Titan's Son: (Children of Titan Book 2)

by Rhett C. Bruno

  Desmond and I passed one bar that had the words NO GLOVES OR MASKS PERMITTED ON PATRONS posted on the door. Earthers tried to be clever about keeping my people out of certain places without outright saying NO RINGERS ALLOWED. With glasses at the bar passed between Trass knows how many uncovered hands, there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d ever go in.

  As in the Uppers, the views from the main concourse were spectacular. Translucencies were cut into the passageway’s floor at a downward angle to reveal Saturn’s rings. Seeing them extend away from me on a horizontal plane almost made them feel artificial.

  We had to take the tram-line crisscrossing the tiny moon to reach the Piccolo’s departure hangar. Since Desmond and I had been the last to get off the shuttle from Titan, the first tram was full, making us later than I’d thought. Security ushered us into our seats when the next tram finally arrived after twenty more minutes.

  The tram-line was closer to a lift than a train, since cutting through the spherical station from where we were standing meant going straight up. Every seat in the car was arranged horizontally, with our backs facing the floor. Halfway through the moon’s core, the car flipped 180 degrees so that we’d be right side up on the other side upon arrival. I remembered puking the first time I took one and having it whipped right back in my face. That was when I learned that the center of Pervenio Station had no gravity. It was also the first time I had the pleasure of meeting Desmond. He’d been delighted not to try to hide his amusement.

  The Piccolo’s hangar was a short distance from where we were let off. I was relieved to find the ship still docked. Security scanned our IDs and checked our bags, then added us to the departure ledger before allowing us to pass. That part wasn’t stressful, but I was glad to be through. Security checkpoints had become so ingrained in my life that I hadn’t really noticed how many there were until I’d had something to hide. It was like a tremendous weight being lifted off me.

  Captain Saunders waited directly inside, foot tapping. At first, I was worried, then I noticed that the Piccolo was still being loaded with supplies. Members of the crew rolled containers filled with food and other necessities into the cargo hold. Others carted cumbersome cylindrical canisters meant for transported harvested gases to the ship’s cold storage.

  The Piccolo currently had a total crew of forty-one, with pretty much an even split between Ringers and Earthers. My last time aboard, it was forty-three, but things changed shift to shift. I recognized most of the faces save for a few new members of the maintenance crew, like me. We did everything from cleaning harvester canisters and tanks to making minor repairs. Then there was a handful of overseeing mechanics, including the head one, security, a few engineers, a doctor, and a chef who seemed unnecessary considering the slop he served. I didn’t spot Cora, but the ship’s engines rumbled, so she was probably already at her post running through checks. She was the only Ringer with a position above maintenance.

  “There you two are,” Captain Saunders remarked without averting his gaze from his busy crew.

  “Sorry we’re late, sir,” I said.

  “Not your fault,” the captain groused. “Pervenio security has everything backed up more than usual. We had to wait for them to sweep the entire ship before we could start loading. Like anyone in Sol gives a damn about the Piccolo but us.” The captain turned to Desmond and me. “Get hauling—we’re only waiting on a few more. Cora’s had the engines prepped for hours already. Waste of damn time.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Desmond glared at me for a moment as we set off toward the Piccolo, and then sighed. “‘Yes, sir,’” he mimicked.

  I ignored him.

  The Piccolo was exactly how I remembered. Its tapered hull was designed to slash through heavy winds and looked to have experienced far too many storms in its time. A patchwork of plates and fist-sized bolts coated the exterior, all with varying degrees of corrosion and piss-colored stains from being pounded by Saturn’s sulfuric atmosphere. It was impossible to tell what was original from when the ship was constructed, years before the Great Reunion had even happened. Its flanks were what inspired its name, as they had the appearance of an ancient woodwind instrument. A line of vertical ducts ran down either side, interspersed with the massive pumps used to siphon gas out of Saturn’s atmosphere. Tubes extended from them and ran across the hull, able to be extended and reeled to reach gas pockets. They led to the harvesting bay, where gas was refined and sorted before being carted to cold storage in the belly of the ship.

