Titan's Fall

by Zachary Brown

  “You’re asking us to attack human beings who were building the ships we needed,” Ken noted.

  “You’re attacking them only if they fight back or you can’t figure out a way to resolve the situation,” Anais replied. “And even if you have to make the worst choice, it could still well save everyone we love back on Earth. I’m not saying the job ahead of you is easy. But we’re not here for easy choices; we’re here to fight a war.”

  “What am I authorized to offer them, if they surrender?” I asked.

  “I’m told we’re past that point. I’m told that anyone you take alive, we will keep humanely jailed. Now get to airlock five-B; they’re waiting for you. Handle this. Get back in the game.”

  And then he was gone.

  I looked over at Ken and Amira. “We should go. It gives us options.”

  “Like what? Joining mutineers?” Ken hissed.

  “Our choices are to flush the Arvani out a lock and pretend it didn’t happen, or get to some kind of transport not controlled by Arvani,” Amira said. “He’s right, Ken. What do you want to do here?”

  Ken half crouched in his armor. His face, behind his helmet, was obscured by reflections. I couldn’t figure out what he was thinking.

  “We can’t kill the commander,” he said. “Whatever we do, we cannot have the Arvani turn against the CPF. We do this, we destroy the freedom the CPF has gained for itself. We put more than our own lives at risk.”

  “Options are good,” Amira said. “Let’s tie our pet squiddie to a chair and get the hell out of here.”

  Within minutes, Sthenos was lashed tightly to one of the bunks back in our quarters. I turned away from Sthenos to face the platoon and explain the orders we’d just been given. “I won’t force any of you to come with us, or force anyone to stay,” I said to the entire platoon as they all arranged themselves around me, ready to head out with their full weapons kit and everything else they could think to carry packed and strapped. “You all have the choice.”

  I had more of a speech planned, but they all knew what was what.

  “If we stay, Arvani will string us up to blame,” Aran Patel said. “In Chennai, I saw them put an entire sector’s police force to death for something a captain did. You made the call, we have to follow. One way or another. There’s no real choice. We’re expendable to them. You know that.”

  “Jesus, Patel, you make it sound like he personally sentenced you to death,” Erica Li said with a snort.

  “Well,” Aran said calmly.

  He wasn’t wrong, I knew.

  I was going to apologize, but Ken interrupted. “We’ve always been facing death when we’re given commands. That is the nature of what we do. That is the nature of an order, a decision, when in war. Our choices become how we want to face death.”

  “Well, I’m not giving up my power armor,” Aran said.

  “Does anyone wish to stay?” Ken asked.

  No one did.

  “Then it’s airlock five-B. The Arvani might be bastards, but if the Conglomeration figures out we’re in the middle of a mutiny, everyone else around here is going to be dead. Let’s move!” Ken shouted.

  17

  We were shot out of airlock five-B in all-too-familiar reentry capsules, little more than a heat shield with some thrusters and a parachute we didn’t need. Inside the claustrophobic coffin, my helmet an inch from the heat shield, I tried to relax as we tumbled through the half-mile gap of empty space.

  No thrusters to adjust course; that would reveal us. We drifted slowly, like seeds thrown onto the wind.

  “First barrage,” Anais informed us. “To keep them busy.”

  We heard nothing. We couldn’t, in the cold vacuum. Hundreds of beams of light would be stabbing at the other ships, and missiles would be lobbed. And I waited in the dark of the windowless capsule.

  “Chaffing out,” Anais said.

  We would come with a wave of confusing, glittering dust, bouncing signals every which way around us.

  “Okay,” Amira said. “What’s the plan? We join up with Earth First? Or we take the carrier ship for ourselves?”

  “Can you fly a carrier ship?” I asked Amira. “Because it seems like a large number of technicians and specialists are on it right now. The large crews are for a reason?”

  “We don’t even know if they can fly it,” Amira said. “All we know is that they took one over.”

  “But you can’t fly one.”

  Amira was silent for a moment. I imagined her grinding her teeth. “No.”

  “Then we’re going to need to ally ourselves with them. Or . . .”

  “Or what?” Ken asked.

  “Or we help quell the mutiny and face what comes next,” I said. “Because those ships are to retake Titan. To protect Earth. With human crews. There is a war. And what are we going to do? Join the Conglomeration?”

  “I will die first,” Shriek said.

  “We know what they do to planets,” Tony Chin said. The three sergeants didn’t normally interrupt the squad command channel, but he sounded very sure of his opinion. “I’m not doing that.”

  “I was just thinking out loud.”

  “Devlin, pick a course and follow it,” Ken snapped. “Lead. You are our leader. This is your job. Embrace it and stop trying to hand it away.”

  “I’m not going to kill any humans who are putting their lives at risk to do what’s right,” Amira said. “Putting this mutiny down? I’d rather join it and flip the damn Accordance my middle finger.”

  “Amira—” The thrusters lit up, shoving me face-first against the inner side of my capsule. Then it peeled itself away from me and I hung in the air for a second, coasting toward a large pitted landscape of rock.

