Children were crammed inside, at least a dozen of them of all varying ages. Most were already unconscious from the pressure, but the cries of those who weren’t were drowned out by the racket. Only I noticed them. A girl no older than five stared at me near the entrance, her eyes bulging and bloodshot. They’d probably been brought on board by their Pervenio Corp fathers and mothers who decided that being sacrificed to kill me was better than living under the rule of Ringers.
Someone grabbed me by the shoulder. “C’mon, Kale!” Rin’s voice rang in my ear. “We need to get you out of here now!”
I remained still, eyes locked with the girl’s. Tears streamed down her grimy cheeks as well as all the others’. They were Earthers, all of them. The Cora was probably built well enough to hold for the few extra seconds longer it’d take us to gather them; to save all the potential future collectors, security officers, and corporate directors. All I needed to do was give the order, and my people would listen...
Two
Malcolm Graves
My eyes popped open. I lay back on a bed, poked all over with needles like a fleshy pincushion. No full respirator was stuffed my mouth, but tubes in my nostrils pumped me with oxygen. I think. Whatever it was, it had me lightheaded and remarkably calm, all things considered. My vision was improved too.
I studied my surroundings. I was in a medical room. The walls were polished white, and every piece of equipment shined like it was fresh out of the factory. All the highest quality stuff too. Holographic viewscreens monitored my bodily functions as a scanner slid back and forth along a thin rail above, projecting a tight grid of pinkish beams through me. An IV fed something clear into my veins, though it didn’t seem to help with how insanely thirsty and hungry I felt.
There were no viewports, so I wasn’t exactly sure where I was, but the color red answered a few of my questions. Pervenio Corp logos were everywhere, on everything—that branch wrapped in a crimson helix that I’d spent most of my life serving. So I wasn’t in hell, but I was back in one of their facilities. Whether it was as a prisoner awaiting interrogation for what had happened on Titan or purely as a patient, I wasn’t sure.
What I did know was that my partner Zhaff was dead. He had been one of Luxarn Pervenio’s Cogents, a group of elite special agents forged out of young men and women with a concoction of mental illnesses that left them unsuited for normal society. We hadn’t worked together long, but he was a good kid and ten times the agent I ever was at his age.
Things got even better when I found out he was secretly Luxarn’s troubled, illegitimate son. I was handpicked to show him the ropes of being a Pervenio Corp field agent, chasing down bounties and extinguishing rebellions throughout the solar system before they ever started. A dream assignment. One I didn’t even realize I’d been waiting thirty years as a collector for until it was too late.
We were sent to Titan to uncover the truth behind a terrorist attack on Earth during the only holiday humans from that withering planet had left. M-Day, when we honored all the billions who’d died when a meteorite came crashing down three centuries ago. Only we stumbled upon something I’d never imagined. A rebel cell known as the Children of Titan wanted medicine to cure their beleaguered people, and my daughter, Aria, was helping them get it. Five years since we parted ways and never looked back, and that was the first time I’d seen the woman she’d grown into.
My sweet little Aria, working with radicals. Zhaff pinned her down and left me with a choice—take her in as a criminal or gun down my partner and set her free. I made the decision any father would. The last thing I could remember was both our pulse pistols going off. I hit him in the head, he hit me in the leg, and after lying on the surface of Titan freezing to death, my world went black, and I woke up in wherever the hell I was now.
One thing struck me: if Luxarn Pervenio blamed the person who was responsible for his son’s death, it didn’t seem likely I’d be kept on a soft mattress. If he blamed the Ringers or Aria… Her face flashed through my mind, teeming with apprehension as we bid our final goodbyes and I was left to die.
I tried to force the image away as I propped my head up to get a better look at the room. The entrance suddenly whooshed open and drew my focus. In walked a nurse. No, a doctor. Standoffish expression, graying hair tied back, white lab coat with a Pervenio emblem on the lapel—she was a seasoned vet.
“I’ll have to ask you to please remain still this time, Mr. Graves,” she said, voice as coarse as her face. “After your last excursion, some scans had to be re-administered.”
