head to the sleep pods. She muttered incomprehensibly. I froze in the entry for a moment and stared back at the corpse of my guardian. Gareth always had a grim demeanor, like there was a foul taste in his mouth that he couldn’t rid himself of. Until now. He looked almost… peaceful.

  “Kale!” Rin called back to me. I finally tore my gaze away.

  I swam down the corridors of the Cora with Aria in tow, through stale, frigid air that suddenly bore the heady stench of death. We drifted too hard and slammed into the controls for Aria’s sleep pod. I righted myself and hovered in place to prepare the pod for her entry. My surviving guards were already busy loading themselves into theirs. Some were in worse condition than others. We knew releasing an ion stream at such close proximity was a risk, but whatever the Cora was packing in her prototype impulse drives was clearly worse than anticipated.

  I fumbled with Aria’s IV line as I raised her arm to stick it in. My fingers were getting numb. My stomach rolled. I lifted her weightless body to place her in the pod, and as I did, she leaned forward and pressed her lips against mine.

  “I’m so sorry, Kale,” she whispered. “I should have told you about him…”

  I ignored her and tried to focus on getting everything hooked up properly. She was sick for two now. That was my main concern. She’d secretly enhanced her pod to provide nutrients for two before we left Titan, but nobody expected radiation sickness.

  I lowered her into the gelatinous substance filling the pod and checked her IV and other connections.

  “He didn’t make it, did he?” Malcolm asked. He was being escorted by two of my guards. His lips went taut as he battled the same horrible pain that afflicted Aria. “Pressure from acceleration probably squished the blood out of him like a wet sponge.”

  “Be quiet, Dad,” Aria said. She rolled her head from side to side and squeezed her eyes in agony.

  “I want you to know exactly the type of man you’re serving.” He cleared his throat. “He’d rather run than slow down to save one of his own. Think about what he’ll do with you if he has no other choice.”

  “Please… just stop.”

  “That’s enough, Earther!” one of the guards barked. Malcolm was too debilitated to do anything about it as they stuffed him into a sleep pod, right next to the one in which Basaam Venta slept soundly. Three Earthers now on my ship.

  “Kale…” Aria reached out and grazed my cheek. “I’m sorry…”

  “If I hadn’t let you leave, he’d still be alive,” I said. “They all would be.”

  “We… we didn’t know what she’d do…”

  I folded her arms over her chest and signaled calming pharma to be injected into her veins and induce slumber. Then anti-rads would begin cleansing her system along with my unborn child’s.

  “You can’t blame yourself for Gareth, Kale…” she uttered as she began to get drowsy. “You can’t…”

  I stared at her. Her leaf-green eyes glittered, that broken girl who’d eased my own anguish returning once more. That girl who had been there, right when she needed to be, and then conceived my child. And now she had her fingerprints all over everything that had gone wrong on Mars. The summit, a hostage negotiation, the Pervenio Cogents attacking under the lead of her estranged father—everything.

  “I don’t blame myself,” I said, then pushed the pod’s lid to seal her in.

  Rin and Gareth were right. I really didn’t know anything about her at all. And she sure as Trass wasn’t one of us.

  I turned, and one of my guards was immediately there to escort me. “Your pod is prepped, Lord Trass,” he said. “I’ll help you.”

  “I’ll do it myself.”

  I headed straight for the open pod beside Malcolm’s. My people were busy ensuring all of us got loaded in safely before worrying about him, even though he was in the worst shape. So I took it upon myself to hook him up, just as I’d done for his daughter. If what he told me about Luxarn Pervenio’s hiding place was true, he would prove an asset.

  “Every death is on you, Drayton,” he grated. I stabbed his arm with an IV needle as forcefully as I could. The veins on his irritated throat bulged as he released a half laugh, half chuckle. “That’s what it means to be a leader. You don’t get to blame the Earthers for your problems anymore.”

