“They’re holding our people on the command deck!” a Titanborn at the entry informed me.
I hopped on coms. “Forward squadrons advance!” I said. “I want none left alive.”
Gareth entered the adjoining hall first, and I made sure I was second. Two Pervenio mudstompers fled some ways down. Blood sprayed the wooden trim on the walls as we unloaded into their backs. Then we bounded forward with both squadrons at our backs and Rin bellyaching into my ears.
With two full squadrons following me and two more simultaneously breaching the ship’s ruptured cargo bay, Director Lawrence didn’t have enough men to secure the corridors. The blast door to the command deck was sealed shut, but my men immediately got to work bringing it down with fusion cutters.
“Form two lines at the entry,” Rin stepped in front of me and ordered. “Everything they have left will be holed up in there.”
Rows of soldiers positioned themselves before me. I went to shove them aside, but Rin pressed her palm firmly against my chest plate. “You’ve done enough,” she said sharply over our private line.
A harsh response simmered on the tip of my tongue until Gareth too moved out from my side and directly in front of me. He gestured to a blackened mark on the edge of my torso where a stray bullet had glanced off my armor.
“You fought well,” he signed. “Rin will handle the rest.”
I regarded my soldiers. Some of them trembled as they aimed, watching the sparks slowly wrap the blast door like a blooming rose, but they all stood firm. For Titan and for me. I finally conceded and took a step back.
“Do not fire unless you have a clean shot,” I ordered over the mass coms. “They’re holding our people in there. Pervenio Corp’s hold on the Ring ends today!”
Chants of affirmation rang in my ears. The fusion cutters stopped.
“Check ammo,” Rin said. “Prepare for advance!”
The thick blast door toppled inward with an earsplitting crash. My people flooded the command deck under Rin’s leadership, but not a shot was fired on either side. Gareth and I entered last.
The Ring Skipper’s command deck was a marvel of engineering. The curved portion of the semicircular space was entirely comprised of a viewport looking out upon the thunderous skies of Saturn. Its burnished steel structure was so thin it didn’t seem like it could support anything. Three stories of catwalks wrapped it, loaded with navigation consoles and other terminals, though currently, every workstation was vacated.
Director Lawrence and his troops stood near the central console on the main level. About a dozen of them were left, and they had our Titanborn hostages on their knees, pulse rifles aimed at the back of their heads. Rylah was under the watch of the new director himself. In the short time I’d known Rin’s half-sister, she’d always been perfectly manicured and flaunted her lithe physique in exquisite, skintight dresses. She’d grown up in the Lowers just as I had, but she wasn’t afraid of using both her assets and her intelligence to help her become the foremost information broker in the Ring. Now her hair was disheveled, her dress ragged, and her face blemished by splotches of blood and fresh bruises.
My fists tightened, and I immediately wished I was out front with Rin. If the new Titan we were building were a corporation like Pervenio, Rylah would be our chief technology officer. She didn’t share Trass’s blood from Rin’s father, but she had a brilliant mind. A knack for understanding how things worked that, alongside Aria, was crucial as my people adapted to the Pervenio technology we now owned.
“I’m glad you could make it!” Director Lawrence hollered across the room. The wicked smirk he wore told me he knew we had reached a stalemate.
“Rin…” Rylah rasped. “Get out of here!”
“Quiet!” Lawrence smacked her in the back of the head.
Rin stomped forward. “Let them go!” she demanded. “And I promise you a quick death, mudstomper.”
Lawrence continued to sneer. “I’d prefer slowly. And you’ll all join me!”
The ship lurched to the side so violently that all of us were thrown off balance. One of my people smashed into my side, sending me scrambling to find my footing. But the ship didn’t recover, stuck in a steepening tilt. In the chaos, I saw a bullet from Rin’s gun slice through Lawrence’s forehead just before he could execute Rylah. The rest of the officers went down just as quickly, trying to take a handful of hostages with them rather than put up a real fight.
“Kal—Lord Trass, they blew the engines!” Aria yelled over the com-link. “Half of Charlie and Delta Squadrons were lost. The ship is in free fall!”
