The Circuit: The Complete Saga

by Bruno, Rhett C.

  Beyond them, she recognized the armor of Hand Yavortha, all the way across the hangar amongst a sea of soldiers. He stood on the raised ramp of a transport ship.

  “We’re going—” Sage began before a sharp pain pulled at her side. She pressed her human hand against her wound and took a measured breath. “We’re going to need to find a new way out,” she said through her teeth. “We’ll only get one shot at this.”

  “Nice rescue this was,” one of the Ceresian prisoners groaned. “I say we blast through!”

  Blast through, Sage thought. She peeked around the corner and saw two vacant mechs sitting against the wall behind the ranks of shooting androids. Their rail guns might be enough to break the Ascendant’s hull.

  “Talon, can you operate a mech?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I helped Julius with one or two back on Kalliope, but those were for mining and old as hell.”

  “There’re two left. I’m going to provide cover so you can reach the exterior wall. I’ll load into the further mech and fire the rail through the wall of the hangar. You and Elisha will be yanked out into space, and Tarsis and the others can hold on until Cassius retrieves you. I’ll follow right behind you.”

  An unexpected look of dread seized Talon’s face. “No,” he whisper-shouted, grasping Sage by her forearm. “We’re not bringing Elisha back to him.”

  “There’s no time to argue, Talon,” Sage said. She looked toward the two surviving Ceresians. “Get in Tribunal suits and put on the helmets.”

  They didn’t even wait a second before picking through the many Tribunal corpses to find one with an uncompromised suit. Talon backed down and started whispering with Tarsis while they waited. Sage took that time to use her wrist-blade to bend the punctured portion of her own suit over her bullet wound. That would ensure that there was constant pressure on it and that her suit was sealed when she entered space.

  When she was done, she glanced out from cover again. A sea of green armor crashed down on them, under the direct command of Hand Yavortha. Androids dropped one by one, a sight that at any other time would have made Sage smile.

  An explosive round took out a cluster of them, spraying metal arms and legs through the air. If she was even able to reach the second mech, it would take some time for it to charge up its rail gun. She wasn’t an android, so she couldn’t calculate the odds, but it was beginning to seem likely that she wouldn’t be able to follow Talon out into space.

  One last mission…

  “Talon, are you ready?” she called over. “We’re going to get her out of here.”

  Talon brushed back Elisha’s hair and stared down at her, lines of terror racking his face. She’d never seen him so scared. “I’m ready,” he whispered.

  “On my signal, then.”

  Sage closed her visor and switched on her helmet comms. She lifted her arm, giving the freed Ceresian prisoners just enough time to finish putting on their suits. Then she let it fall, signaling the rest to move before she ran out shooting.

  She hopped from android to android, taking cover behind each one and picking off what were once her own people. Talon sprinted behind her, winding his way across the bodies and the debris toward the mech parked against the adjacent wall.

  Sage couldn’t see Yavortha’s face as he watched her from across the hangar, but she could just imagine his rage. It propelled her. It felt good to join a fight from beyond the shadows against someone she knew deserved it, for once in her life. Yavortha wasn’t deserving of the Spirit’s love. He was a cancer that’d wormed his way up the ranks.

  “We’re in!” Talon shouted over comms.

  That was her cue.

  She broke off from the androids and bolted toward the other mech. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Talon’s mech’s cockpit sealing. She hurdled the broken-down chassis of a fighter ship, sparks showering and bullets trailing her. A few times the pain in her hip almost made her stumble, but she managed to keep her balance.

  When she finally reached the mech, she froze in her tracks. The cockpit was already occupied and closing, only it wasn’t a Tribunal inside. It was Tarsis. His visor was lifted so she could see his messy beard and the pull of each of his strained breaths. The veins of his face bulged, so blue that he looked like a gravitum generator ready to burst.

  “I can never repay the gift Talon gave to me, but take care of them, Sage,” he whispered, so raspy she could barely hear him. “Let’s hope your people are right about the Spirit.”

