“Kale!” my mother reprimanded. She took my arm, but I shoved by and slammed my hands down on Orson’s desk. With my powered suit on, the metal wilted. Orson, for what it was worth, stood his ground.
“Earthers have been driven by fear since the moment the Meteorite was discovered,” I said. “We need them to come here with all their might because until they try to destroy us, we can’t make them fear that they won’t be able to. That is when we win, and because of you, we’re at greater risk than ever.”
“All we seek is proper compensation,” Orson said. “We Titanborn may all be equal, but our hands and brains aren’t. Our experiences aren’t. You assigned these people to Phoebe because this is the Ring’s best ship-factory left intact after the fighting, and we know ships. My workers are breaking our backs, for what? And now this business with Red Wing will make it worse.”
“You’re compensated better than anyone else, Fring,” Rylah remarked. “More than the fighters who risk their lives holding every station on the Ring every day.”
“Please, I know what you were before all this, Rylah. When trade opens up, and credits go back into circulation, you’ve sold out enough people on both sides for information to be comfortable for life. All we have are the extra rations we need to stay awake regardless. Or Uppers residences back on Titan that we can’t enjoy until this rebellion is over? Which is when?”
“That’s all this is to you?” I said, a harsher edge creeping into my tone.
“I’m sure he didn’t mean it like that,” my mother said.
“I mean no disrespect, Lord Trass. I appreciate everything you’re doing for our people, but one day, credits will mean something again, whether we use them on the Ring or not.”
“Credits,” I groaned, pacing the room. “Credits, credits, credits. Does it always have to come down to them?”
“We aren’t asking to be rich because we were lucky enough to have worked in shipyards or factories,” Orson said. “Pervenio paid us slave wages, and that was more than we get today. But it was something we could use. You want a fleet, and we want to give it to you.”
“We need a fleet now,” Rylah said.
“Yes... But not all of us were behind open war and revolt, even if we support it now. Not all of us wanted to lose every part of our old lives.”
“Then you’re as blind as they are!” I growled.
He either didn’t know how to respond or didn’t want to risk it. The room went silent for Trass knows how long until Rylah pulled me to the side.
“It’s just credits,” she whispered. “I say it’s worth the risk. We have plenty stored in offworld accounts from the Children of Titan. Preparing for the PerVenta fleet is more important than anything now.”
I glanced at my mother, who bobbed her head solemnly. I closed my eyes and drew a long, steady breath. “The moment we compromise, we’re lost,” I sighed. “Don’t either of you understand that?”
“Foreman Fring.” I turned to face him. “I will give you one last chance to resume an accelerated production schedule for the sake of Titan. There will be no credits, but I promise all workers who put in extra hours preparing us for the Earther fleet will be rewarded with the freshest greens from our hydro-farms. I will have our captive Earthers surveyed to find out which one of them has experience in ship construction, and you can use them as you see fit to boost production.”
“You mean make them slaves this time,” Orson said, taking no care to hide his disdain.
“Earth is coming. This isn’t the time for us to argue or show weakness. We must all work together now to establish the Ring Trass envisioned. You will end these protests immediately and present a unified front. After this is over, I promise we will sit down and finish this conversation.”
“Lord Trass, I—”
I raised my hand to silence him. “That is what I can offer. Do this for Titan, or I will find someone else who can.” I turned to Rylah. “Make sure things get up and running,” I ordered then headed for the exit.
Rylah and my mother thanked Fring for his time, but he didn’t respond. Instead, he waited until I was at the exit. “Lord Trass,” he said. I stopped and peered back over my shoulder. “Before you go, would you care for some advice from an elderly man who’s seen almost everything this awful universe has to offer?”
I nodded for him to continue.
“The name Trass helps you lead, but it doesn’t make you him,” Orson said. “Never forget that you rule over all the Ring now, not only those who agree with you and your methods. Otherwise, you may as well be Luxarn Pervenio.”
