The nearest cruiser was already on the ascent, so we didn’t have long. Hayes pushed the Sunfire’s engines so hard that we all had to strap in and load up on g-stims just to stay conscious during the thrust. I could feel the worn-down pieces of the ship priming to snap off all around me.
Once we boarded the cruiser, we’d borrow the suits of the cruiser’s Ringer workers and infiltrate Pervenio Station. Rin was also going to have to tap into its long-range coms to contact her sister Rylah and tell her about the change in plans so that she could hack into the station’s security systems using the hand-terminal I’d smuggled and sneak us into the prison bay.
That was the easy part. Skulking around was my specialty. The impossible part would come after we sprang Cora and nineteen other incarcerated Ringers from Pervenio Corporation’s main headquarters in Sol. We’d lose Rin’s sister’s tech support by then, so hiding for as long as we could in the station’s tram tunnels was the best option our collective minds could come up with. Finding enough exo-suits and ejecting ourselves through the vacuum toward Titan was another choice, but burning up in the moon’s dense atmosphere was more of a concern than how we were going to land. Commandeering a ship would get us blown to bits by the station’s defenses.
It was a far cry from jobs I was used to. Even Dexter Howser’s looniest assignment couldn’t hold a candle to what we were going to attempt, but it was my one chance. I was in too deep to get out, and if Rin had taught me anything in our short time together, it was that I couldn’t escape some of the blame. I’d chosen the quick path to saving my mom, and I would’ve done it a thousand times over again. But Cora, Desmond, and the others were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because of me, they sat in cells, spending every minute fearful of being spaced.
I was going to get them out no matter the cost.
Presently, I trudged down the Sunfire’s airlock corridor, using the wall to lug myself along. Even my powered suit wasn’t enough to combat the ship’s force of acceleration.
“I thought I told you to stay away from me,” Captain Saunders grumbled weakly upon noticing me. He clutched a pipe to keep from sliding along the floor, his face glistening with sweat. Dark bags hugged his eyes. He looked thin and pale, skeletal, like my mom the last time I saw her in person.
“I’m taking you off this ship, Captain,” I said. “I don’t care whether or not you believe me, but I’m getting you help.” I grabbed his cuff and yanked it so hard that it broke off the pipe it was linked to. I was getting used to being abnormally strong. He scrambled backward, but I wrapped my arm around his shoulder and lifted.
“Ah, dammit!” he shrieked. He squirmed out of my grasp and crumpled to the floor, puffing uncontrollably and clutching at his wound. “Oh Earth, just leave me.”
I knelt and checked his injury. The veins surrounding it looked like the webs of an earthborn spider, and the skin was so discolored it was now yellow. Pink-hued pus oozed out of it as the pain caused his stomach muscles to spasm.
“You need a real doctor,” I said. I gave lifting him another shot, but the moment I moved him, he screamed like I’d never heard anyone do before.
“Stop... I can’t...” Captain Saunders wheezed.
“I’m not going to leave you.”
“Then don’t.” He attempted to point at something but couldn’t raise his arm. Instead, his gaze aimed toward the control panel for the airlock.
“Sir, I can get you out of here,” I said.
“If you really aren’t behind all this, then I’m still your captain by contract.” He had to pause for breath between every few words. “End this. That’s an order.”
“Sir—”
“Don’t make me beg. A captain... a captain should go down with his crew.”
“There’s still time.”
“Kill me!” Captain Saunders roared like a madman. He grabbed hold of my thigh and shook. “Just end this. I can’t... I can’t...” He struggled for air and fell backward against the wall, his entire body quivering.
I crouched next to him, unable to choke back my tears. I’d expected him to fight me taking him, but not to give up.
“Please, Kale,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m here, but I’ll tell you people anything you want to know. Anything. Please...” His jaw clenched. “The pain is too much.”
I wiped my cheeks and took a seat beside him. For two years, he’d been my captain. He’d barked orders and kept us in line. Never once did he waver. He was stern, authoritative, and did his best to seem fair. Or, at least, I always thought so.
