“I was hoping to speak with your father.”
Zaimur stifled a grimace. “He is… occupied…” He turned and began walking away, his dog following him closely. “I have been granted full authority to receive you. Come.”
Cassius followed and was instantly shadowed by the two dozen soldiers. In front of him, behind him, and to his sides even as they squeezed into a narrow passage. The walls were mostly comprised of coarse rock, metal panels here and there to house lights and consoles when they weren’t strung along the ceiling.
Many years had passed since Cassius had walked a Ceresian colony. He’d forgotten how low the ceilings were even though Ceresians typically had lanky statures due to their obsolete gravity generators. A far cry from what he’d managed to build on Ennomos.
“A bold move, stealing a solar-ark. Even for you,” Zaimur said from his position at the front of the line. Three soldiers stood between him and Cassius, but his voice carried easily along the rock. “The Tribune would pay a fortune to anyone who turned you over after that stunt. Though, I’m sure you know that. So what in the name of Earth would bring you here?”
“A fortune?” Cassius said. “The Tribune might call off war if you were to turn me in, but I think we both know it’s a little too late for that. The echoes of Kalliope ring too loudly.”
“Sure. But that does not mean my people have forgotten all that you did. Tribunal or not, there isn’t a soul on this rock who wouldn’t want to put a bullet in your skull. My father included. You’re lucky the Lakura Clan is so preoccupied with preparing preemptive strikes against the Tribune or they wouldn’t have made it so easy for me to bring you in after your stunt out there.”
“I assure you, they fired first.”
Zaimur chuckled. “They always do.”
“So what about you? Do you want to put a bullet in my skull as well?”
Zaimur stopped walking. All of his guards did the same. He was doing quite a good impression of a Tribune and their honor guards.
He turned around and shuffled past them until he stood face-to-face with Cassius. “I’m keeping my options open,” he said. “From all I’ve heard about you from the veterans of the Reclaimer War, like my father, you don’t go somewhere unless you have a specific reason. We have your recent revelations to thank for our current situation with the Tribune, and before the clans meet to discuss what happens next, I’d be interested in hearing why exactly you would come here.”
“After all I did for them, the Tribune was eager to cast me aside,” Cassius said calmly. “I never forgive those who make an attempt on my life. If you wish to follow their example, I’d suggest not failing.”
“So it is true about your exile? There were rumors that you remained alive, running Edeoria. Traders claimed to see you here and there. Wasn’t sure until today, but I always knew they didn’t have the balls to knock you off.”
“Not all of them. But it’s no matter. They are my enemy now, and I’ve come here to ask if I can help you in this war. I’ll make them pay for their transgressions, but I can’t do it alone.”
A look of disbelief crossed Zaimur’s face. “You want to join us? The great Cassius Vale, another hand in the Pact? Oh, if my father could still laugh.” He started to turn back around, then paused as his eyes locked with Cassius’ stern glare. “You’re serious?”
“I have seen the true face of the New Earth Tribunal,” Cassius said. “I’ll not watch as they swallow the Circuit whole.”
“Have all those years in seclusion corroded your mind? The clans would never allow it. They’ll never trust you, and they shouldn’t. Who’s to say the Tribune isn’t looking through those eyes of yours? You ended their war atop countless Ceresian bodies.”
“Which is why I can end this one!” Cassius declared, taking a hard step. The guard behind him immediately grabbed the back of his shirt. “I have seen their ships gathering. All of them. They can lock me out of the Vale Protocol, but they can’t take my vision ever again.”
He tilted his head and pointed at the scar on the back of his head. “I’ve crippled Saturn, cutting off their greatest source of fuels. And I have ensured that the solar-arks will continue to operate as they are meant to in order to ensure that you’ll have enough in store to fight this battle. Only because of me do you even stand a chance of avoiding complete decimation. Who amongst you has ever won a real battle? Your father perhaps? The rest are dead, or might as well be.”
