Titan's Fall (6 page)

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 here 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.

We were riding the skeleton of a ship to orbit.

+  +  +  +

The engines kicked out. Titan's clouds passed far underneath us and the curve of the planet-like moon could be seen on the horizon.

“We're still alive,” Min Zhao marveled.

“Amira?”

“Shut up and don't talk to me. Orbit mechanics
suck
.” The jumpship spun around and the engines fired up, nudging us back down toward the clouds a bit. Then it shifted again, pointing forward and firing. Amira was constantly changing orbit.

Occasionally, Amira would swear.

The entire horizon lit up, something white-hot blazing away. It started to move, gathering speed, and then faded off into the dark. Then another blinding spot did the same.

“Carriers making a run for it,” Ken said.

“Hold on,” Amira said. “They're coming for us.”

“I don't see anything.” I looked out the numerous holes in the jumpship around us.

“There we go,” Tony Chin said from closer to the front.

Something slipped across the darkness between us and Saturn. Inky blackness slipped off its skin.

“That ours?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” Amira said.

The darkness opened its mouth and revealed a cargo bay full of other jumpships inside. It was moving faster than I realized. “Oh, shit!”

The lip of the cargo bay slammed into the jumpship, which spun all the way around until the back end struck the deck and halted the spin. The ship bounced across the bay, smacking into pillars, and came to a stop up against the back wall of the bay.

Four struthiforms in full armor bounced up to the side of the jumpship and ripped the doors off. “Get out!” they ordered.

The docking bay was closing up like a large mouth after swallowing, Titan disappearing behind it.

Accordance lights began to strobe and flash.

“Launch is imminent. Secure yourselves!” The struthiforms scattered and bolted for safety.

A deep thrum vibrated through the Accordance carrier. Then it launched. Anyone not holding onto something was shoved back to the wall. A damaged jumpship farther up the bay groaned, its tie-downs snapped by our ship on the way in.

“Watch out!” Ken shouted.

The carrier accelerated harder still, gravity pressing down on all of us. The jumpship slid down the bay and slammed into three of the team in armor.

“Everyone okay?” I shouted. “Who got pinned?”

Before they could answer, a beam of light sliced through the cargo bay, burying itself deep in the ship. Everything shuddered, but the carrier kept moving. But now the entire side had been sliced away, and we were all staring out into space. Staring at the beams of light searching and stabbing for us and the other carriers.

We watched the winking lights and explosions of the battle we were accelerating away from and held on tight.