Titan's Wrath

by Rhett C. Bruno

  “My dad was the opposite,” I said. “Always promising to be around but never there.”

  “Yeah. They’re never perfect, are they? But you know what? He was right.”

  “About what?”

  “Seeing Sol was so much better, as much as I complained.”

  I exhaled. “Keeping me out of the Children of Titan was probably smart of mine too. I’d be dead by now otherwise.”

  “To our distinguished families.” She giggled before pressing her lips against mine. It was nice to see her in a better mood, and as I closed my eyes and kissed her back, I could almost pretend I was in one too.

  “I’ve never had a home,” she whispered after she pulled away. “But I’m glad I have one here.”

  “You’re one of us now, Cora. Until the end.”

  Her eyes bulged, as if that idea was terrifying. She backed away slightly, then put on a smile again. I could only imagine how strange belonging anywhere felt for a woman like her who’d spent her lifetime planet-hopping.

  “I know it’s safer here for me here right now, but do you think I could see Malcolm?” she asked.

  “You might believe he’s out of the game, but we can’t risk it.”

  “I get it, Kale, I do. It’s just hard to imagine him locked up, of all people. Maybe I can talk some sense into him.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Aria kissed me again, long and hard. “That’s all I ask.” She pulled herself up onto me and wrapped her legs around my slender hips. She was strong, stronger than Cora ever could be being born on the Ring to a Titanborn mother. Aria’s hands gripped either side of my face, and she kissed me again, until I was lost in her touch.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  MALCOLM GRAVES

  “Eat up, M-mudstomper,” Desmond cackled. He slid a bowl filled with grub into my cell so hard it tipped over. It’d been weeks since Maya had found me huddled with Orson’s body. Maybe longer. She’d had to fight off her own people to stop them from kicking me into the ground. I expected a public execution, but they’d dragged me right back to my cell.

  I crawled to the bowl on four limbs like a beast, digging in with my hands until I realized what I looked like. I grabbed it and threw it at Desmond. It clattered against the bars facing the wrong way and spilled all over me.

  Desmond laughed. “Starve for all I care.”

  “What?” I grumbled. “Your lunatic king doesn’t need me for any more hits?” Pain still pulled at my sore ribs from the beating I’d taken. They’d likely been fractured. Desmond had been keeping his distance since I returned, but I was chipping away in our limited face time. Pissing people off was what I was best at.

  “Whatever he’s p...p...planning to do with you, I’m sure it’ll be good,” Desmond said.

  “Pervenio Collectors have a special place in our hearts.”

  “You don’t know, do you, kid?” I realized then that I hadn’t heard any newsfeeds playing in the hollow. Even at his station, Javaris often complained about his lack of access to most corners of Solnet for data. Now I could barely hear him over the racket of whatever he and his team of Ringers were building. Desmond was locked away underground with us like a sick dog, a memory from a horrible thing that Kale didn’t want to be reminded of. They’d probably taken me to kill Orson while he was sleeping.

  “All I know is that you’re gonna get w...what’s coming to you,” he said, his gaze momentarily shifting toward Javaris Venta’s busy workspace across the hollow. “All you mudstompers a...a...are.”

  I wiped the muck off the bottom of my sanitary mask and dragged my impotent cybernetic leg toward the bars, the electromag band reactivated.

  “You think so?” I asked. “What do you have that brilliant Earther building for you?”

  His brow furrowed for maybe a second before he put on a sneer. Long enough for me to notice. “Your end,” he replied.

  “You have no idea, do you?” It was my turn to laugh. “No idea that the bastard you serve has totally lost it. I’ve seen it before. Protestors dig in until they’re at their wits’ end and then start killing each other. How long before he has me kill you because he can’t stand to look at your face?”

  “Not this time, G...graves,” he said. “They told me to ignore you.”

  “Because they know I might talk some damn sense! What do you think they removed me from my cell for, some coffee? A chat about how Earthers tick? I’m Kale’s Collector now, and it’s more of the same.”