  At the front end, a glassy bulb popped out like the eye of an ancient insect. It housed the command deck, where I knew Cora waited anxiously to put her navigating skills to good use on the decades-old command console. The nuclear-thermal engine with auxiliary ion thrusters stuck out the very back. While most ships used ionic impulse drives these days, anything heading into Saturn needed extra thrust. Stubby wings flanked it, which alone wouldn’t accomplish much if the engines failed while in the midst of Saturn’s impressive winds. It was a long plummet to the planet’s core, where the pressure would crush our bones into dust before the ship itself gave out. The captain often reminded us of the horrific story of the Sunfire, a gas harvester, which nearly three years ago had inexplicably lost power to its engines and disappeared down there, never to be heard from again. It was his way of ensuring that nobody slacked off when it came to keeping the engine core in optimal condition.

  “You two, let’s fuckin’ move it!” John shouted from his position at the base of the ship’s entry-ramp. Seeing him made my heart skip a beat, but the fact that he was just pointing in our direction and not charging me meant he still didn’t know I was the one who stole his hand-terminal. He was in an exceedingly grumpy mood, however, and I figured it was because of the loss.

  “Ship ain’t gonna prep itself,” he said, “and I don’t feel like hearing that bitch complaining that we had her keep the engines on too long.”

  “Why’re you standing around, then?” Desmond asked.

  John grinned, a wad of synth-tobacco in his mouth making his lower lip bulge. He crossed his arms so that his biceps bulged out of his boiler suit’s short sleeves. On either side of him, the two other burly Earther members of the Piccolo security team who’d been with him in the Sunken Credit did the same. They made sure that scuffles on the Piccolo didn’t last long... when they weren’t the ones starting them.

  “I’m so glad to see you again, Desmond,” John said. “Should be a fun shift.” He spat at our feet.

  I noticed Desmond’s hands ball into fists, but I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him onto the ship. The XO was looking for any excuse to fight and get Ringers stuck on a shift keeping the boiling-hot engine room squeaky clean. He glared at us until we were all the way onto the ship.

  “Wait until we’re in Saturn, at least,” I said.

  “I’m going to kill that man,” Desmond seethed.

  “Well, wait until I’m asleep, then.”

  We dropped our bags off in the Ringer dormitory. Desmond was greeted in the hallway by his close friends Lester Cromwell and Yavik Vanos. They’d been in the Foundry the night before too. The three of them liked to pretend they oversaw the Ringer members of the crew, with Desmond as their ringleader. Lester had an even sharper tongue than him, and the narrowest, most hawkish face I’d ever seen. Yavik wasn’t bad on his own but was frequently too high on foundry salts to do anything but go along with everything the other two did. His skin was a medium-gray hue because his ancestors apparently came from a place on Pre-Meteorite Earth where people were all brown-skinned.

  “What took you so long?” Lester asked. “Thought you were coming up with us. That mud stomper, John, is in rare form today.”

  “I had business,” Desmond answered succinctly. “Let’s go.”

  I listened to their footsteps fade down the hall before taking a second to change my gloves; they had the filth of Darien and Pervenio Station all over them. After I did, I glanced into my pocket at the hand-ter
minal, where the mysterious orange circle remained.

  After finding out about my mother, I never thought I’d be back on the Piccolo, yet there I was. The first step of R’s task was done. Now it was time to help get the ship moving.

  NINE

  When the Piccolo entered Saturn’s upper atmosphere, all the Ringers, including me, were issued a g-stim injection. The chems helped our muscles and organs endure the Earth-like g conditions, where even breathing could be straining. The ship’s doctor oversaw dispersing doses every morning so that we wouldn’t deplete the ship’s Pervenio-issued supply before the shift was up.

  I was then immediately assigned to work in the harvesting bay. No time to check out the command deck or say hi to Cora. I wondered if she’d even heard I was back.

