The Circuit: The Complete Saga

by Bruno, Rhett C.

  “Let’s tear this son of a bitch down, Julius,” Talon Rayne said over his comm-link.

  Talon was a Ceresian miner employed by the Morastus Clan. He wore a clunky enviro-suit, complete with a bulbous helmet that was so filthy it made his cobalt eyes difficult to see. It was an older model, but it got the job done, providing oxygen and protection in the inhospitable tunnels within the asteroid.

  It was weighted sufficiently as well. Artificial gravity generators could hardly reach his position, so far from the residential block of the facility.

  “Roger that, Tal,” Julius responded from the cockpit of a Mark II quarrying mech. Static muddied the channel.

  Talon gave the pile of explosives at the base of a pillar of rock another look over before retreating around the narrow mouth of the cavern. A group of men in similar suits awaited him. Julius’ mech positioned itself in front of them.

  “Blow it.”

  A small blast caused the whole space to shudder. Fragments spewed out, harmlessly peppering the armored front of the mech. Then the sound of expanding cracks greeted Talon’s ears like rumbling thunder. The far ceiling came crashing down.

  He stumbled back a bit, wincing as even his suit’s helmet couldn’t drown out the thunderous clamor.

  “You girls havin’ fun listenin’ from back there?” Julius quipped as his mech slogged forward over the debris. The cloud of dust vanished into the vents of a vacuum on either side of the vehicle’s midriff.

  “Gets louder and louder every time,” Talon remarked, wiping the grime from his visor.

  “Never get tired of watchin’.”

  “How’s it look?”

  “Scanners goin’ wild. Seems like we knocked the vein down right on top of us.”

  “Well, boys, let’s get to it.”

  A hauler drove up from behind Talon, loaded with machinery and smaller carts. The mech would do most of the heavy lifting, utilizing the two powerful drills built into its arms. The rest of the six-person crew operated the smaller pieces of equipment, breaking up larger chunks, sifting out undesired rock and transporting extracted metals.

  That was pretty much all there was to it. It was arduous work, but it was an honest living.

  Talon had gotten used to the clamor of churning drills echoing throughout the cramped tunnels by then. He approached the blast site through a haze of dust Julius had missed. Crouching, he began loading up one of the pushcarts no differently than he had done a hundred times before.

  “Nice and steady now,” the miner balancing the pushcart shouted over the racket. Bavor was a tall, impressive specimen of a man. What he lacked in intelligence, he made up for with a hulking frame fit to labor for hours at a time without tiring.

  Talon noticed how the man eyed him with an irritated glare because he was moving so sluggishly. It was no secret to the crew there was bad blood between them.

  “I got it,” Talon panted. He might have hoped nobody would notice, but his arms trembled so intensely that it was noticeable through the hefty sleeves of his suit. The muscles up the length of his limbs burned as they hadn’t since his first day working the mines.

  He’d lifted similar chunks of cold rock a thousand times before, most of them heavier than the one presently resting on his forearms. Not again, he thought just before the rock tumbled out of his grip, slicing across the side of the cart and tipping it over.

  Bavor fell backward, cursing. When he was able to get to his feet, he charged over the spilled rubble, hoisting Talon up by the suit until their eyes were level. Beneath his dusty visor, his expression boiled.

  “You piece o’—” He strained to think of an insult before tossing Talon aside out of frustration. “We don’ get paid by the hour!”

  Talon grunted. After a three-month shift, he was growing tired of Bavor’s bullish nature. His legs might have been quaking, but they had just enough energy to spring him to his feet. They had to. Right before he made the move, however, a massive metal arm came between them.

  “Enough out of you, Bavor!” Julius threatened over comms, his baritone voice immediately commanding respect. “Tal, you alright?”

  “Yeah, I’m good. Just slipped,” Talon said. He grasped the mech’s arm and allowed it to lift him.

  “Man’s too weak to be liftin’!” Bavor sneered. He began tossing the spilled rocks back into the cart to show how easily he could do it alone.

