From Ice to Ashes

by Rhett C. Bruno

  “Take the captain,” an attacker ordered. Another stepped forward to grab Captain Saunders’s wounded body and sling it over his or her shoulder.

  “I’ll kill you!” Desmond roared. He crawled toward me, but couldn’t get far on the slick floor. His face was so red he looked like something out of a nightmare.

  Yavik and Lester hurried to help him to his feet, but the guns kept them at bay. The attackers continued to pull back, and once we were around the corner they started to jog. My ribs dug into a plated shoulder as I bounced up and down repeatedly.

  Eventually, I was placed down gently. I found it difficult to focus, but I recognized the sealed entrance of the command deck beside me. The attackers were having a discussion in sign language. One removed his helmet. It was a Ringer man, with graying hair and weary features.

  “Where are you taking me?” I moaned.

  “Fear not, Kale Drayton,” the unmasked man said. He removed his armor with the help of the others. Beneath it was a white boiler-suit, similarly marked with an orange ring on the torso.

  “Please, don’t hurt them.”

  The man kneeled and placed a hand on my shoulder. His fingers were surprisingly weak without his powered armor on, just like those of any normal Ringer. “By the time the Piccolo reaches Pervenio Station, we will all be heroes. Soon, you will be too.”

  Before I could answer, the other attackers lifted me. One wiped Captain Saunders’s blood off my mouth with a clean rag while another extended my arm. I noticed the same device that they had been using to analyze our bone density earlier and flinched. This time a syringe was attached to it.

  “Relax,” a distorted voice said. “It’s antibiotics and Trass knows what else. The last of what we’ve got.”

  The icy metal needle pricked a vein on my neck and injected me with the medicinal concoction. Once the syringe was emptied of every last drop, they emptied my pockets, which carried nothing but an ID card and some garbage, and forced me into the discarded armor of the unmarked attacker, like I was their plaything. I didn’t have the energy to resist.

  My legs and arms fit in snugly, as if it had been designed with me specifically in mind. Short pins stuck into my back and chest on the inside. After their initial pinch, my lungs and heart suddenly felt at ease, as if I were back on Titan. The helmet went on last. I could still see and hear through it, but the sounds of the world around me were quieter now.

  “You will never be forgotten, Joran,” one of the faceless attackers said to the unmasked man. The distortion was gone, revealing the voice of a woman.

  “Only not by you,” the one she called Joran said. His tone was gentle, almost tranquil in nature.

  “You might need this.” The female attacker handed him back his pulse-rifle. He hesitated for a second, before nodding and taking it.

  “For Titan, my brothers and sister.”

  “For Titan.”

  An arm wrapped around my newly armored body and guided me in front of the sealed entrance to the command deck. Another attacker picked up a weathered respirator mask lying beside the door and placed it over the captain’s mouth. He or she also hugged his body with a shiny, ruffled blanket. Joran then raised the hand-terminal I’d smuggled aboard and keyed some commands.

  “Hold on to something,” the female attacker said to him, “and place the fear of Trass into their hearts.”

  I had to turn my entire torso to look behind me. Joran fought back tears and watched us longingly. His fingers hovered over a key on the hand-terminal. Over his shoulder I spotted Cora standing at the other end of the hallway. Her hair was strung across her tear-and-blood-stained face. I couldn’t manage words, so I reached toward her with the aid of the powered armor wrapping my arm. I wanted to stroke her soft cheek one last time and tell her to survive.

  “From ice to ashes!” Joran bellowed. He tapped the hand-terminal, signaling the command deck’s entrance to open. My body was swiftly tugged through by a powerful change in pressure. In the seconds before it caused me to faint, I saw that the dome of the command deck was splayed open and exposed to Saturn. The dark mass of another vessel loomed above it, with me, the armored attackers, and Captain Saunders’s body being pulled toward it through Saturn’s unrelenting wind.

  Chapter 14

  My eyelids blinked open. My gaze darted from side to side. Cold air brushed against my cheeks, colder than it ever was even in the Darien Lowers. I could see my breath escaping the now open visor of the armor the Piccolo’s attackers had forced me into.

