“Earth has come to wipe us out,” I continued. “They’ve brought more ships than any of you have seen in a lifetime. But do you know who works those ships? Wage slaves and mudstomper cowards. They fight for nothing. Dream of nothing. Not like us.”
I surveyed the eager Titanborn faces in the crowd. They believed in what we were doing with everything in their hearts. My people who had been tortured and beaten for half a century. Who’d had their families shoved into quarantines after Earthers spread their sicknesses and charged impossible fees for treatment. Only one among them looked solemn. At the far side of the hangar, my mother watched in silence. Our eyes locked.
“They don’t understand what it means to believe,” I said, staring straight at her. “What it means to know deep down in your heart that you belong somewhere. Titan is our home! Ice runs through our veins. It’s time we show Earth what it means to live in fear. Stand with me this one last time, and I promise you all, we’ll never know their sickness again. From ice to ashes!”
All of Darien shook as my people repeated those words over and over. I’d never heard anything so loud. Even the thunder and lightning constantly lashing across Titan’s stormy skies couldn’t compare. I closed my eyes and raised my arms, pushing them to get louder and louder. It felt like I was in a dream. When I reopened them, all that changed was that my mother was no longer watching.
“Prepare the fleet,” I ordered Maya. “Don’t engage. Let them panic after they receive the packages, and I promise you, Madame Venta’s orders will be ignored. Good luck.”
I turned to reboard the Cora, but Maya seized my wrist. “Come back to us, Kale,” she whispered into my ear, so close that the smooth surface of her scars brushed my neck. “You hear me? Come back.”
I answered with only a grunt, then entered the Cora and sealed the ramp. The survivors and healthy members from the squadron of soldiers who’d accompanied us to Mars awaited in the cockpit. Eight Titanborn, fully armored. The elite crew of soldiers selected by Gareth prepared to die for their world if it came to it.
“Lord Trass, as soon as the hangar is cleared, we’re prepared to leave,” the youngest of them addressed me, bowing his blonde head. I still had no idea what his name was.
“Excellent. All we need now is our pilot.” I stalked through the corridors of my ship, toward the hall of sleep pods that made a journey across the vastness of space feel like seconds. Three of them were filled with Javaris, Malcolm Graves, and Aria.
I drew myself over Aria’s pod and stared through the glass. She was peaceful inside, sleeping, right where I’d left her ever since she went along with Mazrah’s plan to escape. The mother of my child. Our ambassador. There was a time when I thought she could help me forget Cora, but all I could think about when I saw her now was the woman she could never live up to.
I tapped the control panel, and Aria’s pod opened with a hiss. Cold steam poured out, and the gelatinous substance formed to her body liquefied and drained away. Her eyes snapped open, in a state of shock, until they fell upon me.
“Kale,” she whispered, voice still ragged from being under. She tried to sit up and reach me on her own, but I wrapped my arm around her back and helped her out. Her stomach grew more from our child every day, and until he was born, I couldn’t have her overexert herself.
I leaned her against the pod. She rubbed her bleary eyes.
“What happened?” she asked.
“You tried to run,” I said, matter-of-factly.
“Kale. I... It wasn’t what it looked like.”
“At least have the damn decency not to lie to me.” I slammed my fist on her sleep pod, bending the lid. “You said you told me everything, but not about Mazrah and your father. How long were you planning to run?”
“Just listen to me!”
“I’m so tired of listening. Everyone told me not to trust you from the beginning, but I ignored them. They warned me that you were only out for yourself like a true Earther.”
“That’s not true.”
“Well, you picked a hell of a way to show it. You want to know what I think? I think you were planning to leave the moment your summit failed and I let you visit your old home. You and your father were going to disappear until Venta mucked things up.”
“I told you. I had no idea he was alive.”
“More lies from the mouth of a whore who sold her body and soul to Madame Venta.” She slapped me across the face. It stung, but I didn’t budge. I edged closer until her back pressed against the wall and I was glaring down at her from almost half a meter above.
