Takedown on Titan (Stark Raven Voyages Book 2)

by Jake Elwood

  The side walls were blank. On the wall farthest from the stilt he found a little balcony and a couple of handholds. His hesitation was brief. Sure, there could be depraved drug lords inside, ready to murder him, but staying outside meant certain death.

  He caught a handhold and swung down to the little balcony.

  There was no airlock as such, just a tiny closet with two doors. He wedged himself inside, pulled the outer door shut, and clamped it. Then he fumbled with a handle mounted to the inner door. The inner door gave abruptly, and he stumbled into the box.

  It was utterly dark inside, which he found strangely reassuring. It meant the hideout was empty. He stood in pitch blackness for a moment until the lights on the outside of his helmet came on. A quick scan of the room showed a clutter of shelves and boxes and no human life. He pressed a hand to a button beside the door, and light panels in the ceiling came to life.

  For a long moment he stood there, taking it in. The room reminded him of nothing so much as a kids' treehouse. It was a small, cramped, dingy space, ramshackle and messy, looking as if it was badly in need of adult supervision.

  He set to work rummaging through the boxes and shelves on the back wall, more to distract himself from fear than anything else. He found air bottles in two sizes, big ones as long as his leg for filling a ship or part of a station and little bottles that would connect to a suit. He swapped out the bottle on his back for a full one.

  He went through the shelves and crates, looking for anything that would help him communicate, climb, or just survive. He found plenty of air, and what he had to assume was a drug-making kit. There were sacks full of a gray powder, and boxes containing greenish crystals. He found a hot plate with a methane burner connected to an air bottle, and several scorched pots. He had no idea how rock was manufactured, but apparently it involved cooking.

  The search was almost complete when he found the handcuff. One cuff went through a couple of holes drilled in the wall, effectively locking to the wall itself. The other cuff was open. Chan stared at the cuffs for a long time, considering the implications.

  Riverson was here.

  Where was the man now? Only two possibilities occurred to him. The first was that someone had paid his ransom and the old man was free. That hardly seemed likely. He hadn't heard any news before he went over the railing, and it wasn't as if he'd passed Riverson on his way down.

  The other possibility was that Chan's snooping had panicked the kidnapper, and they'd chucked Riverson off the balcony. His stomach tightened at the thought.

  He looked around the room. If some kidnapper had shoved the old man into the abyss, where was the killer? No, if Riverson had been murdered, it had happened before Chan took his plunge.

  Feet thumped on the roof of the box, and Chan looked up. He hadn't expected to hear sound, somehow. He associated vac suits with vacuum, after all, but the thick atmosphere of Titan carried sound quite well.

  A hundred scenarios flitted through his mind. It could be cops, storming the hideout. He could be in a great deal of trouble. It could be the kidnappers returning. That would be worse.

  Footsteps clomped across the ceiling and stopped. A moment later Chan heard the thump of impact as someone landed on the balcony. Just one person. Not cops, then. There was no way a cop would arrive alone, not with an unknown number of bad guys possibly waiting. No, only a bad guy would assume the hideout was safe.

  "Crap!" He scanned the room frantically, looking for a weapon, as a metallic scrape from the door latch told him that he was out of time. His hands closed around one of the small air tanks and he turned. As the door swung open he sprang to the doorway. He had a brief glimpse of a man's silhouette before he rammed the base of the air bottle into the figure's midsection.

  The man doubled over, flying backward out the doorway and hitting the balcony railing. Chan, cursing Titan's microgravity, lost his footing, flying back and rebounding from the wall. He sprang to the doorway, reached out, and hauled the man in by the forearm before he could topple over the railing.

  The man hit the back wall of the hideout, hands up to brace himself. He wore a burgundy vac suit, and Chan could see the rectangular shape of a radio mounted on the top of his left shoulder. Chan coveted the radio, but there was no way for him to use it, so he leaped forward and brought the air tank sweeping down in a vicious chop. He hit the radio squarely, and the man screamed, the sound muffled by two helmets.