  Shriek jumped back in on the common channel. “I will turn myself over after this. I will claim I did it all. The Arvani—”

  “Shriek, shut up,” I ordered. “We deal with this first. Then we’ll sort that out. Everyone, get your head in this game, right here and right now.”

  “We’re here,” Ken grunted.

  The capsules left us with enough momentum that we gently struck the rock in a rain of tiny silver chaff. Laser light flickered in the air around us, madly trying to carve up the remains of our capsules that still hung above the hull.

  “Hopefully, the Accordance won’t start shooting too,” I said.

  We stuck to the hull. Somewhere inside the ship were Accordance gravity plates. I’d felt the faint flip inside my stomach that was the pull of gravity as we’d approached.

  It wasn’t very strong out here. Moon level, maybe. It would increase as we moved down and in toward the core.

  “Contact,” Zizi shouted on the common channel. “I found an airlock.”

  “Devlin, what are we doing?” Lana Smalley asked.

  I looked at the twinkling chaos between the Trojans and the crude, rocky carrier we were hanging on to. A split second of thought. “Try not to kill them,” I said. “But we’re going to put this down and take the carrier.”

  “For the Accordance?” Amira asked suspiciously. “Or for ourselves?”

  “I don’t fucking know yet,” I said. “But either way, try to keep them alive if you can keep yourselves out of risk.”

  Then I let go of the side and kicked my way down toward Zizi.

  A long arc of light danced across the pits and craters of the rocky hull, lighting everything up with harsh white and casting long shadows. “What the hell was that?”

  “They’ve got hull welders,” Zizi said, almost bemused. “They don’t want to let us in through the airlock, apparently.”

  With a loud bang, I spun around and bounced off rock. I steadied myself. “They’re shooting. With what?”

  “They’ve got some kind of jury-rigged rail gun. Three o’clock,” Min Zhao said. “Everyone, take cover.”

>   “Don’t return fire!” I shouted.

  18

  I scrabbled my way forward to join someone sheltering behind a dip in the hull. It was Chandra Khan.

  “You okay, Chaka?” I asked.

  “It’s going to be hard to get into that airlock without hurting someone,” Khan said.

  Amira popped onto the command channel again. “I have another interesting question I think we need to mull.”

  “Right now?” A piece of metal slammed into the rock hull, sending shards flying everywhere. I winced as the debris rattled against my armor.

  “Now’s as good a time as any to get our heads straight,” Amira said. “We need to know what’s happening. What we’re doing. And you need to make some calls. Because you’re the leader here.”

  “Okay, what’s wrong?” I wanted to rub my forehead.

  “Ghost sign,” Amira said. “I have to keep my head down; I can’t help in the usual ways or it’ll spot me. It’s strong.”

  “So the Conglomeration is here,” Ken said.

  “How is that even possible?” Min Zhao demanded. “They were buried under the ground on Titan. But how are they on a carrier ship, here in the Trojans? How are they fucking popping up everywhere?”

  “Don’t worry about how,” Ken said, his voice reassuring and calm. “Just worry about the fact that this mutiny is not what it seems.”

  Things were shifting around again. Our plan to maybe sneak off somehow was fading. If there were Conglomeration here, ghosts here, something else was going on.

  “This answers a question I have,” Ken said.

  “Which is?” I asked.

  “Where are the other platoons on this attack?”

  I glanced up in the sparkling debris between us and the Trojan docks. No more shooting. No more drama.

  “We’re it. There were other CPF around that might even have been closer,” Amira agreed. “Why us?”

  “You think they’re suiciding us?” Lana Smalley asked. “Or using us as a diversion? Maybe they already know about Sthenos.”

  I was lying with my back against the rock hull, still staring out into space. I could hear the tension in my sergeants’ voices. Smalley, Chin, and Zhao hadn’t attacked their Arvani commander. They’d been taking my orders calmly for long enough. They’d put themselves at risk for so long.

  “They sent just us because of the ghost sign,” I said on the platoon’s common channel, taking the debate out of command loops. “Anais, his techs, they must have spotted it. So they sent us.”

  “I don’t understand,” Smalley said.

  “When Amira sniffed out the ghost sign back on Titan, it was because she was familiar with the patterns and code,” I said.

  “Devlin. What are you doing?” Ken sounded nervous. That was a first.

  “Time to let the Rockhoppers in on the great big fucking secret,” I said. “We captured a ghost. Back at Icarus Crater.”

  “What?” I wasn’t even sure who shouted that in shock. “We’re supposed to get clear of them. How?”

  “Luck,” I said. “But we know what we’re fighting. Accordance claims we need to pull back and let heavy forces in. But what they want is to not let humans find out what the ghosts are.”

  “They’re human,” Amira said.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Smalley asked. “What do you mean, human?”

  “They look like us. Inside this carrier, it could be anyone. They look like us. Ghosts look like us,” Ken said.

  “Why haven’t you told us these things before?” Smalley continued.

  “We were under very strict orders,” I said.

  “Bullshit! Either we’re all in this together, or the three of you are just as useless as the squiddies,” Smalley snapped.