  I sat upright on a bed that looked like it’d endured at least a dozen wars. The room surrounding me bore a similar character. The amount of rust on the walls made the Ringer dorms on the Piccolo seem brand-new. Clusters of pipes were bent or broken. Panels of the grated floor were flat-out missing. The air recyclers clicked as if someone were sitting in the ducts bashing them with a wrench.

  I turned my body to see if anybody was behind me. The powered armor didn’t dull the unrelenting soreness aggravating every part of my body, but it allowed me to operate my limbs with minimal effort. There was, however, a new pain affecting me: My eyes felt like they were being tugged on from inside my skull, and the result was a pounding headache.

  “He’s awake,” someone said. “Finally. A mouthful of Earther blood—that’s a new one. You’re lucky he’s still clean.”

  “He’s stronger than he looks,” answered somebody else.

  “Who is that?” I yelled nervously. My gaze snapped toward the room’s entrance, but it was sealed. There was nobody around me, and it took a few seconds to realize that the voices had emanated from a view-screen built into the wall above my bed.

  At first, the only thing on the display was the fuzzy image of an empty chair. Then the lower part of an attacker’s white armor passed by, and a chill ran up my spine. I scrambled backward on the bed as far as I could go, until I could feel the room’s corroded wall wilting under the strength of my suit. That was when I noticed a slight but unceasing vibration all around me—the familiar reverberation of engines powering a ship through Saturn—and remembered what had happened before I passed out.

  “W…What’s going on?” I stammered.

  An attacker sat in the chair silently, visor raised like mine. The grainy image and general murkiness of the room on the view-screen made the face difficult to perceive, but I saw no demon out of a nightmare with flaming red eyes. Only a female Ringer, same as any other. Or at least that’s what I thought until she leaned forward into a field of light bright enough for me to perceive her in detail.

  She had stark black hair, trimmed short around her ears in a way that framed her pale features. Her hazel eyes spoke of two lifetimes’ worth of experiences even though she didn’t appear to be older than forty. She might once have been beautiful, however, the left half of her face was mottled by a patchwork of gruesome scars, from her jaw all the way up to her hairline. Like an explosion had gone off right next to her and she’d somehow survived. A portion of her left cheek was missing entirely, revealing the muscle and sinew beneath, along with a few of her yellowed teeth.

  I was wrong. Demon she wasn’t, but she could’ve easily been the production of a nightmare.

  “Relax, Kale. You are safe now,” she said. “Healthy, no thanks to my crew.” Her voice was so gravelly that it would’ve been easy to mistake her for a man, and the way her open wound stretched and contracted as she spoke made it even harder to look at.

  “How do you know my name?” I questioned.

  “We see all of Titan. You are Kale, son of Katrina and Alann, born in Darien, Titan, in 2315 and a resident of Level B2 of the Darien Lowers. With your mother struggling to support both of you, you turned to thieving to make life a little more manageable.”

  My hand slipped off the surface of the bed. I sunk backward. “Mom…” I whispered. Memories of the last time I saw her aggravated my thoughts and made my head pound even worse.

  “The first crime your mother found out about was when you
ran salts at the age of ten for a vile Ringer named Dexter Howser,” the woman continued. “At the age of sixteen you were arrested for breaking into the residence of your mother’s former employer, and turned to a life of honest work aboard the Piccolo. Now, we are here. Shall I continue?”

  “Whe—” I wheezed. My throat was raw and I needed to gather my breath to speak coherently. “Where is here?”

  The woman spread her arms offscreen in an exaggerated motion, as if we’d just stepped inside the awe-inspiring ruins of some ancient palace. “Welcome to the gas harvester formerly known as the Sunfire.”

  Hearing the name of the ship made my eyes go wide for a few seconds before the unusual stress being inflicted upon them made me blink.

  “The name is familiar?” she asked.

  I nodded as best I could. There wasn’t much room for my head to move inside of my helmet.

