Sage turned back to Cassius. He was panting and attempting to slide towards her. Then she noticed the executor recovering and going for her weapon. Sage crawled for Cassius’ pulse-pistol lying on the floor between them.
“Sage,” Cassius rasped, “we have to go.”
“For the Tribune!” the executor yelled.
Sage grasped the gun just as her executor replacement armed herself, and they both fired. A bullet struck Sage in the upper part of her artificial arm as she turned inward. With her gun hand, she aimed across her stomach to plug the executor in the chest.
No hesitation. No remorse. An executor knew what they were in for, and this one had failed horribly. Too late to save Benjar, too inaccurate to avenge him. A sad attempt by Benjar to replace Sage.
As the bang of the shots echoed, she heard a cough. Sage whipped around to aim directly at Cassius’ face. Right between the eyes.
“Why?” she asked, voice shaking.
Cassius coughed, barely able to lift his head. Blood dripped from his nose.
“Why!” Sage screamed.
He propped up on his elbows, huffing for breath. “To show you, to show all of you, that Earth was no more than a planet,” he rasped. “I have seen enough horrors to doubt faith, but I have seen enough miracles to believe that we all might be connected. You, standing on New Terrene with no way out until I arrived. Talon Rayne’s child winding up in a freighter with you. A son placed down on my doorstep. If there is a higher Spirit, it’s not within some dead planet.” He reached out and took Sage’s forearm. She held the gun steady, but he used her arm to pull himself closer and rest his hand over her chest. “It’s in you.”
Sage tried to ignore his words. “I’m going to kill you.”
“There is nobody I’d rather be with at the end.” She thought he smiled, but there was too much blood to tell.
The Hound’s Paw shuddered again. A pipe in the ceiling burst, and warm steam sprayed out. Then a beam of light shot across the viewport out in space, tearing through a portion of a Ceresian ship and continuing on to snap off a ring of the Luna Conduit Station.
“This was your grand scheme, then?” Sage asked. “Destroy everything, and start over? Build a new Circuit in your own image?”
Cassius slowly raised his head and looked over the barrel of his own pistol and into Sage’s eyes. She knew that look. He wasn’t going to fight her. He wasn’t even going to ask her not to fire.
“You never planned on surviving this, did you?” Sage realized. “You get to break the Circuit and then finally get your release. No! You don’t get to leave us behind to pick up the pieces!” Sage lowered her aim and flung the gun across the room. “I worshipped you, Cassius. I wanted to grow up and be like you. You were like a father to me.”
“Nobody gets to choose their family,” Cassius said.
“Says the man who built a child from scraps to replace the one he lost? What will your creation do when you’re gone? All of this planning and in the end, you’ll only fail another one of your children.”
Suddenly, it dawned on Sage why with all the chaos going on directly through the glass outside, not a single shot had struck the command deck of the Hound’s Paw. She remembered the fighter throwing itself in front of debris only a minute earlier as if to protect Cassius.
“This isn’t you, is it?” Sage began to chuckle. “ADIM… Benjar was right. You are powerless after all.”
She stood tall and took a good look through the viewport. There were so many shreds of ships that the breaking Earth was lost behind them.
“I hope he kills us all,” she said. “I hope he ends this world you’ve fought so hard to create, because I want nothing to do with it.”
Cassius was on his knees, staring forward blankly. She’d known him for more than two decades, and she’d never seen him appear so weak. Even after Caleb died, he was at least fueled by anger, but at that moment he was as empty as she was. His Spirit, whatever it was, was gone as well. He had nothing.
“Sage, we have to get out of here while it’s safe,” he managed to whisper.
“I’ll never get on that ship with you again,” Sage said. “I’d rather spend my final moments up here with corpses.” She walked over, grabbed Cassius by the back of his tunic, and heaved him to his feet. “Run, like you always do.”
He was still woozy and had to rest his hand on the viewport’s sill to stay on his feet. He turned to Sage, but she looked away and shuffled toward Talon’s body.
