Titanborn (21 page)

That was when the combatants raised their arms, revealing orange, carbon-fiber wings extending between their arms and sides. They were promptly pulled through the breach, and soared out across the sky of Titan until the haze of a violent storm rendered them invisible.

“Winged suits,” Zhaff identified.

“You've got to be fucking kidding me!” I shouted. “I thought those things were myths the locals told to scare new immigrants.” It was said that because of the low gravity and dense atmosphere of Titan, Ringers had learned how to craft suits allowing them to roam the skies as easily as birds do on Earth before they were outlawed shortly after the arrival of my people.

“There are no such things as myths.”

Zhaff sprang up and sprinted toward the opening. I got up to follow him, closing my visor as I did so my nose didn't freeze off. “What the hell are you doing?” I questioned, grabbing his shoulder before he leapt blindly through the opening.

“I have a read on their position. If we don't follow we'll lose them. There is no time to deliberate.”

“We'll freeze out there!”

“We are wearing similar suits,” he replied. “They are capable of handling Titan's harsh environment and contain a suitable auxiliary oxygen supply in case of emergency.”

“Are you sure?” I checked the seal beneath my helmet nervously. The rickety joints, especially in mine since it was so loose, had me worried that I wouldn't last more than a minute outside.

“Yes.”

I took a deep breath. It's safe to say that I would've never trusted it without his nod of approval, but up to that point he seemed to be very sure of things before he said them. And he never lied. “Ready when you are then,” I muttered.

We sidled out to the edge, where even through my helmet I could hear the wind howl. The ground wasn't that far below us, but beyond that the visibility conditions were too poor due to a looming storm to see anything. Zhaff hopped off without hesitation and skated down the slick, angled surface of Darien's enclosure.

“I'm getting too old for this,” I whispered to myself.

I shrugged, swallowed my pride, and tried to emulate him. I can't say I made it look as smooth but my feet landed safely against the gentle slope of the translucent roof encasing Darien's hydro-farms. A layer of swirling sand made it impossible to see the green beneath.

I followed Zhaff as he jogged headfirst into the storm. They were a common occurrence on Titan, much as they were on the planet it orbited. I couldn't see more than ten meters in front of me with all of the sand being whipped about, and I couldn't put on my spotters through my visor. I had to rely completely on Zhaff's eye-lens to keep a reading on the smugglers, and his word that our suits would hold up.

“You're sure about these things?” I asked him again. We didn't have a com-link; I had to essentially yell so that my voice would project over the storm through my helmet's built-in speaker.

“Yes,” he answered.

My entire suit bounced with every step, and I found it unsettling that I could hear the wind so clearly through it. I could even see my own breath against my visor because it grew so cold inside the helmet. It was well below freezing, though that was admittedly better than the two hundred Celsius or so below it was beyond it.

After ten more minutes of slogging through the murk, the storm dissipated and Zhaff stopped. I moved next to him and gazed forward.

Based on the few times I'd been beyond the major settlements on Mars, I found the worlds quite similar in appearance. The biggest difference was that even when it wasn't stormy, the sky of Titan was blotted by a rusty haze so thick that the location of the sun was impossible to determine. It made things not only dim, but also frigid enough to freeze your bones in half a minute. Pervenio researchers claimed the terraforming efforts, which used cryo-volcanic eruptions across the surface to pump the atmosphere with oxygen, had warmed average surface temperatures by a few degrees and even left trace amounts of the element permanently in the air. True or not, I wasn't about to test it.

Once we escaped the hydro-farms' roof, the fine-grained, ruddy sand that made up most of the region extended beyond my range of vision in every direction, with thousands of smooth, frozen rocks scattered across the flat landscape. Now that I could see them it made it difficult for me to walk in a straight line, even in my weighted suit. They didn't seem to bother Zhaff.

In the distance rose a lonely white plateau beyond which the visibility remained extremely poor. The earlier storm had passed but there was another brewing. Bolts of lightning flashing throughout the dark clouds above them were enough to tell me that this one was going to be far worse. I didn't want to be caught in it.

“They went in there,” Zhaff said. “The Darien quarantine block.”