  Chan bounced up and back, the top of his head hitting the ceiling. He took a moment to slam the door and latch it. The last thing he needed was to rebound through the doorway and fall to his death.

  A thoroughly bizarre battle followed. A corner of Chan's mind wanted to laugh at the strangeness of it. Every blow sent both men bouncing through the room. It was like combat between two rubber balls. Chan had an early advantage and he made the most of it, pummeling his opponent before the man could recover his breath.

  The man had some sort of low-gravity martial arts training, and would have won easily in a fair fight. He dodged blows, and if he couldn't dodge he let his body move with the impact. He recovered from tumbles faster than Chan did, and several times nearly managed to get Chan in an arm lock. But Chan fought with a berserk fury, hammering away with the air bottle, aiming for kneecaps and elbows and the solar plexus. He'd injured the man with his strike to the shoulder, and slowly the accumulated damage began to take its toll.

  At last the moment came when a hammer blow from the air bottle sent both of them tumbling, and the man was a bit too slow getting up. Chan took his time lining up a shot, then slammed the air bottle into the back of the man's helmet. When Chan regained his footing the man was on hands and knees, shaking his head slowly from side to side. A sweep of Chan's foot brushed the man's right arm to the side. Chan dropped to his knees, jerked the arm sideways, and clicked the handcuff closed on the man's wrist.

  Then he shoved the man's head against the floor with his forearm and pressed his helmet against the man's helmet so the vibration would transmit sound. "All right, you bastard," he panted. "Where's the old man?"

  Chapter 10

  Silence.

  "I'm leaving," Chan said. "You're staying here. I can leave you with another air bottle in reach. Or not." He lifted himself up long enough to thump the man's head against the floor, then pushed his helmet against the other helmet again. "Now talk!"

  He had to fumble with the air bottle on the man's back, pretending he was going to remove it, before the man broke. The confession came in a rush.

  "I didn't do it! I'm just the bag man. I wasn't in on the kidnapping, I swear. He owes us money, I'm just here to pick up the ransom."

  "Who owes you money?"

  "Riverson!" the man shrieked.

  Chan felt his jaw drop. "The old man owes you money?"

  "No, not him. John Riverson. He gambles."

  "Go on."

  The words poured out, barely intelligible. "We gave him credit. Lots of credit. With his old man's money, why wouldn't we? He's the biggest whale in Saturn space. And he's really bad at cards. He owes us so much, he couldn’t pay in a hundred years on his salary. So the boss got impatient, told him he needed to make a payment. Sweated him a bit. Threatened to tell his old man about his little gambling problem.

  "The kid came up with the plan. He knew these scumbags." The man waved a burgundy arm at the squalid hideout. "The plan was, they kidnap the old man, and his kid pays the ransom. Out of his dad's money, of course."

  "Of course," said Chan.

  "I come down and collect the ransom, they let the old man go, the kid is square with the house, everyone's happy."

  "If I was any happier I would puke," Chan growled. "Where's the old man?"

  "I don't know." The man's voice was ragged with stress. "I think they dumped him as soon as the bank released the ransom."

  Chan stood, feeling cold. He was too late. He couldn't save Riverson. In fact, he likely couldn't save himself. No one knew where he was except his new frie
nd's accomplices up top. The next people to arrive would be thugs from the gambling syndicate. They wouldn’t blunder in like the last man had, either. They'd be expecting trouble.

  Chan's own danger seemed trivial, though. He kept seeing Riverson's lined face in his mind's eye, the quiet determination as the old man shoved a kidnapper's arm up, saving Chan's life. The pain on his face as an elbow sank into his stomach.

  The urge to hammer the man in burgundy into a pulp was strong. Instead, Chan unlatched the door and stepped onto the balcony, taking deep breaths, searching for calm.

  There was a cable hooked through a carabiner welded to the balcony, stretching upward until it vanished into the fog. A wire gripper hung half a metre or so above the railing, a little gadget with a hand grip that a person could use for braking.

  He looked down and saw the bottom end of the cable waving gently thirty or forty metres below. He thought about hooking himself to the cable and hoping the people above eventually drew him up. What would they do with him when he arrived, though?