“It was a trap!” Rin screamed. “Gareth, get Kale out of here now! All ships, we need emergency retrieval.”
Before I could respond, Gareth pulled me free of a body and rushed me toward the exit. “We aren’t leaving them!” I threw him off and turned around. Rin had Rylah and made her way toward us, but with the ship plunging headfirst, we were all heading uphill.
“I’ve got her,” Rin said. “Dammit, Kale, you need to go!”
I slid down the angled floor until I reached Rin and could help her carry her injured sister. “Not without all of you,” I said. Gareth arrived soon after and grabbed another hostage lucky enough to avoid a bullet from his captor. Even in our powered suits, the inertia and mounting gravity made climbing back across the command deck a challenge.
“Aria, tell all ships to grab as many soldiers as they can through existing breaches,” I ordered. “We have Rylah. You’ll be recovering us last at the command deck.”
“I won’t be able to get under the bow of the ship now,” she replied, the urgency in her tone unmistakable.
“Use a hole in the top of the dining hall, then. We’ll meet you there.”
“I’m not sure this ship can handle the pressure if the Ring Skipper goes down much farther.”
“Get it done, outsider,” Rin growled. “All I hear is how great a pilot you are. Prove it.”
“It’ll hold,” I assured. “Everyone move, now!”
Hearing my commands inspired a few of my soldiers to fall back so they could push us along. One slipped and rolled down the command deck, shattering the viewport on his way out into the storm. Air rushed into the command deck, and we just barely made it into the corridor, where we could use the walls to brace ourselves. A handful more Titanborn weren’t so lucky. The viewport’s structure bent as if it were made of paper and was torn out into Saturn’s atmosphere along with everything and everybody else remaining on the command deck.
My muscles seared as we pulled ourselves along the wall back toward the dining hall. Luckily, Rin and I had been stowaways on the Ring Skipper before and knew a faster way. Reports from the other squadrons filled my ears. The pressure exerted from diving so deep into Saturn’s atmosphere forced one rescue ship to have to pull away and abandon soldiers.
“Velocity synchronized,” Aria said. “Hull integrity is holding, but I don’t know how long. Please hurry, Kale!”
“We’re close,” I strained to say. The pressure on my lungs was almost too much to bear. Every armored soldier around me ground their jaws in an effort to keep conscious. Rylah and the other few hostages we hauled along had already passed out. No human body was built to survive the real depths of Saturn but especially not a Ringer’s outside of powered armor.
“Through…here,” Rin groaned. We plowed through a swinging door into the ship’s kitchen, a mass of at least twenty people using each other’s bodies to fight gravity and inertia to move. Shiny utensils were scattered all over the floor. Light and wind pierced the many bullet holes dappling the chrome walls.
As we entered, a violent bout of turbulence sent all of us sliding. Plates and frozen food shattered. I was the first to hit the wall, and I used it to try and steady us. My arms felt like worn rubber bands. Just as I went to join back with the group, the heavy hatch of a walk-in freezer cracked open.
Children were crammed inside, at least a dozen of them of all varying ages. Most were already
unconscious from the pressure, but the cries of those who weren’t were drowned out by the racket. Only I noticed them. A girl no older than five stared at me near the entrance, her eyes bulging and bloodshot. They’d probably been brought on board by their Pervenio Corp fathers and mothers who decided that being sacrificed to kill me was better than living under the rule of Ringers.
Someone grabbed me by the shoulder. “C’mon, Kale!” Rin’s voice rang in my ear. “We need to get you out of here now!”
I remained still, eyes locked with the girl’s. Tears streamed down her grimy cheeks as well as all the others’. They were Earthers, all of them. The Cora was probably built well enough to hold for the few extra seconds longer it’d take us to gather them; to save all the potential future collectors, security officers, and corporate directors. All I needed to do was give the order, and my people would listen...
