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

by Rhett C. Bruno

  “You’re probably right, but you made the biggest mistake possible. You made this personal.”

  Lucas’s eyelids spread wide, but then he unexpectedly started to snicker like a madman. Until the pain made him wince. “You can’t kill me, Graves,” he rasped. “There’s no price on my head.”

  “You’re right, there isn’t.” I kneeled over him and turned back to Aria. She stood beside David’s body, watching us with tears in her eyes. “Turn away sweetie.” She listened. Good girl.

  I pressed my gun against Lucas’s chest and leaned over to whisper to him. “This one is for me.” The captives gasped as the shot rang out. I watched with pleasure as the life fled from his eyes. After a few seconds, they were vacant as one of his abominations.

  I stood, wiped my pistol on my duster and holstered it. Aria still held her hands over her eyes. The captives around me started begging to be freed while the fake androids by Lucas’s body stared, unsure what to do. Across the room, Jimmy Fring peaked out of his cage, arms shaking as he crept out slowly. They could all wait.

  I returned to my daughter and pulled her to my chest. “It’s okay, Aria,” I said softly. “Everything’s okay now.”

  “I told him what you said to…” she whimpered. “I was so scared.”

  “I know, baby. You did nothing wrong.”

  I heard feet shuffling and quickly raised my pistol. A reflex, especially considering I was out of bullets.

  “P…p…please take me away from here,” Jimmy Fring said meekly, scared to get too close to his savior. I wasn’t surprised. He ran away from home to see the world, and he got to experience the worst of it. A Collector’s world. My world. I squeezed Aria tight and kissed her head, hoping she’d never try to do the same but vowing that if she did I’d make sure she was prepared. Monsters like Lucas Mannekin waited across Sol to take advantage of the naive and the helpless. He wasn’t the first one I’d put down—though he was the first I’d ever killed for free.

  “You sure you’ve had enough running?” I replied.

  “Please, Mr. Collector. I want to go home.”

  I chuckled, then without letting go of my beautiful daughter, sent a message from my hand-terminal to my Pervenio Director.

  GOT JIMMY FRING. NEED A NEW TRANSPORT SENT TO MY COORDINATES IMMEDIATELY FOR PICKUP.

  They’d be pissed when I loaded up all of Lucas’s tortured subjects and sent them off to find new homes, but nobody deserved to be stripped of mind and body. The others…Lucas’s living dolls …I had no idea what to do with them. Rebecca kneeled beside her maker, eyes wet like a lost puppy. Her brain had been reprogrammed to respond only to a man who was now dead. That last shred of her soul, her purpose, stripped away.

  The decision was probably above my pay grade, but maybe they’d all vanish in an accidental explosion from an overactive fusion core just like there had been at Lucas’s old Mann Industries facility on Mars. Before that, however, somebody needed to patch up my wound and get my aging body up and working correctly again.

  “Hey Jimmy,” I said.

  He swallowed hard. “Y… yes.”

  I nodded toward Rebecca. “How about a massage before we go?”

  This concludes The Collector, but Titanborn , the first book in the Children of Titan Series, picks up Malcolm’s story, ten years later, and the epic has just begun!

  Where will Malcolm's next mission take him?

  Can he keep his daughter hidden from his employers, or will he lose her forever?

  Find out what happens next!

  Grab Titanborn now!

  The series is also available on Audible, performed by the award-winning RC Bray, narrator of The Martian.

  Don’t have Audible? Get two free audiobooks now when you sign up.

  Get the whole series on audio here.

  THE CHILDREN OF TITAN, ORIGINS

  THE INTERVIEW FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

  The next is a Nebula Award-nominated story about the first men and women Darien Trass sent to the Ring.

  142 Hours Until Impact…

  “Come in,” I said.

  My office door creaked open. Sgt. Hale, my head of security, ushered in the Titan Project’s next candidate. I quickly downed the remnants of a glass of lukewarm whiskey in my liver-spotted hand to calm my mind, then placed it down behind my computer screen. Sgt. Hale and I exchanged a nod before he exited, leaving myself and the candidate alone.

  The man didn’t make it more than a step before he stopped to stare out of my window at the tremendous spaceship docked in the center of my compound. It was the pinnacle of my illustrious technical career which had left me one of the richest men on the planet. At least until a massive asteroid was discovered hurtling toward Earth and money became as useless as the paper it was printed on. People had given it some creative nicknames like “The Devil’s Fist,” or “Ragna-Rock,” but in my opinion, there was no reason to call it anything different than what it was. The end of Earth as we knew it.

  “Congratulations on making it this far, Mr.—” I hesitated at his name. I’d conducted thousands of interviews by then and was beginning to lose count. I glanced at the already opened resume on my computer. He was Frank Drayton. Twenty-seven years old and already a world-renowned horticulturalist. Not the most exciting job, but a necessary addition for a colony on a hostile world. He was marked for possible acceptance, but nobody got a spot in the Titan Project without me looking them in the eyes first.

  “Drayton,” I finished.

  He blinked as if waking from a dream and hurried over to my desk. “Director Darien Trass. You can’t even begin to understand how much of an honor it is to meet you,” he said. He extended a trembling hand.

