TITAN:PROLOGUE

While many of the planet’s more beautiful and majestic animals had dwindled in prosperity and grown extinct with little pageantry over the past several centuries, crickets had prevailed. Their chirping was incessant and seemed to hang infinite in the warm August night. The figure, perched unseen on a narrow catwalk connecting a pair of factory buildings, quietly thanked the cacophony for serving to further mask his presence. The light field armor he was wearing was dark enough to blend into shadow, and the black paint on his face added another layer of concealment, but to have nature’s orchestra swelling above the sounds of his heavy boots striking metal and concrete gave him as much comfort as the situation could possibly warrant, though that still wasn‘t much.

The labyrinthine network of factories that composed the industrial ring surrounding the city ended abruptly on the east side, the smoke stacks and narrow alleys giving way to the base of a structure that resembled one of the old space elevators. Had this battery not been recently deactivated, it would produce enough light pollution to illuminate several surrounding square blocks, day or night, and his catwalk hiding spot would be proven ineffective. Then again, if the battery had not been deactivated, there would be no reason for that catwalk to be presently occupied. The figure in the light field armor inspected the decommissioned battery site from his perch, impressed only by the fact that his intel had for once proven right: the battery was crawling. Behind the makeshift fence that now surrounded the battery’s immediate proximity, something on a grand scale was unfolding. Fleets of immense excavation vehicles and equipment pored in and out of a large hole that had been blasted through the thick wall of the battery, tall portable spotlights had been erected, shedding light on the dozens of men who swarmed around the area. The electrical storms that were always prevalent around an active battery had subsided and been replaced with black snow. What seemed to be missing was a considerable military presence, as there were only scant few Surface Volunteer Guards peppered throughout the site. In the dark, the figure on the catwalk pulled a slight scope from his belt, activated the night-sight feature, and scanned the entire perimeter again and again, memorizing routes and sizing up potential marks.

Waiting had always been the hardest part. A bustling excavation site had blossomed on recently defunct federal property, more or less before his eyes, as the waiting continued interminably. He shifted his weight for the first time in what seemed like hours, and could see that one of the G.R.I.D.’s mighty ribs was breaking the horizon. As it inched closer it grew, eventually seeming like it was filling the sky overhead.

It was in those long, silent minutes the figure hiding in the shadows felt, because he had grown so incredibly adept at the task of waiting, like he could relate to the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart. So often he found himself an ominous spectator, hidden in the dark while events slowly unfolded before him. It was this train of thought, which had brought to mind an ancient literary protagonist, that caused him to dwell on the reason why he had joined the rebellion in the first place. There was no elaborate chain of events that ushered him into this clandestine lifestyle, it was, essentially, a variation of every rebel‘s story. His brain would never be good enough for the GRID, that was decided before he was even born, and so he would fight this insufferable secret war until he could finally see this world change for the better. That change, he knew, was unlikely, in his lifetime or even the next. But no matter. He would continue fighting, and, for the time, continue waiting.

Contemplating the pointlessness and ceaselessness of the extended war of attrition in which he was currently engaged caused his patience to falter. For a brief moment, he entertained the notion of switching his radio off, and as he did so he brought his scope up to his face, eye-balling the closest gap in the fence and the two guards that stood on either side of it. They were Surface Volunteer Guards, and his contempt for them was without equal. An SVG was as close as a citizen could be to an actual GRID dweller, although the position had become something of a joke since GRID construction came to a halt nearly a century ago. These two SVGs were no different from any other; lean and muscular, but dim-witted and over-confident. The thought of taking the pair down was growing more attractive by the minute, as was the prospect of uncovering what exactly was occurring inside the battery’s impressive circumference. So attractive, in fact, that before he was even fully cognizant of what he had resolved to do, that the figure, in the shadows, on the catwalk, was tucking his gear away and preparing to move from his perch. A voice broke radio silence and resonated from within his earpiece.

“Eyes, what are you doing?” The voice was not amused.

The figure called Eyes paused. The voice spoke again.

“Operative, you are not prepared to engage a single enemy, nor are you authorized to expend your limited ordinance in any situation that is not life-threatening. Great sacrifices were made to get you to that stakeout point, and you will remain there unless notified otherwise.”

Eyes was indignant. It was true that the only field combat he had seen was brief and clumsy, but it was also true that ninety percent of SVGs had never seen field combat in any capacity. Whenever a skirmish arose on the planet’s surface, usually incited by a headstrong rebel or group of rebels, heavily armed G.R.I.D. military would arrive on the spot within minutes and quell the disturbance. The absence of G.R.I.D. military here would make his chances of successful infiltration that much greater. He would defy his superiors, yes, but he would return to them a hero, return as the man who unlocked the mysteries within the deactivated battery. However: selfish visions of heroism were not the strongest motivating agent here. The desire to be a catalyst for change, for the benefit of the entire human race, was what ultimately made the choice for him. Ignoring the voice in his ear and forsaking his post, the operative called Eyes switched his earpiece off and began to make his way toward his target.