I bit my lip. Him, Malcolm, my old gas harvester captain—old men were always preaching. Too set in their ways to see anything different than the world they know. Even if Orson Fring did as I asked, he’d be a thorn in my side until the day he croaked. The experienced workers standing on protest clearly respected him enough to listen.
“Goodbye, Mr. Fring,” I said without turning back.
Eight
Malcolm
The days ticked by slowly, and Basaam Venta’s laboratory grew. More workers trickled in, including some men and women who were obviously Earther engineers unlucky enough to be stuck in the Ring when Kale took over.
More workers meant more guards, which made it tougher to get much face-time with my old friend Desmond. Basaam even grew more comfortable barking orders at Ringers and making sure everything was in line. They even took off his chains, as if he could run anywhere onto Titan’s surface without freezing to death in a millisecond anyway. That was the thing about brainiacs. Once they got their engorged minds fixated on a project, it was all they could think about.
“Do you really think if you pull this off, they’ll let you go?” I asked him one day or night—time had become inconsequential. He sat, legs folded in front of Helena’s cell, enjoying a bowl of gruel with her. I’ll say that for him, he’d been doing a fine job keeping her calm.
He glared over at me then continued with his meal.
“I’m talking to you,” I said.
“Would you be quiet?” he whispered. “I don’t feel like any trouble today when we’re just starting to make progress.”
“You? They’re too busy watching the others now. So, c’mon, are you that naïve?”
“I don’t know what they’ll do,” he snapped. “Now please, stop talking.”
“Probably plant a bullet right here.” I tapped the back of my head. “In both of you.”
“What, so you think we should just give up?”
“Better than giving them a key to the stars.”
“And what about you?” He stood and stomped toward my cell.
“Basaam, don’t,” Helena said softly.
“It’s fine,” he said. “What about you, Collector? Without you, none of this would be possible.”
“You should be thanking me for keeping you both alive,” I said. “It doesn’t mean it was a smart move on my end.”
“So what? We should just walk outside and… kill ourselves because you don’t think they’ll keep their word.”
I rolled my shoulders. “Dying is always easier to talk about. I seem to have a hard time doing it.”
“Forgive me, Collector, if I’d rather take a chance on them. I didn’t make a living locking up offworlders. I’ve heard enough stories about collectors like you, and your kind has stolen enough research from me for Pervenio over the years.”
“I’m sure that’s true.” I laughed. “Can you believe our employers are going to kiss and make up now after everything? I used to think you guys were the enemy. Like the logo on your uniform means anything.”
“It does here,” he said.
“That’s for damn sure.”
Basaam sighed and sat with his back against the bars of my cell. He broke off a piece of his ration bar and held it through. “Here, there’s no reason for us to fight when we’re in the same position. It’s chicken-flavored.”
Considering all I’d had for days was a bowl of blan
d, chunky gruel, I wasn’t about to let pride keep me from something that tasted decent. “Thanks,” I said.
“Jumara hired me out of Phobos Academy when I was so young. All I ever wanted to do was make Sol a better place.”
“I always thought I was,” I said with a full mouth. “At least you probably did it.”
“You’ve seen their armor? That muscle-enhancing, nano-weave underlay was my very first patent out of the academy. I watched the Piccolo attack and had to wonder if Madame Venta sold the tech to them just to get one over on Luxarn. Their ship, the Cora? It may have been Luxarn’s, but its impulse engine was my prototype.”
“And some poor bastard on ancient Earth probably invented a gun so he could protect his home. We’re humans; turning things into weapons is what we do. It’s the thumbs.”
“Thumbs.” He chuckled. “Right. I just hoped we were more evolved than slaughtering each other like this.”
“Then you weren’t paying attention.”
“Basaam, get over here!” Desmond shouted from the other side of the hollow.
Basaam hung his head, then stood. “Duty calls,” he said.
“Just do me a favor and don’t build them anything that works before I’m able to do like I promised and get you both out of here.”
