No true outdoors existed in New Terrene, for to be beyond the enclosure was to endure the biting cold of Mars’ surface, the naturally low gravity, and, of course, the lack of breathable air typical on all the planets and moons of the Circuit. Instead, an intricate ceiling spanned between the skyscrapers high above him. Solar panels tilted with the sun, providing the perfect amount of ambient light to mimic an afternoon on Earth while also protecting from radiation.
The city’s towers all seemed to dematerialize as they climbed toward the artificial sky of New Terrene, filled with living units in the lower half, and vertical farms above. With Earth’s surface unusable, there were no vast fertile plains in the Circuit, only contained environments suitable for growing crops. Nowhere was the green more spectacular than the upper skyline of New Terrene.
Cassius turned down the main avenue of the city. He had no love for crowds, and the city was nothing if not that, but nobody paid much attention to him. Anonymity was the name of the game in New Terrene. Anyone caught out of line would answer to the ceaseless military presence. Soldiers in the traditional black-and-green armor of the Tribune were always on patrol. The quaking footsteps of combat mechs stomping up and down the suspended streets were a constant reminder for citizens to behave.
He could see the transportation hub rising to take its place in the heart of the New Terrene skyline. Dozens of suspended rails zipped through it, with the more massive lines running above him. They cut axially along the main avenue and eventually rose up Pavonis Mons to the Mons Space Elevator.
“Drop the bomb!” a voice suddenly shouted over the din of the busy streets.
Cassius nearly slammed face-first into a mob of frantic civilians. His wandering gaze snapped down toward the commotion. He pushed through the crowd, eager to see what had caused such a panic. At the edge of the hub’s atrium stood a line of soldiers, eyes down the sights of their pulse-rifles. Many of their arms shook, but he couldn’t see their faces to grasp how nervous they really were.
“Drop it or we will fire!”
Cassius rose to his toes and peered over the line. What he saw stopped him dead in his tracks.
5
Chapter Five—Sage
“Shit, shit, shit…” Sage Volus repeated to herself under her breath. She crouched over her target’s corpse. Blood oozed out of a laceration across his neck, and his legs continued to spasm. With her natural hand, she aimed her pulse-pistol at the three innocents across the elevator in order to keep them back. Then she analyzed the arm. Through the circuits on the bicep, she could see the spinning core of some type of improvised explosive. It was built into the arm, and a small timer within displayed three minutes and twenty-five seconds.
Checking the civilians to ensure none grew bold enough to do something foolish, she quickly flexed her artificial hand in the specific manner that extended a long wrist-blade—titanium with a tungsten carbide edge. She began to saw through the man’s flesh at the base of his shoulder, making sure not to damage the root of his prosthetic and risk detonation. After she cut all the way down to the bone, she swung down as hard as she could to snap it. Blood spattered her face. With another hack she severed the arm completely from the man’s shoulder, drenching herself in doing so.
A woman across the room was crying hysterically. The man at her side cradled her head to his chest and covered her eyes. The other civilian was a young boy, staring in awe as Sage rose with a bloodstained artificial arm dangling from her own artificial grip.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said, attempting to comfort them. She’d never been good at such things. She also couldn’t speak for the bomb.
The Ceresian had probably been targeting the top of the lifts where they reached the atrium of the city’s transportation hub. Judging by the size, the explosive was powerful enough to level the building’s structure, closing off the chief means of transport out of the Labyrinth of the Night and killing thousands with it.
The elevator stopped. The three civilians sprinted out screaming, “She’s got a bomb!” Sage glanced around the exit. People were everywhere. There was nowhere to hide.
Sage inhaled deeply and switched her pulse-pistol to the unwavering clutch of her artificial hand. Then she made a break for it.
Half the crowd scattered as soon as they heard the word “bomb.” The other half stared in sheer terror when they saw blood dripping from her clothes. She barely made it to the opposite side of the atrium before NET soldiers converged on her. When a few more swooped down on personal hover-bikes, she froze, looking straight down the barrel of no less than a dozen rifles. Her gaze fell to the bomb—two minutes and eleven seconds.