With a minimal amount of grace, Eyes left his catwalk perch and scaled down the closest wall to the alleyway below. The pair of guards that had been monopolizing his attention for the past fifteen minutes were much closer than they had seemed when he was a half-dozen stories above the ground, but, looking once again through his pocket scope, he didn’t need to guess their distance. When a piece of equipment like Eyes’ scope tells its user that an object is one-hundred and twelve yards away, they have a tendency to believe it. Improvising, Eyes moved from one piece of cover to another, his boots crunching lightly in the ebony snow, until eventually the distance between him and the break in the fence was only a quarter of its original length. From his belt, he produced a small black disc, palm-sized and inch-thick. The disc was practically an antique, an old relic that had become more of a good luck charm or an albatross than anything else. Eyes knew he would only have one shot to use it, and that it would be very expensive to replace, in terms of both currency and the time it would take to hunt down another. Eyes stared down at the disc in his open hand for a moment, slightly morose that he had disobeyed orders and jeopardized the stakeout. Raising his head and looking forward with the clearest intent he launched the disc through the air, which sailed end over end until it landed, silent and unnoticed near the feet of two Surface Volunteer Guards. Within seconds, the oxygen around the guards had been replaced by a colorless, odorless gas that rendered them immediately unconscious. The opportunity to hide the incapacitated guards with great ease was a luxury the darkness had provided the rebel operative on this night.

Beyond the fence, inside the busy, well-lit area surrounding the battery, was another story entirely. Abundant shadows and inattentive men would not be easily found within this camp, and it would worsen as he drew closer to his intended destination. The only advantage Eyes had was that the attention of the men working within the fence was focused primarily on whatever was occurring inside the walls of the battery. SVGs were either patrolling or stationary, always in pairs, but their placement was sparse and they too were far more interested in the commotion within the battery than they were in their duties. Directly ahead, Eyes could see the gaping hole that had been punched through the battery’s impossibly thick wall. A steady stream of monstrous vehicles with heavy treads rolled continuously into and out of the hole, many of them with large beds that carried loads of loose rock to a pile on the opposite side of the structure. The resulting plan, the one that offered the least resistance, was fairly obvious: board one of the trucks while it deposits a load of rock, and, when it returns to the interior of the battery, ride it through to the excavation site.

Eyes had forgotten just how large a battery was. Being a part of the rebellion, and the near-constant relocation he endured as a result, caused him to miss out on a great deal of average civilian activity, such as visiting the local battery to receive his energy allowances. Subsequently, Eyes did not expect it to take him the better part of an hour to walk to the opposite side, pausing briefly here and there to find solid cover and avoid detection. The gravity of the current situation did not reveal itself until Eyes witnessed the trucks’ unloading zone. Exhumed rocks and debris were stacked hundreds of feet tall. Every time a truck dumped its payload, a small mountain was being created. Eyes knew by the volume of digging equipment that this was a big job, but he had assumed the number of laborers meant they were trying to accomplish something quickly, not something on a huge scale. Huge indeed; a functional battery had to tunnel more than two dozen miles underground; what, then, would be the purpose of lengthening or widening that hole? For a quick second, Eyes considered switching his radio back on and relating the scope of this project to the higher-ups, but he decided it would be in his better judgement to get a better idea of what was occurring first, and to prolong the opprobrium he would be receiving from his superiors for as long as he possibly could.

Fear was coercing itself into Eyes’ bloodstream. His half-crouching stance, which would normally lend itself to a hasty departure from his hiding spot if the necessity arose, suddenly became rigid, and it occurred to him that he could not move if he wanted to. This is foolish, he thought to himself. Worse than foolish. This was suicide. Eyes’ behavior had always been undermined by his impetuous nature, but his instincts had never led him into certain peril or death. Preparing to abandon the stowaway scenario, his brain was racing to uncover an alternative course of action, but the impending threat and the mysteries it insinuated were without parallel. He closed his eyes and cleared his mind, attempting to rediscover his fixity of purpose, but was startled by the roar of a loan truck that was pivoting to return to the battery interior.

Nathaniel Dawson was furious. He had served as personal assistant for Mr. Nakatomi for three months now, and this was the first time had duties had carried on well into the middle of the night. But the absence of slumber was not what had given him reason to grit his teeth and exhale loudly through his nose and curse this godforsaken battery altogether. This was the first time Nathaniel Dawson had ever been off-G.R.I.D. in his all of his twenty-seven years, and it was so much worse than his privileged life on the G.R.I.D. would have led him to believe. The air on the surface seemed heavier, felt dirtier. Upon his first arrival, he had nearly gagged, and made an immediate mental note to have an airborne pathogen scan once he could return to the G.R.I.D. At the moment, his lungs were feeling very much like the magma-scarred walls that surrounded the broad clearing inside the battery. Nathaniel Dawson wanted this night to be over. He wanted to be back in one of the suspended arms of the G.R.I.D., in his climate-controlled apartment with his air purifier turned on its highest setting. Earth’s surface was a miserable place.