“Then you better hurry, Collector, because I’ve never been good at disobeying orders. I know you may think I’m a naïve fool, but I believe in people doing the right thing in the end. Even them.”
That was another thing about brainiacs. They held humanity to impossible standards. I actually pitied the man as I watched him traverse the start of his masterpiece. Welders and engineers had begun to construct a giant sphere made from who-knows-what-kind of impossibly durable alloy.
“You’re not going to get into anybody’s h-h-head,” Desmond said, approaching from the other side. “You just get to w-watch your own work.”
“That’s what they all sa—” The words died on my tongue as I spotted someone with Basaam who I could never forget.
My throat went dry.
My fingers slowly wrapped the bars of my cell, ignoring how cold the metal was.
I watched her saunter across the cavern as Basaam instructed her about what he was doing. She wore a form-fitting dress that could have a weaker man lapping out of a saucer at her feet. Rylah had been the top information broker on the Ring before we lost touch and things on Titan went haywire. Now, she was high enough in Kale’s regime to be here with Basaam and it was evident whose side she was really on.
It wasn’t always that way. There was a time, long ago, Rylah made Titan worth visiting…
I gave the body of a poor waitress a push, and it swayed. It was about five years or so before Kale’s rebellion. She hung upside down, her pale Ringer body made even whiter from being drained of blood. Serial killers were rare as natural-growing trees in my time, with all the surveillance and my people’s obsession with safety and survival post-meteorite.
This one had a penchant for hanging pretty women up by the feet in Decontamination Chambers, stripping them, and slitting their wrists. The Stalactite Killer, or so the newsfeeds called him, had murdered four Earther immigrants by then, leading Director Sodervall to believe he was a terrorist, but the Ringer body swinging before me proved my hunch—this was indeed a killer targeting women, regardless of where they were from.
Why? I wasn’t sure yet. The man didn’t leave any clues, no sexual deviance, not even a sign of struggle on the women’s bodies over how he got them there. And the women? Besides each having two X chromosomes, they had nothing in common, from their jobs to their appearances to their personal lives. Maybe they gave him a bad look one day or were just in the wrong place.
All I knew was that since I’d been summoned to Titan, a body had shown up in a decon chamber every Friday. Didn’t matter how much security I had Pervenio post outside of them either. And if I did too much to impede the local population’s ability to stay clean, my employer would never hear the end of the complaints.
We were between a rock and a cold place, but now that a Ringer wound up dead, the locals would be clamoring for justice even louder.
“Sir, forensics is here,” a security officer said as he peeled away the divider curtain wrapping the decon chamber.
“Give me a minute,” I said.
I circled the body, using my sleeve to lift her limp arms. Back then, I still worked alone. I didn’t need fancy tech and analyzers to find the killer, I just needed to find the pattern. I drew back her hair to get a look at her scalp. Nothing.
I sighed. This killer was good at hiding it, but there was always a pattern. Nobody, not even madmen, murdered over nothing.
“What are you hiding?” I asked as I crouched in front of the woman’s face and stared into her gaping eyes. They were brown with flecks of gold. Her records said she was born in the highest level of the Darien Lowers and worked at an Earther restaurant in the Uppers. Hell of a life she’d missed out on.
I stood and exited the chamber. “All right, let them at it,” I said to the officer just outside. The rest of them stood by the security tape keeping a crowd of angry Ringers at bay. Things were simpler when it was just Earthers dying. Now a hundred pale faces shot daggers my way, as if they didn’t already hate my kind enough. Ringers back then weren’t foolish enough to touch a collector. They used to have respect.
“And, Officer,” I said, “have headquarters forward her records to me. Everything, just like the others.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, saluting. He went to talk with the line of examiners wearing exo-suits who parted the crowd, but I grabbed his shoulder.
“I mean it, everything. I wanna know who her first kiss was.”