  Nothing good.

  He looked down. Riverson's body would be somewhere directly below him. The impact would have killed him, either directly or from a cracked faceplate. It would have been a cold, ugly fall. Chan hoped death had been quick. It was certainly inevitable.

  Of course, Chan's death had seemed inevitable when he went over the railing of Dome Eight.

  He felt his pulse quicken. What if the old man hit the mesh of plastic support strands, just like Chan did? If he'd been down there more than an hour or so, it wouldn't matter. He'd be dead from lack of air.

  Chan thought back to the two sizes of air bottles in the hideout. People used the small bottles because they were lighter and less bulky. A prisoner, though, didn't need a lightweight bottle. They'd probably hooked him up to one of the big bottles. He could be good for hours.

  Would they have been cold-blooded enough to unscrew the air bottle before they dropped him?

  Chan abandoned his speculations. There were no guarantees. It was possible that Riverson was down there, still alive, watching his air run out. That was good enough for Chan.

  Something tickled his memory, and he headed back into the hideout. The man in burgundy was sitting up now, one arm around his knees, glowering at Chan. Chan ignored him, rummaging in the boxes against the back wall.

  "Aha!" It was a spool of thin steel cable, hundreds of metres of it. The drug dealers had stored their surplus cable down here, where it wouldn't trigger any awkward questions.

  He found some cable clamps as well, and used a couple of them to anchor the end of the cable to the railing of the balcony. The railing would have been too flimsy to support his weight back on Earth, but on Titan it was far more than he needed. He stood on the balcony with the cable spooled around his feet, pondering his next step. A sense of urgency clawed at him, but he made himself pause and think. There would be no recovering from a mistake.

  He imagined the man in burgundy coming down the cable. How exactly had he done it? Was he clamped to the cable while his friends lowered him, or had he slid down? The gripper suggested that he'd slid. And how did he avoid the obstacle course of plastic strands that Chan had hit? A man in freefall would be deflected by air resistance, Chan decided, while a man on a cable, sinking much slower, would come straight down.

  Chan turned to the prisoner, examining him. A bulky shape at the man's hip caught his eye. It was a little maneuvering rocket, a device the size of a coffee cup, good for maybe a minute of thrust. He would have used it to reach the roof of the hideout when he reached the right depth on the cable. Chan strode over, knelt on the man's chest, and took the rocket.

  He found a roll of tape and attached a spare air tank to the side of his leg. Then he transferred the wire gripper to the second cable and clambered over the railing. A voice in the back of his mind screamed at him not to do it, not to take the irreversible step of dropping into the abyss. But Riverson was down there, and whatever time Chan had left was time he owed to the old man who'd saved his life. So he took a deep breath, grabbed the cable gripper, and stepped off the balcony.

  He fell a metre or so, his hand squeezed convulsively on the gripper, and he stopped, swaying gently just below the balcony. I could still make it back up there. I don't have to do this. He shook his head at his own cowardice and made himself relax his grip.

  The hideout rose and disappeared into the mist as he fell. He put gentle pressure on the gripper, moving quickly while staying in control. He could imagine the friction building in the gripper, though his glove was too well insulated for him to feel any heat. He turned from side to side, swinging his shoulders to increase the range of motion, peering into the fog in every direction. Riverson might have drifted in any direction as he fell.

  It occurred to Chan belatedly that he would never see the end of the cable coming. He should have put a cable clamp on the lower end. As it was, the first he would know the end was coming would be when he found himself in freefall. He looked down. A couple of dozen metres of cable were in view before it faded into the fog, but he couldn't keep looking down or he'd plunge right past the old man without seeing him.

  He squeezed a bit harder on the gripper, dropping slower, craning his neck to look in every direction, taking quick glances at the void beneath his feet. A dark shape loomed in the fog to one side and he squeezed harder, almost stopping. It was nothing but a section of plastic lattice.

  When he reached Riverson, Chan looked right at the old man without recognizing him. A strip of plastic made a horizontal line through the fog, but there was a gap in the middle. Chan stared at it, trying to make sense of what he was seeing, and finally squeezed hard on the gripper, stopping his descent.

