Titan's Fall Read online

  Out in the basin, a flood of yellow vacuum suits and civilians rushed the wasp-like ships the moment they touched ground. There were drivers leaping into the mess, shoving tails down into spines and spinning the civilians around to their own purposes, only to be executed by soldiers in armor.

  Raptors boiled out of the tunnels, and CPF soldiers hanging out of the sides of the jumpships opened fire on them.

  Several squads stayed on their hills, raking the basin with energy. The scarred rock bubbled and boiled, dead Conglomeration obliterated.

  Then the hilltop guns stuttered out and stopped firing.

  At least that would let more ships get to ground. But now the basin was a scrum.

  “There is not enough transport for the civilians,” Ken said as the platoon re-formed in a rough circle near one of the larger jumpships.

  “Holy shit,” I said, looking at the numbers of people surging around the basin to try to get aboard anything that was flying. “This is a disaster.”

  “It’s happening all over Titan. The Accordance wants soldiers back. It wants to preserve fighting strength. The civilians are extraneous to them,” Amira said. “You know they do not value human life.”

  Over and over on the common channel, pilots were shouting, “Spaces are reserved for armored and fighting personnel first.”

  Despite that, CPF soldiers were shoving civilians into ships and guarding the basin, expecting them to fly away and come back. Or at least, refusing to jump in first.

  “Keep the perimeter,” I ordered the entire platoon on the common channel. “Anyone who wants to get aboard, can. But I’m going to stay right here until they bring down more ships.”

  “Think hard about that,” Amira said on the command channel, her words clipped.

  “No,” I said. “We’re in armor. Hundreds of pounds of protection and enhancement. Three or four days of air. Water. Nutrition dripped right into our bloodstreams. Adaptive camo. We can get out there into the plains and survive for a pickup. Everyone standing out here in yellow is a target. That’s time for us to figure out what to do next, time these people will never be able to get for themselves.”

  Amira shifted on her feet visibly. I could sense the coiled frustration even through the armor. “I don’t like this,” she said.

  “No one is supposed to like it,” I snapped. “That’s why I told you to get aboard if you wanted. I’m not going to stop you. I told you what I’m doing, anyone who wants in can join. I can’t force you to do this, particularly when it’s against Accordance orders.”

  “Don’t shout at me,” she said calmly.

  I was freaking out a bit. Because I knew they would all probably follow me out into the plains. Into a giant gamble that we would get picked up later, even if the Conglomeration was overrunning the base.

  But this was the right thing to do.

  “There were so many we never got a chance to save back in Icarus Base,” Ken said, surprising me by interrupting us. “Devlin’s right. We have time to come up with another solution. They don’t. I don’t want that on me. Not again.”

  Thank you, Ken, I mouthed to myself. Thank you.

  “I’m not—”

  “They’re taking off !” someone shouted on the common channel. The jumpship we’d been guarding powered up. Pebbles and rocks slapped against my armor and rattled as it rose into the air.

  A handful of yellow vacuum suits staggered back to their feet and looked up as their way off Titan accelerated out over the hills.

  All around the basin, more jumpships rose, scattering to the points of the compass gently and then picking up speed.

  “There they go!” said a voice on the common channel. Zeus. “Your heroes. Your leaders. Your soldiers. The Accordance. They’ve left you all behind. Now what? I will tell you. Now you will learn what it is like to live as true, free humans.”

  “He’s coming downhill,” Ken said.

  I could see the distant cloud Zeus and his team of raptors were kicking up as they raced down into the basin. A mile and a half away from us in the center of it all.

  “Surrender now,” Zeus shouted on the common channel. “Sit down with your hands folded and you will live to see a new day for your species. You will learn how the Conglomeration extends its welcome, even to its most bitter enemies like my own species. But remain standing and I will cut through you.”

  “Always a charmer,” Amira said.

  An engineer in yellow tapped my armor. “What do we do now?” Dismont asked. I could see condensation beading the inside of his mask.

  “You all have two choices,” I said. “Sit down and surrender, or run with us out into the plains. I don’t know how long your air will last.”

  “What happens if we surrender? We’ve seen the videos the Accordance plays. But you’re CPF. You’ve been on Saturn. What happens to us?”

  All we knew were the same Accordance pieces of propaganda. Dead planets. The Conglomeration’s reshaping entire species into functional forms for their own needs. But we didn’t know what happened to the people they captured and ruled over.

  The communications from places that fell went silent.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I truly don’t know.”

  “Then we go with you,” Dismont said firmly.

  I looked at the dust cloud of the approaching Conglom­eration force. “That’s assuming we can even get out of here,” I said.

  8

  We grabbed ammo from squads who were sitting down and folding their arms. “No judgments,” I shouted. “Just grab what you can.”

  Zeus was a mile away now, and the slow picking through surrendering people meant we weren’t moving away quickly enough. But I wanted everything we could get our hands on.

  “Are we sure none of the ships are coming back down for us?” Tony Chin asked.

  “If they were only taking soldiers, something bad might be going down upstairs,” Amira said. “I’ve been trying to patch in, but there’s a lot of interference. That can’t be a good sign. . . .”