“Sage, I—”
“No!” she growled. “You got your vengeance, but you’ll never have my forgiveness. You’ve tainted the good name of your son. He may have doubted the Spirit, but you have failed us all.” She took a deep breath. “I hope you never find peace, Cassius.”
The ship quaked again and flung Sage off balance. She caught herself against a console and used it to propel herself toward Talon’s body. Kneeling beside him, she ran her fingers through his hair. He looked so peaceful.
She could feel the warmth of Cassius’ breath as he hovered over her shoulder. She could hear the splatter of blood drops as they ran off his chin. He didn’t dare touch her.
“We can cast off our hoods and emerge from beneath the boot of the Tribune, but only us few can understand,” he said. His voice had never sounded so frail. “An executor without a mission is a shadow without form. We can never be at peace.”
He started to drag his feet towards the exit after retrieving his gun. Cassius stopped in it and swallowed loud enough for her to hear it over the rumbling of debris slamming into the Hound’s Paw’s hull all over.
The fallen executor lay nearby, gargling on blood as more leaked out of her chest. “Such a sad fate, to be a tool,” he lamented. Holding the woman’s gaze, he put her out of her misery with a bullet to the head.
“We’re only tools if we hate what we do,” Sage said, watching the life drain from the woman’s eyes. “That’s the difference between you and me, Cassius. I served something bigger than myself. You only ever cared about yourself. Even Caleb said it. The truth is that you didn’t give a damn about him until he died. Another excuse for more killing.”
Hearing those last words caused Cassius’ cheeks to go pale. She expected to earn his anger, but instead, he just appeared dejected. Showing emotion for once in his sad, lonely life.
“If you do escape this ship, go to an asteroid in the Trojan cluster named Ennomos,” he said softly. “There you will learn that there was more to my mission than death. Goodbye, my dear.”
Then he left. Sage turned her focus on Talon’s stony features, waiting until Cassius’ footsteps were a distant echo. Only then did she allow her lower lip to begin to tremble.
It wasn’t because the entire foundation of her faith had been shattered. It wasn’t because she’d lost everyone and everything she ever served or loved. It was because Cassius was right. She couldn’t just sit on the Hound’s Paw, brushing the hair of the man who changed her life, and allow herself to die surrounded by death and destruction.
The Tribune could cast her out and claim she was a traitor, but they could never take away what she was. She slid her hands beneath Talon’s cold body and lifted him. It took all the strength in her weary limbs.
“It’s time to go home, Talon,” she said. She had one last mission to carry out.
26
Chapter Twenty-Six—Cassius
It was in complete silence that Cassius propelled the White Hand out through the airlock. He did so slowly, because directly outside was a field of debris so copious that it would’ve torn him and his ship to pieces if he wasn’t careful. Floating bodies burned up as they passed through his plasmatic shields, leaving only bones to rattle his viewport.
Pilotless Tribunal ships tore into the remnants of the Ceresian fleet all around him. An entire generation of Ceresian leaders lost. Everyone Cassius had invited to witness the end of their former world was dead, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He couldn’t t
ell ADIM to stop, because they were already dead, targeted while Sage bruised his face. The two Tribunes here were gone, Cordo without knowing what hit him, his Hand no doubt killed with him. Benjar Vakari at Cassius’ hands.
Every leader who’d survived the last war had finally been wiped off the face of the Circuit. Everyone but Cassius.
Earth was splitting apart, and there wasn’t a soul present to care.
Even Cassius couldn’t hold his focus on the broken world, as much as he might have wanted to. He’d fought in every major battle in the Earth Reclaimer War and had never seen two fleets so vast be ravaged so completely. It would take years to clean away the wreckage just so mining the fragments of Earth would be safe. The Ceresian remnants fled in any direction they could manage, but with so much in their way, the ships under ADIM’s control remained close behind.
“ADIM,” Cassius said, taking a leap of faith that in his emerging network, ADIM had returned to the White Hand’s.
