I couldn’t remember the names of more than a handful. And of the faces...only the last one it blew apart. Zhaff’s. My one-hundred-thirty-third confirmed kill. I could remember his face; it was right in front of me, every second of every day. I knew it so well that while everybody else would’ve claimed he always wore the exact same expressions as the six Cogents standing before me, I could point out all his quirks. The way his eyebrow twitched ever so slightly when I said something that didn’t compute for him. The subtle tug at the corner of his lips when he learned how to tell a joke.
“What’s one more, huh?” I said softly.
“One hundred thirty-three.”
I released a somber chuckle. Zhaff would’ve responded the same way.
“My advice,” I began, “is to shoot at Kale the way you shot at me back on Undina. Don’t focus on anybody else. They’ll be confused enough when we blow through. Get a clear shot, put one between Kale’s eyes, and get out.” Getting their attention away from Aria and Venta was my number one concern if I wanted an opening to grab her.
“Titanborn armor is dense. The proximity required for a confirmed fatal shot through his helmet is within ten meters.”
“Well, you lot don’t care about dying, do you?” He answered with silence and that confounding blank stare Zhaff had been so proficient with. “Can you send Mr. Pervenio a message for me before we go in?”
“Yes.” He withdrew his hand terminal.
“Tell him he’s welcome.”
“For what, specifically?”
“Just that. He’ll know what it means.”
Varus’s fingers danced across the small screen; then he stowed the device. “Sent.”
I took a deep breath and grinned. My wrinkled hand slowly wrapped the grip of my pistol, the only true friend I’d ever known. My index finger slipped through the trigger guard as it had so many times before. Two-point-four pounds of pressure. That was the difference between life and death for the one hundred thirty-three poor souls who’d wound up on the wrong side of the barrel.
I drew it, ducked behind a nearby container, and covered my ears. It was time to help finish what Zhaff and I had started when we met back on Earth. Time to bring an end to the Children of Titan once and for all and avenge what the boy king Kale had done to Pervenio Corp. That would make Luxarn and me even for the bullet I’d put in Zhaff. A life for a life, both times with my daughter’s hanging in the balance.
“Blow it,” I told Varus.
A second later, the contained blast peeled open a portion of the dense wall as if it were made of paper ribbons. My ears rang as I bounded through the breech alongside the Cogents. My gun was up, but I had no eye lens to help me see through the smoke. All I could distinguish was blurs of color and flashing muzzles.
I aimed from side to side as I pressed forward, panting, trying to keep up with my Cogent entourage. When I realized how futile that was, I lowered my pistol and rushed through the fog. The head of a Venta officer exploded as I took cover behind a shipping container. Another turned and spotted me, but I kicked him in the chest with the one part of my body that couldn’t get tired. The force of my synthetic leg sent him flying, and once outside of cover his body was ripped to shreds in the crossfire.
I peeked around the container.
Thirty years and I’d never seen employees of Earth’s three biggest corporations open fire in the same room. Gunmen took cover wherever they could find it. The Red Wing officers by the gate seemed confused about who to shoot at, but that didn’t stop most of them from doing so. The Venta Co. men unloaded in both directions, peppering fighters in white and red with bullets. And from the shadow of their ship, the Titanborn soldiers shot at anything that moved.
“Focus on the Cogents!” a woman taking cover somewhere near Kale shouted. He and the Titanborn soldiers who had survived the initial onslaught had taken cover behind their ship’s loading ramp.
“Aria!” I heard Kale roar after a few more seconds of fighting.
I followed the direction of his voice and located Aria. She’d made an attempt to escape that Venta Collector I’d gotten friendly with the past two days. He tackled her out in the open. Nobody fired at them. The Cogents were wholly focused on eliminating Kale, and neither the Titanborn nor Venta officers wanted to risk killing one of their own.
The Collector crawled on top of her and started pounding her face. My heart thumped so fast that my chest stung. I leaned around the corner and took aim. They were barely ten meters away—a shot I’d made plenty of times in my life—but all my attempts at focusing had my old eyes seeing two of him. I edged farther out of cover. Aria pushed back the Collector’s throat to slow his punches, groping with the other hand for the pulse pistol dangling from a fallen officer’s hip.
