The Circuit: The Complete Saga

by Bruno, Rhett C.

  He gazed at the debilitated fighters, as speechless as the crowd for his own reasons. All he could think about was how years of plotting and waiting had made him soft. In his prime, those ten worthless fighters would have all been dead before they even had a chance to sniff him. Now he had to thank Zaimur for his life.

  “My people!” Zaimur’s booming voice resonated throughout the arena.

  The Morastus prince came strolling into the arena, a dozen Morastus guards at his side. As he approached, the gunmen arrayed themselves in a semicircle around Cassius and aimed their pulse-rifles at him.

  “Well, Cassius Vale, it seems your legend was not exaggerated,” Zaimur said, projectors displaying him on holoscreens all around the arena concourse and amplifying his voice for all to hear. “What to do with you now?”

  “Kill him!” someone shouted, breaking the hush of the crowd. A few more voices echoed those sentiments distinctly before all words were lost to a sea of chanting.

  Zaimur lifted his arms to quiet everyone with the poise of a master performer. “In time, he will die. We will walk him out here every day until his body is so broken that it finally gives out. The slow death he deserves for all that he’s done.” Zaimur glanced back at his men. “Grab him.”

  Two of his guards hurried out and seized Cassius. They did it fast and forcefully so he couldn’t fight back. Cassius winced as they pinned his arms behind his back and stretched his torso. They dragged him back towards the exit until a familiar voice hollered out and stopped them.

  “No!” Yara Lakura stood in a private box hanging over the rim of the arena. “There’s no waiting with this one. He dies now, Zaimur.”

  Zaimur glared up at her. “Surely we should discuss this in private.”

  “We can discuss it now. Your father and I had an agreement. He dies today, while my people are still close enough to watch the live feed.”

  “That’s not my problem—”

  “Would you rather I fetch your old man?”

  “Go ahead,” Zaimur grumbled before he kept walking.

  “Zaimur, get back here!”

  He ignored her as he, his guards, and Cassius stepped into the arena’s entry tunnel. He and Cassius both knew that after sending all her most loyal followers on a preemptive strike against the Tribune, she had few left on Ceres to enforce her decisions.

  “Are you ready, Cassius?” Zaimur asked.

  Cassius exhaled and swallowed the pain away. “Yes,” he said. “Are you, ADIM?”

  “Yes, Creator. It has been done,” ADIM replied as suddenly a patch of the wall shifted to reveal him. The Morastus guards panicked, ready to shoot. Zaimur stayed their hands. He appeared solemn but determined. It isn’t easy work, erasing family.

  Cassius glanced at the frightened gunmen. “Are you sure we can trust them?”

  “These are the most loyal men I have,” Zaimur replied. “They’ll do what they have to.”

  “Good. Go make Yara happy, then. We have a war to win.” Cassius nodded at Zaimur and then moved in front of ADIM.

  “You are injured,” ADIM said, his eyes beginning to spin rapidly.

  “I’ll be fine.” He knew he couldn’t hide his pain from the android. ADIM knew him too well, from his healthy heart rate to the tiniest nuances of his facial expressions.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Completely. Go with him now. I’ll see you soon.”

  “Yes, Creator.”

  ADIM’s frame was suddenly enveloped by a projection of Cassius while he himself stood staring at his own living reflection. Zaimur ordered two of his guards to grab ADIM.

  Cassius and the remaining guards watched from the shadow of the entrance as ADIM was then dragged back out into the arena behind the Morastus prince, dragging his feet as if he were a wounded human.

  A perfect touch, Cassius thought, admiring the performance.

  “After all this, you would give him a quick death?” Zaimur yelled up at Yara’s box.

  “I will give my people what they need to see before I join them,” Yara responded. Cassius couldn’t see her, but she sounded relieved. “For Ceres. Come to your senses and put the past behind us! War is coming, and your men will need this too. We need this.”

  “Consider this the affirmation of our pact, then,” Zaimur said. “The Morastus are prepared to stand with you in the coming war.”