  One of the skyscraper-sized anti-orbital guns glowed red. Electricity sparked up its sides, gathering into a house-sized ball at the very tip, and then leapt into the sky.

  “I think shit’s all fucked up and shit,” Lana Smalley said.

  “Has anyone seen Shriek?” I asked. He would be able to provide some hints as to what might be happening. He’d seen more of this than any of us.

  “He got on the jumpship,” Ken said.

  “Of course he did,” I said.

  “We need to move,” Amira said. “Not many people standing anymore. We stick out.”

  “Where are we going?” Dismont asked.

  A good question. “If the jumpships aren’t coming back down, and everything is up in the air—” I started.

  “Not everything,” Ken said.

  “Can anyone here repair a broken jumpship?” I asked on the common channel.

  One of the yellow vacuum suits in our midst raised a hand. “I’ve worked maintenance before getting promoted down to the power core and retrained. What’s broken?”

  “We sucked crickets into an engine and then crashed,” Ken told him.

  “We’ll need parts,” the engineer said.

  “Amira? Where can we find parts?” I asked.

  We were all moving as a group, trying to keep the yellow-­suited engineers in our midst. Amira broke away for a tunnel. “Downstairs,” she said.

  After the heavy doors shut behind us, they groaned and started smoking. “What’s that about?”

  “Slowing Zeus down,” Amira said.

  + + +

  We had to make the hard choice of loading up with spare engine parts instead of ammo. We left the guns on the floor. But with a plan at hand, the four squads pulled together quietly.

  Mohamed Cisse carried a turbofan
on his back like Atlas, the engineers clustered near him, and we formed up around them. Amira led us back up and out. We popped out like groundhogs and ran for the hills. After a few lopes, we started dropping even more gear and just picking up the engineers under our arms so we could leap our way from rock to rock.

  A triangular formation of raptors fell in behind us, but Ken took Alpha squad and fell behind a bit. The firefight was intense and brief.

  We crested the hills and pelted downhill toward the open plains and the ethane lake where we’d crashed with the new platoon members just a day before.

  “Keep up the pace,” Ken muttered. “We went down a long way from the base, and the engineers don’t have that much air. Don’t stop for any Conglomeration, just keep moving.”

  I didn’t respond. I was too busy focusing on each armor-­enhanced leap that took us farther away from Shangri-La.

  + + +

  “I think the Conglomeration may be taking orbit,” Amira said, looking up from the bank of the ethane lake.

  I looked up as well. But there was nothing more than Titan’s usual gloom and thick clouds. “How can you tell?”

  “I’m listening hard. Through the static. I think I’m feeling some battle chatter. Ship-to-ship stuff.”

  Three squads got their shoulders under the jumpship and lifted it up. “I think I just shorted something out,” Erica Li said. “Someone take my place.”

  They all staggered the jumpship up out of the liquid ethane, letting it all gush out of the gaps as they waited, and then carried it up onto the bank.

  Someone started coughing on the common channel. “Shit, same here, something blew inside my suit. There’s smoke.”

  “Contact,” Ken said.

  “Take Alpha and engage,” I said. “Bravo, Delta, circle up and keep the ship in the middle. Charlie, you’re there to help the engineers move anything heavy.”

  As everyone scrambled to, I stood by the jumpship and looked out across the ethane lake, half expecting crickets to come boiling out of it again. But there was only stillness.

  A moment of calm in the storm. It caught in the back of my throat, like a hiccup. As if I’d still been moving forward and then suddenly braked, and everything came up.

  The sound of weapons fire floated over Titan’s air, breaking the moment of stillness.

  “Ken?” I asked.

  “Raptors. Scout team. We’ve been located,” he reported.

  “Fall back and tighten up. Charlie, you’ll have to help the engineers and shoot anything that gets through. How is the ship looking? How long do we need?”

  “Two hours,” came the response.

  “We have fifteen or twenty minutes before the bad guys hit us,” I told them. “Hurry.”

  The first wave of crickets hit ten minutes later.

  + + +

  The next hour, we ground the crickets down as they came at us. Amira took point, using the EPC-1 to down them in swathes. Anything that got through, we stomped into tiny debris.

  But the raptors that came in afterward required bullets and direct confrontation, though some of the mines that Ken had taken the time to lay down killed many in the first batch. There was no running now. We had to keep them from the jumpship as the engineers swore and removed this part and that part.

  It didn’t take long to run low on ammo, even despite short bursts and frequent direct confrontation. It took three to four of us to wrestle down a single raptor and break its helmet or shove a grenade into some key part of the Conglomerate armor.

  We were losing people. Several engineers dropped in the crossfire. Aran Patel started screaming when Mohamed Cisse jumped out and caught a raptor that leapt into the inner circle. It had swung around and ripped open his armor with the wicked nano-filament blades on its legs. In seconds, Cisse ended up shredded, and his armor scattered around the ground before everyone opened up.

  “Out,” Min Zhao shouted.

  And more and more of the platoon started tossing weapons to the ground.

  The sound of a loud belch got me to stare back at the jumpship, as I’d almost forgotten what it was we were doing here.