  “N...n...no. We’re free here now.”

  “Free? He’s killing anyone who speaks out against him. Sounds a lot like Luxarn to me.”

  “He’s nothing like him!” He smacked the bars.

  “You’re right. Worse. At least Luxarn had the decency to lock up peaceful men instead of leave them bleeding on the floor.”

  “What do you call what he had S...sodervall do to me? To Cora. That’s the problem with you mud...mudstompers. You think you can justify everything.”

  “At least we know what we are. You lot parade around your colonies like you’re heroes all because Kale dropped a nuclear bomb on a bunch of security officers. You think they knew what was going on when they entered that quarantine? They were just doing their jobs. Men with families, children. He killed all of them and then some more. Anyone who stood in his way, and he locked the rest in cells. Does that sound like heroes to you? You’re a bunch of damned skelly fanatics.”

  “What the f...f...fuck did you just say?”

  I could see his fingers itching around the trigger of his gun. I’d found a nerve, and it was time to keep poking it.

  “I was there in New London when your Children of Titan bombed it. Civilians with their limbs blown off. You call that fighting for freedom? I call it an excuse for a bunch of murderers to dance around a moon pretending they own it.”

  “You really think that even compares to what your p...people did to us?”

  “What? Put you in quarantines because you got sick?” I paused. I’d seen the condition of those places. The way his people were withering away to bones under Pervenio’s watch because it was better for business. I couldn’t back down now, though. “How does that compare to the Children of Titan spacing twenty Earthers on the Piccolo just to send a message?”

  “Do you know how many times those same men sm...smacked my meal away or beat me with batons because I was a ‘filthy Ringer.’ Or h...how they made us scrub the shit out of canisters because our arms are longer while they grinned and drank?”

  “So, you kill them all. Everyone who’s ever had a bad thing to say. Then you wonder why a man like Sodervall is pushed so far he spaces a bunch of innocent Ringers like Cora just to find out how to stop the Children of Titan. He may have hit the switch, but your king is the reason she’s dead and you can’t walk. He forced Sodervall’s hand while he hid like a coward.”

  Desmond raised his gun, screamed, and fired. The gunshot echoed so loudly in the hollow it sounded like an explosion. A bullet struck me in the hip just above the connection to my synthetic leg, sending me hurtling into the wall. Desmond kicked open my cell’s door and limped at me.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken a clean shot like that. Oh right, it was the same moment I killed Zhaff. Out on the surface of Titan and in a suit, I hadn’t felt it, but this one stung.

  “That was your people’s fault!” Desmond yelled at the top of his lungs, anger erasing his stutter. “You did this to us, not him!” He shoved the barrel of his pulse rifle into my fresh wound. The pain was so sharp it was almost numbing. I now knew what all the targets I’d interrogated by aggravating their wounds felt like. Poor bastards.

  “Is it our fault your kind are more suited for cleaning up our messes?” I said through clenched teeth. That was the final straw for Desmond, a former gas harvester worker who’d done just that for Earthers for most of his life. Who’d been crippled at the hands of one before watching most of his crew get spaced.

  He went to shift the
aim of his rifle toward my head, and I used that opening. I mustered all the strength in my earthborn muscles and punched him in the side of the head with my good arm, the only spot his armor exposed. He flew against the wall, the rifle flying out of his hands. I scrambled across the floor and tackled him.

  I reared back to strike him again, but by then his head was turned away and he was crying. “No, please,” he repeated, eyes twitching as he did. I imagined those were the words he said as Pervenio Corp. tortured him for information on Kale that he didn’t have.

  I couldn’t bring myself to hit him again. Seeing me, an Earther, stooped over him clearly transported him back to that moment of terror. For all his gun-toting bravado, the Ringer was broken. He’d shot me in the hip, and all I could manage was pity.

  “You have gone soft,” I laughed to myself. I rolled off him and barely had a chance to crawl for his weapon before more guards arrived at my cell, holding me at gunpoint.