Her gaze fell upon my hands, and as I tried to move them, I realized my wrists were restrained, ankles too. At least, one was. As much as I tried to wiggle the toes on the other, I couldn’t feel anything.
“Right, sorry about that,” I said, remembering my half-conscious adventure down the halls of wherever I was to a room filled with Zhaffs. Whatever drugs I was loaded up on clearly had me seeing things.
I coughed. My throat was also so dry, it was as if it was lined with cotton balls. I sounded like an eighty-year-old Ringer strolling under Earth’s high G for the first time.
“I…where am I?” I asked.
“You are in an underground research facility of the Cogent Initiative beneath Sector A of the Undina Mining Facility,” she said as she strolled over to my bed. She sat on a stool by the end, paying attention only to my medical readouts and not to me directly.
“Undina?” The irony that Luxarn’s secret project to craft perfect agents was buried there made me chuckle, then cough again. “You’ve got to be kidding me. He was training them here?”
“I’m not kidding you, Mr. Graves. You nearly interrupted the research with your sloppiness back before M-day.”
She referred to an assignment dealing with a miner’s protest here I’d screwed up. My punishment was being paired with Zhaff to track the Children of Titan rather than working alone. At first, he was such an insufferable know-it-all, I actually wanted to put a bullet in his brain. But I rubbed off on him and he on me…before I offed him.
My features darkened. Her news also meant that the room full of Zhaffs wasn’t a hallucination, but instead more people like him.
“I never thought I’d be back here,” I whispered.
“Mr. Pervenio had you transported here specifically after you were found exposed to Titan. Most of you made it, but you’re lucky to be alive.”
“Most of me?”
She turned her attention to my legs and peeled up the blanket. My liver-spotted skin wrapped the one I could feel. The other was synthetic from the hip down, metal or more likely some kind of composite, fashioned to appear like a human leg without the skin. Plates formed each imagined muscle, tiny rifts between allowing for full range of movement. The foot was skeletal, sleek, and curved around the heel with independent toes featuring knobby, flexible, joints.
She prodded the ball of it with a blunt tool. The toes twitched automatically, or at least that was what I thought at first. An unusual, barely perceptible sensation affected the nerve endings on my hip where a scarred band of skin met the artificial limb. Like I was subconsciously controlling the motion. A reflex.
“Your leg was a mass of dead, frozen cells,” she said. “Fortunately, that impeded the blood flow, and airships were able to get you indoors before the cold spread to your vital organs.” She tapped another area of the foreign appendage. Again, I felt a faint pull as the entire top of it bent forward.
“It will take some time to grow accustomed to it as your nervous system acclimates to the new connections,” she said. “Eventually, you’ll think about moving it just like you used to, and it will happen. It will be like you never lost your leg. In fact, at your age, it should work better.”
“Is every doctor in this place as sweet as you?”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Mr. Graves. There are escaped survivors from the Ring in far worse condition than you. If not for our employer demanding your special treatment, I’d be tending to them.”
�
��What the hell happened out there?” New leg. Survivors. I’d never woken up so confused in my life, and I’d endured too many drunken nights to count.
She grimaced, and for a moment, she no longer appeared like just a gruff old doctor. She seemed to be haunted. “Kale Trass happened.”
“Who?” The name sounded familiar, but my head was so foggy I couldn’t place it.
“Mr. Pervenio is on his way to apprise you of the situation as we speak.”
I lost my train of thought when she ran her fingers around the top of both my new leg and my old one, as far up the inner thighs as she could go. It wasn’t because of the sensation of her touching there either. It was because I could barely feel anything at all on either limb. I felt like one of Lucas Mannekin’s perverse fake android creations. The thought made me shudder. Now that was a story for another time. Most twisted bastard I’d ever met, Lucas, and dealing with those types of men was my specialty.
“Now,” she began, “it might be difficult to urinate on your own for a short while.”
I reached desperately for my groin. I was wearing a loose-fitting robe, so making sure everything…important…was still in its proper place was simple enough.