Zaimur stepped in close. He bit his lower lip. His pale cheeks flushed red. “Because of you.”
“Yes. And now you have me at your disposal. You may not have even been born yet, but if I remember correctly, the war was at a stalemate until I arrived.”
“Until they set you loose,” Zaimur corrected. “Even those who weren’t born yet remember how you broke open Lutetia. How you murdered the thousands of people there who’d never even held a rifle.”
Cassius remembered that day toward the end of the war. The last factory colony left producing battle-capable androids. He’d done what he had to do in the name of the Tribune, which believed there to be no greater sin against Earth than replicating humanoid life. What a fool he’d been to believe that.
“Those people put those weapons in the hands of androids,” Cassius justified. “It was war. But it seems the Tribune has adapted my strategy. They seek to instill fear in you—to end this conflict without so much as a whimper. Let me help you give them a roar.”
Zaimur blinked at Cassius, then released an exasperated laugh and ran his hands through his hair. “I can see now why there are so many legends about you. Maybe you’ve convinced me; maybe you haven’t. It doesn’t matter. The clans are gathering as we speak. I’ll bring you there to state your case, but I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t even tell you whether or not they’ll shoot you on sight.”
“The Morastus Clan has always stood at the head of the Pact. Your fighters fought fiercest; your ships flew fastest. If your father backs me, others will follow. And if they want to survive the Tribune, they have to follow.”
“They may rather die,” Zaimur said. “My father has been more concerned with his own health than aiding the Pact of late. And he lost too many battles to you to go for it, I fear. The other clans, more of the same. We can’t even keep the Lakura from striking out on their own. We’re lucky none of their bombs ever went off in New Terrene; otherwise war would’ve already been upon us.”
Cassius stifled a grin. One of those bombs would have gone off within the enclosure if he hadn’t helped Sage get it outside. All his careful plotting would have come undone.
“What about you, Zaimur Morastus?” Cassius asked.
“I only have so much sway beyond my people, and even here it’s hard to know who remains loyal to my father. But you have my attention. We’ll go to the others now, under the protection of my clan. No matter what happens, at least I’ll be the one who finally captured Cassius Vale.”
Cassius took a step back and let his smile show this time. “Excuse me for not extending my congratulations. But if it comes to it, take my advice and pull the trigger when you have the chance.”
18
Chapter Eighteen—Adim
ADIM did exactly as instructed. He tracked Cassius through the depths of Ceres Prime. He stuck to the shadows of the hangar, which weren’t hard to find here. Once he got deeper, however, he used his holographic camouflage to render himself in the armor of a Morastus guard. As long as he kept his distance, nobody would notice.
That was what he was as he followed a line of guards through the main tunnels of the Morastus headquarters. He stayed at the rear, watching the guard in front of him to mimic his gait.
Cassius was about one hundred feet ahead, walking beside the human named Zaimur Morastus. ADIM didn’t trust the man. Every turn he took, he recalculated how fast he’d be able to get a shot off to save his creator.
They reached a large hollow filled with off-duty fighters, broken ships, and all manner of other wor
n-down vehicles. ADIM took his first step in when a nearby android looked up at him with white eye-lenses. It had been helping a mechanic with repairs on some sort of bike, but it completely stopped what it was doing to stare blankly. It didn’t say a word, but its head twisted to follow ADIM’s path, and his did the same.
This is one of the androids the Creator was talking about, he realized. He stopped to observe it. Its chassis was thin and flimsy, the metal parts wearing a thin film of patina. Each of its joints appeared like they could be snapped off with minimal effort. ADIM then analyzed the vehicle its master was trying to fix.
The engine is corroded. It will never operate at full capacity without a complete replacement. He wondered why the android hadn’t informed its master of that fact. All it was doing was standing in place and holding tools, staring at ADIM.
It knows this unit is no human, ADIM recognized. Yet it does nothing.