He pointed toward the plateau. It didn't look special, but a tram line ran across the surface of Titan between Darien and it, entering an illuminated cave carved into its side. Within it lay the quarantine zone. Zhaff and I shifted our path to stick to the shadows of its tram lines' towering stilts.

“Looks like we're on our own then. No way would Pervenio risk the blowback of publically sending Earther reinforcements into a quarantine zone. That's probably exactly what the Children of Titan want them to do.”

“You are correct,” Zhaff replied. “I will inform the director of the situation.” He took out his hand-terminal and typed into it.

“Fifty years,” I said while I waited. “You'd think they'd have cleaned them out by now.”

“The increase in immigration has helped keep sickness a constant threat to locals. All it takes is one missed germ during decontamination to infect an entire block.”

I remembered how sick the Ringer on Earth had looked. How he was coughing up blood before he took his own life. I'd never actually been to a quarantine zone, but I couldn't imagine a more depressing place in all of Sol. They were among the only places on Titan where the Ringers were granted some level of control, minus the legions of Pervenio security guards who monitored the entrances off the tram lines. Whatever this Doctor and his crew were up to, there were few better places in the Ring for them to hide.

All Ringers who showed signs of sickness were sent to quarantine, buried like ancient lepers within a mountain. It didn't matter what the diseases were, either. Most of them had no labels, or did once but no longer affected Earthers and saw their names lost in the annals of pre-Meteorite Earth. All I knew for sure was that getting the proper medicines from any of the sanctioned USF corporations with a stake in the Ring was as difficult as it was expensive. They were almost exclusively produced on Earth by Pervenio Corp and shipped all the way across Sol.

“Consider me lucky for not being born in this wasteland,” I decided. “How'd they get in? The entrance to that place can only be accessed through the tram line, I thought.”

“Their signatures disappeared beneath it,” Zhaff answered.

“Well, however they did it, I have a feeling that the Drayton woman who escaped got out the same way. We'll find it.”

“We have to.” Zhaff stored his hand-terminal and scanned the horizon. “The quarantine block is approximately three point eight kilometers away. We must quicken our pace in order to ensure we retain a safe amount of oxygen.”

He'd conveniently left that part out earlier. I cut down on how deep my breaths were, and we ran. He was decidedly faster, but I was able to keep close enough behind. Fear of suffocating had my adrenaline pumping and my legs churning despite how sore they were getting. If I was going to go, I'd prefer it to be in a hail of bullets or while I was drunk and fast asleep.

As we got nearer, the quarantine zone's plateau filled my vision from end to end, obstructing the subtle glow of the rusty sky. There wasn't even a single translucency to interrupt the uniformity of the rock.

I was busy studying the tunnel entrance located many meters above where we were when Zhaff suddenly stopped. A noisy tram raced by overhead, breaking the alien silence of Titan's surface that had prevailed after the first storm passed.

“What're you doing?” I yelled over the racket. I leaned over to catch my breath.

He didn't answer right away. As soon as the tram went by completely the fizzle of gunfire zipped around my helmet, kicking up pockets of sand directly beside us. We rushed behind one of the tram lines' columns for cover. The barrage was coming from above, and it didn't relent.

I fired a few rounds blindly from behind the column to try to scare whoever it was before taking a quick peek around it. A group of objects darted across the ruddy sky, the flash of pulse-rifle muzzles giving away their positions. They were too small to be ships.

“They are attacking,” Zhaff stated. “Three of them.”

“Shit!”

Zhaff sprang up and sprinted toward the quarantine block. I followed, weaving behind columns as they were peppered with bullets. We were halfway there when one glanced off my armored shoulder. The force of it knocked me off my feet, and a single winged attacker soared right over me. Zhaff somehow sprawled out of the way and got off a shot. It clipped the attacker's wing, causing him to sputter through the air and crack his head against the side of a column.

I rolled over anxiously and checked my shoulder. It was only a scratch, not enough to compromise the suit's integrity and expose me. Once I was sure, I hurried toward Zhaff.

He picked up the fallen attacker's body with ease and handed it to me. “Take him,” he said.

