“Gareth!” Kale shouted, but he didn’t move. He couldn’t. I’d snatched Gareth’s pistol out of the air and aimed it straight at the king of Titan’s face.
A stroke of luck for once. I could end it all then, just like I’d helped get it started when I put Zhaff down. My hand wasn’t even cramping this time. I was too sick for my compromised mind to hamper me. Kale Trass, or Drayton, or whatever he thought he was, had it coming. Not a soul on the Cora, even his allies, didn’t know it.
But I didn’t shoot.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Aria’s pleading face. I remembered when I’d killed the smuggler Elios Sevari to try and protect her—the first man she’d ever fallen in love with. I remembered all the times I’d let her down, and the last time I’d saved her by shooting my own partner and friend. Murdering Kale wouldn’t free her from the life her bad choices led to. She wasn’t one of them, and Rin would order our slaughter the moment I pulled the trigger. I could see that written all over her scarred face. Once the shooting started, nobody would get off the Cora alive.
So I made the only decision a father could. I coughed once, wiped my mouth, and then spared the boy king of Titan his warranted assassination. I released the gun and allowed his revolution to keep on churning.
Twenty-One
Kale
The moment Malcolm released the gun, I loosed my restraints, pushed off my chair, and zipped across the Cora’s cockpit toward Gareth. I knew Malcolm wouldn’t shoot, not with Aria there, but he’d wasted precious time.
“Earther scum!” Rin snarled as she shot forward and punched Malcolm across the face.
“Aria, he needs medical attention!” I said. Her gaze darted back and forth between the ship’s controls and Gareth. “Now!”
Navigation could wait. So long as Venta upheld their end of things, drifting aimlessly through space posed no current threat. Aria unstrapped herself, glided over to us, and placed two fingers over Gareth’s neck for a pulse.
“He’s still alive,” she panted. “We need to get him to the medical bay.”
I nodded and grabbed the ceiling bars to help pull us along when I noticed Rin preparing to follow. “No. You have to stay and watch the collector.”
“With all due respect, I’m no babysitter,” Rin said.
“I’m happy to fly if you need a pilot,” Malcolm muttered.
Rin grabbed Gareth’s pistol and shoved it against Malcolm’s cheek. “You sat there and let him bleed out!”
The old collector rolled his shoulders. “Seems like we all did.”
Rin’s hand quaked, and I was completely prepared for her to pull the trigger, when Aria intervened. “Would you shut up, Dad!” she snapped. “Just… just stay here and don’t move.”
Malcolm grabbed Aria’s forearm, and they glowered into each other’s eyes for a few seconds. Then he released her, exhaled, and allowed his head to sink back farther into his viscous headrest. He looked deathly ill. The radiation was ravaging his old body faster than his daughter’s, but he didn’t have a forming baby to worry about.
“Kale, let’s go!” Aria shouted.
We drew Gareth’s weightless body through the Cora as quickly as possible. It would’ve been easier with gravity. The only ships I’d served on in my life endured more of it within Saturn’s atmosphere, not its absence. On our way, Rin ordered a few of the healthy Titanborn seated in the hall outside the cockpit to keep an eye on Malcolm and prepare the sleep pods with anti-rad infusion.
The medical bay was down through the ship’s mostly vacant galley. A few of the burnished cabinets were stuffed with ration bars, though with everyone but me put under for the journey, there hadn’t been much need for anything else.
We whipped around the corner into the med bay and laid Gareth down on the table in the center. Everything around me was white, like the halls of the Darien Q-zone before I razed the place to the ground and booted Luxarn Pervenio from the Ring.
“I need to stem the bleeding,” Aria said as she rifled through the magnetically sealed cabinets searching for equipment. “Get his suit off him.”
I fumbled along his back searching for the switch that loosened his red-stained armor, but I could hardly see straight. All the white was dizzying. Rin brushed me aside and unlatched him herself. Then she started removing his suit. His bloody shirt was stuck to the inner layer and had to be peeled away like a shell.