“Drop the bomb!” one of them shouted.
She could’ve yelled out and claimed who she truly was, but there was no reason for them to believe her. Executors were members of an elite, covert group answerable only to the Tribunes themselves or their respective Hands. Even the identities of all other executors was a mystery to her.
Her sworn duty was to protect and serve the New Earth Tribunal at any cost, even if that meant taking the lives of its soldiers if left with no other alternative. She counted thirteen armed guards, with two combat mechs approaching. Had there been four or five, she had no doubt she could take them out before they could land a shot. Not thirteen.
“Drop it or we will fire!”
I am the silent hand of the Tribune… She began reciting the executor vows in her head. Her heart pounded. It was time to finally see if years of training would pay off. Her trigger finger slowly prepared to squeeze, until, all of a sudden, a familiar voice yelled out to break the tension.
“Hold your fire!” An older man wearing a violet tunic burst through the lines. “Hold your fire!” He backed up toward Sage, facing the soldiers with his arms spread wide as if to impede a surging mass.
“Get out of the way!” one of the soldiers growled. He charged forward and swung the butt of his rifle at the intruder’s head. The aged man easily ducked out of the way. Then he delivered a few lightning-quick strikes to the soldier’s throat and one more that cracked the visor of his helmet.
“I am former Tribune Cassius Vale!” the older man declared as the soldier hit the floor. “You will stand down.”
The soldiers looked back and forth at each other anxiously until one decided to speak up. “I’ve seen him before. I don’t think it’s him.”
“What if it is?” another asked.
The first grimaced. A few of the others nodded to one another. Still, none of them shifted their aim from Sage.
She noticed the long jagged scar running down the back of the man claiming to be Cassius Vale’s neck. It can’t be. He wasn’t lying. After so many years apart, she’d forgotten the sound of his voice.
“This woman is a Tribunal executor,” he declared, “and the next one of you who keeps her from her duty will have to deal with me.”
The soldiers considered what he said, but still, none lowered their guns. The mechs were nearly in position to get their heavy gauss cannons locked on her.
“Lower your weapons!” Cassius boomed. The authority in his tone had most of the soldiers shaking noticeably. He was a legend. A war hero who’d risen to serve on the Tribunal Council.
Sage wasn’t sure if it was out of respect or fear of what he might do, but the soldiers finally backed down.
She let out a mouthful of air. Cassius turned to her. He put on a nervous smile, one it didn’t look like he was accustomed to wearing. But a sparkle in his dark eyes told her everything she needed to know. Once again, the ex-Tribune who’d rebuilt her arm was there at a time of desperation.
She opened her mouth to thank him, to say how much she had missed him, but he shook his head and silenced her.
“Ascend, my dear,” he whispered, glancing toward New Terrene’s ceiling.
After a quick check of the bomb’s timer, Sage decided he was correct. She bolted toward one of the security vehicles. Don’t look back, she told herself as she pus
hed through the flabbergasted guards and jumped onto one of the hover-bikes.
She powered it on and zoomed upward, the blur of Cassius receding in the viewport’s reflection. The combat mechs stopped and swung their weapons to aim at her, but with an occupied building behind her, they wouldn’t dare fire.
There was no time to reach the outer walls of New Terrene, only to go up. Pulling back on the controls with all her might, Sage steered the vehicle up through lines of public transit.
Her destination was one of the tiny maintenance ports leading out to the outer surface of New Terrene’s ceiling enclosure. Once she was high enough, she leaped off the bike and grasped the latch with her metallic hand. Dangling high above the city, with the bomb in her free hand, she armed her wrist-blade. It sliced up through the lock. She held her breath before swinging up legs first and kicking through the opening.
The sudden change in pressure made her brain feel like it was going to burst out her ears as she landed atop the ceiling. She could hardly think. There was no time to waste with thinking anyway.
