My breathing hastened. It couldn’t be connected.
“For gas stores, I reckon,” another crew member responded, motioning to the dozens of canisters standing all around him.
“This early in the shift?” said another, echoing my sentiments exactly.
Desmond sat up and glanced in Captain Saunders’s direction. “You finally insult the wrong person, Cap?” he said.
“Shut it,” John growled so that the captain didn’t have to waste the energy projecting his voice across the harvester bay.
Desmond grinned but didn’t respond.
“Maybe they got what they wanted from cold storage and left,” Yavik said.
“Kindest pirates I’ve ever heard of if that’s the case,” someone else added.
“Enough,” Captain Saunders groaned. “You’re all giving me a headache. Let Cora keep working. Anything yet, girl?”
“Nothing,” she responded softly, too focused to worry about if anyone could hear her. “I’m locked out of everything. Every time I find a way through, they have a counter.”
They conversed back and forth with technobabble I couldn’t follow. R’s message repeated in my head. If this really was connected and I’d invited our invaders on board, what could they want?
“Hey, Kale,” Desmond said, snapping me out of it. He was slumped against the harvesting vats beside me. He had his eyes closed, but he wasn’t asleep. He was just resting, preparing for the fight we all knew might be imminent.
“What?” I asked.
He held out his palm. A Red Wing Company g-stim pack lay in the center of it. “Here,” he said. “I’m tired of listening to you wheeze.”
“Whe—” I lowered my voice. “Where’d you get that?”
He nodded toward Yavik. “He’s always got an extra stash to take the edge off. C’mon.”
I looked around as if it mattered we were breaking the captain’s rules, then grabbed the stim and jabbed it into the side of my neck. In seconds, it felt as if there had been a belt tied around my lungs that was now loosening notch by notch.
“There you go.” He slapped me on the back and slid closer. “I saw you,” he whispered directly into my ear, playing his guessing games with me once more.
“Saw me?” My heart skipped a beat. He couldn’t have seen. Nobody saw. Was I about to be blamed for this?
“Getting up out of her bed,” he clarified. “Thought you’d be able to hide it from me in the chaos, but I think I have a knack for catching you.” He turned to face me and smirked.
“Oh, that,” I replied, trying not to let my relief show.
“Lester will shit himself if he ever finds out. I never thought it’d actually happen. Never thought I’d be jealous of you either.”
“Why? You’ve got a girl back on Titan, don’t you?”
He hesitated, and his lips twisted. “Yeah... sure I do... but not one like her. You’re braver than I thought.”
I peered over at Cora. Even considering the circumstances, she was as stunning as ever. Watching the way the muscles on her slender forearms tightened and untightened as her fingers flew across the console’s controls quieted my mind for a few much-needed seconds.
“At least one of us had a last night to remember,” Desmond said.
“We’re not going to die,” I said, mostly to reassure myself. “She’ll find help. They don’t even want us de—”
“Trass!” Cora exclaimed. Everyone’s attention fell on her. In two years of knowing her, I’d never heard her raise her voice so high.
“What?” more than a few members of the crew, including myself, asked in unison.
“They’re diverting power from the ship’s systems. They’re...” She backed away from the console, her eyes gaping in horror as if she was about to faint. I used Desmond’s shoulder to get to my feet and limped over to her. The screen blinked and was cluttered with indecipherable strings of code.
“What is it?” I asked.
The Piccolo answered me before she could. The room’s air recyclers hummed loudly for a few seconds and then clicked. The attackers had reversed the harvester bay’s oxygen supply, sucking it out of the room. It was an emergency protocol to be used in the event of a fire.
“What’s happening?” voices questioned.
“Cora, stop this!” Captain Saunders ordered.
She threw herself back toward the console, carrying me with her. I could feel her arms trembling as I held them, or maybe it was my hands. Probably both. Everything she tried was received by an error message.
My body started to feel warmer. The current of air flowing through the ship had never been noticeable to me until then, when so much of it had been sucked away.
“C’mon,” Cora said to herself. “Work!” She banged on the keys, and the screen went black. The sound of the rest of the room’s machinery losing power hung on the stale air. Even the red emergency lights finally switched off, drowning us in complete blackness.
“Was that you?” I asked.
“No...” Cora whimpered. I felt her head fall against my chest, her hands against my back. “I couldn’t stop them... I couldn’t...” She sobbed, and we fell to our knees together. I withheld my tears. We needed to control our breathing, or we’d suffocate even more quickly.
It was hard to hear what anyone else was saying. Curses and frightened shouts echoed. Crew members ran for the blast door, the thinning air causing them to forget that they weren’t safe on the other side of it either.
“It’s sealed!” they shouted.
Of course it was. Without power, there was no way to get it open.
I held Cora close. I’d have given anything to look upon her face again. It was too dark to even see her nose as it grazed mine. I could only feel her tears on my cheeks.
“Just breathe slowly,” I said.
“I wish I’d been with you sooner,” she sniveled.
“Me too,” I answered. The words slipped through my lips as little more than a whisper. My head was getting lighter and lighter every second.
“I don’t want to die... Kale.”