  He drew a pulse-pistol and aimed it at ADIM’s head, who pretended to struggle against the guards, just as he’d been instructed to. Cassius turned away. For some reason he found it unsettling watching himself about to be executed, like he was watching a bad dream.

  “Cassius Vale,” Zaimur said, “for all your many crimes against the Ceresian Pact and all humanity… may you never find peace.”

  A gunshot rang out. The collective gasp of the crowd felt even louder. Cassius couldn’t help but peer out and see his body topple over, a projection of blood leaking out through a fake wound in ADIM’s hologram’s head.

  If not for Zaimur’s assistance, he’d come dangerously near to that body actually belonging to him. He’d never allow himself to show such weakness again.

  27

  Chapter Twenty-Seven—Talon

  The entry into Eureka was rocky. Talon could see the asteroid growing nearer through the narrow viewport in the center of his ship-buster chamber. It wasn’t nearly on the same scale as Ceres, but it was still nearly two and a half kilometers in diameter. Most of it was comprised of wrinkly gray rock, but circling its center was a band of ports and docking stations.

  Narrow landing pads stuck out into space from them like the legs of a metal insect, utilized for constructing ships too large to fit snugly within the hangars. The shells of a few incomplete frigates floated between them.

  Missile fire flashed across Talon’s view, along with the occasional bright burst of sparks when one of the other chambers was struck. Luckily, Eureka’s defensive turrets were mostly kept occupied by speedy Lakura fighters.

  Talon’s ship buster accelerated so fast he thought his chest was going to crack open. He gritted his teeth as hard as he could and fought through the pain.

  He couldn’t move much in the gelatinous pool, but he wriggled his hand and slipped his holopad out of his pocket. In his peripherals, he watched Elisha’s recording down by his hip. It made his blood start to boil. Made him numb to the pain.

  The ship buster made impact with Eureka, flinging the device out of his hand. The snug, supple interior of the compartment saved his body from experiencing too much of the whiplash involved in coming to a sudden halt. Still, it wasn’t enough to curb the sensation of every joint in his body being snapped like rubber bands.

  “Assault team, prepare for breach,” a voice said through the comm-link in his helmet. Talon was linked to the frequency of the entire initial assault team, receiving orders from officers on the Lutetia with no military training, who’d probably never seen a gun fired in person.

  Talon’s chamber whistled as foam sprayers along the front expanded to form an airtight seal with Eureka. His ears popped, and as they did, a contained blast shook the area by his feet. Even through his armored suit he could feel the heat. The Lakura Clan specialized in robotics dating back to the Earth Reclaimer War yet fell short when it came to constructing much else.

  Before he knew it, Talon was launched forward. He almost got a grip on the holopad, but it slipped through his fingers before he plummeted into one of Eureka’s many docking stations. The assault team members with jammers had already taken up position by the hangar’s airlocks so they could ensure they couldn’t be opened to suck everyone out.

  The Tribunals would be killing themselves in doing so anyway, since most of them weren’t wearing suits intended for space. It appeared they’d been caught completely unprepared. They didn’t even have any of their construction mechs reoutfitted for battle.

  Talon charged forward with the members of the forward assault team, finding sporadic cover behind any piece of equipment large en
ough. Bullets whizzed and ricocheted in every direction, echoing from every one of the adjacent docking stations so that Talon couldn’t tell where any of it was coming from.

  As soon as he noticed movement across the way, he squeezed his trigger. A mixture of rage and adrenaline seized his body, causing him to hold it down until his first clip was empty. He’d been yearning for a more personal clash, but that didn’t mean he didn’t hope that some of his spray of bullets found homes in Tribunal chests.

  Pulling up behind a pile of ship scraps, he caught his breath. His legs were killing him from the fall into the hangar, and his lungs were tired from screaming. He hadn’t even realized that he’d been doing it the entire time he charged.

  He peeked out and saw Lakura bodies sprinkled all around the docking station, but nowhere near the number expected. In fact, the assault team had accomplished its goal with ease. Eureka’s resistance had retreated entirely to the docking station’s back half, hiding behind makeshift defensive positions made from loose ship parts.