  “Could they be sending us out here to die with that information?” someone asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But you all need to know what we’re facing in there.”

  There was cursing in four different languages on the common.

  “But what does it mean?” Ilyushin asked, frustrated.

  “It means they need us,” Ken said.

  Everyone quieted. “Go on,” I said.

  “I’ve been thinking about this since Titan,” Ken explained. “The Conglomeration are using humans. Or something that looks human. The Accordance, they’re putting us into carrier ships like this one. They’re using us to build more ships. They wouldn’t be doing all of this, either of them, if they didn’t need us. The only reason humans took these ships over is because they were building them. The Arvani, they just don’t have the numbers. There are only a handful of Pcholem in the system. Even the struthiforms are dying off because they lost their homeworld, their nesting grounds.”

  “How the fuck does that help us right here, right now?” Vorhis asked.

  “Because we’ve assumed, since the day the Accordance came to orbit and pacified Earth, that it was about them. Their tools. Their abilities. Their technology. But the truth is, they’re fighting over us right now. That’s their weakness.”

  “How the hell is them ripping us apart to fight over us a weakness?” The common channel devolved into angry voices.

  “No,” I shouted. “Ken’s right.”

  The common channel settled down.

  “Anais sent us in because we know what ghosts are,” I said. “We’re not joining the Conglomeration. We’re not going to slaughter these people either, which is what the Arvani would want. They have skills we’re going to need soon.”

  “When?” Ilyushin asked.

  “When humanity gets out from under them all,” I said.

  “That sounds like Earth First talk,” Ilyushin noted.

  “Well, I am the son of famous Earth First terrorists,” I said. “What the hell were they expecting?”

  I used my fingertips to skim along the hull.

  “Where are you going?” Amira asked.

  “To disable anyone firing at us with a homemade rail gun. Then we’re going to break in and, bulkhead by bulkhead, carefully retake this place without killing them. We’re wearing alien-designed power armor, built to take full combat hits. This is a one-sided battle.”

  I flung myself over the rocky lip and toward the two spacesuits by the airlock.

  “They might get lucky,” Amira shouted as slugs slammed into my helmet. For brief seconds, liquid metal streamed down the side of my vision as they obliterated themselves against the shielding.

  “True,” I said. “So I’ll have to move quickly.”

  And before I’d even finished muttering that, I was between the mutineers. They struggled to draw on me, but I snatched the weapons away, crushed them between my armored fingers, and shook my head.

  19

  Patel came running down the corridor. “Fire in—”

  The explosion came right behind him before he’d finished his warning. The flames enveloped him, throwing him forward and into a nearby bulkhead.

  Alpha squad shot forward, Zhao taking point.

  “Patel?” I called out.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  “Go back and join Taylor, have Shriek look you over.”

  “I’m fine,” Patel gritted.

  “Do it anyway.”

  Patel stood up and moved to the back with our twenty captives. Engineers, miners, maintenance workers, all zip-tied together and looking somewhat dazed. Lilly Taylor sat with them. One of the rail guns had punched through her shin guard. Shriek had filled the hole in her with a gel and pumped some painkillers in, and she was ready to get back into the mix. But I had her guarding the captives.

  “Hart?” Zhao called out on the command channel.

  “Yes?”

  “We have a situation.”

  I looked down through the clearing smoke
. “Yeah?”

  We’d cut our way down into the carrier. Delta had our asses covered, and Alpha and Bravo were taking turns blowing up doors and pushing forward. We were rolling up resistance and zip-tying them to each other as we went.

  It was slow and tedious corridor work. We’d been at it for an hour.

  I kept to the side of the corridor and moved up to the front, crouching down by Erica Li, who was covering with her rifle the next bit we’d have to leapfrog into. She pointed down the corridor. Bulkhead doors were open down the corridor. A straight run.

  Too good to be true. We’d been fighting through thick steel door after thick steel door. Designed to frustrate invaders like us and keep the carrier airtight no matter the scenario.

  The mutineers had kept them all shut to slow us down.

  Now they were throwing out the welcome mat?

  Someone slowly put their hands out from behind a bulkhead into the open space. “We want to talk,” a voice shouted into the open space between us.

  Zhao was lying against the bulkhead, looking straight at me. “Second verbal request,” she said.

  I closed my eyes and thought the command to slide my helmet back down. My nostrils burned. The acrid smoke from the explosives still in the air seared the back of my throat. Not my brightest move; I could have used the amplification in the suit.

  But responding in kind felt like the right move. “Hello,” I shouted. “What would you like to talk about?”

  “We’re willing to talk, but only to someone we choose that you’ll have to bring over.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “Who is it that we have to bring over?”

  Zhao lowered her helmet and crabbed over to me. “There’s some equipment I’m seeing farther down the corridor,” she whispered. “I think it’s an even bigger rail gun they’ve wheeled into place.”

  “Fucking engineers,” I hissed. And then louder. “Who are we bringing over?”

  “Devlin Hart,” the voice shouted back.

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I looked at Zhao, who shrugged, the action taken up by the heavy armored shoulders.