Zero-g made it difficult for her to gain leverage, and after a few seconds, I gathered my bearings enough to help. Gareth was injured badly. I knew right away I should have never let him keep pushing himself. Not that it would’ve mattered. Thanks to Aria and her suddenly appearing father, there would’ve been no time to treat him before taking off.
“Kale, move!”
Aria shoved me out of the way and cut his shirt down the center with a scalpel. His milk-white stomach was drenched with blood. The gaping hole in its center bubbled. A perfectly angled shot had apparently sliced clean through his armor and out the back.
Aria sprayed Pervenio Corp congealer over the wound. I’d learned a bit from watching her work. The stuff was as cold as the surface of Titan, enabling it to slow the flow of blood cells and cause them to clot.
“Is that it, Doctor?” Rin said.
“His heart’s stopped,” Aria said. “Hold him down.” She ripped a defibrillator off a rack on the wall, touched the two pads together, then held them over his chest. His body arched toward the ceiling when she pressed them down once.
“He’s not breathing!”
“Come on, Gareth!” She went to shock him again but lost her grip on the handles. She turned toward the sink right in time before vomiting. It bounced around the rim in zero-g, streaks of red in the bile. I wasn’t sure if it was the extreme radiation, which was enough to penetrate my suit or the sight of another dead friend, but I joined her at the sink and vomited as well.
“Give me those!” Rin snatched up the defibrillators and continued jolting Gareth. The parts of him not held down all slowly lifted, limp like the arms of a puppet. By the third try, I couldn’t watch anymore.
“He’s dead,” I rasped, holding out my arm.
“N… no…” Aria stuttered. She wiped her mouth and tried to return to Gareth’s body. “We can still—”
“He’s dead!” I smacked the defibrillators out of Rin’s hands. “I don’t need to be a damn doctor to know that!”
“I can… still save him,” Aria whimpered.
“You’ve done enough, Ambassador.” Rin lowered her face over Gareth’s and pressed her lips against his forehead. I remained completely frozen, watching. “From ice to ashes, old friend,” Rin whispered. She ran her fingers over Gareth’s eyelids to close them.
Aria’s hand suddenly slipped as she went to push off the wall again, and she knocked into the med table, startling us both. She released a bloodcurdling moan and held her stomach. I felt the pain in my gut too, like someone was lighting a bonfire in the pit of my stomach, but Aria had been totally exposed in the hangar.
“Kale,” Rin said.
“Gareth,” I finally managed to utter. I grasped his hand, and his long fingers rolled across my palm as if they were slabs of rubber left in the freezer too long. Rin pried me free.
“Kale. If we don’t get Aria to a pod soon, I fear for your child’s life. I’ll plot our route home and update Rylah. Aria. Aria!” She slapped Aria’s face lightly to keep her conscious. Her freckled cheeks were discolored, and her eyes rolled aimlessly between brief stints of focus and moaning. It was only then, as her hand rubbed across the barely perceptible bulge of her belly, that I remembered what she carried inside of it.
“I’ve got her,” I gasped. I wrapped my arm under her shoulder.
“She knows?” Aria looked up at me and wheezed. Her eyes were bloodshot.
I nodded.
“We don’t have long before it hits us too,” Rin said. “Our suits were made to withstand many things, but nothing could block an impulse drive that
close completely.”
“I know,” I said. “I feel it.”
“The IVs in the sleep pods should all be set to pump us with every ounce of anti-rads that came with this thing.”
“What about Gareth? We can’t just leave him here like this.”
“Oxygen to the ship will be off while we’re all under. His body will be right here when we wake, unspoiled just like all the others. Now let’s go.”
“I don’t want to sleep.”
Rin took me by the jaw. “I know, Kale, but you have to this time. Pretend it’s a long dream.”
I bobbed my head. I didn’t have the energy to fight her. Rin rushed by us on her way to the cockpit, and I took Aria around the waist so we could head to the sleep pods. She muttered incomprehensibly. I froze in the entry for a moment and stared back at the corpse of my guardian. Gareth always had a grim demeanor, like there was a foul taste in his mouth that he couldn’t rid himself of. Until now. He looked almost… peaceful.