Twelve seconds.
She switched the bomb to her artificial hand and hurled it with all her might, aiming away from the tightest cluster of skyscrapers toward where the least damage would be done. The amputated prosthetic of the Ceresian soared through the air until it escaped the artificial gravity field that helped New Terrene feel like Earth.
Quickly, she slipped down through the opening, but as she went to close the latch, the bomb went off in a dazzling blast of purple and blue. The shockwave wasn’t enough to shatter the transparisteel of the ceiling, but it was enough to launch her as the port closed behind her.
Air rushed by as she plummeted, making it almost impossible to draw much-needed breath into her lungs. Tumbling, she reached out with her artificial arm, desperately hoping the Spirit of the Earth had a miracle in store for her.
As her vision began to go blurry, her hand slammed into the top of a tram. Her body came to a jerking stop, the muscles in her shoulder beginning to tear. The pain was unbearable.
Her artificial fingers dug in so hard that the suspension broke and it too plunged toward the streets of New Terrene. She hung on for her life until they crashed to the streets. The last thing she saw before everything went black was the fading, affectionate expression of her savior, Cassius Vale.
6
Chapter Six—Cassius
After ensuring that Sage would survive her injuries, Cassius quietly departed Mars. He’d had no desire to make his presence there public, but he couldn’t allow Sage to be gunned down in the heart of the capital. He owed her that much.
Two weeks later, the White Hand touched down within the hangar at his clandestine station on a tiny asteroid named Ennomos. The moment he stepped off his ship, he was surprised to find that he’d beaten ADIM.
Worried that something might have happened, he thought about switching on his comm-link to contact the android, just to make sure. But after remembering how superior the engines of his ship were in comparison to a common Tribunal freighter, he decided that the incident on Mars was fuddling his judgment.
It’s good to be away from that place, he thought.
ADIM might have looked the same as he did the day he was powered on, but he was older than Cassius sometimes realized. Even out in the void of space, he knew his creation was safer than most people in the Circuit.
So Cassius strode down Ennomos’ vaulted hangar alone, running his hand along the smooth hull of the White Hand. He rarely took the time to marvel at the ship. At first, it was a gift upon his inauguration into the Tribunal Council, before the other Tribunes grew fond of their mammoth New Earth cruisers.
It had the appearance of a pelican from ancient Earth. The long, flat barrel of a rail gun ran through the ridged top between the wings and stopped just short of its sharply curved viewport. The exterior was clad in a pearlescent silver coat, indicative of his Tribunal station, with the edges of each of the ship’s plates trimmed with bright white accents. Dual fully rotational impulse drives were built into the center of the thick, L-shaped wings.
The rest of the design was so sleek that it was almost impossible to tell where its weaponry and other outboard systems were nestled. The White Hand was, however, extremely well armed. Cassius had spent his early years as a Tribune tinkering with the vessel. On the outside, it appeared the same as it had originally, but upgrades to its engines made it faster than any ship its size in the Circuit. It was also outfitted with state-of-the-art plasma shield defenses and had stealth systems that made it almost impossible to locate on any typical NET scanners.
However, the addition Cassius found himself most proud of was Gaia. She, though primitive when compared to ADIM, was an intricate virtual intelligence that allowed him to run the ship without a crew. Such technology was considered blasphemous by the Tribune, who preferred manned vessels, but he’d always had an affinity for making things work beyond their expectations.
Breathing in the sight of the ship in its entirety as he came around the front, he remembered fondly the first time he’d asked Gaia to power on the engines without even needing to lift his finger. His foray into the realm of artificial intelligence began with her, and it ended with ADIM.
