Children of Titan Series: Books 1-4: (A Space Opera Thriller Box Set)

by Rhett C. Bruno

  “Dead,” he said.

  He positioned himself on one side of the entrance, his body painted completely red by the light of the overloading core. When I finally caught up to him, I went to the other. That was when I finally decided to draw my pistol.

  “Can you see anybody inside?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “The core is causing interference.”

  I stared at him and saw that the countless systems behind the glass of his eye-lens were working hard to maintain focus. Then I noticed that his lips were twitching, even more than when he’d learned the truth about Aria. I wasn’t sure what discomfort looked like for a Cogent, but I had to imagine that was it.

  “We’ll go in on three,” I said. “Shoot to kill this time.”

  “Agreed,” he said, and for the first time, I heard his voice affected by pain as well.

  I counted down, then we snapped around the corner, guns raised, or at least mine was. Zhaff’s pistol swayed back and forth like he was blind. The roar of the spherical engine core suspended in the center of the circular room was deafening. The pulsating light it emitted as it roiled made it impossible to see clearly. I took a step forward, and out of the corner of my eye, I picked up a shadow moving.

  “Get down!” I yelled.

  I was lucky I’d been holding on to the wall with one hand because I used it to throw myself at my partner and tackle him to the ground just before a barrage of bullets almost took off his head. His firearm flew out of his hand, and with our heads so near, I could hear the clicks of his eye-lens going haywire.

  “The Ring will never be yours, mud stompers!” a man shouted. “We were chosen by Trass!”

  “I’ll take him!” I shouted. “Slow this thing down!” I yanked on the grated floor and sent myself soaring around the edge of the circular walkway wrapping around the core.

  I could see the flash of the Ringer’s rifle’s muzzle as he attempted to track me. Bullets clanged off the walls, ceiling, and floor. If one of them struck the engine, we were all going to be barbecued. I felt a shot graze the top of the plating guarding my calf as I pushed off the wall and changed direction.

  In my ear, Director Sodervall said, “Graves, you have thirty seconds or I’ll have no choice but to shoot that rust-bucket down!”

  “Just hold your damn fire!” I responded into the com-link.

  I aimed my pulse-pistol toward the area where I thought the Ringer was and unloaded the clip. He returned fire, but his shots veered off toward the ceiling until there were no more. My pistol clicked, and just as it did, the engine quieted. The Piccolo slowed down, and the pressure on my chest dwindled until it no longer hurt to breathe again. I remained puffing from exertion regardless.

  The main halogen lights throughout the engine room blinked on, and I saw the Ringer in a tattered white boiler-suit—orange circle printed on his chest—lying on the floor around the bend of the spherical core. At least one of my shots had met its mark because there was a gash in the side of his neck with blood gushing out and spiraling across the room. He gurgled on it, but by the time I was able to drag my weightless body over to him, he was dead. His pulse-rifle drifted harmlessly away, and I grabbed it. It was nothing a Ringer should’ve been able to afford, but there were no markings on it, and the model number was removed. Purchased off the black.

  “Reverse thrusters are activated, Director Sodervall,” Zhaff announced through the com-link, sounding back to his normal self. “We’re in control.”

  Director Sodervall breathed a sigh of relief. “That was too close,” he replied. “Bring her in slowly, and we’ll start cleaning this up.”

  I looked up and saw Zhaff on the other end of the room, holding on to the engine’s manual override control console. He had his hand-terminal connected to it. Even impaired, he got the job done.

  “You all right, Zhaff?” I asked, still panting.

  He turned around to face me, expression blank as ever. “I am,” he stated.

  I imagined that was as close as I was going to get to a “thank you” for saving his life. Though, by slowing the Piccolo, he’d already made things even. That thought alone was enough to make me snicker. Either I was destined never to get an edge on him, or we were actually starting to make a decent team. The only thing I could be sure about was how glad I was not to have countless pounds of pressure towing on my tired body.

  “Nice job,” I said.

  Back to working properly again, Zhaff’s eye-lens angled toward the Ringer’s body and focused. “And you, Malcolm,” he replied.