“Do you think I wanted that?” she asked. “I did what I had to do to survive after I was left alone, just like any of you would have.”
“You’re not one of us. The only reason you’re not in a cell with Mazrah is because of who you’re carrying. And the moment he’s born—”
“You’ll what?” she said. “Kill me like you did Orson Fring? And probably Mazrah by now. You’re right, Kale; I did want to leave. I wanted to take my baby and run to the other side of Sol just so he’d be safe from you. The man I met all those long months ago believed in something, but this? I refuse to sit back and watch you destroy our son like my father did to me.”
“Well, lucky for you, after we’re done, you won’t have to watch anything. You can go to Earth for all I care. But Titan is his birthright. I’m doing all of this so that he and every one of our children can grow up in a world where we’re more than garbage.”
“No, Kale. You’re doing all of this for you.”
I bit my lip. How could I have been so blind? How did I ever think she understood what we went through, when all she was was a two-faced rank climber? First Madame Venta, now me. I’d never wanted to toss somebody off my ship so badly, but I caught a glimpse of her bulging stomach and controlled myself.
“Get in the cockpit,” I demanded. “We’re leaving.”
She scoffed. “We’re not going anywhere with you.”
I drew my pulse pistol and aimed it through the viewport on Malcolm’s sleep pod. “You’re no longer our ambassador, Aria. You’ll take me to Luxarn Pervenio, or you’ll watch your father be spaced the same way his boss killed Cora and so many others.”
She threw herself in front of the sleep pod so there was no way I could shoot him without going through her stomach. “This is between us!” she said. “Leave him out of it.”
“It’s too late for that.” I pulled her away and pushed her into the waiting arms of one of my nameless guards. “I want eyes on her at all times,” I ordered.
“Let’s go, Earther lover,” he sneered as he prodded her along.
My crewmates aboard the Piccolo once called me that because I didn’t like to start trouble with the captain or the rest of the Earther crew members. I wasn’t sure that I’d even recognize that quiet, cowardly Ringer I used to be in the mirror anymore. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
MALCOLM GRAVES
Titanborn guards directed me through the Cora. I stumbled after every one of their pushes since my old electromag band was returned and had my synthetic leg neutered and unable to bend. They snickered. My hands were cuffed behind my back; otherwise, I would’ve smacked the smirks off their faces.
They dumped me onto the command deck. Then, before I could manage a breath, they heaved me up and into one of the seats along the back wall. They kept my arms cuffed behind my back as they locked in my launch restraints.
“Glad you could finally join us, Malcolm,” Kale said. He sat in the copilot’s chair. Beside him, flying the Cora, was Aria.
“Aria,” I rasped. “Are you okay?”
She went to look back, but the guard directly behind her straightened her head. He held a pulse pistol against the back of her head.
“I’m fine, Dad,” she said, failing to contain her frustration.
“Where the hell are you taking us?” I said.
“I told you,” Kale said. “We’re going on a family trip.
”
The Cora’s thrusters kicked in, and we shot forward into Titan’s stormy sky. Lightning flashed all around us. The ship rattled and whined, battered by an atmosphere so dense a human being could fly in it. G forces shoved me against the back on my chair, crushing my arms behind me. It felt like they were going to pop out of my shoulder sockets. All the aches in my torso flared up, worse than ever...and then we were through.
Weightlessness took hold. I finally felt like I could breathe again. What I saw in space immediately stole the air back from my lungs. Dozens of ships emerged alongside us, with lights of more winking all around Saturn’s moons and stations—everything that comprised the cosmological archipelago known as the Ring. The planet’s icy disks slashed across the corner of the viewport, wrapping a planet swirling with more colors than an Earthside rainbow. People said Saturn was the most stunning sight in all of Sol, but I was hardly able to pay it any attention.