  The cockpit sealed and Tarsis pulled down his visor. Mechanisms hissed as its body lifted until the gargantuan hulk of metal stood at its full imposing height.

  “No!” Sage shouted.

  She slammed her fist against the mech, but as she did, the Tribunals took notice and started riddling it with bullets. She ducked down behind its leg and looked back to search for Talon. His mech bounded across the hangar, the two surviving Ceresian prisoners using its legs for cover.

  “Sage, are you in?” Talon asked over comms, sounding frantic.

  “She’s in,” Tarsis said before she could respond. His mech’s feet slammed down, anchored, and it bent over to reveal the illuminated spine along its back. White light began to brighten along with a humming noise even louder than the countless firing rifles throughout the hangar.

  There was no time to think. With the entire room’s attention turned to Tarsis, Sage took off to catch up with Talon. She picked up a large shard of metal from a wrecked fighter with her artificial arm and used it as a shield. It didn’t take long before dozens of bullets clanged off it. She immediately discovered why. The eyes of the remaining androids were slowly going dark, and they were collapsing without even being shot.

  ADIM was no longer controlling them.

  Using her human hand to reach into her artificial forearm while she ran, she activated the holorecorder Cassius had given her so he knew they were coming. Keeping the makeshift shield upright in the face of so much fire was almost impossible, even for her artificial arm, but it at least helped distract her from the hole in her hip.

  In front of her, Talon managed to keep the legs of his mech churning. The further he went, the better he got at piloting the thing. It went from swaying side to side to maintaining a straight line, and then unloading the chain gun built into its arm toward the Tribunal ranks.

  “Sage, are you going to shoot?” Talon shouted. “We’re almost at the wall!”

  Any possible response died in Sage’s throat. She caught up with Talon’s mech, and as soon as she did, she glanced up and saw a wall of soldiers impeding them. Yavortha stood in their center, fully armored and aiming down the holo-sights of a precision rifle with his single remaining eye. The rest of the soldiers were focused on Talon’s mech.

  “Bring it down!” Yavortha thundered.

  Sage couldn’t use her shield to guard both her flank and front. She was forced to zigzag to avoid the Hand’s shots. Running straight had been easy, but every cut she made further distressed her wound. On one turn her foot gave out and she slipped, and as she did, a bolt of white energy lanced over her shoulder and pierced the wall of the Ascendant. The entire ship rocked to the side.

  She extended her artificial arm as far as she could. Her metal fingers dug into the leg of Talon’s mech just in time before she, the mech, and anything else near the breach was sucked out.

  “I bet even the android never would’ve thought of this!” Tarsis laughed over the comm-link, gunfire echoing in the background. “Flying a mech out! Take that, you bastards!”

  Everything else around Sage went quiet. She gathered her bearings as she and Talon’s mech tumbled through space, and then drew herself up its body until she was right beside the cockpit. Through the narrow viewport she could see Talon staring out, dumbfounded.

  A bullet suddenly grazed her artificial bicep. She pulled herself flat against the metal chassis and used her artificial arm to roll over, dodging a few more shots. She could hear Tarsis and Talon conver
sing over her comm-link, but there was no time to ask Talon what was going on. Yavortha was clambering up the other leg of the mech, his sidearm in hand. Another soldier was with him, but he kicked the man off to give himself a boost.

  He crashed into Sage. With her artificial hand she held him from being able to shoot her in the head, but he was able to position his pistol to unload the rest of his magazine through the arm itself. She couldn’t feel anything, but slivered shards of metal and circuits sprayed across the vacuum.

  She wasn’t sure why she screamed, but she did. She kicked off the mech, rolled behind Yavortha, and put him in a choke hold. He elbowed her in the stomach and twisted away, his strong fingers wrapping around Sage’s calf and wrenching her leg backwards.

  The muscles in her quad hyperextended. She willed her artificial arm to move, but not even the fingers twitched. After Yavortha’s close-range onslaught, she couldn’t control it. He flipped her over and wrapped a hand forcefully around her neck and slammed her back against the mech’s chest.