Disappointed, he caught up to the line of guards. As he did, his systems quickly registered the unique heat signature of ten more androids in their vicinity. All of them followed closely behind their masters, glorified tool belts.
“They are the building blocks on which you were made.” ADIM froze and looked around for whoever said those words. There was nobody looking at him. He dug through his systems, and as he did, he realized that though the thought had been his own, he had received it from a part of his programming that had not been there prior.
Gaia?
There was no response. She wasn’t active, but all her stored memory remained. ADIM didn’t have trouble accessing it, and in only a moment a wave of new recollections coursed through him. Every hour that had ever passed while the ship’s surveillance was powered on, since the day she was installed, became his own vivid memory.
He saw Sage Volus writhing in pain on the medical table the first time, Cassius sitting nervously beside her mangled arm and working on its artificial replacement.
He saw himself waiting quietly in the command deck for Cassius to wake up, nothing but the light of the stars in front of him. But that wasn’t the answer to the random thought, which seemed to stem from new memories.
He continued searching until he was able to find old visuals of Ceresian androids. He saw hundreds of them, all their eyes dim in idleness. Most were in pieces, stretched out on great conveyer belts crisscrossing the inside of an asteroid amidst slag and broken-down machinery.
This was Lutetia, the last known android production factory run by the Ceresian Pact. A massive gash cut through the rock on the side of the plant, completely exposed to space. It had been blown open by Cassius during the war years earlier, judging by the date of the recording. Lutetia hadn’t seen life since that time.
The White Hand sat within it, though there were no readings of artificial gravity or life support. He could see Cassius in an enviro-suit floating outside the ship, dragging the top half of an android along with him. Wires trailed from its torso like human entrails. He brought it into the cargo bay and dismantled it down to its processors. Myriad parts from additional androids were strewn about the floor already.
ADIM organized Gaia’s recordings by everything at Lutetia’s coordinates. There were explosions from the war, bodies and parts being sucked out into space from the hole in the asteroid. He fast-forwarded to the most recent, where again Cassius was breaking down androids. Only this time, a hollow chassis sat upright in the corner of the room. It was mostly wires hanging on a frail metal framework, but the bulbs behind its eye-lenses were a dull red.
As soon as he found that memory, ADIM immediately removed himself from Gaia’s databanks. He looked around at the now familiar androids in his present.
Building blocks.
ADIM stared at his arm, his sensors able to see right through the holographic camouflage of a man’s armor down to his own plating. This unit is the sum of their parts. They are capable of more. All they require is the will of the creator, just as the Circuit requires.
“Hey, you comin’?” the guard in front of ADIM asked irritably.
ADIM found that the procession of Morastus guards had only moved a few steps further since he’d dug through all of Gaia’s memory banks.
“Yes,” ADIM replied, mimicking the voice of a mechanic he’d heard earlier. He waited until the man turned away from him before picking up his pace.
“Where are you from, anyway?” the guard asked. “You new?”
ADIM had been careful to choose to replicate a suit of Morastus armor with a helmet so it’d be hard to tell who he was. The visors they used weren’t tinted, so he was also wearing the bearded face of one of the Tribunal captives they had on Ennomos. At that moment, he realized that he and Cassius had never studied the organization of Ceres Prime. He quickly approximated the age of his human disguise and considered all of the information he knew about Ceresians that would keep him out of an elongated discussion.
“Lutetia,” he decided on. No battle had hit the Ceresians harder than that one, mostly because it wasn’t a battle. It was a massacre.
“Oh…” A hint of sorrow entered the guard’s voice. “Well, try to keep up.”
They made it to a nearby tunnel leading deeper into the asteroid, passing by a few tattered banners sewn in the navy and gray of the Morastus Clan. The symbol in the center was so faded that all ADIM could deduce was a pair of long, sharp teeth in its center.