“Relax,” she said. “You’re recovering nicely. There is no reason to believe that most of the sensation in your remaining lower extremities won’t return. In time, you will be able to engage in all the reprehensible undertakings you collectors pride yourselves in. It just may not feel the same.”
“May not?” I threw the blanket off me completely and spotted the catheter extending out from a flap in my robe. “That’s supposed to cheer me up?”
“It’s the best I can offer. Titan took its toll on your body, and at your age—”
“Would you stop bringing that up?”
Her lips formed a straight line; then she placed her hand on my upper chest and pressed me down. “I know you’re confused and unsettled,” she said, a failed attempt to sound caring. “Just try to remain still until Mr. Pervenio arrives.” She gestured to the catheter. “And please don’t rip that thing out again. I don’t feel like scrubbing the floors, and he prefers a spotless room.”
“Rip it out? Oh…” I realized I must’ve done that earlier when I’d stumbled out of the room and not even felt it. How could I not feel that?
As the doctor quietly checked more of my vitals, I started wishing Luxarn had left me on Titan to freeze. Things would’ve been a lot simpler. Instead, my employer, or former employer—I wasn’t sure which yet—was on his way to see me. If he knew the truth about Zhaff, I was dead. If he didn’t, then the army of Cogents I’d seen during my joy walk when I first woke up could likely pry it out of me. Reading people based on their reactions and acute facial twitches was one of their many skills. Either way, I was twenty-or-so-percent less of myself, impotent, and cuffed to a bed far away from the drink I so desperately needed.
“As I live and breathe,” the familiar voice of my employer uttered. “Malcolm Graves, you really made it.”
I looked up to see Luxarn Pervenio standing in the doorway, appearing as distinguished as ever. His finely tailored tunic bore the red and black of his corporate empire and hadn’t a crease to be found. He was combed, manicured, shaved, and tidy, but none of that could steal my attention away from his face. Gone was his trademark confidence and voracity. The artificially stretched skin covering his skull finally showed creases, and for the first time, he looked every bit his age.
As I regarded his weary eyes, all I could see in them was Zhaff. Titan’s icy sand wisped over the Cogent’s crumpled body as his single green eye remained gaping. The gunshots rattled around inside my skull. I winced and turned away.
“Please, don’t strain yourself,” Luxarn said as he entered the room. My doctor hurried out without having to be told. “By Earth, you cannot imagine how good it is to see you awake again.”
He sat on the end of my bed, giving me no choice but to regard him. His resemblance to Zhaff was so clear to me now, I don’t know how I ever overlooked their relation. Some collector I was.
“It’s…” I paused to gather my breath. He appeared an entire solar system away from happy, yet he didn’t seem displeased with me. That meant either he didn’t know the truth, or he was playing me. I had to be careful. “It’s good to see you too, sir.”
“They did fine work.” He patted my artificial leg, which of course I couldn’t feel, but the foot twitched. “Most cutting-edge piece of cybernetics in all of Sol. Dr. Aurora will have you back up in no time.”
So he didn’t know the truth. Luxarn was a businessman first and foremost. He wouldn’t waste however many millions of credits my new leg cost if he were going to space me. Only the best for his prized collector.
“That’s good,” I said. “I’m already getting tired of lying around.”
“Of course you are,” he said. “It’s not in either of our natures.”
I smirked and tried to sit up. The restraints impeded me. Luxarn noticed my struggle and freed my aching limbs. I yawned, stretched, and took the opportunity to tap my artificial leg and make sure I wasn’t dreaming. The thing was a marvel—like I was wearing a spaceship on my bottom.
“What exactly happened down on Titan, sir?” I asked.
His features hardened. “I could ask you the same thing.”
I swallowed the lump forming in my throat. What had happened was that I’d chosen my own flesh and blood over his. A hard choice, which I’d make a thousand times over, but not one a man like him would ever pardon. I needed a good lie, and I needed one fast if I didn’t want him spacing me. I hadn’t had much of a chance to think of one while I was out for… how long had it been? Undina orbited Earth and was a long ways from Titan.