  Yavortha pinned her human arm down with his free hand so that she could neither fight nor reach the switch to speak through her comm-link and allow Talon to hear her. All she could do was stare into his ravenous eyes as he squeezed the life out of her.

  That was when the massive arm of the mech swiped across her view and slapped Yavortha away. She couldn’t hear if he said anything, but despite weightlessness rendering his mech mostly useless, Talon was attempting to help her.

  Yavortha grabbed onto the arm when it stopped moving, and he pushed back toward Sage. She quickly stole a glance down at her artificial arm. She might not have been able to move it with her mind, but she wasn’t useless yet. With her human hand, she grabbed it and began to manually shift it into various positions, hoping to find the one that would cause her wrist-blade to shoot out. Before she could, Yavortha’s elbow slammed into her sternum, knocking both of them away from the mech and causing them to twirl through space.

  That was when it finally worked.

  The blade sank into Yavortha’s chest. Blood spiraled out across the vacuum as Sage screamed at the top of her lungs and used her human hand to lift it. The blade sliced up through his body until her broken metal arm stuck out the top of his helmet.

  They continued to spin through the vacuum together, she and the Hand of her former master. By the time she was finally able to stop screaming and tear her gaze away from him, she was completely out of breath.

  A cluster of ships bore down on their position. Her vision was too blurred from pain to tell what was what, but one of them had to be the White Hand.

  She yanked her blade out of Yavortha and attempted to contact Talon when a dazzling series of explosions coruscated across space in front of her. She felt her back cradled by the open hand of Talon’s mech, and then darkness took her.

  13

  Chapter Thirteen—Talon

  Talon tried to tell Sage what he’d discovered about Cassius the moment they reached the Ascendant’s hangar and had a chance to breathe. “There’s no time to argue, Talon!” she barked, turning her attention to the two surviving Ceresian prisoners accompanying them. “Get in Tribunal suits and put on the helmets.”

  Talon exhaled. He glanced down at Elisha cradled in his arms. They were getting sore, but he’d let them fall off before he let her go.

  There must be another way out of here, he thought as he gave her a squeeze. Who knows what he really wants with us… or her…

  Tarsis grabbed him by the shoulder. “Talon,” he said weakly, “it doesn’t feel right going back if we already have her. He’s a killer.”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Talon said. He glanced around and saw that the other Ceresians were busy changing, and Sage was performing makeshift repairs to her suit. He leaned in close and whispered: “I think you’re right that he was the one who destroyed Kalliope. I think he orchestrated all of this.”

  Tarsis blinked. “How do you know?”

  “Call it a feeling.”

  “We’re going to need more than that.”

  “If we let him pick us up, we’ll be in debt to the man who murdered all those people.” It was easy when Talon could blame the Tribune for everything, but if he was right, that meant he’d been next to the man who murdered his best friend, and nearly his daughter. Hiding away in his ship for weeks. And as long as Cassius had ADIM at his side, there was nothing he could do about it.

  “No, we won’t.” Tarsis reached into a compartment on his belt and pulled out a mobile comm-link. He extended his noisy, reinforced arm around Talon’s back.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s synced to the Monarch’s comms. Sorry, Talon, but I told Larana the truth. Screw Vale. She stayed in range just in case she needed to retrieve us instead. She’ll help you get Elisha to safety. My people always will.”

  Tarsis backed away, leaving the device sitting within Talon’s palm. There was a glimmer in the bearded Vergent’s tired eyes. Talon wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but before he could reply, Sage interrupted.

  “Talon, are you ready?” she asked. “We’re going to get her out of here.”

  He ran his fingers through Elisha’s messy hair. She was trembling, her eyes squeezed shut. Whether through Cassius or the Vergents, Talon was going to get her out.

  “I’m ready,” he said.

  “On my signal, then.” Sage’s human arm lifted into the air as the other Ceresians secured their suits and moved behind her.