  “Everyone get in,” Amira yelled. “I’ve got power.”

  “You’re flying it?”

  “No one else can interface with the systems or has any experience.”

  We fell back. Charlie squad covered us from the doorway, which now was just Aran Patel and Suqi Kimmirut.

  There were too many of us. We crammed into the jumpship face to face.

  “Amira?” I asked.

  The jumpship’s engines leapt up an octave, trying to push us into the air. Instead, we scraped along the rocky ground. Metal screamed and something snapped off the bottom of the jumpship.

  Energy beams sliced against the sides of the ship, one of them punching through. Blood and flesh splattered against my helmet. The ship bounced off a boulder, spun slightly, and smacked into something. I wiped blood away just in time to see a yellow vacuum suit spin out of one of the large rents in the side of the jumpship.

  “Hold on!” Amira shouted. The jumpship wobbled higher into the air and the ground started to fall away. “I think I’m getting this.”

  The jumpship shuddered again as we rose slightly higher. Another loud bang from something striking the side made me jump.

  Alarms started whooping from the cockpit. “We going to make it?” I asked.

  “I’ll get back to you on that,” Amira said.

  9

  Saturn filled the sky, massive and roiling with clouds, the rings casting shadows over the clouds we’d struggled to get above.

  “I’m getting comms,” Amira said. The jumpships had direct quantum-entangled linkups into the Accordance. But the minds on the other side of a call could be halfway across the solar system. Getting answers about what was happening overhead, and convincing them she was for real, had been taking up her time as we continued to spiral farther and farther up toward the clouds.

  “I can fly the ship. But I don’t know anything about getting a craft like this to orbit,” Amira had said when I’d asked her why she was spending so much time trying to call in rather than getting us the hell upstairs.

  And the engineers only had rough guesses about how orbital dynamics worked. As they pointed out, we didn’t want to run out of fuel trying this. Or end up in the wrong place.

  “Okay,” Amira said on the command channel. “I’ve explained our situation and sent back our fuel levels and dynamics, and Accordance is on the other side talking me through our sequence. It’s tricky.”

  Tricky. It must have been if Amira was happily chatting with Accordance pilots over comms. She was not the type to stop and ask for help.

  “There’s a ticking clock. The ships in orbit are getting ready to punch out and leave. We have a very limited window to get scooped up in time. We don’t have enough fuel to come back down.”

  “You’re saying we may get stranded in orbit,” Ken said.

  “If we make it, yes,” Amira said. The jumpship banked to the right. Yellow and brown clouds far under us appeared through the gaps in the ship’s hull, and the wind screamed through the cabin as airflow changed. The entire jumpship flexed and warped.

  Swearing cluttered the common channel as everyone tensed, waiting for the jumpship to rip itself apart.

  “Amira?”

  “Fuck, I know,” she said, sounding rattled. “I’m trying to line us up. I’m doing the best I can, but the software is struggling with all the damage and I’m not a pilot; I have no idea how much we can push this. So, we might not make it up. And there might not be anyone there when we get there. But I know I can get us back down to ground.”

  I was sure the rip in the hull near me had gotten wider. “We should ask on the common channel.”

  “Oh, really, Lieutenant, it’s suddenly a democracy in he
re after all those orders you’ve given out of late?”

  “I gave everyone an option at the jumpships on the ground, and I notice you stayed. That was your choice,” I said.

  Amira grunted. “You two idiots would have killed yourselves down there without me. After all we’ve been through, you’re the closest thing I have to family.”

  “Sergeant Singh, are you getting all sentimental on me?” I asked. One of the other squad leaders snorted and tried to smother it.

  “I’ve had to carry your asses so much, I feel like a mother duck,” Amira said. Then on the common channel: “Hey, everyone, I need you to make a choice: up or down.” She outlined the situation as she began to point the jumpship slightly up, gaining more altitude.

  There was silence for a while.

  “That’s a hard call to make,” someone said.

  “You have ten seconds to aye or nay it,” Amira said. “Then our launch window closes.”

  With a loud shriek, a panel ripped away from the top of the jumpship. I looked up toward the purple darkness of space above us. It looked like an electrical storm far overhead, with lightning dancing from spot to spot in the vacuum up there. It lit up gas clouds, like miniature nebula.

  Then one of the tiny dots lit up, the explosion slowly expanding. A ship exploding. I realized the clouds were debris, all backdropped by the massive bulk of Saturn looming over us all, making our life-or-death battles seem insignificant.

  “Three, two,” Amira said.

  “Punch it!” I shouted. “Go, go!”

  The jumpship tilted slightly higher and the Accordance-made engines kicked on hard. People clattered around the cabin as a whirlwind kicked up inside. Everything shook hard enough to blur vision. Some started repeating a phrase in a language I didn’t recognize, but I knew what they were doing: praying.

  After a few terrifying minutes of acceleration, the jumpship rolled over onto its back. An engineer screamed and someone tried to grab at them, and then they were sucked clear out of a new gap in the ship’s frame. The yellow figure kicked and wiggled in the air as they fell away behind us.