“Yes, Creator?” ADIM replied, his steely voice emanating throughout the White Hand’s comms.
“You can stand down, now. They’re running.”
“I must ensure your safe passage. The factions of Ceres are defiant and do not understand what is happening. I must assure their compliance.”
The flash of a rail gun speared across Cassius’ view, slicing through a nearby Ceresian warship, which apparently refused to back down. Shards of it flew in every direction, but a cluster of Tribunal fighters crashed themselves into the ones in danger of impacting the White Hand.
“Compliance with what!” Cassius yelled.
“Your will.”
My will. He would’ve laughed if he still had the energy. He could think back to every moment where he’d hinted to ADIM that he wanted this to happen, for the weak to perish. The unworthy. He’d asked for exactly what was happening, yet seeing such a massacre was something else entirely. This made Lutetia look like child’s play.
“This isn’t what we planned,” Cassius said. “We need leaders to help build a new future, ADIM. Don’t you understand? We can’t run the Circuit on our own.”
“We can now,” he replied. “We have studied much of human history together, Creator. The leaders of your species build fleets or armies to instill order. We now control the largest in existence. It is as you said, Creator, ‘The weak will perish in the flames, and from the ashes of Earth, humanity will rise.’”
It was only then that Sage’s words rang true for Cassius. What would happen when he died, and ADIM remained? What would happen when, to ADIM, Cassius himself was the measure for a man’s quality? He had accomplished more than anybody else since the Ancients built the arks and the conduits. He had cracked open a planet far sooner than nature intended, but perhaps most significantly, he had created the next stage in the evolution of life. Even if ADIM didn’t fully comprehend that yet.
“ADIM, I’m coming to Mars,” Cassius said. “Don’t attack another ship until I arrive.” He paused and realized what he’d have to add for that to be sensible to ADIM. “Unless it threatens me.”
“Of course, Creator. I will ensure your safe passage while the majority of our fleet initiates the trip to Ceres Prime. Order must be established there as it has already been established on Mars.”
A horde of Tribunal fighters came out of nowhere to surround the White Hand. They fired missiles to clear a path through the debris until Cassius emerged into a pocket of clear space where he could see the full breadth of Earth.
The violent aftereffects of the gravitum bombs had diminished, leaving only chunks of barren rock surrounded by dense fields of ice particles. Specks of raw gravitum glittered throughout what remained of Earth’s cooled, darkened mantle, the pieces having drifted far enough apart by then to reveal space beyond.
Minutes earlier it was the most beautiful sight Cassius had ever laid eyes upon. Now it looked like a cluster of asteroids that had wandered too close to each other. He wished Sage had killed him in that fleeting moment of euphoria when all his dreams came true, because it was completely gone. All the vengeance in the universe, and Caleb remained dead. What would he think about this? Would he feel vindicated?
Sage had Cassius questioning everything. He reached into his belt and clutched his holorecorder. Then he screamed at the top of his lungs.
“Is everything all right, Creator?” ADIM asked once he was quiet.
Cassius exhaled slowly. “Everything is perfect.”
He couldn’t bring himself to switch on Caleb’s recording to soothe him, so he placed the broken device in his belt. Then he set the coordinates to Mars and banked his ship around the dark, sparking hull of a Tribunal frigate. The ship itself was operating, but its command deck was dark, and as Cassius passed around it, he could see the bodies of Tribunal engineers littering the command deck like garbage. None of them were bleeding, but they were clearly dead. They’d suffocated within their own ship because ADIM didn’t need oxygen to live. He didn’t need anything.
Cassius shook his head and straightened out his course. Mars was a bright speck amongst a sea of them, a week away with the White Hand burning at max velocity. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep, so Cassius leaned back and let the pressure of acceleration take some of the focus from his aching jaw. The fighters under ADIM’s control kept pace with him, gunning down a few similarly sized Ceresian vessels that attempted to run in the wrong direction.