  “Yes, who could forget the tragic story of the Sunfire, even after all these years?” she said, seeming amused. “The engine malfunction that caused a harvester to be consumed by Saturn. At least that’s what Pervenio Corp assumed happened when we disappeared and were never heard from again. They never considered that, perhaps, we didn’t want to be found.”

  I propped myself up to try to get a better look at her. As far as I could tell, she was as much a stranger as the bed I sat on. There was no way I could’ve ever forgotten those scars, even if we’d run together in the Lowers only once. Squinting at her didn’t help my sore eyes at all, and the pain grew so intense that I groaned and had to squeeze them shut.

  “We’re deeper into the atmosphere of Saturn than any person born on Titan ought to be. The suit will ensure that your body remains upright and your lungs don’t collapse, but it can’t help with everything.” She pointed toward the counter beside my bed. A tiny, square-shaped pill rested on it that I only then noticed. The emblem of Venta Co—a series of three overlaid Vs—was imprinted on the center. “In time your eyes and head will grow more accustomed to the stress. That will help.”

  I stared at the pill, but didn’t budge.

  “It’s just a G-pill,” she insisted. “More potent than the ones your captain provided.”

  I remained still, and eventually she sighed. “If I wanted you dead, you wouldn’t be here, so you might as well get comfortable.”

  I turned squarely toward the screen and growled: “Tell that to the people you murdered!” Shouting exacerbated the pain behind my eyes and forced me to lower my voice. “Why did you do it?”

  She grinned, the deformed side of her face crinkling to give it a ghoulish quality. “Justice.”

  “For what? Who are you?”

  “I am Titanborn, just like you and the portion of your crew that was permitted to live.”

  “That isn’t a name.”

  “It’s been a long time since my name was relevant. Officially, I’m dead, but you may call me Maya.”

  My nervousness was ousted by a long-suppressed rage festering in my gut. Her name had to mean only one thing. “It’s you, isn’t it? M?” I asked.

  Again she grinned, even more impishly this time.

  I sprung to my knees and wrapped my hands around either side of the view-screen’s paper-thin frame. “My mom. You said you’d help her. Is she all right? Tell me!”

  “You fulfilled your end of the bargain. Your beloved mother is on the road to recovery. She’ll never see the inside of a Q-Zone again.”

  “Let me talk to her!”

  “Communication with Titan is impossible where we are. My word will have to do.”

  “You’re lying!”

  “You’ve done well, Kale,” she said calmly. “Take the pill. When you can think clearly, we will talk.”

  The feed cut out and the screen went dark. “Show me her!” I screamed. I didn’t care how much it hurt my head. I punched the wall, my suit-powered fist denting the metal so deep it almost split open. “What the hell am I doing here?”

  The exertion caused the discomfort behind my eyes to flare up worse than ever. I lost my balance and fell backward off of the mattress. It felt like someone was dragging the dull edge of a rusty knife in a circle around the inside of my skull. A bullet to the head would’ve been a mercy, but one my captors seemed incapable of.

  “What do you want with me?” I panted. Nobody answered.

  I reached through my open visor and pushed on my temples to try to drive the throbbing pain out. It didn’t help much, but it focused me enough to be able to twist my body so that I was facing the pill. Without the suit they’d shoved me into I probably wouldn’t have even been able to move.

  The pill appeared harmless, like the ones we took for shifts on the Piccolo, only with Venta Co as the manufacturer. Maya, M, whoever she was, was the only person who could answer the countless questions swarming around my weary brain, the least of which was where the fuck we were. I’d held up my end of the deal. I needed to know for sure that my mom was okay.

  I reached out and snatched the pill. My powered fingers caused it to snap, and both halves tumbled into my palm. I’d have to get used to my newfound strength. I stared at it for a few seconds, until my eyes were too strained to focus.

  Maya was right about one thing: If they wanted to kill me they would’ve done it already. If they wanted slaves, they would’ve taken every member of the Piccolo’s crew. Instead, they’d murdered half of us and did Trass knows what with the rest. Cora, Desmond, and the other Ringers were all alive when I left. Maya knew where.

