“Yeah. I think I do now.”
“There. I told you.” He twisted his body, groaning, and regarded me, eyes red as the surface of Mars. “Now, please... I can’t take this anymore.”
I rose to my feet wordlessly and walked over to the airlock controls.
“Thank you, Kale,” Captain Saunders said. “I knew you weren’t like the others.”
I placed my armored hand over the screen. My lower lip trembled. I bit it to keep it still.
“Would you mind knocking me out first?” he asked. “I’m tired of feeling.”
My finger hovered over the command to close the inner seal, but I didn’t press it. “The Sunfire will be devoured soon,” I said. “I hope you last that long.”
His eyes gaped. “You gave your word!” he shouted.
I signaled the inner seal to slam shut and locked him inside. Depressurizing and evacuating the airlock was as simple as pressing another button, but I walked away in silence. I could hear Captain Saunders banging against the hatch all the way down the corridor.
“Where’s the mudstomping captain?” Hayes asked me when I reached the command deck, making no effort to disguise his derision.
“He passed,” I said bluntly.
He stopped what he was doing at the navigation console and gawked at me. Rin and Gareth stood behind him, holding on to his chair. They stared as well. Pulse-rifles were latched on to the backs of all their armor, and Gareth had a supply container strapped to his hip. It wasn’t big, but it held as much water and ration bars as we could stuff in.
“Are we ready?” I asked after they’d remained silent for a few too many seconds.
It took Rin a few more to finally answer me. “Almost,” she said. She grabbed a pulse-rifle off a rack on the wall and thrust it into my gut, so I had no choice but to grip it. “Now we are. Just in case.”
I’d never held a rifle before in my life. The thing was dated, its polymerized coating scraped and dented all over, but it made me feel like more than a thief.
“Your father would be proud of you, Kale,” Rin said.
“Let’s not get emotional until we survive,” Hayes said. “We’re coming up on the cruiser fast. I get any closer, and their scanners will light up, so this is where we get off. Luckily, nobody knows we exist, so they aren’t looking for us.”
“All right. Time to fly.”
“Wait, what?” I asked. I looked up at the command deck’s dome-shaped viewport. Ruddy-colored wisps of wind lashed beyond it, and in the distant clouds, I noticed the large, dark silhouette of the cruiser. I recalled the ads about them all over Darien—ships with every luxury humans of ancient Earth could want, from earthlike gravity, to a conservatory filled with rare plants, to a small, man-made beach.
Rin hit a switch built into my armor, which I hadn’t noticed earlier because it was woven into the belt. I heard a rasp, and then something popped out of my arm plates. Rin lifted my arm and stretching between it and my hip was some sort of orange-colored fabric.
“The finest tensile nano-fabric Venta has on the market,” Rin said. “You ever heard of the winged suits our ancestors used to traverse Titan and help construct the Blocks?”
“I thought they were myths,” I said. I strummed the end of the wing, which somehow remained taut no matter where my arm went.
“No, merely outlawed by Pervenio so they could control transit. Until now.”
“You’re not really a Child of Titan until you soar, kid,” Hayes looked back and said, smirking. “Welcome to your initiation.”
I laughed nervously. “You guys are kidding, right?”
“Serious as a Q-Zone.”
“It’s simple,” Rin said. “On my mark, Hayes is going to blow the harvesting bay. The blast will shoot us forward, and we ride the acceleration all the way to the cruiser. Now, I don’t need to tell you what kind of wind speeds are out there. The armor can handle it, but we use subtle motions to keep our course true. Gusts might knock you around a bit but remember not to panic.” She grabbed my arms and raised them to about a thirty-degree angle from my sides. “You extend any more than this, and we’ll be waving goodbye.”
I glanced up at the faraway shadow of the luxury cruiser again and then back down at Rin. She seemed completely serious.
“There’s got to be a better way,” I said.
“Not one that keeps us from getting caught,” Hayes said. “Your plan, remember, kid?”