Two
Malcolm Graves
My eyes popped open. I lay back on a bed, poked all over with needles like a fleshy pincushion. No full respirator was stuffed my mouth, but tubes in my nostrils pumped me with oxygen. I think. Whatever it was, it had me lightheaded and remarkably calm, all things considered. My vision was improved too.
I studied my surroundings. I was in a medical room. The walls were polished white, and every piece of equipment shined like it was fresh out of the factory. All the highest quality stuff too. Holographic viewscreens monitored my bodily functions as a scanner slid back and forth along a thin rail above, projecting a tight grid of pinkish beams through me. An IV fed something clear into my veins, though it didn’t seem to help with how insanely thirsty and hungry I felt.
There were no viewports, so I wasn’t exactly sure where I was, but the color red answered a few of my questions. Pervenio Corp logos were everywhere, on everything—that branch wrapped in a crimson helix that I’d spent most of my life serving. So I wasn’t in hell, but I was back in one of their facilities. Whether it was as a prisoner awaiting interrogation for what had happened on Titan or purely as a patient, I wasn’t sure.
What I did know was that my partner Zhaff was dead. He had been one of Luxarn Pervenio’s Cogents, a group of elite special agents forged out of young men and women with a concoction of mental illnesses that left them unsuited for normal society. We hadn’t worked together long, but he was a good kid and ten times the agent I ever was at his age.
Things got even better when I found out he was secretly Luxarn’s troubled, illegitimate son. I was handpicked to show him the ropes of being a Pervenio Corp field agent, chasing down bounties and extinguishing rebellions throughout the solar system before they ever started. A dream assignment. One I didn’t even realize I’d been waiting thirty years as a collector for until it was too late.
We were sent to Titan to uncover the truth behind a terrorist attack on Earth during the only holiday humans from that withering planet had left. M-Day, when we honored all the billions who’d died when a meteorite came crashing down three centuries ago. Only we stumbled upon something I’d never imagined. A rebel cell known as the Children of Titan wanted medicine to cure their beleaguered people, and my daughter, Aria, was helping them get it. Five years since we parted ways and never looked back, and that was the first time I’d seen the woman she’d grown into.
My sweet little Aria, working with radicals. Zhaff pinned her down and left me with a choice—take her in as a criminal or gun down my partner and set her free. I made the decision any father would. The last thing I could remember was both our pulse pistols going off. I hit him in the head, he hit me in the leg, and after lying on the surface of Titan freezing to death, my world went black, and I woke up in wherever the hell I was now.
One thing struck me: if Luxarn Pervenio blamed the person who was responsible for his son’s death, it didn’t seem likely I’d be kept on a soft mattress. If he blamed the Ringers or Aria… Her face flashed through my mind, teeming with apprehension as we bid our final goodbyes and I was left to die.
I tried to force the image away as I propped my head up to get a better look at the room. The entrance suddenly whooshed open and drew my focus. In walked a nurse. No, a doctor. Standoffish expression, graying hair tied back, white lab coat with a Pervenio emblem on the lapel—she was a seasoned vet.
“I’ll have to ask you to please remain still this time, Mr. Graves,” she said, voice as coarse as her face. “After your last excursion, some scans had to be re-administered.”
Her gaze fell upon my hands, and as I tried to move them, I realized my wrists were restrained, ankles too. At least, one was. As much as I tried to wiggle the toes on the other, I couldn’t feel anything.
“Right, sorry about that,” I said, remembering my half-conscious adventure down the halls of wherever I was to a room filled with Zhaffs. Whatever drugs I was loaded up on clearly had me seeing things.
I coughed. My throat was also so dry, it was as if it was lined with cotton balls. I sounded like an eighty-year-old Ringer strolling under Earth’s high G for the first time.
“I…where am I?” I asked.
“You are in an underground research facility of the Cogent Initiative beneath Sector A of the Undina Mining Facility,” she said as she strolled over to my bed. She sat on a stool by the end, paying attention only to my medical readouts and not to me directly.
“Undina?” The irony that Luxarn’s secret project to craft perfect agents was buried there made me chuckle, then cough again. “You’ve got to be kidding me. He was training them here?”
