I patted a wet, unused harvesting rag on the front side of his wound.
“Garghhh...” he groaned. “Stop.”
I grabbed his jaw and tilted his face. He squinted through his eyelashes at me.
“Captain!” I exclaimed. “I never thought I’d hear a familiar voice again.”
“What the...Where are we?” He attempted to sit up, the effort causing him to grimace and clutch his stomach.
“Don’t move.”
His breathing picked up. He lifted his bandage and struggled to focus on what lay beneath. The skin surrounding the hole was slightly discolored and oozed pus.
“By fucking Earth!” He poked the area and lurched. “Oh god, it hurts!”
“Don’t touch it.” I brushed away his free hand and returned the bandage to its proper position, then pulled it as taut as possible.
“We’re still on the Piccolo?” he groaned.
“No. You wouldn’t believe where we were even if I told you.” I shuffled backward and sat across from him. “You loved to remind us about the place.”
He noticed that one of his hands was cuffed to a pipe. “They took us prisoner?” he said. “Where’s the rest of the crew?”
I paused for a moment, then said, “Far away or dead. Don’t you remember?”
“We were by the airlock.” His weary gaze darted around the room. The color drained from his cheeks. “This one.”
“It’s not—”
“They took all of my people! John, Orsini, and the others.” He scrambled as far away from me as his cuff would allow.
“Captain, you should try to stay still.” I wrapped my fingers around his ankle. His stare swept from one of my unchained arms to the other. His eyes opened as wide as they had since he’d come to when they settled on the orange emblem on my chest.
“Don’t fucking touch me!” he shouted.
“Captain, relax!” I said. “You’re safe here, I promise.”
“You son of a bitch... You’re one of them!” He sprang at me, but his body was snapped backward, and he face-planted. He screeched in pain. “You son of a bitch!”
“I’m just trying to help you.” I went to lift him back into a seated position.
“Don’t you fucking touch me, traitor!” He punched my chest, his knuckles crunching against my armor. He roared like he was shot all over again, rolled onto his side, and cradled his arm. Blood started leaking out of his gut, but he didn’t have a free hand to help stem the flow.
“I stuck my neck out for you,” he panted.
“I know, and I’m grateful,” I said. After everything that had happened, it felt good to say that and know I meant it. Whether as a slave or not, he did get me out of the shadows, gave me a chance to see Saturn for the first time. The good feeling didn’t last long as I witnessed the mounting revulsion on his face.
“I swear,” I said. “None of this is what it looks like.”
“You put on quite a show, Drayton,” he said. He was sweating so profusely I could’ve showered under his chin. “Leading on Cora. Pretending to save my life while you handed over my ship. My crew. What the hell did you do to them?”
“That’s not what happened. Just calm down, and I’ll explain everything. You’ll aggravate the wound.” I picked up my wet rag and held it out for him, smart enough to keep my distance this time.
“Scared of getting sick?” He spat at me, a sticky mixture of saliva and fresh blood. I was able to turn my body just in time so that it splattered on the side of my helmet instead of my face. “I should have never let you back on!”
“Wash yourself, then!” I shouted. I threw the rag at him and shot to my feet. I stopped outside of the airlock’s inner seal. “I’m trying to help you, sir.”
“You touch me again, and I’ll wring your skinny skelly neck, Drayton! You took my ship! I’ll kill you.” He tugged on his cuff again, then collapsed onto his side and squirmed in agony. The veins in his neck bulged. “I’ll kill you!” I heard him groan through his teeth after I decided to hurry away.
My eyes welled with tears. My throat was tight. I made it around the nearest corner, and then screamed at the top of my lungs. I punched the wall repeatedly. My armored fists slammed through a cluster of exhaust pipes, causing hot exhaust to spew onto my face. I didn’t stop. I kept punching until my arms were sore and the lights started flickering from damage to power lines buried in the wall.
“Why is this happening to me?” I asked myself as I fell to my knees. “Why me?”