  I smiled wearily and nodded at him. He nodded back.

  If I weren’t weightless, I would’ve collapsed against the wall and taken a nap. Instead, I demagnetized my boots, closed my eyes, and allowed myself to enjoy weightlessness for what little time I could.

  FOURTEEN

  “I told you, I don’t know anything else,” the girl we found on the command deck of the Piccolo said. Based on our records, her name was Cora, and she sat in one of Pervenio Station’s cramped interrogation rooms. She’d already cried so much during our questioning that her cheeks were permanently stained. In her boiler suit, I could tell her forearm was fractured, but she still hadn’t been permitted to receive medical attention.

  “You’re saying that a man around your age named Kale Drayton was behind this?” Zhaff asked. He sat across from her while I stood leaning against the door. We’d spoken with half of the twenty or so Ringer members of the crew recovered from the Piccolo by then, and many of them had brought up that same name. My and Zhaff’s first legitimate interrogations together as partners. He wanted to start with her, but I insisted they let her get some rest so she could calm her nerves. My little act of generosity to try to loosen her up.

  “No… I mean… I don’t think so,” she said. “But they seemed to know him.”

  “They?” I asked. I knew who she was talking about, but keeping a suspect thinking was a trade secret. Of course, I couldn’t look directly into her soul like Zhaff seemed to be able to do.

  “The people who attacked us,” she clarified, her gaze held on me. She’d spent most of the conversation doing that rather than staring into Zhaff’s eye-lens. I couldn’t say I blamed her. “They took him with them.”

  “Right. He was forcefully taken by three armored soldiers in white other than the one we found on the Piccolo, but only him. And you don’t know why?”

  She shook her head meekly.

  “You’re never going to get anywhere with these people unless you spill a little blood,” Director Sodervall said into my ear. He had me on com-link for the interrogations, claiming that dealing with Ringers was his area of expertise.

  I rolled my eyes before reaching up to switch off the device. I could picture him cursing me under his breath.

  “Show her,” I said to Zhaff.

  He pulled out the hand-terminal we’d found her with on the Piccolo and placed it on the table in front of her. Her eyes bulged again upon the sight of it.

  “What about that thing?” I asked. “Was that really the first time you saw it on the command deck?”

  “I… I can’t remember…” she stammered.

  Zhaff turned his head toward me. I motioned for him to stay quiet before he said what I knew he was going to say. She wasn’t a practiced criminal, and even I could tell she was holding back.

  “C’mon, Cora,” I said, strolling over to the table and leaning down beside her. She didn’t look much like my daughter, but I hoped if I employed the same tone I used to while scolding Aria, then I might be able to get her to talk without needing to get violent. She seemed ready to break.

  “If it were up to my partner here,” I said, “there’d be officers snapping your fingers off until you told him what he wanted to know. Being that you’re still alive, I’d say this can get a whole lot worse for you unless you start answering our questions truthfully.”

  Cora continued to stare at the device in silence. A heavy tear rolled down her cheek, and I could tel
l words were forming in her throat. “I saw it… with Kale,” she said finally. She pointed at the side of the slim device, at a series of scratches along the edge. “It was his, I think.”

  “See how easy that was?” I asked.

  “He wouldn’t do something like this.” She sniveled. “I swear it! In the name of Trass, I swear it.”

  I slammed my hands down on the table right in front of her and said, “Because of him, all of you on the Piccolo went hurtling toward Pervenio Station like a bomb. He was going to kill you!”

  “It wasn’t him!” She grasped my arm so abruptly that Zhaff jumped to his feet and had his hand wrapped around the grip of his pistol. “I know him. It wasn’t him… It wasn’t him.”

  I took a deep breath, peeled her fingers off me, and stepped away. Her broken arm made her wince. Zhaff released his weapon.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t.” I waved toward the officer outside the door. “We’re done with you for now. And would you get her arm looked at already?” He offered a halfhearted nod before grabbing her.