  Talon looked back to see if the main troop transports were coming. Fighter ships out in space tore into the exterior landing pads, battering the moored Tribunal frigates beyond repair. Bursts of flame and sparks danced across the viewports before being quickly squelched by vacuum.

  Soaring safely through the chaos came a flock of Lakura troop transports heading toward Eureka’s docking belt, two for each hangar. Engineers by the airlock hacked into the entrance controls to allow them entry.

  Heavy gunfire rained down from them, and Talon hope that Tarsis was the gunner on one so he could at least have someone to live through vicariously. The barrage quickly tore through the Tribunal defensive position, ripping through armor and limbs and painting the hangar with blood and flames.

  The Tribunals had no rockets to fight back with, which was something the Lakura Clan must’ve counted on. Excluding a few exceptions like Lutetia and apparently Kalliope, the New Earth Tribunal was strict when it came to destroying livable, gravity-generating settlements deemed to be extensions of Earth. It was considered sacrilege, a fact that had helped the Ceresians survive their first war for so long before Cassius Vale arrived and changed everything.

  Talon had to give the Lakura Clan credit. They were far more prepared than he’d thought. Like they’d spent the last decades thinking up how to flawlessly invade a Tribunal colony.

  There was no time to waste if he wanted to get a shot at joining the carnage. He took a deep breath and then sprang back into the fray. It was hard to tell what he was hitting, but by the time he emptied his second clip, most of the heavy fighting was over.

  Word came in over comms that the rest of Eureka’s docking stations fell just as easily. The asteroid still had miles worth of subterranean tunnels to clear, but it was only a matter of time. The sheer number of Tribunal corpses lying amongst the wreckage meant that there couldn’t have been much of a defense force remaining.

  Talon reloaded his pulse-rifle and joined up with the rest of the forward assault team. They headed into one of Eureka’s many contiguous corridors. At least two-thirds of them had survived—more than expected—and he could tell by the glint in their eyes that they were all eager for more. Madmen, just like he was.

  “You’ve all seen enough bloodshed for now,” a high-ranking Lakura officer commanded, stopping them in their tracks. “Help us secure this docking station. Madam Lakura’ll be arrivin’ soon.”

  “She’s comin’ here herself?” one of the gunmen near Talon asked in disbelief.

  “Aye. Headed out right after Vale lost his brains. She wants to send the Tribunals a message personally. Now, let’s go. That’s an order. Cap’n Hadris wants every inch of dock on this rock covered before she gets here.”

  Talon considered ignoring him, but decided against it. In addition to being completely drained from the assault, he realized that he had less of a desire to chase fleeing men through dark tunnels compared to open war. They might have been Tribunals, but it sounded all too similar to what his old job working for Zargo entailed, before Elisha came into his life.

  Tarsis was right. With war inevitable, he’d get plenty more chances to fight the Tribune head-on.

  After an hour or so of waiting, Talon regretted his decision. Cleaning out the docks wasn’t much work. Tribunal stragglers hid wherever they could, but not enough to cause a problem, and those who didn’t try to fight were swiftly detained and transported to the Lutetia.

  Mostly, he was posted beside a bridge connected to the adjacent docking station, keeping an eye out for anything awry while the Lakura officers turned the docks into an improvised Ceresian battle station. He snuck off once in a futile search for his holopad so he could see Elisha.

  While there, Talon overheard that the Lakura Clan’s long-range scanners had limited capability, so Captain Hadris wanted to hack into the ones that already existed on Eureka. He hoped to get a better glimpse of how the Tribune was going to respond to being attacked.

  After a few more hours doing busywork, Talon was starting to doze off leaning against a wall when the docking station’s inner seal irised open. Yara Lakura’s personal transport arrived, a yellow-finned ship in the shape of a dagger.

  She emerged alone, a crooked sneer plastered on her face. Her armor might once have displayed the bright yellow of her clan, but it had somewhat browned with age. The knife hanging from her belt seemed to suit her roguish appearance.