“Kale!” Rin called back to me. I finally tore my gaze away.
I swam down the corridors of the Cora with Aria in tow, through stale, frigid air that suddenly bore the heady stench of death. We drifted too hard and slammed into the controls for Aria’s sleep pod. I righted myself and hovered in place to prepare the pod for her entry. My surviving guards were already busy loading themselves into theirs. Some were in worse condition than others. We knew releasing an ion stream at such close proximity was a risk, but whatever the Cora was packing in her prototype impulse drives was clearly worse than anticipated.
I fumbled with Aria’s IV line as I raised her arm to stick it in. My fingers were getting numb. My stomach rolled. I lifted her weightless body to place her in the pod, and as I did, she leaned forward and pressed her lips against mine.
“I’m so sorry, Kale,” she whispered. “I should have told you about him…”
I ignored her and tried to focus on getting everything hooked up properly. She was sick for two now. That was my main concern. She’d secretly enhanced her pod to provide nutrients for two before we left Titan, but nobody expected radiation sickness.
I lowered her into the gelatinous substance filling the pod and checked her IV and other connections.
“He didn’t make it, did he?” Malcolm asked. He was being escorted by two of my guards. His lips went taut as he battled the same horrible pain that afflicted Aria. “Pressure from acceleration probably squished the blood out of him like a wet sponge.”
“Be quiet, Dad,” Aria said. She rolled her head from side to side and squeezed her eyes in agony.
“I want you to know exactly the type of man you’re serving.” He cleared his throat. “He’d rather run than slow down to save one of his own. Think about what he’ll do with you if he has no other choice.”
“Please… just stop.”
“That’s enough, Earther!” one of the guards barked. Malcolm was too debilitated to do anything about it as they stuffed him into a sleep pod, right next to the one in which Basaam Venta slept soundly. Three Earthers now on my ship.
“Kale…” Aria reached out and grazed my cheek. “I’m sorry…”
“If I hadn’t let you leave, he’d still be alive,” I said. “They all would be.”
“We… we didn’t know what she’d do…”
I folded her arms over her chest and signaled calming pharma to be injected into her veins and induce slumber. Then anti-rads would begin cleansing her system along with my unborn child’s.
“You can’t blame yourself for Gareth, Kale…” she uttered as she began to get drowsy. “You can’t…”
I stared at her. Her leaf-green eyes glittered, that broken girl who’d eased my own anguish returning once more. That girl who had been there, right when she needed to be, and then conceived my child. And now she had her fingerprints all over everything that had gone wrong on Mars. The summit, a hostage negotiation, the Pervenio Cogents attacking under the lead of her estranged father—everything.
“I don’t blame myself,” I said, then pushed the pod’s lid to seal her in.
Rin and Gareth were right. I really didn’t know anything about her at all. And she sure as Trass wasn’t one of us.
I turned, and one of my guards was immediately there to escort me. “Your pod is prepped, Lord Trass,” he said. “I’ll help you.”
“I’ll do it myself.”
I headed straight for the open pod beside Malcolm’s. My people were busy ensuring all of us got loaded in safely before worrying about him, even though he was in the worst shape. So I took it upon myself to hook him up, just as I’d done for his daughter. If what he told me about Luxarn Pervenio’s hiding place was true, he would prove an asset.
“Every death is on you, Drayton,” he grated. I stabbed his arm with an IV needle as forcefully as I could. The veins on his irritated throat bulged as he released a half laugh, half chuckle. “That’s what it means to be a leader. You don’t get to blame the Earthers for your problems anymore.”
“I could let you die, you know,” I said. “Tell her the radiation ravaged your withering body before we could get you under.”
“And I wouldn’t blame you one bit. Just like you wouldn’t have blamed me if I’d pulled the trigger.”
“Only you didn’t.”
Malcolm groaned and leaned his head back into the pod. “I didn’t.”
I grabbed on to the edge and, hand over hand, pulled my weightless body up so that I could look down into it. The viscous substance formed around his body, the pod automatically stabbing a few more needles into the side of his neck.