  “I could let you die, you know,” I said. “Tell her the radiation ravaged your withering body before we could get you under.”

  “And I wouldn’t blame you one bit. Just like you wouldn’t have blamed me if I’d pulled the trigger.”

  “Only you didn’t.”

  Malcolm groaned and leaned his head back into the pod. “I didn’t.”

  I grabbed on to the edge and, hand over hand, pulled my weightless body up so that I could look down into it. The viscous substance formed around his body, the pod automatically stabbing a few more needles into the side of his neck.

  “Do you know when I realized that I’d do anything to keep my people free?” I asked.

  “Was it when you dropped a ship on thousands of officers?” Malcolm joked, then coughed. “Or no, before that. How about when you had the innocent Earther crew members of a gas harvester publicly executed and let all the Ringers on board, your own people, take the rap for it? Yeah, that must’ve been it.”

  I didn’t let him get under my skin. Instead, I told him the truth. “One of your people took Rin’s sister hostage, and we went to rescue her,” I said. “A Pervenio man, like yourself. He set a trap, and as we were escaping it, I passed a room filled with children. Earther children. You see, he’d left them there to die because apparently, living under our rule wasn’t worth living at all. So do you know what I did next?”

  “I’ll bet it’s heroic.”

  “I left them there to die. I probably had time to save them, but I didn’t. Future collectors, baton-wielding security officers, and corporate directors—I let them all be swallowed by Saturn. I still see their faces when I close my eyes, but I did what had to be done.”

  He didn’t answer. He merely leveled his heated sickly gaze in my direction. I could tell how difficult it was for him to keep his eyes straight, but he managed.

  “You’re my collector now, Malcolm Graves,” I said. I removed his hand-terminal from my pocket—Gareth’s last heroic move, which ensured the collector wouldn’t be able to contact his boss while we were all distracted. Then I pressed it against Malcolm’s thumb, unlocking the screen.

  “You’re going to help me get to Luxarn Pervenio when the time is right,” I said, shaking the device in front of his face, “and together, we’ll show him and every Earther in Sol what it means to be afraid.”

  Even with all Malcolm’s assumed training, his expression told all. I had him. I started to close the lid of his sleep pod until he whispered, “This is all about her, isn’t it?”

  I stopped. “Aria? She’s lucky she’s alive with all the secrets she kept from us. Her relations with Madame Venta, you—”

  He shook his head. “No, Cora.”

  Hearing her name stunned me to silence.

  “The girl you named this ship after,” Malcolm said. “The girl who you left behind on the Piccolo while you ran off to play rebel. Who you left to die at the hands of a tired bigot like Sodervall. He may have flipped the switch, but you put her there.”
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  “Don’t,” I said, seething.

  “That’s it. Cora’s dead and you can’t handle it because deep down you know the truth. That it’s your fault.”

  “No.”

  He chuckled then coughed. “You put this crown upon your own head, Drayton. I hope you wear it proudly.”

  “No!” I slammed the lid and pushed off. Rin was there to catch me, apparently finished plotting our course in the cockpit. She rubbed my shoulders in a way that told me she hadn’t heard what he’d said.

  “It’s time to sleep, Kale,” she said.

  Her sanitary mask was removed, making the clicking of her tongue against her marred cheek with every hard syllable more noticeable. She prodded me back toward my own pod and held my body against the rim.

  “Get off of me!” I roared, throwing her aside and pulling my body toward the command deck, panting like a madman.

  “What are you doing?” she asked as I hunched over the navigation and started keying commands.

  “We’re making one stop before we go home.” I set the ship to slow a short distance away from Europa. Then I raised Malcolm’s hand-terminal to my face. Luxarn Pervenio’s personal contact information was already pulled up, with one cryptic message sent to him from Malcolm. I started drafting one of my own, forcing myself to focus as sickness made me see two of every key.