I furrowed my brow at him, but as more fire whizzed by us, I quickly got his meaning. Without being dressed in a weighted suit, the Ringer's thin body was incredibly light in the low-g conditions. I hauled it sideways around my free arm and wielded it like a shield before Zhaff and I continued to run.

Zhaff fired calculated shots as we moved, but even those didn't strike our targets, which says a lot for the Children of Titan's flying abilities. I decided to show him how it was done. Projectiles deflected off the armor of the dead Ringer I held as I slowed down and aimed my pistol over his hip. I unloaded toward a blur of motion in the sky. One of the two remaining attackers plummeted, slamming into the ground a way off in a cloud of sand. The last one promptly changed course and flew toward the quarantine, out of sight.

“Well-placed shot,” Zhaff said flatly.

The praise had me grinning until I remembered that I was reveling in a compliment from my teenage partner on his second real assignment. I forced my lips into a straight line and mustered my most serious tone. “We should hurry. We can't give them time to set up another ambush.”

Zhaff nodded.

We reached the base of the quarantine block without any other attacks and skirted along its craggy base. According to Zhaff the Children of Titan went beneath the plateau, so there had to be some sort of secret passage. It was strictly forbidden for anybody deemed healthy, Ringer or Earther, to enter a quarantine zone without proper clearance. I wished that my spotters were built into the helmet I wore so that its thermal function might help me find it.

“See anything?” I asked Zhaff after a few minutes of searching. Everything looked the same to me. Sand and rock and metal as far as the eye could see.

He bent over, picked up one of the smooth stones, and scanned it closely with his eye-lens. After he placed it down his head snapped to a nearby location. He got up and took long strides toward another cluster of rocks.

“It is here,” he declared as he went to grasp one. There was a subtle flicker of light distortion as his hand passed right through it and a portion of the ground beneath it. “A hologram.”

Once again, I had the chance to observe Zhaff's enhanced senses in action. The Children of Titan probably needed special scanners to locate it, even after knowing where it was. I didn't bother to ask him how he noticed the difference.

“Guns ready,” I said.

We stepped through the hologram side by side, down a steep ramp into a rocky tunnel lined haphazardly with flickering lights. It was dim, but I could make out a sealed hatch a short distance down. I kept my eyes trained down the sight of my pistol as I stepped cautiously along, scanning the walls for any hidden charges.

“They cannot risk the seal with explosives,” Zhaff stated when he noticed my helmet turning from side to side. “That is an air lock ahead. Whoever dug this did so within the last decade judging by the wear on the metal around the lights.”

“The Children of Titan must be using this to hide right under Pervenio's nose,” I noted.

“I can override the lock.”

He crouched down in front of the air lock's control panel, withdrew his hand-terminal, and rifled through commands. He was so fast I couldn't keep up with him. In no time, he sliced through the lock and the heavy door of the outer air lock swung open.

I stormed into the dark cavern, my aim snapping from side to side to check my corners. It was empty. Zhaff stepped through calmly and shut the hatch behind him. There was a shrill whistle as the air lock resealed. My ears popped slightly, and then it got a little warmer inside my suit.

The inner seal opened in front of us. Expecting to meet a wall of gunfire, I rushed to the side of it and peeked around the corner. Again I found nothing but an empty hall and a silence so cavernous that I could hear my heart beating inside my suit.

I switched off my oxygen supply and took in a gulp of the stale air. “I'll go first,” I volunteered, mostly to make sure Zhaff didn't have another chance to handle everything on his own. I was getting tired of him striking first and making me look useless.

“I'll be directly behind you,” Zhaff responded.

I wanted to tease him for being cowardly, but thought twice. Courage had nothing to do with it. It meant that he wasn't exactly sure what awaited us. He was being cautious, and for good reason. Whatever we found, chances were better of one of us getting out if he wasn't the one shot first. The mission was primary. At every turn I was beginning to better understand how his mind worked, and in my own bizarre way I was also forming a greater level of respect for it.

I pressed on.

“Going right,” I whispered sharply when I reached the end of the tunnel. The craggy ceiling of the large hollow beyond was filled with wavering light fixtures. I popped out first, pistol aimed high. Zhaff followed my lead in the opposite direction.

What I saw stopped me dead in my tracks.