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  THE TITAN TRAP

  A NOVEL OF THE GAIAN CONSORTIUM

  CHRISTINE POPE

  DARK VALENTINE PRESS

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  If You Enjoyed This Book…

  Also by Christine Pope

  About the Author

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE TITAN TRAP

  Copyright © 2014 by Christine Pope

  Published by Dark Valentine Press

  Cover design and ebook formatting by Indie Author Services.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems — except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews — without permission in writing from its publisher, Dark Valentine Press.

  Please contact the author through the form on her website at www.christinepope.com if you experience any formatting or readability issues with this book.

  Created with Vellum

  CHAPTER ONE

  Cassidy Evans watched the approaching yellowish-orange sphere and thought, not for the first time, I really need to get a better gig.

  All right, so she hadn’t actually chosen to make the monthly supply run to the maximum-security prison on Titan. No, she’d inherited the contract, along with the aging freighter she now piloted, and since she didn’t have many alternatives, she hadn’t deviated from the schedule, had kept making the loop from the supply depot on the Moon to Titan and back again. It was tedious…okay, mind-numbingly dull…but it paid the bills. Mostly. The Avalon, which her father had named because of a maudlin longing for his family’s homeland of Wales (never mind that he’d never set foot there), was now older than Cassidy herself, and thirty years could put a lot of wear and tear on a girl.

  Don’t I know it.

  Lately it seemed that most of her income went straight back into the ship, paying for the repairs to keep it limping along so it could continue to earn even the meager rates the Consortium’s corrections division was willing to offer. Every once in a while she contemplated selling the aging freighter and using the money to buy her passage to one of the colonies the Gaian Exploration Commission was continually opening up, just so she could start over, but she wasn’t sure the Avalon would even fetch that much. Never mind that the GEC didn’t much care for single colonists. It preferred families so all those husbands and wives could keep producing more children to populate all those new worlds.

  Yes, she knew there were shady organizations out there that, for a fee, would match up singletons such as herself so they could have quickie weddings and then apply for expedited colonist status, but Cassidy wasn’t quite that desperate.

  Yet.

  The comm beeped, and she pushed the button to accept the incoming call.

  A man’s face filled the small screen mounted in the console. Expression stern, he said, “Freighter Avalon, this is Titan MaxSec Logistics. Proceed to Xanadu Station, Hangar 12.”

  Cassidy nodded. “MaxSec Logistics, proceeding to Xanadu Station, Hangar 12.”

  Protocol satisfied, the man relaxed into a smile, then continued, in a much warmer tone, “Welcome back, Cassidy. You ever going to let me buy you that drink?”

  “Now, Dale, you know I never mix business and pleasure.”

  “I keep hoping maybe I can get you to change your mind about that.”

  “Not until you can offer something better than the depot on Hyperion.”

  Titan itself housed the prison facility and nothing else; all support personnel and their families lived in the domed outpost on Hyperion Base, which didn’t have much to offer beyond breathable air, a lackluster commissary, and an even worse cafeteria-slash-pub. Dale had been flirting with her ever since her first solo run here, and she did find him moderately attractive, but her current desperation wasn’t quite overwhelming enough to allow her to settle for a drab existence on Hyperion, where she’d be lucky to share a conjugal visit every ten days, since that was how often personnel were cycled in and out of the MaxSec facility to get their Consortium-mandated three-day break.

  “Wish I could, beautiful, but I’m not seeing the inner worlds for another two years. Not until my contract’s up.”

  “Then I’ll take a rain check, and you can ask me again in two years.”

  He laughed, although Cassidy thought she heard something hollow in it. They’d been doing this same song and dance for the past three years, and nothing had changed. It was fine. The flirtation at least helped to break up the monotony, even though she knew nothing would come of it.

  “All right, Captain Evans, we have you on final approach. Protocol Alpha.”

  “Copy that, Logistics. I’ll be there before you know it.”

  “Protocol Alpha” simply meant that she would approach her designated hangar, dock, and wait for the automated carts to trundle into her cargo hold and remove the food, clothing, weapons, ammo, and any other items corrections had mandated be transported on this supply run. Xanadu Station was a supply depot and nothing more; the actual prison was located some twenty kilometers away. It was set up that way on purpose, as the corrections department wanted to make sure that the supply depots and the ships that docked there regularly could not be a tempting target, a means of escape.

  Of course, no one had ever escaped the MaxSec facility, let alone managed to cross twenty kilometers of some mighty inhospitable territory, methane lakes and all, so Cassidy thought the whole setup was overkill at its finest. Not that anyone would ask for her opinion.