  Riverson, wearing an orange vac suit that blended into the clouds, was draped across a strand of plastic twenty metres or so from Chan's dangling cable.

  The little attitude rocket was much more difficult to use than Chan ever would have guessed. He missed Riverson completely, but came close enough to the plastic strand that he was able to hook an arm over it. After that he killed the rocket and worked his way along the strand one hand at a time until he was beside the hanging body.

  Chan tapped Riverson on the shoulder.

  The orange helmet turned, and a knot of tension released in Chan's shoulders. He looked into Riverson's face. The man seemed to have aged a couple of decades in the two days since the kidnapping. The eyes that looked into Chan's were vague, unfocused. He was in the last stages of oxygen deprivation, and Chan swore, fumbling at the bottle taped to his leg.

  Swapping air bottles wasn't easy. The cable held Chan's weight, but he needed an arm hooked over the plastic to keep himself from swinging away. Finally he hooked one knee over the plastic to free both his hands.

  The little valve on Riverson's air bottle showed bright red. Chan unscrewed it and dropped it into the void, then fumbled the replacement bottle into place and started to twist it. The indicator finally turned green as air flowed into Riverson's suit, and Chan gave a sigh of relief.

  By the time Chan had his leg free and his arm once again hooked over the plastic strand, Riverson was looking much better. The familiar sharpness was back in his eyes as he leaned forward to touch his helmet to Chan's.

  "Mr. Chan. You're providing much better service than I expected."

  "Well, I'll be expecting a tip in the unlikely event that we survive this. I have some bad news, Mr. Riverson."

  The man gave a dry chuckle. "You've arrived in the nick of time with a bottle of air. Under the circumstances I think I can endure some bad news. What is it?"

  Chan outlined the situation. No radio. No more air. No way to get back up to the hideout. No realistic hope of rescue.

  The full depth of his predicament hit Chan as he spelled it all out. He'd been distracted by action ever since his fall from the catwalk around Dome Eight. He'd already lived so much longer than he expected that he'd managed to forget he was still doomed. He leaned back, breaking co
ntact with Riverson's helmet, and stared into the fog.

  Riverson leaned close, and Chan felt a tremor of impact as their helmets touched. "You've given me another hour of life, Mr. Chan. That's not an inconsequential gift. You haven't saved me from dying. Well, we all die. You've saved me from dying alone, though. Thank you."

  They hung there, watching swirls of fog go past, sometimes talking, sometimes enjoying a companionable silence. Chan told Riverson what he'd learned about John Riverson and his gambling debts, feeling guilty for burdening the old man with such bleak news. Riverson just nodded as if he'd suspected the truth.

  He told Chan the story of his kidnapping, how he'd been taken by ship to the little hut on the stilt, how they'd ordered him into a vac suit and left him there, alone most of the time, with air bottles in reach but no food and no more water than the litre or so the suit contained.

  Chan was telling him the story of finding the Stark Raven when he lost his train of thought. A loud tapping sound caught his attention, and he looked around, disoriented. Riverson, looking worried, was rapping on his faceplate with a couple of fingers.

  It's hypoxia. I must be out of air. He leaned in, touched helmets with Riverson, and said, "It's been nice chatting with you, Mr. Riverson. I'm sure glad I found you."

  "We're not dead yet," the old man said crisply. "Stay with me, James."

  "Sure, sure." His mind was already wandering, though. With any luck he wouldn't actually notice when he lost his grip and started to fall. It would be like a dream.

  The plastic strand under his arms vibrated, and he clutched it tighter. That was a close one. I almost let go. He stared at the strand, frowning, wondering why it was trembling. His eyes followed the strand to where it connected to a vertical plastic cable some thirty or forty metres away. The vertical cable was barely visible at that distance, but he followed it upward with his eyes as far as he could.

  "Yup, it's hypoxia," he mumbled. He was hallucinating. A golden butler robot, barely visible against the orange mist, was lowering itself hand over hand down the cable. The image was so absurd that Chan giggled out loud. At least my final moments will be entertaining.