A hand landed on my shoulder. I turned and saw Gareth, expression staid as ever. He signed something to me, slowly so that I could better understand it. He had to repeat the symbols a few times to spark my memory.
“Won’t accept help?” I read.
“No,” I said. “Because he’s an Earther, right? Like your old captain.”
Gareth shook his head. “Would you, as him?”
“No, I guess I wouldn’t.” I exhaled. “I don’t know what to do...” I collapsed against the wall, steam cascading over my shoulders. Gareth joined me. “I’m just so tired.”
“Sleep?” Gareth signed.
“Not like that. I meant I’m tired of being so out of control of everything in my life. All of you telling me who I am. For the briefest moment, I thought I had everything. I saved my mom. I had Cora. A job.”
Gareth’s hands remained still.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this,” I said.
“What do you want?” he signed.
“Me? I have no idea. I thought I was doing the right thing helping my mom. Now everyone else I know is either locked up somewhere, refusing my help, or dead, and I’m stuck here in the middle of Saturn talking to the mute who helped put me here... Sorry. I’m sure you were only following orders.”
His expression didn’t shift. “What do you want?”
I drew a deep breath. “To fix it. I know my life can never be the same—you’ve all made damn sure of that—but I guess I failed at keeping my distance from people. At not caring. Trass, I’d kill to have a drink with Desmond right now, and I never thought I’d say that. I don’t know what I’d do to be with Cora.” A weak chuckle slipped through my lips.
“Then do it.”
“That’s easy to say, but I can’t. You’re stuck here with the most wanted man in Sol.”
He shook his head and then stared directly into my eyes. “Listen to her then. You lead. You choose.”
“I lead,” I whispered. I leaped to my feet, having a sudden epiphany. “I lead.”
I ran to the command deck so fast Gareth could barely keep up with me. Rin sat at a console, keying commands while she munched on one of our precious ration bars. Hayes scrubbed my vomit off the floor and the back of his chair, visor on, presumably so he didn’t have to deal with the stench.
“Rin!” I hollered.
She calmly glanced up from her work. “What is it?” she asked. “Are you feeling better?”
Hayes raised his visor. “Is he feeling better?” he said. “How about me? He should be the one cleaning this shit up.”
“Quiet.”
“By Trass,” he grumbled and returned to scrubbing, cursing under his breath the entire time.
“Kale?” Rin said.
I took a few seconds to catch my breath. “I’m fine,” I panted. “I... You said you wanted me to lead, but if you’ve all told me the truth, you operate in separate cells. So what does that actually mean?”
Her expression brightened as much as her disfigured face allowed. “You’re considering it?”
“Just tell me.”
“The Children of Titan are widespread throughout the Ring, yes. We’ve never had a single leader, but neither did Titan before Pervenio arrived. Some don’t believe that we need one now. They’d rather separately chip away at nothing until we’re gone. We won’t win a war of attrition, not when they control the trade and medicine.”
“So you want to bring the cells together?” I asked.
> “Yes, and more,” Rin said. “Your father didn’t last long enough for the time to be right for him to take the mantle. He may not have wanted that burden for you, but it’s no longer his decision to make.”
“Why can’t you take it?”
“Sodervall already made you infamous for us, plus you have the plight our people will relate to. Lost father, sick mother, stealing just to survive. Me...” She gestured to her face, grimaced. “I’m just a—”
“Fighter,” I finished for her, knowing that wasn’t what she was going to say. I needed her on my good side for what I was about to propose, and calling her a monster wasn’t going to help, even if it was true.
She grinned halfheartedly. “Sure. But we don’t need you to be one. Titan needs a new voice. All we need from you is to begin broadcasting publicly, provide a face and name to the coming revolution. A Trass to rally to. You can keep your hands as clean as you’d like.”
I regarded the faces of my new companions. They were the strangest group I’d ever encountered, but on second glance, they didn’t seem that much different from those I’d worked with in the Lowers. Dexter Howser lost his legs; Rin her face. Every Ringer worth a damn had scars they couldn’t hide.
