Titan's Son: (Children of Titan Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Children of Titan

  Prologue

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  Epilogue

  Thanks for Reading!

  About the Author

  TITAN’S SON

  ©2019 RHETT C. BRUNO

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the authors.

  Published by Aethon Books LLC.

  Cover Art by: Jasper Schreurs

  Cover Design, Print and eBook formatting and cover design by Steve Beaulieu.

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All characters, character names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are property Aethon Books.

  All rights reserved.

  Children of Titan

  Book 0: The Collector

  Book 1: Titanborn

  Book 2: Titan’s Son

  Book 3: Titan’s Rise

  Book 4: Titan’s Fury

  Pick up the whole

  series.

  Prologue

  Peter Sildario, captain of the Sunfire, fell forward onto Rin’s naked chest. The middle-aged Ringer woman lay on her back near the edge of his bed, one arm pinned beneath his body and the other gripping the blunt end of a shiv carved out of a rusty metal bolt. She’d stuck it into the captain’s throat, and not even his fat fingers could keep the blood from pouring all over her.

  At first, his body twitched while she held it there, then he went still. She tried to slither free, but the layer of sweat and blood smeared across her pasty skin didn’t help. His Earther body was too heavy considering how deep the Sunfire flew within the atmosphere of Saturn.

  Her ribs grew sore under his weight, making it difficult to breathe, and after a minute, she imagined she might suffocate. She’d never wanted to be a maintenance worker on a gas-harvester in the first place and had only done so for the good of her people… Now she was going to die on one. She wasn’t as afraid as she thought she’d be; she only wished she could pass on far away from the captain’s foul stench.

  Three pairs of gloved hands slipped between his body and hers just before the weight caused her to pass out. They pried him up just barely enough for her to slip out from beneath his sagging belly.

  She tumbled to the floor, gasping for air. The captain was rolled back onto his chest, half-hanging off the bed with his face dipped in a deepening pool of his own blood.

  “We heard screams,” a Ringer com operator named Hayes said as he ran in, his tone panicked. He too was born on the icy surface of Titan and had a permanently crooked nose that had been broken by security too many times. “What the hell did you do, Rin?”

  “Trass, he’s dead,” said Joran, who, like Rin, was a Sunfire maintenance worker.

  Rin ignored them. She lunged at the captain and punched him in the side. The fat on his stomach jiggled, but the weighty corpse barely budged. “How does that feel, Captain!” she screamed as she struck him again. “You like that! You want it harder?”

  Gareth, the third Ringer who’d helped dislodge her, grabbed her by the shoulders and tore her away from the corpse. Working with the engines made Gareth the strongest of them despite him also being a Ringer, so he picked her up and sat her on the red-stained bed.

  “Are you all right?” he signed with his long, thin-fingered hands. His tongue had been sliced off at the back of his throat by the Earther captain lying dead before them, so he couldn’t speak. They called it a work accident.

  Rin glanced down. Her boiler suit was torn along the back, so far down so that it wrapped around her thighs. Rows of finger-shaped marks along her slender hips stuck out against her white flesh as if drawn on with a pink highlighter. She was almost entirely exposed to the germ-infested air, a rare sight for a Ringer outside of the Lowers. Her three saviors were clothed from head to toe in boiler suits and wore sanitary masks and gloves as was customary.

  “I’m fine,” she panted, throwing her arms back through her still intact sleeves. Gareth helped her. The fit was loose from having been stretched time and time again by the voracious captain. Hayes took a step to help as well, then regarded the bloody captain and stopped.

  “You’ve really done it now,” Hayes said. “They’ll space us all for this.”

  “He deserved far worse,” Rin growled.

  “Others will have heard the screams,” Joran said. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”

  “Yeah, where are we going to go?” Hayes asked. He was sweating even more than Rin, his gaze glued to the body. “I hear Pluto is lovely this time of year.”

  Gareth shot him an angry glare as he finished helping her back into what was left of her outfit.

  “Just shut up, Hayes, and let me—” Rin was interrupted by the three-man Sunfire security team suddenly appearing in the room’s entrance. All of them were Earthers, painting short, broad figures compared with her tall, slender one. They wore dated suits of Pervenio Corp-fashioned armor, but their shock-batons were top-of-the-line, tips crackling a vibrant blue.

  “You skelly bitch!” one of them yelled. They rushed into the room, weapons raised.

  Gareth didn’t hesitate. He ripped the shiv out of the captain’s neck and charged. He was naturally weaker than the Earthers, but he’d grown up a brawler in a fighting pit deep in Titan’s Darien Lowers. Joran promptly followed, and though he wasn’t a fighter, he knew how to hold his own as a distraction. Hayes wasn’t as lucky. He froze somewhere between fleeing and fighting and got prodded in the side by a shock-baton. His convulsing body toppled forward, vomit spewing from his mouth.