  Talon glanced at Tarsis. The Vergent smiled the broadest smile Talon had ever seen on his face and nodded. For a moment he didn’t even look like he was dying. He looked like the Vergent captain Talon wished he’d had the honor of meeting a long time ago. He would have fit right in with Julius and the others in the mines. Cracking jokes. Helping the dreary, exhausting hours pass by.

  Then Sage’s hand fell. Before he could think, Talon found himself sprinting behind her, making his way across the bodies and the debris toward the nearest of two intact combat mechs. His was parked against the adjacent wall, not nearly as far as Sage’s.

  The noise in the hangar was deafening. Bullets clanked off the walls and floors. Androids burst into pieces, and Tribunal soldiers fell left and right across the way. Talon covered Elisha as best he could, lowered his head, and let his legs pump as fast as they could.

  By the time he reached the mech, his lungs stung from fatigue. He took cover between the machine’s hulking legs and gathered his bearings. He had to be quick.

  Reaching out to set the cockpit to pop open, he allowed it to only rise halfway so that he could use the lid for cover. He kissed Elisha on the head before he placed her in, and then got to work pulling himself up.

  His arms quaked and his elbows felt like they were going to shoot through his skin. Bullets zipped by his ears, growing nearer each time until, somehow, he was within the chest cavity of the mech with the lid sealed in front of him.

  He placed Elisha on his lap, and in the quiet of the cockpit she gazed up at him as if she finally recognized who he was. He opened his visor and smiled at her, barely in control of his own cheek muscles. It was her. His daughter. His everything.

  “Just hold on tight,” he said. “Nobody can hurt you anymore.”

  She mouthed something inaudible, but that was enough to drive him. He scanned the cockpit. Two grips were attached to long mobile appendages. They controlled the mech’s arms. His feet slid snugly into two rectangular slots with pressurized pedals loaded in.

  Just like a mining mech, Talon thought. Sort of…

  He hit a switch on one of the grips, and the mech’s legs began to rise, lifting the cockpit ten feet into the air. A holoscreen HUD lit up around the cockpit, providing a real-time view of what was going on in front of him and behind him. Three hundred and sixty degrees of action. The android numbers were dwindling quickly, and if he didn’t hurry, there would be no more left to absorb fire.

  Once the mech reached its full height, the
foot pedals gained a significant level of weight and resistance. Based on his experience with mining mechs, Talon knew he had to push down on them as if he were walking. The machine would emulate his motions. For something so Tribunal and advanced, manual ambulatory controls prevailed.

  It took all the effort in his tired legs to get it started, but once he built momentum, the mech started plodding forward. After a few more seconds it was running, the HUD flickering as countless rounds of rifle fire peppered the plated exterior. The cockpit shook violently. Elisha buried her face in his chest as Talon glanced down at her.

  Cassius won’t poison her mind with his lies.

  He released the control for the arm facing toward the android ranks. Then he switched off the comm-link in his helmet synced to his companions, and activated the one Tarsis had given to him.

  “Larana, this is Talon,” he began, holding it to his mouth. “We’re going to be bursting through the port side of the Ascendant’s main hangar in less than a minute. We’ll be inside the floating Tribunal mechs. I’m not staying on this channel, but our original means of retrieval was compromised. I repeat, we are requesting a pickup from the Monarch!”

  He turned off the device and switched his helmet comms back on. The wall of the hangar was drawing nearer, and he needed to make sure he’d be getting through it.

  “Sage, are you in?” he shouted. He glanced at the bottom of his mech’s display to see the shadows of his other companions running beneath his mech, unsure who it was. Only two remained instead of three. Talon’s heart skipped a few beats before Tarsis finally responded. He had no desire to lose another friend.

  “She’s in,” Tarsis said.

  With that news, Talon put both the mech’s weaponized arms back to work. He’d grown comfortable enough operating the thing that he was able to fire its chain guns as he ran. The high-caliber rounds tore through enemy lines until, suddenly, an explosive round went off by his mech’s feet, knocking it off balance. His body strained as the machine swayed, but he was able to keep it from toppling over, screaming as his muscles tensed.