For two years, I’d dreamed of hugging her. I’d dreamed of kissing her and lying by her side. Now I’d done all of that, and it’d be the last thing I ever did. We were all going to die.
TWELVE
A flicker of light. The thrum and ticks of power being restored. At first, I thought I was dead, that those Earthers who clung to the religions of the old world were right and there really was a realm my spirit went to after death. I’d always believed that when I was cremated, and my ashes were released into the winds of Titan, as was Ringer custom, I’d become a part of our moon’s icy winds. Drifting for all eternity and watching over my people.
I was doing neither. Breathable air rushed down my throat, inflated my lungs, and I gasped. In my arms, I felt Cora do the same, her chest lifting my hand as I squeezed her tight. The room was filled with the sounds of others having the same reaction. We were alive... at least for the time being.
The halogen lights in the harvesting bay grew brighter, and I realized the blast door was wide open. The canister racks stacked in front of it had all been shoved to the side except for the one currently being moved by an attacker. John’s great wall, brushed aside like a pile of infected laundry.
I wanted to grab Cora and run for cover behind anything I could find, but I couldn’t convince my legs to cooperate. My body was still too fatigued from oxygen deprivation to speak comprehensibly, let alone move. The rest of the crew was in the same position. Reversing the air recyclers was a perfect way for whoever the attackers were to avoid a fight. I just couldn’t understand what they wanted.
And then I saw it.
An attacker finished sliding the last rack out of the way and turned to face us just as two others entered the room. My vision was getting less blurry, and under the blooming light, I could better see the details of their armor. All three suits were identical and bulky enough to make it impossible to tell where their wearers might�
��ve originated from. They were entirely white except for their tinted visors and one other feature: a pale orange circle in the center of their chest plates.
My jaw dropped. Doctor Orsini regained her strength quicker than the rest and scrambled for cover. One of the attackers promptly shot her down. The flat-head round didn’t kill her, but getting hit that hard in the gut at close quarters had her curled up on the ground desperate for the air she’d only just regained.
“Bastards!” another Earther yelled. Not only were the Earthers closer to the door, but their stronger muscles allowed them to recover sooner. Four of them pounced at the attackers. What proceeded happened so fast that it was hard to tell who was who, though I was sure that while John’s two-person security team joined the defense, he stayed put like the coward he was. The captain struggled to rise but wasn’t able to move speedily enough.
Two of the Earthers were taken out at the legs. Another landed a punch against one of the attackers but probably broke his hand against the armor before being smacked into the canister racks. The fourth was grabbed by the throat and slammed to the ground so hard the metal floor caved.
Before anybody else could move, the captain was heaved to his feet and placed at gunpoint. The attacker holding the rifle switched out the clip on his or her pulse-rifle for another. John was next to them, crouched like he was finally preparing himself to join the fray, but remaining still.
“The next rounds are live,” the attacker with the captain said. A distortion device rendered the voice too deep to be natural or infer gender. It resonated over the cavernous silence of a crew too tired and too terrified to move.
“Do it,” Desmond said after the longest seconds of quiet in my life. “See if we care.”
The other two attackers switched their clips as well, each taking aim at one side of the room. I positioned my body in front of Cora, and then all my muscles tensed. Nobody fired, but the message was clear enough for even Desmond to hold his tongue.
“What do you want? Gas?” Captain Saunders rasped, the gun barrel pressed against his bloody hair. “We have nothing else of value here.”
“Value is a relative term,” the attacker replied.
“We’ll give you whatever it is.”
“What we want, you cannot give.”
“Then just leave, whoever you are!” John yelled.
The attacker doing all the talking turned his or her attention away from the captain and stepped toward the center of the room. It was impossible to see any eyes through the visor; however, I couldn’t help but feel that he or she stared directly at me.
“We are the will of Titan,” he or she said. “Comply with our demands, and you may survive this.”
The speaker exchanged a series of calculated hand gestures with the other attackers. It wasn’t just military signals either. I could tell from experience that they were communicating in sign language. That had me believing they might be Ringers.
Deafness had essentially been eliminated on Earth, with its advancements in the areas of genetics and affordable surgical options, so it was a dead language for Earthers. But signing had been a huge part of how we communicated in the early days of the Ring, when we were founding our colonies from the inside of protective suits. Having an entire construction crew chattering over in-helmet com-links could be confusing. Most Ringers weren’t fluent anymore, and I basically knew only the few words and phrases I remembered from school, which came in handy as a thief trying to remain as discreet as possible. The attackers were so fluid with it that the only word I recognized was live.
“Who are they?” Cora whispered, the terror in her voice palpable.
I don’t know, but I think I invited them here, was what I wanted to say. I settled on simply “I don’t know,” which was still the honest truth. Them being Ringers was really an educated guess. Any Earther could learn sign language if they had the time or the desire to put on a mask and make my kind appear culpable. The only thing I could be sure about was that they were professionals, and they weren’t messing around.
“Stand,” one of the other attackers said to all the Ringers in the harvesting bay as he or she approached us. Another said the same to the Earthers across the way.
We all complied.