  YOU’LL PAY FOR ALL THAT YOU’VE TAKEN FROM US, LUXARN. WHAT I DID TO SODERVALL WON’T EVEN COMPARE. I HAVE YOUR COLLECTOR, AND YOU’RE NEXT.

  “Kale,” Rin said, laying her hand on my shoulder. She leaned over me to get a look at where I’d set our coordinates. “You don’t plan on—”

  “I do,” I said. Then I sent the message to the man who’d turned my home into his own personal bank. I wheezed a few times while staring at the screen, the adrenaline driving me slowly waning. After a few long seconds, Rin tore the device out of my hand. I couldn’t fight her, even with my suit augmenting my strength. I tried to snap at her, but a fit of coughing made it impossible.

  She switched it off, then pried open the back and removed the battery. “In case they try to use it to track us,” she said, coughing as well. She stored it in her pocket. “Now let’s get you loaded up before it’s too late.”

  She helped me back to my pod since I could barely feel my limbs. One by one, she helped remove the sections of my armor. The pieces fell away from me into the depths of the Cora, and then I plunged backward into the pod.

  “He won’t have died for nothing,” Rin said as she hooked me in. I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. My brutally scarred aunt continued prepping me for sleep as if she were my mother, until soothing pharma was flowing through my veins.

  “I know you’re worried about your child, but he’s going to be fine,” Rin assured me. “These anti-rads are strong, and it hasn’t been long. I’ll pull him out of that deceitful witch myself if I have to.”

  It took every ounce of what little energy I had remaining, but I reached up and closed the lid myself before she could manage another word. Silence enveloped me. I was finally alone.

  I wasn’t sure what would happen next. The inside of the pod felt like it was spinning, and everything seemed like a lucid dream. I hadn’t wanted to be put under during our voyage to Mars because I was afraid I’d forget Cora, but at that moment, forgetting was all I wanted to do. I wanted to evaporate into the sky of Titan.

  I told myself over and over that what Malcolm said was wrong. That he was only trying to get a rise out of me. Every death couldn’t possibly be on me. I couldn’t control everything.

  And as I lied to myself, again and again, my world went dark…

  Epilogue

  Undina was an unassuming place. A metal-rich asteroid dragged into near-Earth orbit a few million kilometers beyond the moon by Pervenio Corp to help with the construction of the Departure Ark, Hermes. The pull Luxarn used to have for the USF to allow him to draw a celestial body so near to Earth considering the fear people still held of meteorites… Madame Jamaru Venta longed for it.

  Yet the interior bore none of the sleek walls and smartly designed spaces indicative of Pervenio Corp. The moment Madame Venta landed in the hangar, she felt like she’d stepped into the deepest slum on Mars. The whole place was rundown, rusting. It stank of burned-out engine cores, and there was an overbearing metallic tinge to the air, like Luxarn’s entire operation was bleeding out. A dockhand shuffled over, boiler suit rumpled and covered in grime, e-cig hanging out of his lips. Miners lounged about in the adjacent galley, nothing to do, disinterested. No drills or haulers echoed from the deep. In fact, for a mine that was still considered active, the cavernous halls were deathly quiet.

  Jamaru spent a lifetime in rivalry with Luxarn Pervenio. She held equal parts respect and hatred for the man but seeing his company plunge so far troubled even her. It wasn’t pity—he’d done enough never to deserve that—but she knew how easily Venta could now wind up in the same place, dragged through the mud by some ill-fated offworlders who thought the universe owed them something.

  Sol was truly changing.

  A doctor met her by the opposite end of the hangar. The old hag had skin like wrinkled parchment and hair she didn’t even bother to comb.

  “This way,” she croaked. She led Jamaru Venta and the armed collector guarding her to a lift. The doctor stuck out her arm to bar her. “Not him,” she said, nodding at her escort.