  I shook it without standing. It was clammy as a teenage boy’s on a first date. I quickly let go. “I’d prefer we’d never have to meet at all, Mr. Drayton,” I said.

  His gaze turned downward. He said nothing.

  “Relax,” I said. “I only wish the world’s circumstances were different.” I gestured toward the hard, plastic chair set on the other side of my desk. “Please, sit.”

  He released a string of low, panicked laughs as he sat down. His index finger immediately started tapping on the chair’s arm. I took that moment to study him. Heavy beads of sweat rolled down his forehead, and he was in desperate need of a shave. The loose-fitting suit he wore could have used the attention of a decent tailor. Not that I could judge him for that. There were probably none left open on Earth to visit.

  I wasn’t surprised by anything about him. It was the same situation with almost every candidate who entered my office. After all, it’s not every day a human being has to interview for a chance to escape the end of the world.

  “Now,” I began. “There’s little time left, so let’s try to keep this as brief as possible. In this room, your accomplishments are no longer in question. Extraordinary as they may be, I assure you the other candidates are equally impressive. You’re here, Mr. Drayton, so that I can find out who you are.”

  “I…” He swallowed and took another deep breath. His finger stopped tapping, and then he looked me directly in the eyes for the first time and said: “I understand.”

  “Good. I presume my assistant, Kara, already briefed you on the Project and showed you around the compound?”

  “She did.” He looked back through the window. “I didn’t realize how big the ship was until I got up here though.”

  “Not big enough,” I lamented.

  This time I joined him in staring at the colossal ship propped up on the opposite side of my half-mile-wide compound. It had the appearance of a tapered skyscraper wrapped in bowed metal plates. The final layers of radiation shielding were being installed by a carefully selected workforce before its imminent departure when the only plasmatic pulse drives ever to be used non-experimentally would allow it to reach Saturn in two years.

  Mr. Drayton was awestruck. The view made me want to crawl inside a bottle. It’s not that I wasn’t proud of the ship,
but the pale mark in the blue sky above—the asteroid growing ever closer to becoming a meteorite—was where my gaze always tended to wander. There, and at the horde of people camped in the desert on the other side of the tall, concrete wall surrounding the compound, hoping to earn a spot onboard. Armed security drones swept the area to keep them at bay along with the many security officers posted along it.

  Mr. Drayton turned back to me. “How many can it hold?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The ship. How many people can it hold?”

  “Three thousand,” I stated. “Four hundred and six spots have already been filled by my remaining staff. Individual accomplishments aside, I assure you that they had to meet the same, stringent criteria as candidates such as yourself. They’re all that remains of Trass Industries. It felt wrong to ask anyone to help me construct the Titan Project without guaranteeing them a spot on it.”

  The conditions for selection were simple, at least in that they eliminated more than ninety-nine percent of humanity. Other than having to bear an appreciable level of expertise in a field that would benefit the new world, every candidate had to be between eighteen and thirty-five years old. They also had to be in optimal physical health and cleared of all chronic diseases. Kara administered the physicals and nobody who failed ever made it through my door. Those untethered by marriage were preferred since their significant others would have to meet the same conditions. Lastly, anyone with young children was eliminated. My research team feared that an underdeveloped body would be ravaged by the trip through zero-g. I also wasn’t keen on accepting anybody willing to leave their offspring to die alone.

  “Three thousand…” Mr. Drayton muttered after a lengthy silence.

  “Yes,” I said. “No more, no less. Every traveler will be kept in a state-of-the-art hibernation chamber for the duration of the two-year journey. The low activity state will help us conserve the limited resources we’re able to bring until we can establish a sustainable colony on Titan. It’s my job to whittle the list of more than one million suitable candidates to that minuscule number. Sneak in one extra, and I might as well invite the mob camped out there.”

  He glanced nervously back through the window. “Are those really all candidates?” he asked. “Everyone I passed claimed to have met with you.”

  “Not all of them. You can thank whichever rejected candidate decided to break our NDA and leak what was happening here for that. I had to promise fifty spots on board to some of the finest soldiers in the world to keep the project safe. We’re lucky we’re in the middle of the Arizona desert; otherwise, I’d need more.”

  “It sure wasn’t easy getting out here with all the airlines shut down. It took me a day just to find a gas station that wasn’t abandoned or ransacked.”

  “Yes … I suppose I was crazy for thinking I could keep the Titan Project safe from the doomsday hysteria.”

  Ever since the leak, I couldn’t leave the Trass Industries Compound without being hounded or having my life threatened. Rich, poor, it didn’t matter. People had begun to realize the united efforts of governments around the world to divert the asteroid were futile, and that the only way to ensure survival was to leave Earth behind. Other corporations were developing space-stations that would orbit our homeworld or attempting to establish colonies on the moon. But with so many people being crammed onto them, an unpredictable percentage would likely suffocate before their populations leveled out to suit their life-support systems. The safety of my compound was indebted to a majority of people choosing to camp outside of those projects rather than crave a trip to an uninhabitable moon millions of miles away.