  “Hands where we can see them, Earther!” they barked.

  This was it. My chance to go down shooting like I should’ve so many times before. I reached for the rifle, fighting the unimaginable pain tearing at my hip. My fingers grasped for the weapon but only brushed the trigger before I collapsed.

  My arms were wrenched back. I howled in pain. Then the batons came. One blow after the other against my back and already tender ribs. All the while, Desmond remained cowering on the floor, whispering madly to be left alone. Broken, like everything else left in Kale Trass’s wake.

  “Stop!” a strong, feminine voice bellowed. One last blow hit me square in the back before the guards listened.

  “Lady Mazrah,” one of them said. “He attacked Desmond. We—”

  “Desmond was warned to keep away from him. Return to monitoring Mr. Venta’s work immediately.”

  They scurried out of the cell without another word. I rolled over and spotted the most beautiful women I’d ever met in my life. Aria didn’t count.

  “You just can’t stay out of trouble, can you, Mal?” Mazrah said. She knelt by my side and tried to lift me. I moaned. I’m not sure which part of my body hurt most, but I’d put a handful of credits on the bullet wound. Eventually, she gave up and sat me upright.

  “Funny running into you like this again, Maz,” I grated.

  “I think I recall that last time I was the one who’d been shot. By your partner.”

  “He was impulsive.”

  “Until you killed him.”

  My throat went dry. Of course, she knew about that. Mazrah knew about everything. That was her greatest talent. A whiz with tech for sure and as lovely as any supermodel, but she had a knack for knowing. I think that’s why I fell for her all those years ago. Pervenio had me after a terraforming research saboteur, long before anyone knew Kale existed. Some radical Ringer didn’t want Earth looking into how to “improve” his world. I paid Mazrah a hefty fee to help me tap into Darien security cams to track him down. We did, and then did a little more, and then she, Aria, and I spent weeks playing home until Pervenio finally convinced me to take on another job back on Mars. It was the first time I ever considering hanging up my pistol and settling down, but the job sucked me back in like always.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You know who he was?”

  “Aria told me.”

  “Of course.”

  “She also told me what you did for her.”

  I shrugged. “I had no choice.”

  “You did. Now get up.”

  “What. Does your king have another mission for me? If you haven’t realized yet, that lunatic shot me. I won’t be much use with a gun.”

  “Good thing your daughter was a doctor then.”

  Hearing that was enough to get my old ass up to my feet. Blood trickled down my synthetic leg, and putting pressure on it with my hand hurt worse than anything yet.

  “Mazrah, is she okay?” I groaned.

  “She’s fine, Malcolm. For now. We’re going to see her.” She wrapped her arm around my back and guided me toward the exit. I stopped.

  “In exchange for what?” I knew her well enough to know that dealing with her never came cheaply. And especially not free. Another thing that drew me to her back in the day.

  “I can’t explain here. Just trust me.”

  I looked her over. Pain had me seeing two of her, but that didn’t change how she looked. My offworld darling. Last time I trusted her, we ended up in a gun-toting standoff. Ours was never a simple relationship. The closer we got, the harder I pushed away. She did the same. So it was with Collectors and queens of the information underworld. We were destined to be alone.

  But there I was falling into the trap again. I nodded and let her lead me out, putting my full trust into her again. It was probably another on my long list of mistakes, but as much as our relationship went off the rails, I could never forget those days with her. Shirking our responsibilities as we hid in her Lowers hollow. Meals with her and Aria sitting around a table like we were some sort of old-fashioned Ringer family.

  “Mr. Venta,” Mazrah addressed Javaris. He glanced up from a control pad being built into what looked like an engine stalk. His glasses were so grimy I wasn’t sure how he saw a thing.

  “Yes?” he stammered.

  “Do you have any congealing spray? For accidents. Our prisoner is injured.”

  “I...uh.”

  “Answer her!” one of the guards watching him barked, smacking a chunk of cold-formed alloy with a baton.

  Javaris winced. “In my workstation. Medical kit. Where are you taking him?”