  The mess slowed the guard coming at Rin and gave her enough time to think. She’d been invited to the captain’s quarters a few times before she’d had enough and killed him, and she knew he kept a loaded pulse-pistol in a stand by the head of his bed in case the crew got rowdy.

  She sprawled across the mattress and fumbled through the drawer until her reedy fingers found the rubberized handle. She whipped around and saw a shock-baton speeding toward her head. She caught the Earther’s burly arm before it shocked her. At the same time, he grabbed her pistol-hand and shoved it upward. Born on Earth, under Earth-like g conditions, he was multiple times stronger than her. Both of her arms were ready to give out when she decided to pull the trigger.

  The shot hit a power conduit running along the exposed wall behind them. Electricity coruscated through the air toward the baton’s lit end. She squirmed away from him just in time to escape the current as the guard screamed. His back wrenched, and he shook violently. While he was incapacitated, Rin reached arou
nd him and put a second bullet into the head of the guard kicking Hayes’s curled-up body. Gareth and Joran didn’t need her help. The former was plunging his shiv into their guard’s chest over and over as the latter held him down.

  With the wailing, electricity-filled Earther stuck in front of her, Rin was trapped between him and the wall. She tried to slide her thin body around him without making contact, but as she did, there was a crackle, followed by a deafening bang. The power conduit overloaded and went off like a stick of dynamite centimeters away from the right side of her face, launching her across the room.

  Rin rolled over, her vision foggy, her ears ringing. There was no pain. Shadows raced toward her, screaming her name. Hayes reached for her face, appearing horrified as he hesitated to touch her.

  She ran the tips of her fingers across her own cheek. Still, she felt nothing, but when she pulled them away, charred flesh was stuck beneath her nails. She clawed at her face again, this time peeling away skin as if she were a wax sculpture held to a torch.

  Gareth pulled her to her feet while Hayes yelled for her to focus. She pushed them aside and grabbed a baton off the floor. One of the Earthers crawled toward the fallen gun. Rin’s vision remained cloudy, but she didn’t need to see straight to hit one of their fat bodies.

  She spit out a glob of blood, skin, and liquefied sinew, then cracked him across the head with the baton over and over until his legs stopped twitching.

  ONE

  I focused on the off-duty XO of the Piccolo, a rickety, Saturn-based gas harvester on its last legs. Earther John Barnes was enjoying his time off by fleecing the Darien Lowers for cheap drinks while he gambled away his paycheck.

  He sat between two members of the ship’s security crew at a card table in the Sunken Credit. I knew him well after spending the last two years working maintenance on that very same ship. He had a tendency to pick fights with his Ringer subordinates just for the sake of it, and his bulging muscles meant he always won. He gave even Earthers a bad name. Not an easy task.

  He was my mark.

  A pretty server placed a tray of drinks down for them. Their fourth round. She winced as John grabbed her arm before she could hurry away. I slid my stool a tad closer so I could hear what he said to her over the din of the Sunken Credit, mostly the desperate voices of old, worn-down Ringers at slot machines and tables who’d been trying and failing to catch a break every day since they were unfortunate enough to have been born in the Darien Lowers. Noisy clusters of thick pipes ran along the rocky ceiling as well, feeding the water purification plant on the other side of its rocky walls.

  “Aye, you mind telling your Ringer bosses to turn up the heat?” John barked.

  “Of course,” the server replied. “I’ll—”

  He cut her off, instead wrapping his arm all the way around her waist and pulling her close to the table. A full transparent bodysuit and sanitary mask kept her safe from direct contact, but she wore nothing underneath—just her skinny, malnourished figure.

  “And I thought I said to bring it neat?” he blustered. “I said that, right, boys?”

  His two smirking mates nodded. “That’s how I heard it,” one remarked. “If we wanted ice rocks, we’d go outside.”

  “That’s right. Now how about you take your skinny Ringer ass back there and fetch us another.” He handed her the tray but first took his drink and chugged half. He slammed it down, his Earther strength causing her to scramble to keep the tray level as she hurried away.

  She slipped right between me and an old Ringer who’d long since passed out with his face on the bar. I struggled not to glance over at her. The transparent plastic outfit the bosses made every server wear to help garner more tips for the house sure wasn’t doing her any favors when it came to lecherous Earthers like John.

  “I don’t know why we still let those mud stompers in here,” the bartender remarked.

  “They tip well,” the server replied. I caught a glimpse of the parts of her face not covered by a sanitary mask, expecting to see signs of tears after she’d endured a barrage of insults over the course of the night. Instead, she appeared relatively unfazed. A real pro.

  “Well, if you want a break, just let me know.”

  She shook her head. “Just refill them. Neat.”