“Why do you pay us less?” I asked softly, the question suddenly popping into my head as I recalled all the things Rin mentioned, from his exploitation of Ringers, to why he treated Cora special.
“Kale,” Captain Saunders said softly.
“Why?”
“It’s just the market. Not personal. Pervenio doesn’t leave us fully-manned gas harvesters much room for profit.”
“Why’d you name Cora navigator, then?”
It was difficult to recognize the shock through his agonized expression, but I had no doubt it was there.
“She’s not a full Ringer,” Captain Saunders said.
“That’s never mattered to your kind before,” I replied.
“Yeah, well, John couldn’t navigate worth a shit. She was better. The best. I hope to hell she’s all right.”
“That’s not it. I can handle a wrench better than Culver, but you never would’ve named me head mechanic, would you?”
“Is that what all this is about?”
“No, but I want to know. Tell me the truth, and I’ll...” I swallowed the lump forming in my throat. “Help you.”
“I want your word.”
I nodded. “You have it.”
He drew a deep, grating breath and closed his eyes. “Cora, she’s... she’s my daughter,” he said.
“What?” I said, incredulous. “But her mom was—”
“I know.”
I felt like I’d been struck from behind by a hover-car. It was difficult to slow my thoughts enough to formulate words. “Why?” I managed to force through my lips.
“I was young, Kale. Impulsive. I saw a pretty Ringer, had a little too much to drink, and I made a mistake.”
I pictured Cora lying next to me on the Piccolo, her silvery hair brushing across my nose. She was smiling, wider than I’d ever seen before, and now I knew the person behind the reason she rarely did.
“Rin wasn’t lying,” I whispered, mostly to myself.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t regret it, Kale,” he said, “but I tried to make the best of things once I found out. I care about that girl, that’s the truth. It’s why I never told her who I was. She doesn’t deserve to have to know.”
“That you’re the man who murdered her mom?” I said for him. “That made her an alien to everyone?”
“I didn’t murder anyone!” he protested. Raising his voice caused him to wince. “It was a young man’s mistake, just like the one that got you stuck on my ship. You can understand that, can’t you?”
“Yeah. I think I do now.”
“There. I told you.” He twisted his body, groaning, and regarded me, eyes red as the surface of Mars. “Now, please... I can’t take this anymore.”
I rose to my feet wordlessly and walked over to the airlock controls.
“Thank you, Kale,” Captain Saunders said. “I knew you weren’t like the others.”
I placed my armored hand over the screen. My lower lip trembled. I bit it to keep it still.
“Would you mind knocking me out first?” he asked. “I’m tired of feeling.”
My finger hovered over the command to close the inner seal, but I didn’t press it. “The Sunfire will be devoured soon,” I said. “I hope you last that long.”
His eyes gaped. “You gave your word!” he shouted.
I signaled the inner seal to slam shut and locked him inside. Depressurizing and evacuating the airlock was as simpl
e as pressing another button, but I walked away in silence. I could hear Captain Saunders banging against the hatch all the way down the corridor.
“Where’s the mudstomping captain?” Hayes asked me when I reached the command deck, making no effort to disguise his derision.
“He passed,” I said bluntly.
He stopped what he was doing at the navigation console and gawked at me. Rin and Gareth stood behind him, holding on to his chair. They stared as well. Pulse-rifles were latched on to the backs of all their armor, and Gareth had a supply container strapped to his hip. It wasn’t big, but it held as much water and ration bars as we could stuff in.
“Are we ready?” I asked after they’d remained silent for a few too many seconds.
It took Rin a few more to finally answer me. “Almost,” she said. She grabbed a pulse-rifle off a rack on the wall and thrust it into my gut, so I had no choice but to grip it. “Now we are. Just in case.”
I’d never held a rifle before in my life. The thing was dated, its polymerized coating scraped and dented all over, but it made me feel like more than a thief.
“Your father would be proud of you, Kale,” Rin said.