  I tossed the pieces of the pill into my mouth and forced them down without a drink. I got to my feet slowly and fought an oppressive sense of vertigo all the way to the door. It slid open for me automatically, as if I was never locked in.

  If I wasn’t a prisoner, what was I?

  —

  Nobody greeted me when I exited the room into an area that passed for dorms. Nobody was in sight. The only sound was the rhythmic ticking of the faulty air recyclers and the constant clacking of every part of the ship that wasn’t battened down, as if countless spirits were hiding within the walls, shaking the pipes. My suit helped me maintain balance, but I had to walk only a few steps before I realized that without it I’d be rocked side to side after every step by winds more severe than what the Piccolo had ever endured.

  The Sunfire—if that’s really where I was—had a layout similar to the Piccolo’s. It made sense, considering they would’ve been manufactured around the same year, based on the reports about the crash. I spotted remnants of Pervenio logos all over the walls, though the ones that weren’t entirely tarnished appeared to have been aggressively scratched away.

  I passed a door with char-marks surrounding the frame. A heap of spare parts and metal scraps blockaded it, with no way through without a wrecking ball. Then I reached the ship’s central corridor, where my path split. To my right, toward the engines, it was dark as a Titanian night. To my left, the lighting was barely functional, the fixtures looking like they’d been through numerous rounds of makeshift repairs. Down a way in that direction the command deck’s entrance remained wide open, glowing like a beacon.

  I headed toward it. I didn’t feel afraid, though I’d spent so long being in a state of alarm that I wasn’t sure if I still remembered what normal anxiety felt like. I did know that my head was starting to feel clearer and that my every stride was being fueled by anger.

  Once I was only a few meters outside, I spotted the attackers of the Piccolo. They weren’t carrying guns or wearing dark visors. They weren’t signing or distorting their voices as they plotted their next sinister move. The three of them were lounging around a command deck not dissimilar from the Piccolo’s, chatting like nothing was wrong. Maya was on one side, chomping on the last bits of a ration bar. She had to use the right side of her mouth so crumbs didn’t spill through the gap in her left cheek.

  Another attacker sat at the navigation console. That too was reminiscent of the Piccolo’s, though like the rest of the ship it had clearly borne more than
its fair share of crude repairs. The middle-aged navigator’s face wasn’t disfigured like Maya’s, but he had a densely bearded chin. Knotted black hair fell to his shoulders, and it was obvious it hadn’t been properly washed in a long, long time. A blithe smirk crossed his face as he noticed me approaching.

  To his right sat both the grimmest and oldest of the trio. His lips drew a straight line accentuated by a lengthy jaw. He had to be pushing fifty and had already lost every strand of his hair. Wrinkles creased his soaring forehead, so deep that they seemed to belong on an Earther’s face. In fact, I realized that all three of them were wrinkled more thoroughly than most Ringers of their ages, the result of being stuck in G conditions pushing Earth’s for a long time, I guessed. But how long? The Sunfire’s supposed crash had occurred three years earlier.

  “There he is!” the navigator exclaimed once I entered the room. “Thought you’d never wake up after the scare we gave you, kid.”

  Something about his comment pushed me over the edge. Perhaps it was the way he said it, like the universe was one big punch line. Perhaps it was seeing them all relaxing like their worlds hadn’t changed. More likely it was a combination of everything. I charged at him, hand reared back to crack him across the jaw, but I was clumsy in my new suit and he easily evaded the blow.

  Maya and the grim Ringer grabbed hold of me just before my fist crashed through the navigation console. The three of us stumbled backward, with only me falling onto my ass, while they held my torso upright.

  “Whoa, now!” the navigator chuckled. He snapped right back into his lounging position and carefree expression. “Someone angry?”

  Curses shot out of my mouth so fast I’m not even sure what I said. I lunged at him from my knees, but Maya didn’t allow me to get far.

  “Shut it, Vick!” she snapped. In person her voice sounded even stranger, with the hole in her face clearly affecting her speech. I could hear the soft, watery clicking of her tongue against her gums after every hard consonant. “Or do I have to remind you of your first day after the captain went?”