  “Lord Trass wants to see him,” Mazrah replied. She left me leaning against the engine and then hurried to his desk. She pushed a member of Javaris’s work crew aside and rifled through the drawers until she came up with the spray. Javaris impeded her on her way back to me.

  “Please, I have to speak with him too!” he exclaimed. “My clan sister has been locked in that cell this entire time. She needs fresh air. To stretch. A break from the darkness down here. I’m begging you.”

  The guard struck him in the leg with a baton. Not hard enough to knock him over but enough to remind him where he was. “We lived in tunnels like this our whole lives, Earther!”

  “Please! I’ve done everything you’ve asked. Work is ahead of schedule. I just need to be with her for a minute.”

  Mazrah regarded the cell adjacent to mine, and from outside I could finally see inside it as well. Javaris’s clan sister was huddled against the back corner, a barely touched bowl of food beside her. The sounds of her weeping were common in the first days of our imprisonment, but she hadn’t made a peep in a long time.

  “Give them a moment together,” Mazrah said.

  “Lord Trass said not to interrupt production,” the guard replied.

  “Lord Trass isn’t here right now. They’re human beings for Trass’s sake.”

  “Barely,” the guard snickered.

  Mazrah drew herself up in front of him and stood tall. Heels had her towering over him, and if there’s one thing I know about beautiful women it’s that their scowls cut even deeper. None knew how to wield one better than her.

  “He put me in charge of overseeing Javaris’s production,” she said. “Question my orders again and I’ll reserve a cell for you.”

  “Yes, Lady Mazrah,” he conceded. “Break time, everyone; get some chow!” The Ringer workers sighed in relief. Javaris had them working to the bone, day and night, creating whatever the hell it was Kale wanted. Based on my few interactions with him, it couldn’t be anything good.

  The guard then shoved Javaris along. “You get one minute, Earther.”

  “Hold still,” Mazrah said to me. I bit my lip as she sprayed the gel and sealed my wound. I’d had my share of scrapes mended before, but I could never get used to the stuff. It was too cold, like someone was shoving in icicle into me. “There,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “Look at you,” I said. “In charge. How is it you always manage that?”
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  “I learned from the best.”

  “I’m flattered. I was always the one taking orders, though.”

  She grinned. “I wasn’t talking about you.”

  Mazrah. She didn’t take shit, and I think that’s why I fell for her in the first place. Most informants backed down and gave me what I wanted for free when I was a Pervenio Collector. Not her. I’m pretty sure she upped the price. That’s a rare thing, when somebody knows what they’re worth and won’t bend an inch. I like to think I negotiated my Pervenio contracts with the same rigor.

  “We’re not really going to see Kale, are we?” I asked.

  She led me deeper into the hollow. My hip was a scrambled mess, and my synthetic leg was still stiff from the electromag band. The only good thing was that now every time the limb swung, I actually felt it.

  We reached a familiar portion of the caverns that looked like an old cafeteria that hadn’t been used in a decade. When Zhaff and I found the hideout, those very tables were covered with the bodies of sick Ringers my daughter was using stolen medicine to treat. Now it was as empty as an Earth crypt, minus the cobwebs.

  “You always were perceptive.” She groaned and leaned me against a wall to rest. Half-lugging an Earther body like mine was more than any offworlder could handle.

  “I could move better if you took this thing off me.” I tapped the band wrapping my synthetic leg.

  “You like my invention?”

  “I had a feeling this was your work after I spotted you.”

  “You promise not to run?”

  “Where the hell would I go?”

  She rolled her eyes, then knelt in front of me with her hand-terminal out. Half a minute of flurrying fingers later, the band powered down and fell from me. I considered running, like she feared, but I was too damn tired. My body too battered. Instead, I collapsed onto my ass to take a breather. I yanked at my sanitary mask to try and get it off until Mazrah drew a small knife and sliced the fabric. I’d never realized how hard the things made it to breathe until air flowed down my throat freely.