The attacker’s head rotated so that his or her visor aimed directly at Cora and me. My stomach knotted. Her fingers dug into my side and mine into hers.
“Apart,” the distorted voice ordered. “Show your hands.”
We hesitated.
“Now,” he or she demanded.
“It’s okay,” I whispered to Cora. “It’s okay.” It took all my willpower to pry my hands off her, but I did so and made sure to position myself in front of her as I raised them. I couldn’t even feel if they were quaking anymore, they’d been doing it for so long.
“Form a line at the door,” the attacker said. “The order is irrelevant.”
“For what?” Desmond questioned. “I’m sick of this. I won’t be marched away willingly to be used like a sack of meat if that’s what this is!”
“Me... me neither,” Yavik nervously agreed.
Again, I wished Desmond could just keep his mouth shut. The attacker promptly stormed over to him and raised his or her pulse-rifle so that the barrel pressed into the center of his forehead.
“Failure to comply won’t be tolerated,” he or she threatened.
The attacker’s finger pulled the trigger halfway, and Desmond’s expression was ripe with a level of apprehension I didn’t know he was capable of. I could see the lump in his throat bob.
I willed him with my thoughts to stay quiet. It was better to be a slave, if that was what was coming, than a stain on the floor. Ringers were no good in underground brothels, considering our immune systems, so if we were being acquired for work, the worst place I could conceive of that we’d be placed was some hollowed-out asteroid mine. The Lowers weren’t much different.
“Listen to them,” I said. “If they wanted us dead, they’d have kept the air off.” I limped toward the blast door, checking to make sure that Cora followed. She did. I held her gaze as we walked.
“Back to your old obedient self, are you, Kale?” Desmond said through clenched teeth.
I wasn’t foolish enough to respond. Cora and I found a spot behind the Earthers, who reluctantly formed a line at gunpoint. I made sure she was in front of me.
Most of the Ringers followed me, and once Yavik decided he’d rather live a little bit longer, so did he. Only then did Desmond finally lower his shoulders, sidestep the rifle, and mope toward the door.
I exhaled. He was a pain in my ass, but I didn’t want to see him die. I didn’t want to see any of the crew die. Not even John, who took his rightful position as second in line behind the captain. “We’re complying,” Captain Saunders said, mustering his most authoritative tone. “Just tell us what’s happening, and we’ll continue to. Nobody has to get hurt.”
“Judgment, for your benefactor,” the attacker near the head of the line said.
“Where are you taking us?” John asked. He could barely squeak the words out.
None of the attackers answered. They signed something to one another and then spread out at equal intervals along the line, guns still raised. “Time to move,” one of them ordered; it was impossible to tell which, maybe all. The unnatural voice seemed to be coming from all around me. “Move!”
They simultaneously cocked their rifles. Everyone did what they were told. I had to look down just to make sure I didn’t trip over my feet as I started walking. After a few steps, I reached out without thinking about it and placed a quaking hand on Cora’s hip. Maybe it was to reassure her, but it was probably more for my own sake.
“Hand,” the nearest attacker warned. I pulled it away immediately. Cora shuddered. As I looked up, I couldn’t help but stare at the orange circle on the attacker’s chest. The same circle that had been there when I found Dexter dead. The same circle that had nearly given me a heart attack as I transported
it through the heart of Pervenio Corp.
“Yup, I should’ve never taken a job on this ship,” Desmond grumbled. He walked directly behind me. “Had a good thing going, running food down from the Uppers. Barely any all-important credits in it, though.”
I shushed him.
“I’ll be quiet when they put a bullet in my brain,” he said.
“I’m sure they’d be happy to,” I answered.
Before he could say anything else, the nearest attacker slammed me in the gut with the butt of a pulse-rifle. I’m sure it wasn’t as hard as possible, since wearing a powered suit, he or she could have ruptured my organs, but it was enough to knock the wind out of me and drop me to a knee.
“Kale!” Cora yelped. She went to help me, but the attacker grabbed her and forced her back into place. I was lifted next.
“Move quietly,” the attacker demanded and shoved me into line.
I guess there was a shred of decency in Desmond because that got him to shut up in a hurry. Cora glanced back at me over her shoulder, tears dripping down her flushed cheeks. I forced a crooked smile and continued to limp, now also hunched over from the throbbing pain in my stomach.
We were led to the compartment outside of the Piccolo’s starboard docking airlock. It was little more than a wide hallway. Benches ran down the sides with empty exo-suits hanging over them in case of exterior repairs. The airlock was at the far end, from which a shaft extended to mate with stations or ships that didn’t have a hangar large enough to fit the entire vessel.
The half of the Piccolo’s crew that hadn’t made it to the harvesting bay were already there, sitting on the benches under the guard of a fourth faceless attacker. Most of them were bruised and bloody. There was an order to it: The obvious Ringers sat on one side and the Earthers on the other. All of them appeared too exhausted to be afraid anymore. I couldn’t imagine what they’d gone through while we hid in the harvesting bay.
Children of Titan Series: Books 1-4: (A Space Opera Thriller Box Set) Page 37