More ships hovered beyond the Ring’s most distant moons. The sunlight blooming along their flanks revealed the colors of Pervenio Corp., Venta Co. and Red Wing Company. And as the Cora banked away from Saturn to face them, I realized just how many there were. They filled the entire breadth of my vision. Space fleets were the stuff of fiction. Sol had never known an interstellar war before because the USF was too focused on expansion to let any rival factions rise that would require one.
Collectors, like I once had been, ended wars before they began. Then Kale rewrote the book. Now, I was gazing upon an armada clearly intended for one purpose—to take back the Ring by any means necessary.
“Are you really planning to take that on?” I asked him.
“Relax, old man,” Kale replied. “Aria, open up coms to Maya and listen in.”
She hesitated for a moment as she too got lost admiring the size of the Earther fleet. Maybe that’s the wrong word for it, but for a girl from the sewers of Mars, it was a hell of a thing to see. Doesn’t matter how many missions I smuggled her on around Sol.
“Aria,” Kale repeated crossly.
The guard nudged her in the back of the head with the gun. She shook her head and focused, fingers flurrying across the control screen.
“We’re reading an awful lot of movement down there, Maya Trass,” Madame Venta said over the coms. “Any closer and we’ll begin targeting.”
“You wanted your people back,” Maya replied. “Here you go.”
Suddenly, all the Titanborn ships stopped moving. “Engage radar jamming, mask our heat signature, and take us in slow,” Kale whispered to Aria, as if anybody outside the command deck could hear him.
Aria did as he asked without question, even though I could tell she wanted to be on the Cora even less than I did. I’d raised a smart girl somehow. Not impulsive like the king sitting beside her. All the other Titan ships were stopping, but not us. We decelerated and remained cruising straight toward the heart of the blockade.
“Are you going to tell me what the plan is before or after we slam into them?” she asked.
Kale pointed through the viewport, where a cluster of shipping containers zoomed by us. Then more. From every corner of the Ring, shadows of containers blocked out the stars.
“Look at them,” Kale marveled. “Earthers neatly packaged and shipped back to their own people like all the shiny products they waste their lives trying to buy.”
“You’re handing them over just like that?”
His lack of an answer revealed everything. The Children of Titan had been crafty devils since the first time I encountered them in New London, Earth, almost a year back. All I could so now was sit back and watch.
The Cora’s unparalleled stealth systems kept us in the dark as we approached, a short distance behind a cluster of containers. A fancifully designed frigate with swooping wings that served no real purpose glided toward one. The trademark Venta overlapping Vs were covered by the name of the vessel—the Aphrodite.
Its airlock extended after its engines fired in reverse, latching onto one of the containers. Shadows scurried through the glassy tube of the airlock, the sparks of fusion cutters flickering against the blackness of space. The moment they breached the container, it blew. The side of the frigate was split open, silvery metal shards slashing the sleek hull.
More blasts simultaneously went off throughout the Earther fleet as they attempted to open the containers. It was like one of the fireworks displays over New London on M-Day.
“You’re killing them all?” Aria said, incredulous.
“No,” Kale replied. “We just forgot to mention that half of them are empty.”
A handful more blasts boomed in the darkness, sending the Earther fleet into disarray. And that was when I realized what happens when a wealthy aristocrat leads an army against people that have spent their entire lives fighting. Kale saw their fleet and didn’t see an insurmountable mass of alloy and ordnance. He saw another scrap to claw his way out of.
The space between the Earther and Titan fleets was promptly filled by a screen of debris and Pervenio Corp. containers half-filled with real people and half-filled with explosives. Madame Venta couldn’t fire upon the Titan fleet at the risk of killing all the captives, and they couldn’t fly past the containers to engage; otherwise, all of Kale’s hostages would soon suffocate.
And Kale wasn’t done yet. Clinging to the backs of those containers that remained intact were more Ringer soldiers in their powered armor. Raiding parties, ready to give their lives to further confuse the enemy while the Earthers hid in the safety of their expensive ships. They pushed off across space in squadrons, gripping hands and soaring toward the crippled vessels in the Earther fleet, now already blown open for them to invade with ease.