“We took out a bunch of Ringers and got the stolen supplies out, but there were too many,” I rattled off the top of my head. “The last thing I remember is one getting the jump on us.” I took a deep breath. The last component of my self-preserving fib was coming, and it was the hardest part to get out. “Is Zhaff okay?”
I could tell Luxarn was forcing his lips not to tremble. Showing weakness wasn’t his style. He reached into a pouch on his belt, removed the familiar Cogent eye-lens that allowed Zhaff to see on various light spectrums and enhanced ranges, and slapped it down on the side table right beside me. The center of the yellow-colored glass was gashed just wide enough for a bullet to pass through, the jagged edges stained with dried blood.
Again, my mind was stricken by Zhaff’s impassive face. The sweaty hand I was using to prop up my body slipped. I squeezed one eye shut and angled the other toward the wall, hoping Luxarn might not notice how thrown I was.
“They took down my boy, Graves.” The way his voice quavered sent a chill up my spine. “My son.”
“By Earth…” I feigned shock. Another attempt to glance at Zhaff’s lens yielded similar results. It was like I’d never killed someone before. “I didn’t think that was possible.”
“You were supposed to keep him safe.”
Now it felt like he was playing me again. Trying to get me to admit it. That was probably the easiest way to go. I’d died once already anyway. Instead, a lifetime’s worth of honed survival skills kicked in. I caressed the cold plating of my artificial leg and said, “I had a hard enough time doing that for myself.”
“Relax, Graves. I don’t blame you. I blame Director Sodervall for not providing an accurate assessment of the Children of Titan situation before I sent you and Zhaff down. Damn me for thinking he could handle it. Now Sodervall is dead too, executed in front of the whole damned solar system!” Luxarn exploded to his feet and slammed his fist on the nearest counter, causing the rack of syringes there to fall and clank across the glossy floor.
I waited a few seconds for him to relax. “Director Sodervall is dead?” I asked. My cantankerous old handler seemed like he would be around forever, grumbling about Ringer disregard for Pervenio decrees and how things used to be better. “Sir, how the hell long was
I out?”
“Three months. We kept you under during transit and while we installed your new leg. And in that time, everything you accomplished has proven to be for nothing. I’ve nearly lost the entire Ring thanks to that madman.”
“Sodervall’s a dead madman now?”
Luxarn’s brow furrowed. “I forgot. You don’t know. After you and Zhaff discovered their hideout at the Darien Quarantine, I dispatched a sizable force to try and eliminate the Children of Titan once and for all. But they were expecting it. Kale Trass blew up—”
“Trass,” I interrupted. “Why does everyone keep using that name?”
“You remember the Ringer boy Sodervall accused of being behind the Children of Titan raid on our gas harvester.”
“Kale Draven? No…Drayton. I thought that was his name?”
“So did we. After the bastard escaped that poor excuse for a director’s grasp, he commandeered that very same ship and crashed it into the Darien Quarantine. Countless officers died in the blast, and then Kale transmitted a public message claiming that he was a descendant of Darien Trass before executing Sodervall. We were completely unprepared. Kale drove the Ringers into a frenzy. They took over every colony block on Titan, imprisoned any citizen who didn’t escape in time, and stole airships and weapons before turning their sights on Pervenio Station and the rest of the Ring.”
Luxarn had to sit again to steady himself. I took the opportunity to lift my jaw, which had dropped involuntarily after hearing everything I’d missed. Darien Trass was the brilliant scientist who had dispatched an Ark full of humans before the Meteorite impacted Earth. The descendants of those lucky few lived on Titan for two hundred fifty years before Pervenio Corp orchestrated the Great Reunion between them and those who had survived back on Earth. His family line was supposed to have ended shortly after said reunion brought earthborn germs that left the Ringers reeling and Pervenio Corp in control of Saturn and all its moons. Apparently not.
Titan's Rise: (Children of Titan Book 3) Page 3