  “Shut it,” Julius said. He urged his mech toward Bavor with a few colossal footsteps until the muscle-bound miner stormed away in a huff. Then he turned so that the cockpit’s narrow viewport was visible. Talon squinted through the murky glass to see the dark-skinned face of his oldest friend. They couldn’t speak it on an open channel, but his tightened expression seemed to be asking, “It’s happening again, isn’t it?”

  “Son of a…” Julius murmured under his breath as Talon nodded meekly in response to the look. “Take over the hauler from Vellish.”

  Talon didn’t say anything. He stood in place, wearing a blank stare and trying to ignore the throbbing sensation seizing his shoulders.

  “That’s an order,” Julius said.

  Talon wanted to protest, but he was right. He’d be of little assistance doing the manual labor, especially with Bavor on his ass. He headed toward the hauler parked at the mouth of the tunnel, kicking a bit of rock on his way.

  “Li’l girl can’t handle a day’s work.” Bavor nudged him in the chest as he passed.

  Talon clenched his fists, but he didn’t bother looking back. The two of them had shared many scraps before, but with his diseased muscles failing him, Talon knew it wasn’t the right time. So he toughed it out until it was time to clock out and head back up.

  * * *

  He needed the rest, but more than that, he needed the distraction. And after a long grueling shift, there was only one place on 22 Kalliope to grab a drink with your crew. The Elder Muse wasn’t much in the way of luxury. The bar was, literally, a hole in the wall. The metal shed was sunk into rock beneath the asteroid’s upper crust, with walls so austere that it looked like it was never intended for use. The hanging lights and screens along the walls flickered constantly from tremors.

  “Another ace?” Julius swiped his hand through the holodisplay of his cards in frustration.

  “I’d say that makes two of a kind, eh, Talon?” Vellish smirked, twiddling a pick between his yellow teeth.

  “By the end of the night you’re gonna be a poor man,” Talon said. He took his time signaling the winning hand to transmit from his seat’s holoscreen, enough to really rub it in. Maybe his body couldn’t handle mining well anymore, but he could still rob this sorry lot of their money.

  WINNER, his holo blinked, followed by the ching of pico credits entering his account. His opponents all groaned in unison.

  “Nights keep endin’… I still wake up poor,” Julius grumbled, head sinking into his palm.

  “Don’t we all?” Vellish lifted his drink and everyone at the table clanked their glasses together.

  There were four of them, each dressed in their casual wear. Julius sat across from Talon, a burly man with big expressive eyes and skin as dark as soil. His left hand was a clunker, replaced after it’d been crushed on an old job. The others were Ulson and Vellish, pale Ceresians with not much to distinguish them apart from Vellish’s cybernetically repaired nose and Ulson’s neck-length hair.

  Playing cards was one of the few sources of entertainment available in a secluded mining colony. Watching the newsfeeds over the bar got boring fast. And there were no ladies except for the few brazen enough to work the tunnels, and Talon found them to be poor company. Hard-nosed, always ready to pick a fight. Or maybe he just didn’t feel like the effort of connecting with anybody.

  Gambling made the time go by faster. A slot in the table in front of each of their seats allowed them to insert their CP cards and place pico credits on their games, or on the occasional race or fight transmitted from larger asteroids. Big bets were prohibited, so no
body got rich, but a good player could double his profit from a single mining cycle if he was careful. Talon was that player, so crafty he could hardly get a game outside of his own crew anymore.

  “Aye, bot!” Julius signaled to a rusty android limping around the bar with a tray on its outstretched palm. Its right leg was busted, but nobody bothered to fix it.

  The thing was archaic in appearance, built years before the Tribune’s genocide of automatons during the Earth Reclaimer War. Afterwards, robotics had become a mostly forgotten art. The settlements of the Ceresian Pact made use of the few models that managed to survive the Circuit-wide cull. Their simple programming, however, only allowed them to fulfill basic services.

  “Another round over here. On me.” Julius tapped the table a few times.

  “Damn things take forever,” Talon groused. Watching the bots work only ever made him irritated. Worse, now that he knew his lease on life was nearing its end. They moved stiffly, as if being worked by talentless puppeteers, and always stared forward with their impassive white eye-lenses.