Madame Venta’s ship, the Aphrodite, was able to divert power to engines and fall back to avoid them, but it was too little too late. Titan was going to make them lose all taste for battle without firing a warhead.
“You son of a bitch, Trass!” Madame Venta’s screams directed at Maya echoed throughout the command deck. “I will kill each and every one of you, do you hear me, you bitch? We won’t leave until you all starve.”
“I hope your people don’t miss us too much,” Maya answered. “Have fun cleaning up our mess for once.”
“All captains, fall back and expand the blockade perimeter! Disperse medical evacs to each container, but for Earth’s sake, probe them before breach.”
Their coms cut out, and then Maya opened a direct line to us. “You’re clear, Lord Trass. It’ll take them weeks to regroup, and they’ll think twice about engaging with thousands of civilians on board their ships. We’ll send the second wave out the moment things start clearing up.”
“They don’t get near Titan, Maya,” Kale said. “Is that clear?”
“They’ll never want to come back. Advance teams have begun raiding their damaged ships throughout the Ring. They’ll space as many of them as they can.”
“Make the survivors see it.”
“They will. From ice to ashes.”
“From ice to ashes.”
Kale ended the transmission in the middle of a response from Maya. He leaned back and drew a deep breath. We had front row seats to his handiwork. To all the flashes throughout the Ring of gunfire and more empty containers filling the void with shrapnel.
“The damn fools,” I marveled with him. I couldn’t help but be impressed. “They should have never come here.”
“And Maya didn’t think it would work,” Kale said, more pleased with himself then I’d ever heard him. “Aria, take us past the blockade at full burn.”
Hearing him stole back her attention from the chaos. She took the yoke and sped forward, the pressure again constricting me. It wasn’t like she had much choice but to listen. We were getting close to the Venta fleet now and were within firing range. The Cora masterfully weaved around debris and drifting ships. We rolled under a frigate with failing engines, then darted up over a chunk of shrapnel large enough to cleave us in two.
It wasn�
��t the best time to go all proud father, but it was preferable to watching Kale win again. Madame Venta’s lines were completely broken. Half the ships we passed were speeding away while others drifted, unsure what to do. They were captains of commerce and leisure vessels, not commanders. Their fleet still more than doubled Kale’s even with the damage, but I was damn certain they’d push no further than a blockade. It was like they had learned nothing from when Pervenio Corp. was ousted from the Ring. Totally unprepared.
The last line of retreating Venta Co. ships passed overhead, leaving only star-speckled blackness ahead. No targeting alerts chirped from the controls. No coms came through warning us to fall back or we’d be fired upon.
“We’re through the blockade,” Aria exhaled.
“Are you sure?” Kale said.
“We’re not dust, are we?”
“Watch your tone while addressing Lord Trass, traitor,” the guard behind her growled.
“Listen to him, Aria,” I said. “We wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings.”
Kale unfastened his restraints and pulled himself vertically using the ceiling. “Set a course for Undina that takes us as far from Mars and Jupiter as possible. Unless you’d like to be turned to dust.”
I laughed. “You’re really going to go after him? I knew you were suicidal, but if this is all the men you brought to break in there, then you’re crazier than I thought. Buried under rock, surrounded by Cogents, and oh, did I mention it’s only a stone’s throw from Earth?”
Kale turned to face me, beaming. When I had first met him in person, he seemed conflicted, but something had changed since he’d spared me. Maybe it was his mute friend dying; maybe it was having Orson Fring, one of his own people, killed, or being betrayed by family. Maybe all of it. I couldn’t say for sure, but a man who takes pleasure in the killing part of a fight is the one who belongs in a cell most. I’d learned that from Director Sodervall thirty years ago, when he was just a lowly Collector training a newcomer who ran away from home.
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