Mr. Nakatomi’s unsullied shoulder was directly in front of Nathaniel. They were standing on an elevated platform, surveying the mess of bodies and equipment that lay scattered before them. The center of the atrium-like battery interior was a sprawling abyss. Support struts had to be erected around the gaping maw to prevent the earth from collapsing around it, which had slowed the process of extending the opening downward to a mere crawl. Nathaniel wasn’t the only one running out of patience. If they didn’t clear whatever obstruction was preventing the battery from operating before sunrise, the following evening would most likely include of another one of these visits to the planet’s surface.

The battery had been inactive for almost 72 hours. Had it gone dormant a week prior or a week later, containment of the failure would have been considerably easier, but this was the third week of the month, the week energy allowances were distributed among the city‘s inhabitants. A battery acted as the hub of every major city on the planet, and if this one wasn’t repaired and fully operational in two days, riots would undoubtedly erupt in the surrounding area. Fortunately, the obstruction had been discovered, most likely some sort of mineral deposit; the problem now was widening the aperture in the ground so that it could excavated. Nathaniel had shifted his gaze upward and was staring at the rounded walls of that battery that seemed to stretch forever, Babel-like, into the heavens, when someone on the floor shouted.

“We need both of those cranes over here, now!” It was the foreman, standing at the edge of the abyss. “Now, right now!”

The earth shook as the two requested items rolled to meet their demand, and Nathaniel noticed that Mr. Nakatomi had hardly budged in hours. He briefly entertained the idea of breaking the silence between them, but thought better of it. Shigeru Nakatomi was known for many things, but his propensity to make small talk was not among them. As the pair of cranes lumbered into place, men on the battery floor began to clamber down into the hole via a network of scaffoldings that were integrated into the support struts. Nathaniel breathed a sigh of relief, knowing their work was nearly completed and that the hour when he could return to the G.R.I.D. was steadily approaching. He watched the men plunging into the abyss, shouting and signaling to each other, connecting the cranes’ tethers to something unseen just below the breach. Within minutes the cranes were connected and the impediment was being lifted to the surface. It was not a mineral deposit.

At first it looked like little more than a massive rock, ovoid and dirt-covered. But as the cranes lifted it higher into the light and the dust began to shake itself loose, it became something else altogether. It became clear that it did not consist of one piece, but rather many pieces, arranged intricately like a jigsaw puzzle. What it was fabricated from could not yet be ascertained, but its architecture was ornamented by a series of large carvings, etched in discordant intervals along its shell. The carvings were arcane, resembling both language and geometry, and whether or not they or even the orb itself would ever be understood soon became paltry, for Mr. Nakatomi had abandoned his unyielding stance and produced a small communicator from his pocket. Pressing a button on the communicator’s face, Nakatomi brought it up to his mouth and spoke only two words.

“Worst fears.”

Nathaniel had barely processed Mr. Nakatomi’s cryptic message before a hundred G.R.I.D. military conscripts had flooded the battery’s interior, shouting, pulling excavation workers from their posts and vehicles, and forcing them at gun-point to move toward the center of the chamber.

“Mr. Nakatomi, I don’t understand.” They were the last words that would ever escape Nathaniel Dawson’s lips, for no sooner than they were uttered, Mr. Nakatomi had turned to face him and, unflinching, shot him in the gut with a small firearm. The isolated gunshot echoed briefly inside the battery, followed shortly after by a hundred more as every truck driver, excavation specialist, and grunt worker on the premises was efficiently executed by G.R.I.D. personnel. As Nathaniel Dawson fell to his knees and curled forward, his peripheral vision blurring, gunfire erupting all around him, he spotted a lone figure in dark field armor diving from a truck and darting toward the battery’s only exit.

“SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT!” Eyes had managed to commandeer one of the excavation vehicles and navigate it through the battery’s front door, only to have the situation explode right before his eyes. He had penetrated the battery at the precise moment the orb was being lifted into the air and sat bewildered behind the wheel of the truck for a moment before G.R.I.D. military stormed the dig. He was sprinting now away from the battery through the black snow. At first the gunfire was the only sound he could hear above his own heavy breathing, but soon he was able to hear the unmistakable sound of aircraft hovering above him, and their spotlights cut through the darkness around him. Someone was shouting unintelligibly through a loudspeaker as three spotlights converged on Eyes.

“Unidentified intruder, stop now or you will be fired upon!”

Eyes could not afford to slow down. His steady strides were broken here and there by hesitant half-steps as he tried to evade the flying machines, but his attempt to flee was in vain. The trio of vehicles, as if of one mind, fired short bursts of automatic gunfire simultaneously. Bullets ripped through Eyes from three separate trajectories and he fell forward, blood bright against the black snow. He took his final breaths there, in a clearing outside the battery, as one of the ribs of the G.R.I.D. was passing overhead.

-Back to the top- Enjoy.

-Josh Houchin

This Prologue is a work in progress and as such, is not finished. Check back frequently for updates and revisions.