  When it finally arrived, Julius handed over his chit, and the machine read it with a scanner fixed into its wiry chest before placing down four glasses filled with greenish liquid. It was synthrol, or water infused with a certain synthetic toxin that mimicked the effects of liquor. Real alcohol was one of the rarer commodities throughout the Circuit considering the New Earth Tribune refused to produce it, so much so that Talon was sure none of the men sitting in that room had ever been fortunate enough to try it. But synthrol did the job well enough, and for a small fraction of the price.

  “Thank you for your purchase at the Elder Muse Bar and Tavern,” the bot droned. Then it swiveled its hips and proceeded to drag its bad foot toward another table.

  “Cheaper than a person, I suppose, but ain’t no way one of them could ever handle the mines,” Julius said. He wasted no time snatching up his drink. Everybody else followed his lead and tapped glasses.

  “Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Talon replied. As everybody else took a hearty gulp, he barely sipped his. He didn’t want any more. A tiny bit was enough to take away some of the ache from his muscles, but he had to make sure he kept his edge mentally. Everyone around the table might have been his friend, but he desperately needed the money.

  “All right, my turn to deal.” Talon tapped his station, then swiped to start doling out digital cards to the other screens.

  “You hiding something under those gloves?” Vellish joked, slapping the side of the game table and then playfully peeking underneath it. “Some sort of hack?”

  The remark caused Talon to freeze for a moment. From his perspective the world went silent except for a low ringing in his ears. He was hiding something, only it wasn’t something to help cheat at cards. The truth was that he was dying. Slowly and surely his body was withering away from the blue death—an untreatable condition caused by direct exposure to gravitum.

  The effects were recently beginning to show themselves by turning the veins of his hands subtle neon blue, hence the disease’s name. He’d been wearing gloves daily for the past few weeks to hide it since only Julius knew what was wrong.

  “Tal?” Vellish snapped his fingers in front of Talon’s eyes. “Talon.”

  Talon snapped out of it and the familiar din of the Elder Muse filled his eardrums. “Just hands,” he affirmed and continued dealing. He tried not to make eye contact with Julius, who was somberly shaking his head. “I promise.”

  “Bet he’s got his girl watching us from the rafters or something,” Ulson said.

  “Or maybe I’m just better,” Talon boasted. “Enough wasting time. You guys still have credits for me to steal!” He took a long sip of his synthrol, throwing aside his original strategy in favor of peace of mind. He desperately needed his crew to keep treating him normally. Without that, he wasn’t sure how long he could keep at this.

  “Not this time,” Julius declared before pulling his hand up on his station to see what he was dealt. Whatever he saw made his features darken.

  The game went on. The drinks kept flowing, and for once Talon didn’t seem to have an edge on his competition. He didn’t care. It was a small price to pay for how good his aching body started to feel and how clear his troubled mind grew.

  The door of the Elder Muse burst open.

  “What a surprise!” Bavor said as he stormed in, past a line of gaming terminals that barely worked anymore. “Too weak for your shift, but here as usual, playin’ mindless games.” His face was caked with grime and his brawny chest seemed ready to tear through the fabric of his boilersuit.

  “Leave him alone,” Vellish said without bothering to look up.

  His head dizzy from too many drinks, Talon decided not to back down a second time. “It’s a game of cunning and intuition,” he declared. “Seeing as how you probably don’t even know the meaning of those two words, we’d all probably be better off if an intelligent man such as yourself stayed out.”

  Talon took a long sip of his drink, swishing it around in his mouth until his teeth were stained. Then he slammed the glass down on the table. “You know, just to give us a fighting chance.”

  The synthrol might have alleviated his soreness, but it didn’t make him any faster. Before he knew it, Bavor was upon him once again.

  “What the fuck did you say?” Bavor growled, his nostrils flaring. His breath smelled as foul as the very depths of the mines. The rest of the table quickly stood.

  “C’mon, Bavor. We’re all just trying to have a good time after a long day,” Julius said. He laid his hand on Bavor’s shoulder, but was immediately shrugged off.