  The bartender poured more liquor for the Earthers, then reached into each glass and scooped out the ice with his gloved fingers. “That ought to do it. And I’ll be sure to turn down the temperature too. Freeze their fat backs to the inside of their coats.”

  “Thanks, Chev.” The server’s mask lifted from a smile, then she picked up the tray and sauntered back toward the tableful of goons.

  “You having another?” the bartender asked me. I was too busy peering at John’s table to hear him at first. “Drayton?”

  I looked up at him, then down. Ice inside rattled against the sides of the empty glass in my hand. I nodded and flashed him my ID to transfer some of the last few credits I had to my name. The transparent card bore no information but for a data chip linked to the Pervenio database. Words and images were too easy to falsify.

  The charge went through, then purple synthahol lifted the perfect spheres of frozen water as the bartender filled my glass. People didn’t bother selling the good stuff in the Darien Lowers since barely any Ringer could afford it, but water, Titan had plenty of. It was one of the few things we did have and freezing it was easy. If there was a definition of cold, it said Titan next to it, and my people had lived there for three centuries since Darien Trass’s first settlers fled Earth to escape a meteorite large enough to wipe all life from the planet. Zero degrees Celsius was like a warm summer’s day on our former homeworld for me.

  I lifted the glass to my mouth and pretended to take a sip. The only reason it even needed ice was to dilute the dreadful taste of the lab-brewed concoction. Lucky for me, I had no plans of drinking a second. One was all I needed to strengthen my nerve, and now I had to keep my head straight.

  After John and his crew received their drinks, he smacked the table to compel their Ringer dealer to distribute digital cards across the display built into the tabletop. No physical cards meant the dealer didn’t have to touch anything his patrons did, though that didn’t keep him from checking his gloves and sleeves every time he had to swipe the screen just to make sure none of his pasty skin was showing. Contact with an Earther could get a Ringer stuck in quarantine. Staying out of there was the only thing more important than a good tip.

  While John and his crew played, I watched him drink with one hand and with the other whip out his hand-terminal and struggle to read whatever was open on the screen. He barely paid attention to the game, as if he had too many credits to spare… which may well have been true. The device—a Pervenio-issued V3X model, just released in the past month—was worth more than I’d earn in one whole shift on the Piccolo. The screen was double the size my Venta Co terminal had been before I sold it to be able to pay for the previous month’s rent without starving. It was exponentially faster and able to connect to Solnet broadcasts originating from anywhere in Sol. The entire device was thin as a sheet of glass, its silvery back-casing shimmering brighter than anything else under the Sunken Credit’s failing lights.

  I was going to steal it. After leaving the Piccolo to be closer to my mom after she caught something and got stuck in quarantine, I was desperate for credits. My plan was to use the expensive new terminal to try to get back into the good graces of one of the fences I used to run for. They were all still bitter about me leaving the shadows behind to try to make an honest living.

  After two years on a gas harvester, I was out of practice, so John made for an easy warm-up. I knew from experience that he liked to get so drunk he wouldn’t remember how he got the bruises from the night before. The fact that he deserved to get swiped was just a bonus. I had standards, at least. I never liked stealing from people I didn’t know anything about. Earther or not, there was no saying what they’d been through. Mom taught me that, ev
en though she hated what I used to do and was preparing to do again.

  Thirty minutes passed quickly. My staring didn’t appear suspicious, because everyone else in the gambling den had an eye on the Earthers from the moment they’d entered. Ringers came and went, most with heads hanging in defeat and a few wearing looks that said they’d broken even and would be back tomorrow to try getting rich again. John and his friends were on another round of drinks. If they had a shred of decency—which I knew they didn’t—it was long gone. John was swaying. He went to hug the server and fell off his stool onto his knees, cackling hysterically.

  “Oh, c’mon, girl,” he slurred. “I don’t bite.” He grabbed her leg. She kicked at him to pry free, but he didn’t budge. Waves of fear finally flooded her face. John drew himself to his feet, then tugged her tight against his puffy thermal coat. His mates chuckled the entire time.

  “I swear I’m cleaner than any of the Ringer filth you’ve screwed before,” he said. He ran his fat fingers up her back and through the ends of her hair. Seeing direct contact like that between a Ringer and an Earther made my skin crawl. She yelped and slipped down out of his grasp, causing him to again stumble to his knees.

  That was when the bouncers had finally had enough. Just what I’d been counting on. I stood and used them as cover to get closer. I wasn’t worried about John or the others recognizing me with my sanitary mask on. That was the one benefit of having to wear one everywhere: It made me difficult to differentiate from any other Ringer at first glance. What I was worried about, though, was the baton hanging openly from John’s broad hips. Weapons weren’t allowed to be worn anywhere in Darien without special permits, but no gambling den manager in the Lowers was going to stop him, considering what he was spending.