Rin rolled her eyes. “Ignore him. The cruiser’s storage hangar will be on the aft. Our relative velocities should be close enough for us to grab on to the hull, cut through an exhaust vent, and climb on board.”
“‘Should be?’” I said.
“I’m not a mathematician.” Hayes shrugged. He backed away from the controls, stood, and faced us. “No better time than now, though.”
“G-stims,” Rin said. “These are strong ones. They’ll help keep us alert.”
She opened her hand and revealed four of them on her palm—Venta-made like the others they’d given me, but different markings on the casings. Gareth and Hayes snatched one each and injected. I grabbed mine and jabbed it into my neck without arguing. Taking too much of the chems could be bad for the heart long-term, but I didn’t have the time to worry about that.
“Helmets sealed, com-links activated!” Rin ordered.
Their faces disappeared behind their visors. I scrambled to close mine. I could feel my heart beating in my throat. Rin reached over and hit a button on the side of my helmet to switch on a built-in com-link I didn’t realize I had. It made me wonder why they’d been signing to communicate back on the Piccolo, until I remembered Gareth couldn’t talk. That, and fear. It seemed to be Rin’s greatest tool, and nothing made Earthers’ skin crawl like things they didn’t understand.
“Can everyone hear me?” Rin asked, her voice filling the inside of my helmet.
Hayes offered one of his sarcastic remarks on Rin’s looks. Gareth gave a thumbs-up.
“Yes,” was all I was able to eke out.
“Stow your rifle, Kale,” Rin said. “Hopefully, we don’t need them.”
I looked down and remembered it was in my hand. I anxiously patted the backside of my armor until I found the mag-latch, a metallic strip that the gun’s stock attached to.
We stood silently. Nobody moved until Gareth put a hand on Rin’s shoulder, as if he could sense how she was feeling. With the other, he signed, “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Rin said, shaking him off her. “I hate this place. Thumbs locked.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant at first, but the three of them formed three sides of a square and gripped one another’s hands. Rin and Gareth each took one of mine, ensuring our thumbs locked. I could only imagine the grin on Hayes’s face as he positioned himself across from me.
“Ready, Kale?” Rin said.
“I guess—” Before I could finish, she nudged Hayes, and he let go of her hand for a split-second to strike a key on the command console. The Sunfire jolted so violently that we were flung at an upward angle toward the viewport. Our suits crashed through it, headlong into the whistling, tearing winds of Saturn.
My armor shook from the turbulence, but the wings held true. Pressure behind my eyes augmented, as bad as it was when I’d first stepped onto the Sunfire. Maybe worse. I fought through the pain to open them so that I could see what was happening. We were skydiving upward, riding a squall like dust on an Earthen breeze.
Rin issued the others numerical commands for path redirections over our com-link. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I held her hand and Gareth’s as tight as I could and used them to keep my arms from angling any farther than her recommendation. We veered together, slightly right and left, through the rosy arms of Saturn’s eternal haze toward the luxury cruiser’s rapidly growing silhouette.
Thunder clapped so loudly it pierced the soundproof seal of my helmet. Lightning sparkled in the distance. My bones chattered. Wind pressure pulled at my joints. It w
as the most terrifying thing I’d ever done, but as the g-stim kicked in and dulled the pain, I found myself stifling a thrilled scream.
“Wind drag is slowing us!” Rin shouted loud enough for us to hear her over the rushing air.
“One thousand meters and closing!” Hayes replied. “Trust me, we’ll be fine!”
If we were slowing down, I didn’t have the experience to notice. I had to fight the urge to break away from them and glide through the air like one of Earth’s birds. I’d been weightless plenty of times, but it’d never felt anywhere close to this... to flying.
“Five hundred meters!” Hayes said. “Brace yourselves!”
The luxury cruiser now constituted the breadth of my vision. We approached it at roughly a forty-five-degree angle from beneath its backside.
“Kale!” Rin said. “When we land, keep your arms tight to your side.”
I nodded like an idiot first, and then replied, “Arms at the side, got it.”
“One hundred!” Hayes yelled.