“Do you know when I realized that I’d do anything to keep my people free?” I asked.
“Was it when you dropped a ship on thousands of officers?” Malcolm joked, then coughed. “Or no, before that. How about when you had the innocent Earther crew members of a gas harvester publicly executed and let all the Ringers on board, your own people, take the rap for it? Yeah, that must’ve been it.”
I didn’t let him get under my skin. Instead, I told him the truth. “One of your people took Rin’s sister hostage, and we went to rescue her,” I said. “A Pervenio man, like yourself. He set a trap, and as we were escaping it, I passed a room filled with children. Earther children. You see, he’d left them there to die because apparently, living under our rule wasn’t worth living at all. So do you know what I did next?”
“I’ll bet it’s heroic.”
“I left them there to die. I probably had time to save them, but I didn’t. Future collectors, baton-wielding security officers, and corporate directors—I let them all be swallowed by Saturn. I still see their faces when I close my eyes, but I did what had to be done.”
He didn’t answer. He merely leveled his heated sickly gaze in my direction. I could tell how difficult it was for him to keep his eyes straight, but he managed.
“You’re my collector now, Malcolm Graves,” I said. I removed his hand-terminal from my pocket—Gareth’s last heroic move, which ensured the collector wouldn’t be able to contact his boss while we were all distracted. Then I pressed it against Malcolm’s thumb, unlocking the screen.
“You’re going to help me get to Luxarn Pervenio when the time is right,” I said, shaking the device in front of his face, “and together, we’ll show him and every Earther in Sol what it means to be afraid.”
Even with all Malcolm’s assumed training, his expression told all. I had him. I started to close the lid of his sleep pod until he whispered, “This is all about her, isn’t it?”
I stopped. “Aria? She’s lucky she’s alive with all the secrets she kept from us. Her relations with Madame Venta, you—”
He shook his head. “No, Cora.”
Hearing her name stunned me to silence.
“The girl you named this ship after,” Malcolm said. “The girl who you left behind on the Piccolo while you ran off to play rebel. Who you left to die at the hands of a tired bigot like Sodervall. He may have flipped the switch, but you p
ut her there.”
“Don’t,” I said, seething.
“That’s it. Cora’s dead and you can’t handle it because deep down you know the truth. That it’s your fault.”
“No.”
He chuckled then coughed. “You put this crown upon your own head, Drayton. I hope you wear it proudly.”
“No!” I slammed the lid and pushed off. Rin was there to catch me, apparently finished plotting our course in the cockpit. She rubbed my shoulders in a way that told me she hadn’t heard what he’d said.
“It’s time to sleep, Kale,” she said.
Her sanitary mask was removed, making the clicking of her tongue against her marred cheek with every hard syllable more noticeable. She prodded me back toward my own pod and held my body against the rim.
“Get off of me!” I roared, throwing her aside and pulling my body toward the command deck, panting like a madman.
“What are you doing?” she asked as I hunched over the navigation and started keying commands.
“We’re making one stop before we go home.” I set the ship to slow a short distance away from Europa. Then I raised Malcolm’s hand-terminal to my face. Luxarn Pervenio’s personal contact information was already pulled up, with one cryptic message sent to him from Malcolm. I started drafting one of my own, forcing myself to focus as sickness made me see two of every key.
YOU’LL PAY FOR ALL THAT YOU’VE TAKEN FROM US, LUXARN. WHAT I DID TO SODERVALL WON’T EVEN COMPARE. I HAVE YOUR COLLECTOR, AND YOU’RE NEXT.
“Kale,” Rin said, laying her hand on my shoulder. She leaned over me to get a look at where I’d set our coordinates. “You don’t plan on—”
“I do,” I said. Then I sent the message to the man who’d turned my home into his own personal bank. I wheezed a few times while staring at the screen, the adrenaline driving me slowly waning. After a few long seconds, Rin tore the device out of my hand. I couldn’t fight her, even with my suit augmenting my strength. I tried to snap at her, but a fit of coughing made it impossible.
Children of Titan Series: Books 1-4: (A Space Opera Thriller Box Set) Page 79