Pull the trigger, Malcolm! I told myself. I had the vantage now, and I had him lined up in my sights. There was no chance I could miss. But I couldn’t pull the trigger. My hand cramped. It felt freezing cold, like I was back on Titan.
Blood suddenly spiraled out of the Collectors back. I glanced down, wondering if I’d fired without realizing, but my fingers remained stuck. Aria grasped the nearby pistol as the Collector lurched from that first shot, and buried two more slugs in his stomach. A female Titanborn promptly slid next to them, pulled Aria out from under the Earther, and emptied a pulse rifle clip into the Venta ranks as they ran in my direction.
I fell back behind the shipping container, winded. I smacked myself in the head to try and wake my hand up when the Titanborn woman and Aria dove around the same shipping container, backs against the side facing the Venta officers for some reason. They didn’t notice me just around the corner. All I had to do was grab Aria and we could book it out the way I’d come in before any of the Cogents knew the difference.
I peered around the container to see where my companions were. They were completely focused on Kale like I’d told them to be. The King of Titan used his men like a meat shield, or rather they flocked to him as the Cogents tore into what remained of his people. Varus shot one through the chest, and another leapt in front of Kale. Bullets stung the loyal soul like a swarm of angry, mutated hornets.
“Now, Kale!” the Titanborn woman with Aria screamed.
Kale’s ship’s engine sparked, blooming with a blue light so bright my eyes immediately watered. The heat it expelled made the parts of my skin that were exposed start to blister. Varus and the Cogents paused. His lips were drawn into a pin-straight line, calm, even amid a firefight. The inner machinations of his eye lens whirled, the yellow glass reflecting the engine’s star-like radiance.
“Zhaff!” I called out without thinking, my voice hoarse from lack of sleep.
He turned to face me, and then the ion engines ignited. A tail of bluish heat and distortion whipped across the center of the hangar. Varus and the Cogents were caught in the worst of it, the skin and muscle literally vaporized off their bones. Shock threw me to the ground just in time to avoid the same fate. I scrambled around the shipping container to the side Aria was on, jumped in front of her, and pinned our bodies so that only my synthetic leg was touching the boiling surface. It absorbed all the heat, and for the first time since it was installed, I felt the pain.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
KALE TRASS
“Focus on the Cogents!” Maya shouted.
I stuck my rifle around the ramp of the Cora and fired blindly. Pervenio Corp. Cogents bore down on our position from the right, with the Venta officers basically everywhere else. The only reason we weren’t surrounded yet was because Captain Barnes kept his word, deciding shortly after the firefight commenced to try and keep us alive. I knew Aria was holed up somewhere out there because the last thing I saw before Gareth forced me to safety was Madame Venta’s sons do the same to her.
One of my men leaned out from a landing support, but the Cogents popped him in the head. Their push was unremitting. One inch out of cover and their attention was already there, as if they could predict our movements.
“She’s still out there!” I answered.
I peered around the ramp with one eye. Past a wall of Cogents marching at us like yellow-eyed cyclops all in black, I caught a quick glimpse of Aria. She now lay out in front of the fray, with a Venta Collector hunched over punching her. “Aria!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. Gareth jerked me back to safety, bullets whizzing by my ear.
“Gareth, cover me!” Maya said. “I’ll get her.” The Cora’s ramp rumbled as she bounded down from the cargo bay into the firefight.
Gareth held me back with one hand while with the other giving the Cogents as much as they could handle. A bullet nipped him in his gun arm, sending his pulse rifle flying and knocking him off his feet. I grabbed him by the shoulders and helped him scramble back to shelter.
“My lord!” one of my guards yelled. “They’re moving to flank us.”
Off to my right, the Titanborn who’d spoken was peppered with holes as the Cogents got an angle on him. Soon they’d gain favorable position on us as well. There was nowhere to run. Venta Co. had the other side of the Cora completely contained.