We dipped as we entered the vessel’s drift stream directly under the aft, avoiding the white-hot plasma trails of its dual nuclear-thermal impulse engines. My stomach jumped, and my exhilaration gave way to fright. The others didn’t panic at all. Hayes tightened his arm positioning to even us out so that we ran parallel to the lower hull. Our velocities synchronized almost flawlessly.
“Bring us up slow!” Rin said.
Their wings shifted with delicate motions, and we gradually climbed toward the ship. Again, I concerned myself only with not messing them up. We rose until we ran alongside it. I could see the subtle, greenish glow of the glassy conservatory bulging out from its top, where Earthers could pretend they were amongst nature before the Meteorite ravaged their planet.
“Hayes, you first!” Rin said.
Hayes had rotated to be on the side of our formation closest to the cruiser. I wasn’t sure what was up or down anymore. He released the others’ hands without hesitation, twirled around, and smacked against the side of the ship. His powered fingers dug into the sturdy blades of an exhaust vent, and he deactivated his wings.
“I’m on, Rin!” he hollered. “Gareth, let’s go!”
Gareth released my hand before I was ready, but Rin was there to instantly grab me. The mute Ringer looped through the air and landed beside Hayes. He wasted no time removing a cutting torch from his supply bag and getting to work on the vent.
“He’s on!” Hayes said,
“All right, Kale!” Rin shouted. She was now across from me, our visors so close that they were almost touching. I could see the outline of her marred face through it.
“We’ll do this together, okay?” she said. “Arms tight.”
I was short on breath and found myself unable to answer at first. My life was in the hands of the same woman who’d gone out of her way to destroy it. If I went drifting in space during a zero-g repair walk, inertia would carry me in one direction, and there wouldn’t be much around to hide me if anyone was looking for me. Here, on Saturn, I’d be whipped around like a rag doll and plunged into a miasma so copious, I’d be lost in seconds.
“Okay,” I managed, probably too softly for her to hear.
Our bodies twirled once. I clutched her hands so tight, I feared I might break them. We slammed into the cruiser, my back against her chest. Her arm wrapped tight around my gut. I groped behind me for something to grab on to, found the ship, and went to rotate my body so I was facing it. When I extended my arm, my wing got caught in the wind drift, and I was wrenched to the side. Rin lost her grip on me, and for a moment, I was separated from anything but the atmosphere.
Hayes extended his hand as far as he could and clutched my wrist. “I got you, kid!” he shouted.
Rin grabbed him, and together they hauled me back in. My chest crashed into the cruiser, and I hugged it. Fingers, feet—every appendage at my disposal found a groove in the hull before my muscles tensed.
“No wings!” Hayes said as he reached over and deactivated mine.
“Trass’s shit!” I screamed the first words that popped into my mind.
Hayes laughed, and I even heard Rin snicker before she said, “Gareth, how’s that vent going?”
He answered her by tearing off the cover and tossing it. My heart sputtered as I was provided a clear example of what had nearly happened to me. The finned piece of metal twisted across the sky and was bent in half in two separate directions before vanishing into the haze.
“All right,” Rin said. “Everybody in quick! I’m sick of this planet.”
I couldn’t agree more. One by one, we followed Gareth into the cramped passage, and I made sure I got in second. Only after I had a solid surface all around me was I finally able to draw a full breath. Every part of me shook, but I’d made it.
One thing was for certain, though. Sneaking around the Lowers was a hell of a lot safer than flying.
NINETEEN
We traversed the vent’s inner pressurization seals and busted through a grille into the spacious cargo hold of the Pervenio luxury cruiser. It was dark inside, with no need to illuminate a room filled with supplies. All I could make out were the rigid shapes of stacked containers and rolling storage racks. The emptiness did have one benefit, however. There was no reason to heat the room to Earther preference.
I clambered over a tall crate and dropped to the floor between it and another. Never had I been so happy to step foot on a ship. I would’ve kissed the floor if I wasn’t wearing a helmet.
“Still plenty stocked up,” Hayes said. “Recall order must have come real early.”