  The harvesting bay was the largest open space on the vessel, and while the floors, walls, and ceilings matched the ship’s worn exterior, all the equipment inside was kept squeaky clean. The overall harvesting process seemed relatively simple, ignoring the myriad technical aspects I didn’t need to understand.

  Vacuum chambers lining the wall were switched on and off by the navigator, and Cora siphoned gas out of Saturn’s stormy skies when she located a pocket composed of the valuable ones. Pervenio had no interest in most of the elements that made up Saturn’s atmosphere, so the vacuums emptied their stores through a series of thick pipes into towering, noisy vats. Chemical reactions of some sort took place within them to filter the valuable gases into spherical tanks. The largest ones were labeled for helium-3 and deuterium. Those two rare gases, among a few other lesser ones, were what drove fusion cores and interplanetary engine systems. Basically, they were what made the Ring so desirable for Pervenio. Jupiter couldn’t compete when it came to their abundance. Another one of Darien Trass’s brilliant foresights in choosing Titan to run to.

  Much of the harvesting procedure was automated up until storage, and apparently, the newer harvesters had that almost entirely mechanized as well. Engineering staff monitored the systems to make sure levels in every storage container remained at an acceptable level, so that we weren’t all blown to bits. Maintenance men like me were there only for conveyance and cleaning. Anything that interacted with the gases had to be kept as spotless as a Ringer’s body. Otherwise, like the captain always said, “We’d join the Sunfire in being eternally crushed by Saturn’s core.” Every once in a while, the tanks and vacuum chambers were emptied, and I had to climb in to rub them down too.

  It took only an hour of scrubbing the grime out of harvester canisters for me to fall back into my old routine. Prep a canister, wipe the sweat from my brow, and pass it over to a stronger Earther, who would have it inspected by the head mechanic before carting it down to cold storage all the way on the other side of the ship. Keeping a stockpile of flammable gases as far away from humans as possible was the first rule of gas harvesting.

  The work was mind-numbing. As I scrubbed, I often found myself thinking about how I could’ve successfully robbed Tanner Saunders. My duties rarely differed from what the Ringers cleaning the restaurants in Delora’s Upper Ward did. It was high-stakes cleaning—a lack of attention could taint an entire haul or potentially result in a fiery eruption—but it was cleaning nonetheless.

  John liked to remind us how cleaning was a job fit for Ringers, that our long arms and slender fingers allowed us to reach impossible places. I couldn’t deny that might be true, but I welcomed every chance to switch things up. Earther maintenance staff got to do all the lifting and carting, since Earth g conditions made things heavier and made us tire more rapidly no matter how strong the g-stims were.

  Sometimes, however, equipment throughout the Piccolo would malfunction, and I’d have an opportunity to actually repair something. The Piccolo being old as it was, that was a common occurrence. But there were a dozen other workers to compete with, as well as the grumpy Earther head mechanic, Culver, who chose who got to do what. The captain tried to make sure the work was spread evenly to keep us all focused, but an Earther was likely to choose his own as often as he was permitted. That was simply the way of things.

  After a few hours of sweating in the harvesting bay, I’d have given almost anything for a chance to roam the ship’s halls and perhaps catch a glance through a viewport at Saturn’s blustery, ruddy sky. Except for the Ringer dorms, the ship was kept at a balmy seventeen degrees Celsius, but all the working machinery in the harvesting bay made it the second-hottest area outside of the engine core room. The g-stim kept my heart from giving out, but it did nothing for the heat.

  “Hey, Drayton, keep that hand moving!” Culver shouted from across the room. He leaned on a cane, his pebbly eyes glaring in my direction. The wrinkles striating his face seemed to deepen every time I saw him. A scraggly white beard used to cover a lot of them, but it was no longer enough.

  I nodded, without the energy to raise my voice. Desmond snickered beside me. We were both on harvesting canister prep, right next to each other yet again.

  “Gotta love that man,” Desmond said under his breath.

  “Do you have something to say about everything?” I groaned and dipped my hand farther into the canister I was prepping to receive a new haul.

