Chapter 14 Fracture
I tear at the green gravity net that tugs my mass of shards away from Roxi. I could’ve helped her, saved her! We all could have. We’ve fought Venom Squadron before. It wasn’t easy, but we figured it out.
Atomizer walks to the back with Castor, who lifts a hand toward the Close Ramp button. We’re far above Planet Lencio now, the forests just speckled masses below.
“Castor!” I bellow. “Don’t you dare fucking do that!” I claw at the net around me. “Raven!”
Castor shuts the back of the ship.
I am coming apart in more ways than my body.
When she finally cuts off the net, I smash to the floor, arms and legs tangled like a ball of wire instead of a Titan.
I can’t seem to put my pieces back in the right places.
It is an abrading, shuddering feeling not having Roxi with me. I need her touch.
I need her.
“Raven, what did you just do?” I bark.
“Following orders,” she acidly replies.
“Whose?”
“Commander Savage’s.” Raven stashes the rifle and glares at my mass.
I cannot see her like a human yet, but I know where she is by her energy, which my scanners still detect like a radiant blue human silhouette.
“He said to do anything Roxi needs me to. I followed orders. And I am protecting our team, all the ones I can.”
“But Roxi…”
A pounding wave ripples through my pieces, numbing me and sending my consciousness into a realm of temporary darkness. My body realigns slowly, but it’s faster without distractions.
I wake and sit up on the floor. Atomizer holsters his gun and gives me a hand. “I am sorry, Brother. I know you have a special connection with her. It is never easy to be the one who survives.”
Raven crosses her arms. “She doesn’t need us. Trust me. You go down that rabbit hole, and you’ll regret it. Let her go.”
I chase after her. “What the hell is going on between you two?”
Raven throws herself in a seat behind Flashbomb. “Commander Savage outranks you. He knows something we don’t but wouldn’t explain it. There wasn’t time…or something. I don’t know.”
As I stand in bewildered silence, I catch a faint beeping noise from a crate. Needing a distraction from the fact that we’re leaving Lencio’s orbit, I mindlessly dig through the tablets and tools to the one still powered up. I set Roxi’s tablet down and pick up the one making the racket.
On the tablet is the last thing I want to see. Roxi’s gorgeous face glows beside a profile that shatters every single reservation.
I will get her back if it destroys me.
Roxi Angstrom: Plasma containment residue detected. Identification by frequency—CSP.
Base Status: Emergency Shield Activated. Titan Access - Permitted. All Solcrue DNA will be Eliminated. Detonation in Ten Minutes.
Badge: 999
Bodymorphosis: 7
Previous Deaths: 3
Designation: Commander, Titan Security
Classification: Creator
My brittle ultromotor splits open with an agonizing pop. My legs give out. I have failed in the worst possible way.
“What now?” Raven looks over at Flashbomb.
“I don’t know. The shield activated on its own. Eon says Aegis and BlazeStar are reporting the same thing,” Flashbomb remarks beside her.
Emergency measures, because Roxi has been captured…again.
Atomizer collects me by an arm and helps me to my feet. “Brother, I am sorry. I know what it is like to lose a female you care for.”
I stagger in the ship, staring down at the screen, in disbelief of what we have done. “You should’ve disobeyed orders, Raven.”
She scoffs and hangs on as we race into space. “We have to get out of here. Solcrue just entered the system with an entire fleet. Venom Squadron firing at us was enough. We have to go!”
My ultromotor pulses heavier and harder. Ink curls through my pieces, and my anger gets the better of me.
I am so fucking tired of the shitty people getting their way and the good people being the ones that have to make the ultimate sacrifice.
“I don’t give a fuck!”
“Fracture, what’s gotten into you?” Castor asks. “You’re never this disobedient.”
I scan the rest of Roxi’s profile entry in a matter of seconds and record the data in my memory core. “I’m going after her if I have to commit the ultimate crime to get free of this ship. Let me go, or someone is going to know what the Black Death feels like.”
“Brother…” Atomizer inspects me. “Threatening to kill for a mate is understandable. But not of your own kind.”
“She is not my mate, Atom.” I shove the tablet against his chest and storm toward the back of the ship. I thrust a finger at Raven. “We betrayed the only classification that outranks us all! She outranks Commander Savage and even Chasm!”
Raven swivels in her seat to look at me. I can’t stop myself from curling a lip at her.
“And I think Commander Savage knows. If he did and he let her die, then one of us will meet our Brothers in the afterlife,” I snarl.
I take every available weapon I can fit on my body with extra ammo magazines and shields.
I grab an emergency suit in case they damage hers and attach the case to my back.
I know they could have killed her already, but I’m guessing the Solcrue came for her like the bounty hunters and Sin because they knew what she was. I don’t understand how they know.
But seven bodies and three deaths suggest she’s been around a long time. They have had many opportunities to discover her truth.
I walk back to Atomizer. “Are you going to try and stop me?”
He’s still studying the tablet. “Shit… No, Brother. But this is a death trap.”