  “It wasn’t him!” she screamed repeatedly as the officer dragged her out, not stopping until she was well down the hall and thrown back into one of Pervenio Station’s famous cells. They were three-by-three-meter rectangular boxes with blank surfaces on every side except for the floor, which popped through the exterior of the station. That surface was glass, and the thin barrier between breathable air and deadly vacuum was said to be an airlock that could be opened at any time if someone misbehaved. At least, that was what the prisoners were told. I’d never actually seen someone spaced through one of them.

  “Malcolm, she knows more,” Zhaff said.

  “She’s not going anywhere, even if she does,” I replied. “Besides, it’s nothing that will help us. Or can you not see it?”

  “See what?” Zhaff asked.

  I grinned. “You’ve never been with a girl, have you?”

  “I have been beside many females.”

  “I mean been with one. Intimately. Or do they cut off your…” I gestured to his hips. “You know, when you enter the Initiative.” It was a very real possibility based on everything I’d learned about him. The thought made my stomach turn over, and I felt the need to check my groin just to make sure everything was still there.

  “They did not. However, as with all members of the Cogent Initiative, my ability to reproduce naturally has been impaired.”

  I could only imagine how Pervenio Corp went about that. Somehow, a vasectomy seemed too simple a solution.

  “Well, there’s more to it than just making kids,” I said. “No wonder you are… how you are.”

  He didn’t allow any irritation to show, but his eye-lens focused on my face as if it were looking through me. “Malcolm,” he said, “I do not see how this is relevant to our investigation.”

  “Apparently, you weren’t taught everything. Cora obviously has feelings for this Kale fellow. I’m sure we could get his life story out of her, but I bet it’s like that of any other Ringer who’s been pushed too far.”

  Zhaff considered what I said for a moment before stating, “I do not know if I agree with your assessment.”

  “Trust me.” I placed my hand on his shoulder and sat him down. “After we’re done here, I swear I’m going to take you out for a night with the best woman I can find in Sol and then you’ll understand. We’d be wasting our time with Cora. She’s no criminal. Please tell me you can see that at least.”

  “I will rely on your experience in the matter for now.”

  “My experience.” I laughed. “So did you find out any more about Kale Drayton before she was called in?”

  “Yes.” Zhaff pulled down his own hand-terminal and quickly perused the screen. “Security says his name was listed on the manifest for the Piccolo. He is from the lower ward of Darien Colony, level B-2. Security shows him at the center of a riot in the Darien Upper Ward three days ago, before he departed for his harvesting shift.”

  “And they let him leave?”

  “It does not appear that he partook.”

  “Sure.”

  “Security has already raided his hollow since we learned of his name from the captive named Desmond and found nothing. His only living relative is a mother who was contained in the Darien quarantine zone. Katrina Drayton.”

  “Dead?”

  “Gone. After the raid on the Piccolo, she disappeared from the facility and cannot be located.”

  “Damn… so after all that, he’s just another worthless lead.”

  “It appears to be. Director Sodervall has been informed about the situation, and he will initiate a Ring-wide search for both Draytons.”

  “I doubt they’ll find anything. The Children of Titan somehow got her out of a secure q-zone. They’re something else.”

  I sat on the table and rested my head on my hand. My neck was unbelievably sore from the Piccolo. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the bright-orange circle on the screen of Kale’s hand-terminal.

  “What about that thing?” I asked.

  “The hand-terminal was altered to allow the communications systems of the Piccolo to penetrate the Pervenio network,” Zhaff replied. “I have been unable to discover its other capabilities or trace its origin. The programming is beyond my proficiency, or is perhaps unbreakable now that it has been utilized.”

  “Beyond you?”

  He didn’t look ashamed as he nodded, but for whatever reason, I felt like he was.

  “Damn these people. Why would they leave it behind for us to find, then? We know the one operative was left behind to give his life crashing the ship into the station. But the broadcast was already transmitted. Seems like too simple a mistake.” The thought of another Ringer willing to commit suicide gave me a shudder. The director had the man’s body scanned, and as with the bomber on Earth, there wasn’t a single match in the database to tell us who it was.