I let him carry on, and took one last glance back at the poor woman. Bad stuff happened on Earth, but crazy offworlders kept me far busier. I wondered if maybe it was all the enclosed spaces that drove them madder—that constant dread of their world breaking open and suffocating. Whatever it was, it kept me employed. And the only thing that pissed me off more than bodies of innocent women turning up was me not being able to figure out who did it.
I considered a trip to The Foundry nightclub. Nothing got my head straight like a night of filling it with toxins and clearing it out. But I wasn’t in the mood to drink synthesized swill and party with Ringers, so I took the lift back to the Uppers, to my five-star hotel on the south side of Darien overlooking the statue of Trass. A lifetime of traveling meant I could splurge a little on my temporary homes. The upper floor of the place even had a fresh-water pool and garden.
The lobby bar served fine whiskey imported from a Pervenio distillery on Earth, but I continued on past that as well. Sure, I wanted, no, needed a drink, but seeing that poor woman had Aria on my mind.
My daughter waited in my suite, like always. It got easier sneaking her around as she got older. Public transports or hotels, when she was little, it was like smuggling narcotics, but once her chest and hips started filling in, the owners of places just figured I fancied younger girls. Because what else were illegitimate offworlders good for?
Those days, Aria barely needed me to help forge her IDs or a good backstory anymore. The girl was like a sponge, absorbing everything I’d ever taught her, and worse, all the things I hadn’t.
A keycard opened the door to my room on the hotel’s top floor. “Aria?” I said as I entered. She sat at the edge of the bed and slowly turned toward me, eyes glued open in dismay. She was sixteen or seventeen then—tough to remember when I spent so long making up birthdays to help smuggle her—a real young woman.
The freckles across her cheeks and nose really stood out at that age. Her neck appeared too long still, and the Ark Ship figurine pendant she wore only accentuated it. Red hair tumbled from her head in thick, messy curls. She barely ever took the time to comb it. Her tunic barely fit.
I didn’t mind any of it. It was weird enough men had started looking at her the way I used to stare at her streetwalking mother.
<
br /> “What’s wrong?” I said. “Have you been watching the news?”
I took one step in, and her eyes grew wider. I knew why even before I felt the barrel of a pulse pistol against the back of my graying hair. I cursed. Aria knew better than to ever let anyone into our rooms, even cleaners. I could see the regret racking her features even more than fear.
“I thought we said to keep the door locked,” I scolded, then exhaled slowly. “Whoever you are, you’re going to want to rethink this.”
“I don’t think so, Malcolm Graves,” a woman replied, her voice soft yet sultry. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. “You’re exactly the man I want.” The woman dragged her perfectly manicured, free hand down my side and along my hip, then removed my pulse pistol from its holster.
I tried to keep my anger in check. My pistol had just gotten a brand-new carbon-fiber, fluted barrel that left her light as a feather.
“Words I love hearing,” I said.
“Not from me,” the woman said.
“Whoever you are, let the girl leave, and we can have a nice long discussion about why it isn’t nice to hold a man at gunpoint without a proper introduction.”
“Why? Your daughter doesn’t like to hear about what it is you do?”
My face twisted into a scowl. Aria and I had established many ground rules, but number one among them was that she was never to tell a soul she belonged to me. She could be torn away into USF childcare for potential clan-family placement, I could be fined hundreds of thousands of credits and, worst of all, I could lose my job for keeping her a secret.
Aria didn’t react to my expression in the way I expected. Her brow furrowed in confusion. “I swear, I didn’t,” she whispered, so softly I was mostly reading her lips.
“Please, it’s the nose,” my accoster said. “You grow up here, you get good at knowing who comes from what, and she has you written all over her. Funny, I didn’t see anything about a daughter anywhere in your records.” I felt the pistol slide along my head until the woman walked out in front of me toward Aria.
Children of Titan Series: Books 1-4: (A Space Opera Thriller Box Set) Page 91