“That’s why I need you to take out my beacon.”
“We can’t find you that way,” Castor protests.
“You will find me like humans used to. Scan, observe, track anomalies in the stars. Solcrue know how to do it. It’s long past time we upgrade from our interconnected net to their level of stealth. Take. It. Out.”
Atomizer sets the tablet aside and opens the back of my suit. He pries the beacon from the base of my neck and locks it in a cabinet. I close up my back with a single thought.
“This is crazy,” Castor says. “Like Psycho-level crazy.”
“Roxi is what we have been looking for since the plant on Titan was destroyed years ago,” I say.
Raven gasps quietly. “You mean… Roxi…”
“She designed Titan security systems,” Atomizer replies with a dark look over at her.
Flashbomb’s screen brings up a zoomed-in image of Aegis as it comes within range. “We can’t tell the brothers until we run this by Chasm, or everyone will want in the fight. We can’t afford to leave the humans we’ve saved without protectors. Chasm will know who to tell and what to do about this.”
Castor nods. He turns back to me. “Take an extra crackle cell. You’ll need the power.”
I pick up Roxi’s tablet from where I dropped it after Raven released me from the grav beam, and hand it off to Atomizer. “This cannot fall into Solcruean hands.”
He holds it over his ultromotor. “With my Spark, Brother.”
I rip a Solcruean power cell out of the wall and sling the blue cylinder over my shoulder before descending to the hangar below.
Flashbomb>>Fracture: Measure your anger, Brother. Only blow when you have no other way out.
I click back twice, hike up the ramp of the LightBlade, sling the fuel cell into the power bank, and close up the ship. Flashbomb opens the hangar for me, and I hover out of FI and into space. A CSP ship leaves the planet, heading for the Solcruean fleet across the solar system from us.
Taking a direct path will get me to Roxi faster, but Solcrue will be watching for that. I bank wide enough that they will, hopefully, believe I am headed back toward the Iridithatium nebula.
I close all com channels, disconnect the beacon for the ship, and cloak the vessel so I am no more than a shadow in the night.
It was never in my design to be invisible, just transparent.
I was made to break over and over and still pull myself back together.
But if I can’t save Roxi, I may let myself fall apart for good.
A Creator… I can’t believe we found one.
But of course she found us.
And I handled her like a regular human female.
I know now that my reaction to her was not because she is my destined match but because of her designation. I responded to her the way I did because all Titans would.
I feel like an idiot for ever having hoped there was something between us. It is simply because of what we are.
But she is still special to me because she understands broken things. She is a Creator. And Roxi is my friend.
I wish we were more.
She has died three times. She has been remade seven times. That’s what she meant when she said she was human but made in a lab. The CyberTechs kept bringing her back, modifying her body.
Roxi knows what it is like to be a Titan. To endure what we have. To fight and die and be remade into a newer model.
I have to save her.
I remember being a BloodCypher like Diesel and Holo. I remember the WreckTank stage. I even remember being a simple human Augment.
And I remember unadulterated life, though it is just…fragments.
I am used to those.
I have never needed answers about my past. All I need is a single point to orient me, and I will deal with everything else.
Right now, Roxi is my axis. Everything I do revolves around her. I know the brothers would agree that she deserves more respect than we have given her. But I’m not surprised she kept her title from us. She didn’t want to compromise Titan priorities.
I wish I knew why she didn’t tell me, why she kissed me when she knew we were of different ranks, why she would save a lowly Titan like me, and sacrifice her beautiful mind and body for something worth so much less.
Solcruean ships hover in the distance but do not advance on our fleet.
We are of nearly equal size: Aegis, BlazeStar, Ravenger III, Scythe, FI, junker BoltBurners, Rebel fighters, and a host of stolen Skysprinters and LightBlades.
They loom in the stars, opposite the planet with a mothership, three frigates, five cruisers, and a squadron of Skysprinters comparable to our Rebel numbers.
Seeing the fraction of the Solcrue Empire’s armada compared to our entire resistance as they leave makes me wonder how we’ll ever turn the tide of this war.
I don't think we ever will.
Unless Roxi is onto something about making them fight among themselves.
But we cannot simply escape into another, unfamiliar galaxy. The Solcrue will only chase us until we are broken, starved, and adrift like Centurion was, but with no one left to rescue us.
Going in alone against an entire fleet is a psychotic plan. But Titans were designed to fight to the death rather than be enslaved by the enemy.
But I’d be lying to myself if I said it’s just because Roxi is a Creator.
Perhaps I like the lie a little too much, that she and I had a connection.
So I let myself believe it, because that’s what it takes to block out the last of my hesitation.
And I need my hands steady for the heads I’m going to take.
Abducting a Creator is punishable by death.
Hurting her will earn them a vicious, agonizing end.
I want them to know what it feels like to be ripped into a million pieces.
Because that’s what they have done to our hope by taking her.
And it’s what they’ve done to the closest thing I have left to a heart.