“I’ll do it,” I declared. “I’ll say whatever you want me to say, but you’re going to have to do something for me first.”
Rin’s smile faded as she said, “Go on.”
“We’re going to break the Piccolo’s crew out of Pervenio Station.”
Hayes scoffed. Rin struggled not to. “What do you expect us to do, pull the Sunfire up next to it and grab them?” she asked. “Unidentified vessel. They’ll shoot us down as soon as we break atmosphere.”
“I don’t care how we do it,” I said. “You told me to stop worrying about others, but this is what I want. You need your figurehead, you’ll think of a way. Then we’ll be even for what you did to us.”
“Can’t lead anything if you’re dead, kid,” Hayes chimed in.
“No, but would you follow a man who would forsake his friends and crew just to get away?”
Rin glared at me, and even Hayes’s usual smirk vanished from his face. They both knew I was serious, and if I could have seen Gareth behind me, I’d have bet he was secretly glad he couldn’t talk once he realized he’d inspired the idea.
“Kale...” Rin began soberly. “In a cell on Titan, we might have the people and the resources to save them. But there’s a reason nobody’s ever been broken out of Pervenio Station: Nobody’s ever tried. Maybe we could get in, but where would we go afterward? There’s no bridge to Titan.”
“He’s officially lost it, Rini,” Hayes said. “I told you this was a bad idea.”
Gareth stomped forward and signed something slow enough for me to understand. Hayes’s reaction to him helped as well. “Would you rather stay here forever?”
“Better than being dead.”
“We can use the hand-terminal I smuggled to get in,” I proposed. “You told me it will provide a window into their systems.”
“A brief one,” Rin said. “My sister was going to use it to wipe as much of the Pervenio medical database as possible. Erase names and births. Make as many Titanborn illegitimate as possible to hamper Pervenio credit records. But they have to plug into their systems to analyze it, and once she gets to work, it won’t be long before they realize that and destroy it. She can’t do both.”
“Yeah, and we all spent months planning for that,” Hayes added. “It’s the whole reason those people on the Piccolo died, kid. It’d take ’em years to replace the data.”
“And then we’ll be right back where we are,” I said. “Nothing will change.”
“I can look into it, Kale,” Rin said. “You have my word. We can try to arrange something. Keep an eye on them to make sure they’re okay.”
“No. I didn’t ask to be here, but I’m done fighting it. You want more of my help, then it’s time you help me. Otherwise, you may as well shove me into the airlock with Captain Saunders.”
The room went quiet. All I could hear was a gentle chorus of deep breaths and the vibrations from another storm outside.
“Rin, you can’t seriously be considering this,” Hayes protested.
She said nothing.
“If we free my friends from the most guarded place in the Ring,” I said, “Pervenio will know not only that we’ll try to hit them anywhere, but that we can. And people won’t just hope I’m actually a Trass and listen, they’ll believe it, even if I don’t.” By the end of my argument, I was both breathless and impressed with how much I’d improved at negotiation since attempting to haggle with Dexter.
“You’re not going to make this easy, are you?” Rin questioned.
“Rin, c’mon,” Hayes said. “This is the same kid that just puked all over the command deck. He’s probably unstable after what happened.”
“You want to strike Pervenio at their heart.” Rin stood tall before me. The ship trembled, but her balance was pristine. “Me too. For too long.” She extended her hand. “Deal.”
“Deal,” I exhaled. I shook her hand before anyone changed their minds.
Her dark, grayish eyes glinted with a hunger the likes of which I hadn’t seen in them before.
“I hate my life,” Hayes groaned as he threw down his rag.
“It won’t be like sneaking around the Lowers,” Rin said.
“I know,” I replied.
Gareth patted me on the back, and I turned to him. His face remained impassive, but he signed, “I’m with you.”
“This is insane,” Hayes said. “You know I always have your back, Rin, but he’s supposed to be a figurehead. Now we’re taking orders from him?”
“He’s a Trass,” she replied firmly.
“He’s a kid!”
“You’re welcome to stay here alone if you’d like, but it’s time we finally get off this ship.”