“I’m not kidding you, Mr. Graves. You nearly interrupted the research with your sloppiness back before M-day.”
She referred to an assignment dealing with a miner’s protest here I’d screwed up. My punishment was being paired with Zhaff to track the Children of Titan rather than working alone. At first, he was such an insufferable know-it-all, I actually wanted to put a bullet in his brain. But I rubbed off on him and he on me…before I offed him.
My features darkened. Her news also meant that the room full of Zhaffs wasn’t a hallucination, but instead more people like him.
“I never thought I’d be back here,” I whispered.
“Mr. Pervenio had you transported here specifically after you were found exposed to Titan. Most of you made it, but you’re lucky to be alive.”
“Most of me?”
She turned her attention to my legs and peeled up the blanket. My liver-spotted skin wrapped the one I could feel. The other was synthetic from the hip down, metal or more likely some kind of composite, fashioned to appear like a human leg without the skin. Plates formed each imagined muscle, tiny rifts between allowing for full range of movement. The foot was skeletal, sleek, and curved around the heel with independent toes featuring knobby, flexible, joints.
She prodded the ball of it with a blunt tool. The toes twitched automatically, or at least that was what I thought at first. An unusual, barely perceptible sensation affected the nerve endings on my hip where a scarred band of skin met the artificial limb. Like I was subconsciously controlling the motion. A reflex.
“Your leg was a mass of dead, frozen cells,” she said. “Fortunately, that impeded the blood flow, and airships were able to get you indoors before the cold spread to your vital organs.” She tapped another area of the foreign appendage. Again, I felt a faint pull as the entire top of it bent forward.
“It will take some time to grow accustomed to it as your nervous system acclimates to the new connections,” she said. “Eventually, you’ll think about moving it just like you used to, and it will happen. It will be like you never lost your leg. In fact, at your age, it should work better.”
“Is every doctor in this place as sweet as you?”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Mr. Graves. There are escaped survivors from the Ring in far worse condition than you. If not for our employer demanding your special treatment, I’d be tending to them.”
“What the hell happened out there?” New leg. Survivors. I’d never woken up so confused i
n my life, and I’d endured too many drunken nights to count.
She grimaced, and for a moment, she no longer appeared like just a gruff old doctor. She seemed to be haunted. “Kale Trass happened.”
“Who?” The name sounded familiar, but my head was so foggy I couldn’t place it.
“Mr. Pervenio is on his way to apprise you of the situation as we speak.”
I lost my train of thought when she ran her fingers around the top of both my new leg and my old one, as far up the inner thighs as she could go. It wasn’t because of the sensation of her touching there either. It was because I could barely feel anything at all on either limb. I felt like one of Lucas Mannekin’s perverse fake android creations. The thought made me shudder. Now that was a story for another time. Most twisted bastard I’d ever met, Lucas, and dealing with those types of men was my specialty.
“Now,” she began, “it might be difficult to urinate on your own for a short while.”
I reached desperately for my groin. I was wearing a loose-fitting robe, so making sure everything…important…was still in its proper place was simple enough.
“Relax,” she said. “You’re recovering nicely. There is no reason to believe that most of the sensation in your remaining lower extremities won’t return. In time, you will be able to engage in all the reprehensible undertakings you collectors pride yourselves in. It just may not feel the same.”
“May not?” I threw the blanket off me completely and spotted the catheter extending out from a flap in my robe. “That’s supposed to cheer me up?”
“It’s the best I can offer. Titan took its toll on your body, and at your age—”
“Would you stop bringing that up?”
Her lips formed a straight line; then she placed her hand on my upper chest and pressed me down. “I know you’re confused and unsettled,” she said, a failed attempt to sound caring. “Just try to remain still until Mr. Pervenio arrives.” She gestured to the catheter. “And please don’t rip that thing out again. I don’t feel like scrubbing the floors, and he prefers a spotless room.”
Children of Titan Series: Books 1-4: (A Space Opera Thriller Box Set) Page 54
