“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 transparent dome of the command deck was splayed open and exposed to Saturn. The dark mass of another vessel loomed above, with me, the armored attackers, and Captain Saunders’s body being pulled toward it by Saturn’s unrelenting wind.
FOURTEEN
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 corrosion 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 ticked 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 irritating 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. Nobody was 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 nuclear-thermal engines powering a ship through Saturn—and remembered what had happened before I passed out.
“W... what’s going on?” I stammered.
An attacker silently sat in the chair, 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 nothing out of a nightmare, no demon with flaming red eyes. Only a female Ringer, same as any other. Or at least that was what I thought until she leaned forward into a field of light bright enough for me to regard 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 invention of a nightmare. “Relax, Kale. You are safe now,” she said. “Healthy, no thanks to my crew.” Her voice was so gravelly 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 sank 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 were forced 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,” she said. “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 where a g-stim rested that I only then noticed. The emblem of Venta Co—a series of three overlaid Vs—was imprinted on the pack. “In time, your eyes and head will grow more accustomed to the stress. That will help.”
I stared at the stim but didn’t budge.
“It’s just a g-stim,” she insisted. “More potent than the ones your captain provided. Like how we made them to be all those many decades ago.”
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?”
“Justice.” She grinned, the deformed side of her face crinkling to give it a ghoulish quality.
“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 am dead, but you may call me Rin.”
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? R?” I asked.
Again, she grinned, even more impishly this time.
I sprang to my knees and clutched the view-screen’s paper-thin frame. “My mom,” I said. “You promised 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 for now.”
“You’re lying!”
“You’ve done well, Kale,” she said calmly. “Take the stim. 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 wall 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 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, though 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 to face the g-stim. 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. Rin, R, 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 g-stim. My powered fingers caused the pack to compress slightly. 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.
Rin was right about one thing: if they wanted to kill me, they’d have 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. Rin knew where.
I jabbed the pack into my neck and pushed down to cue the injection. 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?
No one 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 angry spirits hid 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 was really where I was—had a layout like 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 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 seeming 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 lounged around a command deck, not unlike the Piccolo’s, chatting like nothing was wrong. Rin sat 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 Rin’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 his long 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. Rin 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 Rin didn’t allow me to get far.
“Shut it, Hayes!” 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?”
Hayes scowled, shook his head, and crossed his arms.
“Thought so,” Rin said. “Now go get Kale something to eat.”
“Rini,” he protested.
Rin’s glare bored through him. It made the grimace Captain Saunders wore when he was irritated seem like a smile. “That’s an order.”
Hayes hopped to his feet and performed an embellished bow. “My lady,” he said before sauntering around us.
“You’ll have to excuse Hayes,” Rin said. “So many years away from home have corroded his manners, if he ever had them.”
“All the years around you, beautiful!” he shouted back, his voice echoing through the vacant corridor outside.
“Years?” I asked.
“I’m sure you have questions,” Rin said. “As long as you promise not to break apart the command deck if we let you go, I’ll answer whatever I can.”
“You won’t space me?”
“Not if I can help it.”
I nodded, then realized my head was covered by a bulbous helmet and she was at my side. I bowed my entire torso forward instead.
They heaved me to my feet and set me into one of the chairs wrapping the command deck. Rin sat across from me in the one Hayes had vacated. Like her voice, her face was somewhat different than it’d been through the video feed. There was a warmth to her eyes, the kind someone bears when they see a friend or loved one after a long absence. It caught me so off guard that my desire to grab her by the throat and demand the truth was stunted.
“By Trass, you’ve grown,” she said. “You look just like him.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“You really don’t remember? I guess your mother did all she could to get rid of us.”
My mind started raci
ng, wondering how long Rin had been watching me, trying to think of all the times I might’ve felt someone lingering in the shadows to my side. I was at a loss for words. I studied her now that my eyes were feeling better and tried to picture her without the scars mutilating half of her face.
And that was when I remembered...
I was barely four years old, tall for my age, even for a Ringer. My head reached my mother’s chest. I stood beside her, gazing up at her inquisitively. Tears filled her eyes, accompanying a look of conviction on her face that as a child I mistook to be purely sorrow.
Few areas of the Darien Uppers existed that were as dark as the world below, where we came from. We were in one of them. A morgue, a funeral home—it was a little bit of both. It was the Darien Hall of Ashes—where Ringers went to say goodbye to their loved ones. It was essentially a long, low hallway lined in stark panels, with a series of glass-topped tubes poking out along the exterior side.
Earthers traditionally buried their fallen in caskets beneath the ground, whether it was on their homeworld, or Mars, or some asteroid somewhere. My people released the ashes of their burned dead into the winds of Titan. We’d done it that way since the days of Trass’s first settlers.
My mother held a transparent, spherical container filled with what looked like dust. I was too young to understand that it was all that remained of my father.
“Kale, come here,” she said to me.
I shuffled forward. Six extraction tubes lined the wall, and a few other families were clustered beside them. I knew from watching them that I was supposed to be sad. They sobbed as they passed around their crystalline spheres and whispered to them.
Children of Titan Series: Books 1-4: (A Space Opera Thriller Box Set) Page 39
