Copper Rain

Copper Rain Part 9

The Present

"Christ, Titus! What the fuck are you doing here?" I asked, staring at the general access screen in the crew compartment.

"Couldn't leave you alone with Zoie. You and her, man, there's a history."

"What the hell are you on about? There's no history. Tell him, Zoie."

She glances across at a vid unit, rolls her eyes and briefly shakes her head, though it's more a gesture of frustration than denial. The lights from the maintenance computer are lit up like a protostar, and the screen has a smirking image of Titus as he appeared before I shot a hole in his betraying ass. Next to the computer lies a couple of cryo-pods with their lids raised, looking as warm and inviting as a self-dug grave. Pleasant thoughts fail to fill my mind, and I wonder if my blindly ignorant commitment to the tetracap card is going to end up costing me large.

"How the hell did you get in here?" I ask Titus.

"Dead easy if you are a disembodied packet of code."

"You piggybacked Julian's hack."

"More like the opposite."

"You helped him?"

"Facilitated rather than helped. And he never even knew I was even there."

Fuck, this shit just keeps getting better. There was a time I considered Titus a friend, and that friendship was a long time building. There was blood spilt; his, mine, but mainly others. We went through the wringer together, but it turned out the relationship still wasn't strong enough for him not to dance the double-cross two-step and chase the easy buck—which, in all honesty, had never made a scrap of sense to me. He could've used the tetracap card at any stage, and I'd have done whatever it took to help out, but no, he had to be the big dick on the street and try to sell us out to another fucking House. At least now I can find out why he tried to kill me.

"Tell me, why'd you pull that gun?" I started.

"And not use the card?"

"Yeah, that was the obvious move."

"And that's you right fucking there, Tarq. Always chasing the data. Always looking for the pattern. Never going with the gut."

"Epic fucking speech. Just answer the question."

"I use the card and wheels get set in motion," Titus tells me.

"What kind of wheels?"

"The kind that will grind the four of us into cosmic dust."

"So wheels are now moving, given I ran the card through Julian."

"Right according to plan. Time to strap your big boy pants on."

There's a rumbling beneath our feet, and Zoie's eyes widen. The vessel's setting up for the sling. With minimal gravity on the nub to hold us back, it's just a matter of calculating the correct launch vector to take advantage of the gas giant for a gravity swing-by that will send us hurtling on to Heladon.

"Do we need to get secured?" asks Zoie.

"We've still got a few minutes," I answer her. "And what exactly do you know about this shit? You're the one with the card."

"You don't remember, do you?"

"Remember what?"

"Before the bone tanks. Before the wet-wiring."

"There's nothing to remember. I was military. We did some shit that pissed people off. I had to hit the tanks to get out from under."

"And you came back as this." She gestures at me with contempt. "You don't even know who the hell you are."