Again, he glanced up at the entrance of the hangar, hoping to see a ship entering, but he found none. This was the longest time he and ADIM had ever been physically apart. So Cassius took a seat on a fuel container beside his ship to wait. After a few minutes, the soft purr of the station’s many systems began to soothe him, allowing his mind to wander back to the day, almost four years ago, when he’d brought ADIM into existence…
***
Cassius Vale stood at the edge of a three-dimensional map of the Circuit in his private lab on Titan. His icy glare moved along the projections of slowly rotating planets, eyes narrowing as they fell upon that of Earth.
A small holorecorder rested in his upturned palm, designed in the shape of a small sphere with illuminated fluted rifts around its circumference. Without looking, he twisted his thumb, shifting one of the offset planes on the device so that a splaying beam of pixelated light shot upward. The particles began to rearrange, the dusky likeness of a human head slowly taking form.
His heart skipped a beat. His hands began to tremble. He tried to steady his breathing, but all his swollen emotions were only serving to drench his brow with sweat. It was the same as the year before, and the years before that, when the fateful anniversary of his son’s death would arrive to bring with it irrepressible pangs of grief and rage.
The face of Caleb Vale was rendered with such realism that only a closely discerning eye would be able to notice the space between each fragment of light. But the image was frozen, the tip of Cassius’ finger hovering over the blinking button that would set the recording to replay for what seemed like the thousandth time. The image had no background. It was as if the young man portrayed was right there with him.
Cassius could usually fight back the tears, but on that day the sight made his eyes well. It was all he could manage to urge himself to switch the message on, cuing the lips of the hologram to begin speaking.
“Happy birthday, Dad!” Caleb wished cheerfully, with only a hint of the vocal dilution inherent in a typical long-range visual message. The ex-Tribune’s inventions were far from typical. “I bet you thought I’d forget.”
Cassius released a pitiful sound, more a grief-stricken snivel than the reminiscent laugh he had expected to slip through his quivering lips. Caleb’s face was so familiar to him and yet stranger with each passing day.
“I can’t believe how fast another year has gone,” Caleb said. His expression dropped to a grimace. “Look, Dad, I know you’re worried about me, but I’ll be fine. You see, we did it. We finally did it.”
The hologram rearranged, zooming out to trace Caleb’s full body. The floor of his environment was rendered, glowing beneath his feet as he walked over to run the back of his hand along the surface of a glass chamber.
At first glance, it appeared to be filled only with water, but swaying beneath the ripples was the straggly form of an aquatic plant. Its stem was wiry, almost pathetic looking, but Cassius recalled the shiver up his spine the first time he saw it.
“We moved it here from the lake,” Caleb continued. “It’s growing under the surface! A real Earthborn plant. For the first time in decades, the purification process is taking a step forward. I… I—” The excitement in his voice was palpable, bringing a twisted smile to Cassius’ lips as his son tripped over his own words. “I know it doesn’t seem like much, but life on Earth after centuries… Dad, it’s… it’s a miracle.” Caleb gathered his breath and then chuckled to himself weakly. “You probably don’t care, but it’s everything to me.”
Everything to me, Cassius thought, his hand nearly slipping from the burnished sill he’d been leaning on.
“Well, we’re about to head out for supplies. Don’t worry, I’ll be safe. Earth isn’t as vengeful as you recall. Anyway, you know I’ll be thinking about you. We’ll see each other soon, I prom—” Caleb was cut off as a powerful tremor knocked him off balance. A red-haired young woman in the background shouted frantically before Caleb scrambled to reach her. Then the recording froze.
Tears ran from Cassius’ eyes in thin streams as he ran his thumb over the holorecorder, replaying those last words over and over until he unraveled. The device slipped through his fingers, its impact drowned out by angst-ridden groans. He hunched over the table, his insides curdling, his throat clenching as if he were being choked to death.
When his stomach finally settled, he turned and mustered his most regal stride. He followed the rolling device across the floor until it bumped against the foot of a console and began to play again. He bent over to pause the message just as his son’s face was fully formed. He considered deactivating it, but instead set it down on a table so that his son’s holographic face was overlooking the laboratory.
The Circuit: The Complete Saga Page 5