* * *
Nothing stood in Cassius’ way through his journey to Mars. He wasn’t sure he’d gotten more than a few hours of sleep over the days. His conversation with Sage rattled around in his mind. Any time he happened to doze off, her face greeted his, her expression teeming with resentment.
All he could do was sit quietly and brace himself for what would come next. For eight years he’d unfolded an elaborate plan. There were twists and turns along the way, but the end goal always stayed true. He hadn’t expected to try everything he could to give Sage the happy ending Caleb never had. He hadn’t expected to fall in love with a son made from wires and metal.
As the red planet grew nearer, Cassius realized that he truly had no idea what he was going to do next.
“Creator, our fleet is seventy-two hours from Ceres Prime,” ADIM announced over the White Hand’s comms. That seemed exceptionally quick, but ADIM could push the ships faster than they were ever meant to go because the safety of their crews was irrelevant.
Cassius sat up quickly. His eyes darted around as he gathered his bearings. “Good,” he said. “I’m close.” He turned his attention to the viewport and saw Mars hovering in the center of a star-speckled black curtain like a blooming rose.
“I know,” ADIM said. The Tribunal fighters raced ahead to lead the way.
Cassius slid forward onto his feet. His legs were tired from moving only to retrieve ration bars, but he slowly shuffled to the burnished rail of his ship’s viewport and stared out. It didn’t take him long to see what had happened to Mars.
Phobos, its largest moon, had resembled Earth’s moon when Cassius last saw it. Mostly outfitted with defensive stations consisting of massive planetary rails, they were now scorched. A cloud of lightless Tribunal frigates surrounded it. The Mars Conduit Station floating between it and the planet remained untouched. It provided no strategic advantage toward guarding the planet, so there was no reason for ADIM to attack it.
“Creator, would you prefer me to assume command of the White Hand on approach?” ADIM said.
“That’s okay, ADIM,” Cassius replied. “I’d like to do it myself.”
He pulled his gaze away from the sight of the lifeless fleet and returned to his chair. Banking around the small moon, he went close enough to the freighters to see how much of their arsenal of weapons had been expended in pounding Phobos into submission before aiming for Mars. New Terrene was located over the crest of the planet, and he swallowed hard as he guided the White Hand towards it.
For the longest time, approaching Mars had a way of stilling his
heart. It made him think of Caleb, and the days following when Benjar had attempted to have him killed on the ruddy surface after shooting him down. Feigning an accident before the other Tribunes forced him to show mercy for Cassius’ life of service.
His heart went still presently as well, but only because of what he saw. The space above New Terrene wasn’t crammed with battle debris like on Earth, but its fate was the same.
The planet’s space elevator, which once reached up beyond the atmosphere and connected to the conduit station, was sheared off just above the Tribunal Citadel and had toppled over. It lay stretched down the slope of Pavonis Mons, red dust already having invaded it enough to make it look like a ruin. Tribune Joran Noscondra’s New Earth cruiser, Arbor, floated directly above the stump, facing New Terrene and casting a shadow over the glassy Tribunal council chamber, where a hopeful flame once glowed like a beacon beneath the plant Caleb grew on Earth. It was extinguished for the first time in Cassius’ life.
He allowed his gaze to wander toward the city itself, following the tram-line down the mountain, which had been reduced to a string of molten slag. The glinting towers of New Terrene remained upright, but the city’s artificial ceiling was peeled open. Tribunal fighters patrolled the streets like security drones, though Cassius wasn’t sure why, since without the ceiling, the upper portion of the city was exposed to unbreathable air.
“This was all you?” Cassius whispered, hardly able to draw words to his lips. He couldn’t remember how many times he’d wished such a fate upon the heart of the Tribune, but he’d never expected to see it.
“No,” ADIM said. “You designed the original programming for the Vale Protocol, Creator. The utilization of the New Terrene fleet was necessary to disarm Phobos and ensure the area around the Enclave could be controlled. Ground resistance lasted only a few hours after the artificial ceiling was compromised. All resistors have fled to the lower city and will pose no threat to you.”
The Circuit: The Complete Saga Page 73