I tapped my armor, frantically searching for the switch to activate my helmet com-link. “Prepare to spark engines,” I stammered once I found it. “Full pow—” Bullets sparked on the floor less than a meter away.
My clip was low, but I managed to hit the shooter in the leg. Another yellow eye lens quickly appeared as my gun clicked empty. Gareth tried to pull himself in between us but was too slow. Another of my guards leaped in front of us instead, bullets pummeling him.
“Now!” Maya’s voice echoed over the rattle of gunfire.
Gareth grabbed our savior’s dancing corpse and used it as a shield while he fired upon the Cogents.
“Do it!” I barked over my com-link.
I drew Gareth back behind the ramp right as a dazzling tail of blue lashed across the hangar. The heat it emanated made my face feel like it was on fire, but together we watched. The Cogents were nearest, and their bodies vanished in the brightness. Venta men, Red Wing men… Anyone who wasn’t behind dense enough cover was reduced to ashes. Even the surfaces of the shipping containers facing us melted like hot wax.
It only lasted for a few seconds, but by the time the engines cooled, groans supplanted the shooting. The remaining heat was grueling even with my suit on. Gareth and I had to use each other to support our wobbling legs. I glanced over, noticing the blood oozing out of two bullet holes in his armor as he released the pitiful whimper his tongueless mouth allowed him to.
“Someone…” I smacked my lips. Despite my sealed visor, just opening my mouth made me feel like I was swallowing fire. “Someone help him!”
One of my men staggered over to us, but Gareth shoved him away. Gareth spat a glob of blood into the bottom of his helmet and pounded his fist on his abdomen. Red trickled through a gash in his armor there, the stream merging with the one already running down the length of his arm from a second hole in his left shoulder.
“I’ll be fine,” he signed. “They didn’t go in deep. What are your orders?”
I regarded him. His protruding brow constantly accentuated his grim demeanor; he appeared like the demons the Church of the Three Messiahs claimed we were. Blood and filth sullied his pale, Spartan features, coating the deep wrinkles a man from Titan’s low G should never bear, thanks to working in Saturn’s atmosphere. The two bullets he took were meant for me, and I knew that so long as he could walk, he’d keep fighting. My loyal guardian. The man who was the first to truly make me believe that I could lead anything.
I offered him a nod and turned to face the rest of the hangar. A broiling haze hung on the air, as if we were trapped on Mercury. Distortion from the ion stream and a layer of radiation so copious my body would start devouring itself from the inside out if I didn’t inject anti-rads soon. Even my suit wouldn’t be enough to hold it at bay for too long, and all Aria had on was a dress. I needed to get her on board the Cora quickly.
“Kill Venta,” I muttered to Gareth and the surviving Titanborn. “Then get our dead onto the ship. We’re all going home.”
They slogged through oppressive heat, stepping over shadows scorched into the floor...all that remained of the Cogents and anyone else exposed directly. Karl crawled from behind cover, his leg mangled beyond repair, body singed merely from touching anything in the ion stream’s path.
“You Ringer filth,” he moaned. Gareth raised his rifle with one arm and splattered the brains of Venta Co. royalty all over the burnished floor.
While he handled the other survivors, I went to search for Aria and Maya. My aunt had plotted ahead of time which container to get behind in the event Venta forced our hands. It was one we’d stuffed with spare parts to help resist the heat. The heat had still probably caused her and Aria to pass out. As I made my way toward it, Captain Barnes and a few Red Wing officers emerged from the opposite side of the hangar where the engine’s blaze was weakest. The entry gate was welded shut to seal them in, the wall around it charred along with every security feed.
“Mr. Trass! Are you okay?” Barnes rasped.
Gareth glanced back at me, his eyes asking for permission to open fire. I shook my head, then lumbered toward the captain. Every step felt like I was wading through water. “You kept your word!” I hollered back to him.
“We always do.” He winced as Gareth shot a Venta Collector in the back who reached for a half-liquefied firearm. “What in Earth’s name happened?”