  “Didn’t realize your hearing was just as poor as your brain,” Talon sneered. As he went to grin, a heavy fist crashed into his jaw. Before he could fall back, he was flung across the table, tumbling onto his stomach with the wind knocked out of him.

  “He was just kidding!” Ulson shouted as the rest of the crew grabbed Bavor to hold him back. The other miners filling the Elder Muse jumped up, crowding around the spectacle. Yelling about a fight. Anything to break the monotony of the asteroid-mining life.

  “What? Li’l girl can’t take a proper beatin’?” Bavor broke free of the others with ease. “Bet his bitch’d be tougher than him. I ought to give her a run back home.”

  Talon snapped. Snarling like a lunatic, he jolted forward from his knees. Another blow met his ribs, but intoxicated and in such a blind rage, he felt nothing even as they crunched. He grabbed a glass and smashed Bavor across the temple with it so hard that the big man howled. Then, evading a wild swipe, Talon grabbed him by the head and slammed it into the edge of the game table.

  Blood spurted out. Frantic hands yanked at Talon before he could hit Bavor’s head again, causing him to fall backward onto a pile of squirming bodies.

  “Tal?” Julius whispered into Talon’s ear as everybody jostled to get their bearings. It was the only noise Talon heard in a room that seemed frozen in time.

  He said nothing, just panted like a wild beast. Bavor was slouched against the table, the side of his head split open. Blood bubbled over a swathe of mashed skin and splintered bone, dripping down over his still-twitching eyelids.

  Talon stared at the corpse. He’d seen enough dead bodies in his time to know Bavor’s time had come. He hadn’t meant to kill him, but that wasn’t what caused his initial shock. The blue death might have weakened him to the point where carrying out his job was nearly impossible, but there was still strength enough left in him to fight.

  Just that small recognition was enough to bring hints of a grin to his lips. That was, until he registered exactly what he’d just done.

  12

  Chapter Twelve—Cassius

  Weeks had passed since Cassius dispatched ADIM to Earth to steal plans for a plasmatic drill. He stood on the glass-enclosed terrace of his compound on Titan, looking out upon the landscape of the moon.

  It was said by scientists that the world resembled how Earth
might have appeared long before life walked its plains. Cassius didn’t see it. On the surface, Titan was deathly cold and dim, as dead as the Ancients had left their homeworld. A dense, bluish-brown haze hung perpetually overhead, with the shadowy profile of Saturn and its ring darkening half the sky. The sun was barely visible during the day, and at night the stars were obscured by half a hundred small moons.

  His prefectural compound was built into the shallow ridge wrapping around the rim of a relatively small impact crater known as Ksa. The floor of the rounded basin was a darkly colored plane of frozen dirt littered with small ice rocks.

  A strong wind churned around the edges of the crater, stirring up the precipitation falling from thick, grayish clouds and making it hazy. In the center of Ksa, Cassius could just barely make out the low peak from which a man-made tower rose. It tapered to a silvery point hundreds of meters in the air. It was the hub of Edeoria, the first colony settled in Saturn’s orbit by Cassius’ ancestors. Beyond it, a conduit station floated out of view, servicing the many moons of Saturn and beyond.

  Unlike New Terrene, the rest of Edeoria wasn’t comprised of glassy spires filled with vertical farms. Titan had inadequate sunlight to make such a strategy beneficial. Instead, Ksa was dotted with dozens of earthscrapers. They sank into the ground like reverse towers, creating hollowed-out tubes wrapped by carved structures. At each of their tops, a sequence of metal jaws sealed them from the frigid, inhospitable environment.

  Millions of souls resided down in Edeoria’s underground shafts, yet he never considered it a home even if he was technically the settlement’s prefect, part of the agreement after leaving the Tribunal Council. Governing Edeoria was his ancestral right, after all.

  He had run from this place for so long, but, in the end, he wound up in the same exact spot as his father before him. Removing his fingers from the rail, his gaze lingered for a long moment at the spot beneath them where the surface had been slightly tarnished over the course of centuries.