  “Perhaps the program needed more time to infiltrate Solnet?” Zhaff said. “I can spend more time analyzing it.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe they left it as if that damn orange circle were a middle finger. Like they knew even you wouldn’t be able to crack it to find them.”

  I snatched the device and spun it around. Physically, it looked like any other Venta-distributed hand-terminal of the same model, but if Zhaff couldn’t crack it, then the Children of Titan were even more skilled than I thought. He’d sliced into the Piccolo’s engine controls in less than twenty seconds, after all. But it was our only lead. We were going to need to find someone to look at it who was even more talented with programming than Zhaff. Someone like…

  “Rylah,” I whispered.

  “Sorry, Malcolm, I did not hear you clearly,” Zhaff said.

  “I have an old connection nearby. She goes by Rylah. Whether that’s her real name or not, I’m not sure. The only thing I know for a fact is that she has the capability of sending out a recording like that if she wanted to. I’ve seen her hack into the Pervenio security mainframe on Darien like she was doing a children’s puzzle. If something goes down in the Ring, she knows at least a little about it.”

  “And you believe it was her?”

  “Nah. She never was one to play sides. Honestly, I’m not even sure whether she’s a Ringer or not. Has that hybrid look like Cora. She’s helped me out of a few jams before, though.”

  “I will have to know more about her before I agree or disagree.”

  I sighed. “She’s an information broker holed up deep in the Darien lower ward on Titan. You mentioning that the Drayton kid was from there made me think of her. It’ll be a steep price, but if anybody can find some digital breadcrumbs about who’d uploaded that recording, it’s her. If we find that person, I have a feeling they’ll know not only where the people who attacked the Piccolo disappeared to, but where our smugglers from Earth are.”

  Zhaff leaned in, his luminous eye-lens poring over my face. “Why do you seem hesitant?”

  “I’ve been doing this for a long
time, Zhaff. Rylah and I, we have a history.”

  “You do not trust her, then?”

  “Trust has nothing to do with it.”

  Rylah didn’t allow many people into her life unless they were willing to pay a hefty sum, but we’d been intimate more than a few times while I was stationed in the Ring years back. She had a thing for collectors, or so I was told. I just hoped she didn’t take it personally that I’d lost touch with her.

  I may not have been sure if she was a full-on Ringer or not, but I knew she’d lived on Titan long enough to have adapted many of their tendencies. They could be very sensitive about people they considered to be their mates leaving, although she hadn’t made an effort to contact me either. The last time I’d heard from her also happened to be the last time I saw Aria, so I usually tried not to think about it if I didn’t have to. But bringing Rylah’s name up out loud caused the memory to come rushing back to me as clear as day…

  I sat on the edge of my messy bed in a room on the highest level of the Pervenio-run hotel in New Beijing, Mars. It was a fancy place with painted walls trimmed with burnished steel and faux wood, and a beautiful viewport looking out over the colony. The planet’s thin atmosphere gave everything beyond it a reddish tint, even the other tall towers rising beneath New Beijing’s four-kilometer-wide segmented dome enclosure. A few hover-cars darted by, hauling freight from one of the nearby vertical farms.

  The shower ran in the bathroom where Aria washed off Elios’s blood. She’d been drenched head-to-toe in it when we sneaked back in. I myself was covered in hardened muck and a stench so foul that I would’ve thrown up if I wasn’t already so used to it. I held a half-drained bottle of liquor in my hand. I wasn’t sure what kind because it was unmarked. I’d snatched it from a dealer on the way up and didn’t really care what I was drinking so long as it dulled my mind. It had a relatively smooth taste, considering how little it cost.

  “Trying to start a family without me, Mal?” a woman asked me, her voice sounding like it came from somewhere far away. “Who is he?”

  I glanced down at the hand-terminal sitting on my lap, almost having forgotten that I’d made the call to Rylah, it’d taken so long to connect. She had skin as pale and smooth as the paper in ancient books, and lips colored bright red. As far as beautiful offworlders go, I’d say she was second to none.