“Let’s not get emotional until we survive,” Hayes said. “We’re coming up on the cruiser fast. I get any closer, and their scanners will light up, so this is where we get off. Luckily, nobody knows we exist, so they aren’t looking for us.”
“All right. Time to fly.”
“Wait, what?” I asked. I looked up at the command deck’s dome-shaped viewport. Ruddy-colored wisps of wind lashed beyond it, and in the distant clouds, I noticed the large, dark silhouette of the cruiser. I recalled the ads about them all over Darien—ships with every luxury humans of ancient Earth could want, from earthlike gravity, to a conservatory filled with rare plants, to a small, man-made beach.
Rin hit a switch built into my armor, which I hadn’t noticed earlier because it was woven into the belt. I heard a rasp, and then something popped out of my arm plates. Rin lifted my arm and stretching between it and my hip was some sort of orange-colored fabric.
“The finest tensile nano-fabric Venta has on the market,” Rin said. “You ever heard of the winged suits our ancestors used to traverse Titan and help construct the Blocks?”
“I thought they were myths,” I said. I strummed the end of the wing, which somehow remained taut no matter where my arm went.
“No, merely outlawed by Pervenio so they could control transit. Until now.”
“You’re not really a Child of Titan until you soar, kid,” Hayes looked back and said, smirking. “Welcome to your initiation.”
I laughed nervously. “You guys are kidding, right?”
“Serious as a Q-Zone.”
“It’s simple,” Rin said. “On my mark, Hayes is going to blow the harvesting bay. The blast will shoot us forward, and we ride the acceleration all the way to the cruiser. Now, I don’t need to tell you what kind of wind speeds are out there. The armor can handle it, but we use subtle motions to keep our course true. Gusts might knock you around a bit but remember not to panic.” She grabbed my arms and raised them to about a thirty-degree angle from my sides. “You extend any more than this, and we’ll be waving goodbye.”
I glanced up at the faraway shadow of the luxury cruiser again and then back down at Rin. She seemed completely serious.
“There’s got to be a better way,” I said.
“Not one that keeps us from getting caught,” Hayes said. “Your plan, remember, kid?”
Rin rolled her eyes. “Ignore him. The cruiser’s storage hangar will be on the aft. Our relative velocities should be close enough for us to grab on to the hull, cut through an exhaust vent, and climb on board.”
“‘Should be?’” I said.
“I’m not a mathematician.” Hayes shrugged. He backed away from the controls, stood, and faced us. “No better time than now, though.”
“G-stims,” Rin said. “These are strong ones. They’ll help keep us alert.”
She opened her hand and revealed four of them on her palm—Venta-made like the others they’d given me, but different markings on the casings. Gareth and Hayes snatched one each and injected. I grabbed mine and jabbed it into my neck without arguing. Taking too much of the chems could be bad for the heart long-term, but I didn’t have the time to worry about that.
“Helmets sealed, com-links activated!” Rin ordered.
Their faces disappeared behind their visors. I scrambled to close mine. I could feel my heart beating in my throat. Rin reached over and hit a button on the side of my helmet to switch on a built-in com-link I didn’t realize I had. It made me wonder why they’d been signing to communicate back on the Piccolo, until I remembered Gareth couldn’t talk. That, and fear. It seemed to be Rin’s greatest tool, and nothing made Earthers’ skin crawl like things they didn’t understand.
“Can everyone hear me?” Rin asked, her voice filling the inside of my helmet.
Hayes offered one of his sarcastic remarks on Rin’s looks. Gareth gave a thumbs-up.
“Yes,” was all I was able to eke out.
“Stow your rifle, Kale,” Rin said. “Hopefully, we don’t need them.”
I looked down and remembered it was in my hand. I anxiously patted the backside of my armor until I found the mag-latch, a metallic strip on the gun’s stock attached to.
We stood silently. Nobody moved until Gareth put a hand on Rin’s shoulder, as if he could sense how she was feeling. With the other, he signed, “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Rin said, shaking him off her. “I hate this place. Thumbs locked.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant at first, but the three of them formed three sides of a square and gripped one another’s hands. Rin and Gareth each took one of mine, ensuring our thumbs locked. I could only imagine the grin on Hayes’s face as he positioned himself across from me.