  I sighed. “It doesn’t matter anymore. In a week the asteroid will hit, and we’ll be on our way to Titan.”

  “Why not Mars, or Europa, or anywhere else closer? Your message didn’t say.”

  “As you well know, there’s no second Earth in our solar system, Mr. Drayton. I chose based on potential. Titan and Saturn host a wealth of resources which will make generating enough energy to stay warm relatively simple once we repurpose the ship into a settlement. The thick atmosphere also eliminates radiation from the list of concerns. We’ll need all the help we can get. Establishing renewable sources of food on any world not meant for life will take time.”

  For the first time, Mr. Drayton’s eyes glinted with the confidence of a man who had risen to the top of his field. “I think I can help with that,” he boasted.

  “I’ve met with three similarly qualified candidates who claimed the same,” I countered. I lifted my finger before he could offer another predictable response. He slouched into his chair and allowed me to continue. “As I indicated earlier, your accomplishments are no longer in question. It was your highly scrutinized thesis on vertical farming at Cornell that encouraged me to reach out to you. I appreciate boldness. I can design all the colonizing spaceships I want to, but without food, they’ll be little more than oversized, metal tombs.”

  Mr. Drayton perked up. “You read that?”

  “I’m always thorough with my research.”

  “Of course you are.” He leaned forward and wrapped his hands around the edge of my desk. “I’ve read all of your work,” he said. “Your 2021 paper about how you pioneered your zero-emissions, automated-vehicular-network to reduce traffic and accidents in Detroit was life-changing.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Life-changing? That’s new. It all seems rather trivial compared to what we’re working on here, doesn’t it?”

  The color drained from Mr. Drayton’s cheeks. I could see his lip twitching ever so slightly as his brain struggled to come up with a response that wouldn’t seem foolish.

  “I appreciate the compliment,” I intervened. I folded my hands over my lap and established direct eye-contact with him. “Okay, as long I’ve answered all of your questions, I’m going to ask you a few of my own. I want you to be as honest as possible.”

  He nodded. His finger started to tap the chair again, but he held my gaze.

  “Okay,” I said. “Your records state that you’re not married and don’t have children. Do you currently have any manner of significant other?”

  Mr. Drayton shifted in his seat. “Not for about two years,” he said, clearly perturbed. “Divorced.”

  “Ah. I have had plenty of those walk through these doors, eager to get away. It’ll get easier with time.”

  He exhaled. “I hope.”

  I turned to my screen for a moment, trying to make it seem like I was reading something so I didn’t rush things. After countless interviews, it was difficult for them not to feel rehearsed. “So, where were you when you heard about the asteroid?” I asked.

  He continued looking in my direction, though his stare grew unfocused. I could read the struggle all over his face.

  “Mr. Drayton?” I said.

  “Sorry.” He shook his head and reestablished eye contact. “I was with my ex-wife. I suppose you could say we didn’t agree over why the asteroid is going to hit Earth. She turned her complete attention to our church and trying to repent for man’s sins so God might reconsider his judgment. It was like she completely forgot about our…” He paused for a few seconds to gather himself before continuing. “Anyway, I tried to go along with it while I could, but I decided that I’d rather take a chance at living.”

  “We all responded differently.” I remained indifferent on the why’s. The only thing that mattered to me after I found out a rogue asteroid the size of Texas had somehow been re-routed toward Earth was getting humanities best and brightest off it. A branch of Trass Industries had been focused on commodifying space-travel at the time, so it seemed like a logical transition … my next real challenge after effectively eliminating car accidents throughout the United States.

  “I’m glad you didn’t hesitate,” Mr. Drayton said. “You were the only one smart enough to consider running far away from Earth before wasting time on anything else.”

  “The value of a clean slate is lost on many of my peer
s.”

  He was handling himself well enough, so I decided it was time to find out what I really wanted to know. I stared at my computer for a few seconds again, so I didn’t seem impatient, and then asked, “Why should I choose you to join this venture to our new world?”

  Mr. Drayton leaned back and breathed deep. “I’ve dedicated my life to understanding living things, sir,” he said. “We’ll need the life we take for granted here to blossom if we ever hope to make Titan feel like a new home.”

  My lips betrayed the slightest grin. There was no doubt he’d practiced that answer in a mirror many times, but I could tell by his eyes that he meant it. It was one of my favorite responses yet. Most candidates couldn’t help but list their achievements or mention their will to survive.

  “Well said,” I admitted. “I think I’ve heard everything I need to. Thank you, Mr. Drayton. Please proceed to the waiting area. I will personally inform you of my decision as soon as possible. If accepted, you’ll be escorted to a safe, on-site dormitory where you will remain until the Titan Project departs at exactly 8:00 PM on September 2, 2034. Roughly five days from now. If you aren’t… Well then, Mr. Drayton, I hope you find peace in whatever way suits you.”

  The interview was briefer than usual, but after administering thousands, I could size people up quickly. I stood and extended my hand. He immediately sprung to his feet and grabbed it.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said twice, shaking vehemently. “Either way, I’ll have accomplished my dream of meeting you.”

  I released his hand and forced a businesslike smile. “Good day, Mr. Drayton.”