  She’d done this so often that she really didn’t have to think about it anymore — come in slowly, slicing through the moon’s thick atmosphere, letting the beacons guide the ship in for the final leg until it came to a rest in a hangar. No point in making the hangar livable, as she — or anyone else — wasn’t expected to set foot outside the ship, and the automated carts certainly didn’t need to breathe.

  Maybe that was the worst of it, that she came all the way here, ten days in, ten days back to the Moon, ten days’ rest there, and never saw one single solitary person face to face. Her interactions with Dale, or, more rarely, Pablo or Roy, were always over the comm. She’d never met them in person, didn’t know if they were short or tall or something in between. They were just disembodied faces on a screen.

  So when she heard footsteps coming down the Avalon’s short central hallway, and a tall figure in an environmental suit burst into the cockpit, she thought she could be forgiven for letting out the beginnings of a scream before she managed to get hold of herself enough to stand up and say, “What the hell?”

  The man pulled a shimmering titanium badge off the belt of his suit. “Security, ma’am. A prisoner managed to escape and was spotted coming toward Xanadu Station. We’re searching all ships.”

  Escape? No, that didn’t sound right. It was impossible to escape the
MaxSec, let alone cross Titan’s frigid landscape in order to get to the one place that would allow a prisoner to get off-planet.

  “I-I didn’t hear anything — Dale…that is, Sergeant Givens…would have contacted me.”

  “We went into immediate lockdown, ma’am. That means no comms contact as well, in case the fugitive somehow managed to monitor our transmissions.” The stranger had made no attempt to remove his helmet, and Cassidy could see only shadowy glimpses of the features beneath the gold-filmed duraplast. “I came in through your cargo hold, inspected it, and then sealed it, but I also need to search the interior.”

  “Go ahead,” she told him, since she knew there wasn’t anything she could do to stop him. At the same time she hoped she’d remembered to make up her bunk this morning, and that she hadn’t left any panties or other unmentionables lying around. After all, she certainly hadn’t expected to have any visitors today.

  After giving her a perfunctory nod, he went back out into the corridor. She could hear him moving around her cabin, and then the other, smaller one that used to be hers before she inherited the ship. Other than that, there was only the galley and the tiny alcove with its two built-in benches and small round table that functioned as the eating area. A Sirocco-class luxury transport the Avalon was not.

  The guard’s inspection barely took two minutes. Really, you couldn’t hide a mouse in the crew compartments in this boat, let alone an escaped prisoner. Cassidy waited in the pilot’s seat, nerves jangling, although she told herself she had nothing to worry about, that the officer had already checked the cargo hold, so of course there couldn’t be some murderous fugitive lurking anywhere on board.

  The man returned. “All clear,” he told her, which was what she’d been expecting to hear. Even so, she sucked in a relieved little breath and waited for him to go so she could let the unloading continue and then get on her way.

  But he didn’t. Instead, she could practically feel his gaze sweep over her from behind the helmet’s visor, and he said, “I need you to take off. Now.”

  “What?” she blurted, sure she hadn’t heard him clearly.

  “The prisoner isn’t here, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t still come aboard. As long as this ship is docked, it represents a possible escape route.”

  “The unloading isn’t even half done — ”

  “That doesn’t matter. Take off…immediately.”

  “I’m going to need to get clearance to take off — ”

  “I’m giving you the clearance. Do it.”

  Something in his stance told her that she’d better do as she was directed. Muttering a curse under her breath, she turned back to the console, checked the security camera feed in the cargo hold to make sure she wasn’t going to crush an automated cargo cart when she buttoned everything up, then flipped the switch. The cargo bay doors began to close slowly.

  “You’ll have to go out through the hatch,” she said, pointing with her free hand in the direction of the corridor. “It’s the door between the smaller cabin and the sanitary facilities.”

  In response, he widened his stance, effectively blocking the hallway. “I’m staying onboard.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Corrections Statute 197A, Paragraph 102 states that in the case of an escape, it’s a corrections officer’s duty to make sure any ships get off the planet’s surface safely. You can drop me at Hyperion on your way out of the system.”

  This was insane. Completely insane. More arguments rose to Cassidy’s lips, but she saw the way the officer’s hand rested on the pulse pistol at his hip and decided discretion was definitely the better part of valor here. Yes, jogging over to Hyperion would slow her down, as she’d have to recalculate her route, but she could file a claim for the extra fuel expenditure. That didn’t mean it would actually ever be paid, since Corrections was slow as hell to pay anything that was actually in her contract, let alone something so far outside it. Even so, she’d feel better for making the attempt.