Gareth approached a container locked by a keypad. He shoved his powered fingers under the lid and, after a few seconds of prying, yanked it free. It was refrigerated, and cold steam poured out. He waved us over, and inside sat a pile of plastic-wrapped, frozen meat. I had no idea what kind of farmed animal they had been cut from. I’d never seen raw meat in my life.
“Steaks?” Hayes exclaimed. “Remind me again why we decided to hit a shit-ass gas harvester back then, Rini?”
Rin slammed the container shut. “Would you two focus?” she said. “They track stock to keep the crew in line. No touching anything.”
“This gets better and better. Kale, tell her we want to see what fine Earther cuisine tastes like. She’ll listen to you.”
The sight of the meat made my mouth water, but I was lucky: Flying across Saturn had left me feeling nauseous. I fought the urge.
“Listen to her,” I said, to a chorus of Hayes’s groans.
Rin stepped from behind a row of containers. A blade of light flared from the top of her helmet, revealing the far wall and the only door in or out. Gone were the corroded walls and exposed organs of the gas harvesters I’d grown too used to. Even the cargo hold of one of Pervenio’s prized luxury cruisers was a thing of conceived beauty. Pearlescent metal, sleek lines, lofty ceilings with perfect corners; it reminded me of the Darien Uppers.
“Cameras will be monitoring the hall outside that door, watching who comes in and how long they stay,” Rin said. “They’d never expect anybody to get in here from the atmosphere, but no way can we sneak out.”
“The vents?” I said, eager to propose doing something that I was actually proficient at.
“Not dressed like this,” Hayes countered.
“Hayes, you got a read on the coordinates earlier,” Rin said. “Approximately how long to Pervenio Station?”
“Six to ten hours, I’d wager, accounting for planet rotation.”
“Long enough for the patrons to leave the beach and start clamoring for a meal?”
“Maybe two.”
“All right, then we wait. Eventually, they’ll send a few Titanborn workers in here for supplies, and we’ll take their uniforms.”
We sat in the darkness, visors down and breathing in the scented air. The Earthers had it smelling like flowers, and the air recyclers pumping the room were so noiseless, there was no sound except for the occasional scratching
of my armor across a container when I had an itch and couldn’t get to it. The floor wasn’t even vibrating from Saturn’s storms, the cruiser built sturdy enough to handle them as if they were gentle breezes.
Hayes snickered as he and Gareth whispered about something—or at least Hayes was whispering. Gareth signed, and I wasn’t paying close enough attention to see what they were on about. Rin sat across from me, her thousand-meter gaze aimed over my shoulder toward nothing. She had her pulse-rifle in her lap and continuously took it apart and put it back together again without needing to look.
“You’re going to miss it, aren’t you?” I said to her.
“Huh?” Rin shook her head as if waking from a reverie, then peered up from her gun.
“The Sunfire.”
She scoffed. “Like you miss the shadows of the Lowers maybe. You stay in a place for as many years as we were there, and it becomes a part of you. The good and the bad.”
“You never got off?”
“Once. Rendezvousing with a Venta transport in a place where the storms never cease wasn’t easy, and we couldn’t sit around during it. I didn’t trust them enough, even with my sister organizing the exchange.”
“Did you ever think about stealing it? Leaving everything behind?”
Her attention returned to her pulse-rifle. “You have a lot of questions.”
“You have a lot of answers.”
A grin tugged at the healthy side of her lips. “I thought about it. Earthers in a different color handed us food and water, guns and armor—everything we’d need to take their ship and disappear. I thought about heading to Neptune and beyond... going until the food ran out. And then I remembered.”
“That you were a Trass?” I asked.
“No, that after spending my entire life listening to every word my brother had to say, running, hiding, and taking on names, I could finally have it back. Control something.”
“No matter how awful it was?”
“Great a man as your father was, the one thing he never understood was that he didn’t have to bear the burden of Titan alone. They were never going to be able to keep you hidden forever. Eventually, the truth finds us all.”
Children of Titan Series: Books 1-4: (A Space Opera Thriller Box Set) Page 44