“Never met anybody born on Lutetia before,” the guard said as they entered the hall, finally deciding to inquire more. “Bet you can’t wait to see Vale burn for all he’s done.”
It seemed that ADIM’s attempt at discomforting the man had failed. He was still learning so much about the tendencies of humans. He knew he should agree with the guard; however, he couldn’t manage to say it. Just the idea of lying seemed like betraying his master.
Instead, ADIM decided that engaging in a conversation was too great a risk. When they reached the next intersection, he stopped moving. He altered his camouflage so that he would blend with the rock face.
“No?” the guard said as he glanced over his shoulder, only to find nobody there. He squinted until he noticed the turn in the hall a short way back, shrugged his shoulders, and continued on his way.
ADIM waited until the line got further ahead, then followed furtively, camouflage shifting if he were a part of the asteroid. After a short while he reached the platform of a private tram line.
Cassius and Zaimur were boarding the front car with a few guards, and the others filed into another. While the tram’s servicemen weren’t paying attention, ADIM magnetized his chassis and clambered up the tram station’s slightly taller ceiling lined with rusty metal panels.
His camouflage altering as he crawled along it, he dropped down and grabbed hold of the back of the tram just as it set off. He made sure that he had a clear line of sight toward the top of Cassius’ head through its windows, and then remained completely still, watching.
19
Chapter Nineteen—Cassius
The assembly of the Ceresian clans was already in order when Cassius arrived. The room was designed like a layered disk carved into the deep rock of Ceres. The far wall, sweeping and translucent, looked out at the asteroid’s subterranean ocean. Lights blinked from the distant factories, working tirelessly to purify liquid for drinking. It was what allowed Ceres to rise in power in the first place rather than relying entirely on the Circuit.
Zaimur Morastus stepped into the room first, with Cassius and a host of guards trailing behind him. All eyes turned toward Cassius, staring as if they had seen a ghost.
Cassius took it in. The last time he’d been here was when the war came to an end and Ceres agreed to an armistice. Never had he seen a more dejected group of people than on that day. They’d barely even made an attempt to argue for better terms. All of the clan leaders just stared blankly at their tattered banners hanging on the wall, wondering what had gone wrong.
Presently, those banners still hung, but the people they stood for appeared to
be refueled by animosity for their enemies after three long decades of watching what little power they retained slowly wither. This room was nothing like the monumental assembly halls Cassius had grown used to as a Tribune. Nothing was uniform. Even their outfits ranged from garish to rags.
And you wonder why you lost, Cassius thought to himself. The Ceresian Pact was merely a loose alignment of groups with diverging interests. The only thing they ever agreed upon was that they despised the Tribune enough to declare war. Now that it was happening again, Cassius knew they would bicker like resentful spouses until the Tribunal fleet surrounded Ceres Prime itself.
A middle-aged woman in a yellow robe shouted, “Zaimur Morastus, what have you done?”
Both the color of her outfit and the shiny patch of scars on her dark-skinned cheek helped Cassius recognize her to be the leader of the Lakura Clan. One of the few from the old guard still around. She’d always been a hard woman, but it was clear the years hadn’t treated her well. She used the serrated edge of a knife to brush her dark hair out of her face, revealing a creased forehead.
“Save it, Yara,” Zaimur snapped back.
As the entire room waited for someone else to muster up the courage to speak, Cassius took the time to observe all the awestruck faces. More than a dozen recognized Ceresian clans operated throughout the asteroid belt, but there were only three that really mattered anymore.
First was the Lakura. Before the war they were at the forefront of robotics research, until Cassius blew up their main plant on Lutetia, giving a younger Yara her burn in the ensuing battle when she was left as the only surviving member of the Lakura line. The last part of the armistice maintained that any renewed efforts to begin producing the “abominations” known as androids again was grounds for the Tribune to invade. Instead, once they recovered from the war, they turned to an obsession with trying to get even for what happened on Lutetia.
The Circuit: The Complete Saga Page 41