  The calculations for liftoff had already been entered in the computer, so she only had to make a few hurried adjustments for leaving several hours earlier than she had planned. The Avalon’s atmospheric engines rumbled on, and she engaged the thrusters, the ship lifting from the hangar floor and moving slowly out into the thick air, yellow and toxic as the Cloud that had swept across half of Gaia’s surface and killed so many billions.

  At the same time, the comm squawked to life, Dale’s face strained and pale. “Avalon, report. Explain your early departure!”

  Frowning, she replied, “Under orders from one of your officers, Sergeant Givens.”

  “No such orders have been relayed to me, Avalon. Abort takeoff immediately and await the arrival of a security team.”

  Horror swept over her, even as the man in the environmental suit leaned forward and smashed the comm screen with the butt of his pistol. Then he leveled the gun at her and said softly, “Disregard that order and continue on your current course.”

  Even though she wanted to protest, to do something to show he wasn’t in control here, Cassidy knew she didn’t have any other options. There was nothing she could do but comply.

  * * *

  So many things could have gone wrong. Even now, as Derek Tagawa watched the hazy surface of Titan drop away beneath them, he couldn’t quite believe that he’d managed to pull it off.

  Well, mostly. He would have preferred to have an escape vehicle that wasn’t quite as old and poky as this freighter, but the one weakness of the MaxSec facility — the one he and his compatriots had managed to exploit — was that its defenses all depended on prisoners never getting out. It wasn’t like some GDF base, fully stocked with fighter craft, ready to go on the attack. A shuttle came in once a week to rotate out personnel to and from Hyperion Base, and the ships brought in prisoners at erratic intervals, when there were enough of them lined up to justify the expense of hauling them all the way out here.

  So the chink in the armor was the supply vessels, which dropped off their supplies twice each month. His intelligence had told him there were two ships assigned the contract, the Avalon and the Orestes. He’d hoped it would be the Orestes that was delivering supplies when the opportunity came to make his escape, but no, it was the much slower and older Avalon. Unfortunately, beggars couldn’t be choosers…and neither could escaped convicts. At least he didn’t have to worry much about pursuit. Not yet, anyway. Of course the security personnel would be contacting the GDF station on Ganymede, and they’d be scrambling fighters to intercept the Avalon. But that would take some time, and he already had a plan in place to make sure this hijacked piece of junk was never found.

  Since he’d known very little about the Avalon, save that it probably should have been scuttled years ago, he’d been shocked to see that the pilot was a woman. He hadn’t been expecting that. He also hadn’t expected her to be so young and attractive. All right, bordering on beautiful, with features too delicate to be paired with the beat-up coveralls she was wearing, and her dark hair pulled up in a messy twist on the back of her head, as if she’d allowed herself roughly two minutes to get ready at the start of her day.

  He told himself that the pilot’s sex didn’t matter, that as long as she was competent and did as she was told, she’d escape this whole thing with the sort of story that would get her free drinks for the rest of her life. Not that she probably had any trouble getting free drinks now, actually. She’d turn heads pretty much anywhere she went, let alone in the far more limited pool of available women on the Moon or in the outer worlds.

  For a second or two, he contemplated telling her that she had nothing to worry about, that he had no plans to harm her in any way, then realized that probably wasn’t a very good idea. He didn’t like the fear in her wide hazel eyes, but he’d use it to his advantage now. Anyway, he had a feeling she wouldn’t believe him if he told her the truth, that he’d never hurt anyone in his life and certainly wasn’t about to start now.

  After all, if he was
n’t a murderer, a criminal of the very worst sort, what in the world was he doing in the MaxSec on Titan?

  He knew she’d never believe that story.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hands shaking, Cassidy maneuvered the Avalon through Titan’s turbulent upper atmosphere until at last they broke through to the cool black of space. “Where to now?” she asked, forcing her voice to sound calm, unconcerned. The whole time the pistol had remained trained on her, and she didn’t want to make any sudden movements, do anything that might set off this madman.

  “Europa,” he replied.

  All right, now she knew he was crazy. She’d guessed at his plan, that he was counting on there not being any real pursuit from the MaxSec. There wasn’t supposed to be any way out of the prison facility, let alone off the planet, and yet he’d managed to pull off that supposedly impossible feat. All right, fine…the cavalry wasn’t going to come bail her out. But on Ganymede, sister moon to Europa, there was a full GDF squadron, and she was sure they’d already been alerted to the hijacking of the Avalon and were scrambling fighters to intercept her ship. The Jovian system was the very last place they should be heading if this escaped convict wanted to stay escaped.

  Not that she thought they had any real chance of evading pursuit, no matter what they did, but it seemed as if her hijacker wasn’t even bothering to put much effort into it.