“Ready, Kale?” Rin said.
“I guess—” Before I could finish, she nudged Hayes, and he let go of her hand for a split-second to strike a key on the command console. The Sunfire jolted so violently that we were flung at an upward angle toward the viewport. Our suits crashed through it, headlong into the whistling, tearing winds of Saturn.
My armor shook from the turbulence, but the wings held true. Pressure behind my eyes augmented, as bad as it was when I’d first stepped onto the Sunfire. Maybe worse. I fought through the pain to open them so that I could see what was happening. We were skydiving upward, riding a squall like dust on an Earthen breeze.
Rin issued the others numerical commands for path redirections over our com-link. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I held her hand and Gareth’s as tight as I could and used them to keep my arms from angling any farther than her recommendation. We veered together, slightly right and left, through the rosy arms of Saturn’s eternal haze toward the luxury cruiser’s rapidly growing silhouette.
Thunder clapped so loudly it pierced the soundproof seal of my helmet. Lightning sparkled in the distance. My bones chattered. Wind pressure pulled at my joints. It was the most terrifying thing I’d ever done, but as the g-stim kicked in and dulled the pain, I found myself stifling a thrilled scream.
“Wind drag is slowing us!” Rin shouted loud enough for us to hear her over the rushing air.
“One thousand meters and closing!” Hayes replied. “Trust me, we’ll be fine!”
If we were slowing down, I didn’t have the experience to notice. I had to fight the urge to break away from them and glide through the air like one of Earth’s birds. I’d been weightless plenty of times, but it’d never felt anywhere close to this... to flying.
“Five hundred meters!” Hayes said. “Brace yourselves!”
The luxury cruiser now constituted the breadth of my vision. We approached it at roughly a forty-five-degree angle from beneath its backside.
“Kale!” Rin said. “When we land, keep your arms tight to your side.”
I nodded like an idiot first,
and then replied, “Arms at the side, got it.”
“One hundred!” Hayes yelled.
We dipped as we entered the vessel’s drift stream directly under the aft, avoiding the white-hot plasma trails of its dual nuclear-thermal impulse engines. My stomach jumped, and my exhilaration gave way to fright. The others didn’t panic at all. Hayes tightened his arm positioning to even us out so that we ran parallel to the lower hull. Our velocities synchronized almost flawlessly.
“Bring us up slow!” Rin said.
Their wings shifted with delicate motions, and we gradually climbed toward the ship. Again, I concerned myself only with not messing them up. We rose until we ran alongside it. I could see the subtle, greenish glow of the glassy conservatory bulging out from its top, where Earthers could pretend they were amongst nature before the Meteorite ravaged their planet.
“Hayes, you first!” Rin said.
Hayes had rotated to be on the side of our formation closest to the cruiser. I wasn’t sure what was up or down anymore. He released the others’ hands without hesitation, twirled around, and smacked against the side of the ship. His powered fingers dug into the sturdy blades of an exhaust vent, and he deactivated his wings.
“I’m on, Rin!” he hollered. “Gareth, let’s go!”
Gareth released my hand before I was ready, but Rin was there to instantly grab me. The mute Ringer looped through the air and landed beside Hayes. He wasted no time removing a cutting torch from his supply bag and getting to work on the vent.
“He’s on!” Hayes said,
“All right, Kale!” Rin shouted. She was now across from me, our visors so close that they were almost touching. I could see the outline of her marred face through it.
“We’ll do this together, okay?” she said. “Arms tight.”
I was short on breath and found myself unable to answer at first. My life was in the hands of the same woman who’d gone out of her way to destroy it. If I went drifting in space during a zero-g repair walk, inertia would carry me in one direction, and there wouldn’t be much around to hide me if anyone was looking for me. Here, on Saturn, I’d be whipped around like a rag doll and plunged into a miasma so copious, I’d be lost in seconds.
Titan's Son: (Children of Titan Book 2) Page 20