  “Excuse me?” Jamaru glared down at the doctor’s arm. Nobody in her company would dare have the balls to touch her or to also ask her to enter a meeting in a mysterious place alone. She’d been under constant guard ever since Red Wing Company allowed that savage Ringer, Kale Trass, to escape. Ever since she found her favored clan-children in New Beijing, charred and brutalized at his hands.

  “Mr. Pervenio would prefer to keep the contents of this facility undisclosed.”

  He’s really lost it, Jamaru thought. She wanted to curse at the doctor and go back to her ship, but instead, a sigh came out. She’d come this far already. No need for company to make a deal with the devil.

  “Wait with the ship,” she ordered the collector.

  “Madame,” he replied. “You shouldn’t go in alone.”

  “I’ve known Luxarn for decades. He wouldn’t dare touch me.”

  She stepped into the lift, which took them deep into the bedrock of Undina. She could feel the gravity relax as they delved further away from the surface and the centripetal force of the asteroid’s incited spin. Deeper than the mines. When the doors opened, she finally entered a place that looked like it belonged to the former wealthiest man in Sol.

  Clean metallic walls with genuine wood trim, polished tile floors—the place was as well put together as anything she owned. An artist couldn’t paint the picture of a more perfect research facility. There wasn’t even a mote of dust in the air. One or two researchers strolled down an adjacent hall, but that was all.

  “He’s waiting for you inside,” the doctor said when they reached the polished doors at the end of a long hall. She muttered something to a hovering service bot, and it sputtered a response, then the doors slid open with a snap and hiss.

  Luxarn sat on the edge of his mahogany desk within, staring at the entry like a dog waiting for a meal. The desk was the only luxurious thing inside. Like the rest of the facility, the room had a lifeless, clinical quality.

  “I didn’t think you’d actually come,” Luxarn Pervenio said, smiling from ear to ear. She’d known him for decades, and for the first time, his age was starting to show. Wrinkles formed around his mouth and piercing eyes.

  “Who’s stupid enough to turn down a meeting with Luxarn Pervenio?” she replied, smirking. She knew he had to be mentally frail after losing so much. Petting his ego like he was still king of Sol seemed the best way to make sure she wound up on the more profitable end of their bargain.

  “Too many people these days, I fear.” He crossed the room and stuck out a hand. She hesitated before shaking it. She couldn’t count on ju
st those fingers how many deals they’d shattered between each other in their quest to rule Sol. They were members of the first clan-families to begin settling the worlds beyond Earth after the Meteorite hit. The old guard. Rivalry like theirs hadn’t existed since the warring countries that existed before it.

  Now all that was unraveling, thanks to Kale, like thread from a broken spool.

  “I’m sorry about what happened,” Jamaru said, struggling to make it sound wholly genuine.

  “No, you aren’t.” He smirked, then turned his back to her and started pacing the room.

  “You see right through me, as always. Things were simpler when it was just us out here.”

  “Was it that fun living in my shadow?”

  “I...” She bit back a scathing response and took a measured breath. “I know we’ve had our differences, Luxarn, but I’m here. Don’t waste my time.”

  “Differences? You helped them take the Ring. You think I don’t know about the weapons you snuck over? The intel? You handed Titan to that monster on a silver platter.”

  “You know you would’ve done exactly the same. Neither of us had any idea it’d put a madman in power. It was politics, pure and simple.”

  “That’s the only reason you’re still alive.”

  Jamaru Venta scoffed. “At least you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”

  He grinned, then snapped his fingers at his service bot. “Bot, get us drinks.” It immediately hovered across the room to a mostly empty cupboard without asking what they wanted. Like he’d trained it to know.

  “I don’t drink,” Jamaru Venta said.

  “You do today,” Luxarn replied.

  “Luxarn, it’s madness out there. Everyone is after a slice of your pie. Red Wing Company made a power grab… Red Wing, for Earth’s sake. The USF is clueless—”

  “Relax, Jamaru. If you’re serious about this alliance, then everything will be taken care of.”