  Yara wasted no time. She hurried over to Captain Hadris and the other Lakura higher-ups in the center of the hangar to begin reviewing plans for what would come next. Talon edged a little bit closer to try to eavesdrop until a hand fell on his shoulder.

  “Whatever happens, at least history will say we won the first battle.”

  Talon turned around to see Tarsis’ face, his broad smile obscured by his thick beard.

  “If they don’t write us out of history first,” Talon replied. “Good to see you made it, Tarsis. I kept an eye out for you while I patrolled some of the nearby hangars.”

  “You wouldn’t have seen me. I ran with a transport clear across the asteroid. Just got off duty and thought I’d come looking for you. I’m surprised you aren’t down in the tunnels, continuing the invasion.”

  “So am I… but I thought I’d follow orders just this once.”

  Tarsis laughed. “Not a bad idea. Thank the Ancients they finally finished shuttling supplies in from the Lutetia back where I was. The gunfight was easy compared to standing on an empty ship with nothing to shoot at. May not look it with this thing on them, but my legs are killing me.”

  “Tell me about it. I was a minute away from falling asleep. They’ve got me on guard duty, and I don’t suppose that’ll change now that Yara’s here.” Talon sighed. “Far cry from serving at the side of Zargo Morastus.”

  “I’ve heard the men down below have begun pillaging every galley they take,” Tarsis said. “How would you feel about sneaking out of here to go test whatever delicacies the Tribunals have piled up?”

  “Sounds good to me. Too bad the bastards don’t drink, though. We cleaned the Lutetia clear out after Vale was killed.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Ceresians, it’s that they’ve always got an emergency stash of synthrol nearby.”

  Tarsis pointed toward the stacks of supply crates being hauled out of a transport arriving with Yara. Talon couldn’t see what was inside them, but he had a good idea. He nodded to the Vergent and surveyed the scene.

  Captain Hadris had begun escorting Yaka Lakura around the hangar, detailing every bit of equipment being set up. She interrupted him from time to time to bark orders at subordinates, but there was nothing Talon could help with beyond standing around and looking intimidating with his pulse-rifle.

  He took a few healthy backward strides before turning to follow Tarsis. As soon as he came around, the floor shuddered so violently that he was thrown from his feet. A blinding light shone through every viewport
along the docks. Chunks of molten metal flew across them, a few scattered pieces of debris crashing into the glass and causing emergency shutters to slam shut.

  “What the hell was that?” Yara hollered. The emergency alarms had been disabled during the attack, but the room was flooded by red lights marking the exits.

  “The Lutetia’s been hit…” Captain Hadris stammered. He was positioned at a cluster of holoscreens mapping out the region surrounding the asteroid. It was suddenly filled with red blips, which hadn’t been there previously.

  Talon didn’t waste any time. He helped Tarsis to his feet and then hurried over to a viewport with a clear vantage. Two chunks of the Lutetia drifted beyond, parts and bodies spilling out of each half like entrails from a human torso.

  “What’s the damage?” Yara questioned.

  “She’s, uh… she’s been split in half by a rail-gun round,” Captain Hadris replied, voice cracking. “It came from somewhere out of range of our current scanners.”

  “Tryin’ to tap into the Eureka ones now,” a tech next to him said. The woman plugged away at holoscreens.

  “That’s impossible!” Yara exclaimed. “What kind of ship has a rail large enough to do that much damage to something as big as the Lutetia in a single shot?”

  While Talon stared through the viewport to find an answer to her question, he noticed a peculiar star amongst a sea of them. It was brighter than any of the others.

  “A New Earth cruiser…” He hadn’t even realized he said it out loud until everybody standing nearby turned suddenly to look at him.

  “Hold your tongue!” Yara snapped. “They had no idea we were coming, How would they have one of them here already?”

  Talon’s eyes widened. “Because they did.” His lust for vengeance had caused him to overlook it, but his people had been baited by the Tribune again. Only this time with an entire army. That was why Eureka was so easy to take.

  “Madam Lakura, you have to evacuate everybody,” he said. “Now!”