“Luxarn Pervenio’s last failed attempt on my life.”
“Kale,” someone whispered from the other side of the shipping container Maya was supposed to be behind.
I rushed around it to discover her and Aria there as expected, only they weren’t alone. An Earther wearing a grimy duster hid behind my aunt with his pistol aimed at her head. His other hand wrapped tightly around Aria’s arm. All three of their faces were pink from the heat, even Maya’s.
“It’s a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance, Kale Drayton,” the man said. The grit in his voice spoke of booze and a lifetime’s worth of scuffles. He surely wasn’t a Cogent. None of his clothing was marked with the Pervenio emblem. His face, mottled by furrows and faded scars, hid under the shadow of carelessly tousled gray hair. A short, salt-and-pepper beard wrapped his square jawline like he’d forgotten to shave for weeks.
I couldn’t place why, but I recognized him from somewhere. Nobody outside of Darien would’ve known my mother’s surname, which I went by for most of my life. Drayton. I figured maybe he was a former Pervenio officer I’d seen around the city growing up. He had the look of one. His hazel eyes were weary, like he’d already seen everything the world had to offer yet couldn’t keep himself from seeking more.
“Just put a bullet in him,” Maya gargled.
“Kale, listen to me,” Aria implored. “He’s not going to shoot anybody.” That same, rattled expression she wore around Madame Venta contorted her face.
“Listen to her,” the old man said. “Nobody has to die.”
“Then drop the weapon,” I demanded. Gareth appeared by my side so fast it was like he’d teleported. The old man’s eyes widened as he saw him.
“You’re that illegitimate from the Twilight Sun, aren’t you? Clever, kid. You’ve been planning this from the start, not because of the summit. Used that dumb fuck Trevor to get to Javaris, I’ll bet.”
I glanced at Gareth. He shrugged his shoulders. “How did you know that?” I asked.
“A hunch. Been doing this for a long time, Drayton.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“I suggest you listen to him,” Captain Barnes said as he caught up with us. “You are under arrest for violating an official USF contract of suspended hostilities.”
“Red Wing,” the man scoffed. “Why don’t you run along and let the adults ha
ndle this.”
“Why you!” Barnes raised his gun, but I lowered the barrel. Gareth took my cue and forcefully shoved him aside so that he wouldn’t intervene.
“What do you want?” I questioned.
“I want to back out of here alive,” the old man said.
“Nobody is stopping you.”
He smirked, and not like Madame Venta did when she wanted to act like she was in control. There was a blitheness to it, the kind of expression that said he hadn’t been truly afraid of anything in a long time and he wasn’t going to start now.
“I’ll make this simple, Drayton—”
“I said stop calling me that!”
“Ashamed of your mother? I can’t say I blame you, kid. I was about your age when I left my clan family and chose a name of my own. Nothing as fanciful as Trass, but, you know, different strokes.”
“Stop stalling.” I sidled forward, my fingers fidgeting around the trigger of my gun, desperate to put down another Earther who spoke at me like I was nothing. He took a healthy stride back, dragging Maya and Aria with him.
“Please,” Aria urged me. “Stay calm.”
“Just shoot him already,” Maya croaked.
“I’ve got a feeling we’ve both seen enough of that today,” the old man said. He coughed, causing his grip on Maya to loosen for a second. I took a hard step toward him, but he recovered and pressed the barrel of his pistol hard into her temple. Aria raised a hand to keep me back.
“Radiation. Every second you waste, your insides corrode a little more,” I said. I gestured toward the whole of the hangar, still rife with contamination.
“It can’t do a better job than whiskey.”
I drew a deep, grating breath. “I’m going to ask again. What do you want?”
“Aria. She’s walking out of here, straight to treatment and away from you. You can kill me if it makes you feel better, but she walks.”
“In exchange for what?” Aria’s brow furrowed at my query, though I couldn’t tell if she was insulted or relieved. A chance to escape her responsibilities. What I wouldn’t have given for that.
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