Hayes released a fake, exaggerated laugh. Then he scanned the broken-down room, looking from one pleading face to the next. He sighed. “Well, you’ll need a pilot, but I’m making it known I don’t agree with this. And don’t expect me to take a bullet for him either.”
“Wouldn’t expect anything else,” Rin jested.
“So you have an actual plan for this, right, Mr. Trass?” Hayes asked me.
My high of excitement died swiftly. Between my conversation with Gareth and the command deck, I hadn’t really had a chance to think about anything other than how I might convince Rin.
“No,” I admitted.
Hayes threw up his arms in frustration.
“Leave it to me to get us in,” Rin said. “We’ll need my sister’s help again. Kale, you’re the expert on smuggling here. Start thinking of how to possibly get people off Pervenio Station.”
“People...” I bit my lip. “They’re a little bigger than hand-terminals. I don’t know if I can—”
“We just need ideas for now. There’s nothing too crazy to consider at this point.”
“That’s for damn sure,” Hayes added.
“Can you do that?” Rin asked me.
“I’ll try,” I said.
“Good. Hayes, get a read on the nearest luxury cruiser and bring us under them.”
“Sure thing, beautiful.” He saluted unenthusiastically before spinning his chair around and getting to work on the navigation console. “Trass-damned maniacs,” he whispered loud enough for us to hear.
“Gareth, evaluate our supplies and munitions,” Rin ordered. He nodded. Then she gripped my arm crisply. “Let’s crack open Pervenio Station,” she said, “and you can tell Director Sodervall who you really are right to his wrinkled, mud-stomper face.”
“There’s one more thing I need to see before we leave.” I stepped past her, ignoring her confused expression, and reached into a supply crate under a control panel. I’d noticed the scanner they used to sort out who had been Ringer, who Earther, on the Piccolo. I grabbed two vacuum-sealed needles.
“Can this check D
NA?” I asked.
“Sure,” Rin said. “Blood type, DNA, and bone density if you go deep enough. Everything to help us figure out who’s really Titanborn.”
“Perfect.” I presented the equipment to her. “I’m tired of being lied to.”
She got my meaning. She took the scanner from me and pricked her neck inside of her helmet. Then she switched the needle and did the same to me so she could compare blood samples. I wasn’t sure what most of the information that popped up on the screen meant, but she allowed me to watch as she worked the controls.
We were a genetic match. Family. That was the least crazy of the revelations about my life she’d provided, but it was nice to be 100-percent sure that my memory of her wasn’t somehow fabricated.
“And Trass. Can it test for that?” I asked.
“We don’t have the resources available here or anywhere,” she said. “You’ll just have to have faith.”
“I wish that were easier.”
“Few things ever are!” Hayes hollered back.
Rin handed the scanner back to me. “Stop worrying about what may or may not be, and let’s focus on surviving what’s to come.”
“Right.” I returned the device, and then the word surviving sank in. “Oh, and one more thing: Captain Saunders is coming with us.”
“Kale.” The healthy half of her lips wilted into a grimace.
“He already knows who I am and thinks it was me, so what does it matter? We’ll leave him behind on the station.”
She glanced over at Hayes. He smirked back at her. “He’s a Trass—remember?” he remarked.
Rin closed her eyes for moment and then nodded. I could tell she wasn’t happy, but I was tired of trying to please people. “Fine,” she said. “But only if he’s able.”
EIGHTEEN
The plan Rin came up with was simple... at least the initial part. We were going to abandon the Sunfire and board one of the luxury cruisers sailing around Saturn’s upper atmosphere that provided Earther clientele a lavish reprieve from living under low-g conditions. Not like the pirates of old this time, however. We were going to sneak on and stow away in the supply hangar. Hayes sliced into some Pervenio com’s chatter as our altitude rose, and we learned that a decision had been made from the top that all unessential vessels were being recalled from Saturn in light of what happened to the Piccolo.
Titan's Son: (Children of Titan Book 2) Page 19