  “I’m not the one who got caught daydreaming. Must really make your heart ache when you get in trouble like that, Earther lover. Must make you want to give old Culver a hug and say sorry.”

  “Why the hell are you even here?”

  “You two—enough!” Culver hollered. “Get working, or I’ll have those masks replaced with muzzles.”

  Desmond muttered something under his breath, so softly that I couldn’t hear him over the machinery. Then he whispered to me: “Same reason as anyone else. Credits. Trass damn them. Didn’t exist on the Ring until the Earthers arrived, you know. All we cared about was making things better.”

  I hushed him. The rag in my hand ran across the bottom of the canister, scraping off a profuse layer of grunge. Even through my sanitary mask, the smell was foul, like sulfur mixed into a cesspool.

  “That was when people like us were judged on skill alone,” Desmond continued all on his own. “You probably would’ve still been right where you are, but I could’ve been a king.”

  “Or a jester,” I muttered.

  “What was that?”

  “Whatever you say,” I said a little louder.

  I removed my hand from a freshly cleaned canister and handed it over to an Earther. It was marked DEUTERIUM, so he carted it over to the matching tank and hooked it up to a nozzle. He raised a thumb to an engineer, then a series of green bars on the side of the canister lit up. The worker detached it once they were filled.

  “All right, navigation says this pocket’s been emptied out!” Culver announced a short time later. I heard his cane clicking as he shuffled into the center of the room so everyone could hear. “Chow time!”

  Everyone exhaled in relief and stopped what they were doing.

  “Finally,” Desmond said. He purposefully nudged me with his shoulder on his way by. “I’m starving.”

  At least that was something we could agree on. Not sure why, but cleaning up filth had my stomach rumbling. I just had to clean my gloves first. They were so filthy it looked like I’d been sloshing around in a Martian sewer.

  I stepped up to the chef’s counter in the galley, and he slapped a pile of food down into my bowl. It was just lumpy, colorless goop, but it contained all the necessary daily nutrients. Or so we were told, and it didn’t look any worse than most of what I’d grown up eating in the Lowers. I filled a cup with murky water from a leaky nozzle at the end of the line and then turned to find a seat.

  The galley was small compared with the harvester bay. Its exposed ceiling was low enough for me to hear the constant buzzing emanating from a series of bundled circuits and ducts. The tiled floor was permanently stained.

  Two long tables were set on either side of the room, each flanked by rusty benches. Ringers wearing gloves and sanitary masks stretched do
wn to their necks sat at one of them, and Earthers at the other. Even if some Earthers and Ringers were friends, it was like an invisible line split the galley in half. Nobody dared to even think about crossing it. That was the quickest way to incite a fight.

  I turned toward the Ringer table and spotted Cora. It was my first sight of her since I’d boarded the ship. The only times she ever got off navigation duty was to eat and sleep, but she was always kept on call. The Piccolo had an autopilot setting and other crew members who knew the basics of flying, but if there was even the hint of a storm, she was summoned no matter what she was doing.

  As usual, she sat at the very end of the table, with an extra-wide space between her and the nearest person and nobody across from her. Some of the Ringer crew felt she was a risk because her strengthened immune system meant she might be carrying something. This ensured, along with her rank, that there was never any real danger of unwanted advances when Ringers drank not far from her bed in our shared dorm. It also served to make her even more intimidating to me.

  The inherent risk involved in falling for her was real. In our dorms, she was even required to wear a mask and gloves. I never thought about it much, but visiting the Q-Zone countless times has a way of making someone view even the tiniest details differently. Paranoia had become second nature.

  But that wasn’t enough for me to let her eat alone. I headed to the seat across from her, knowing from years of observation that she was neat enough for me to be perfectly safe unless I shared her spoon. As I sat down, she didn’t even bother to glance up from her meal.

  “I told you he was back,” Desmond said to Cora. He sat on the same side as her, though with a solid meter of empty space between them.

  “Yep,” Cora answered, still not looking up. She was always fairly timid, but this seemed different. I guess I should’ve expected her to be angry that I’d planned to leave the Piccolo without telling her.