“Yes, she was. According to some of her trainers, even more so than you.”
“I’m sure by then they forgot the war I won for you.”
Benjar stopped walking. They were only a few strides away from the entrance to the command deck. He turned to Cassius and glared at him, his eyes burning with rage.
“Whatever happens here, this is where the legend of Cassius Vale ends,” he said. “Never has an executor risen to such heights, or fallen to such depths. You are a disgrace to us all.”
“Then what does that make you?” Cassius chuckled under his breath and continued forward into the command deck. What awaited him stopped him in his tracks so abruptly that Benjar bumped into his back.
Bodies were everywhere. His eyes darted from side to side. He recognized a few.
Talon Rayne? Yara Lakura?
“Zaimur, what is—”
The command deck’s entrance slammed shut behind them. Cassius scanned the room. Zaimur stood to his side, but as soon as Cassius turned toward him, the Morastus leader’s mouth fell open and his eyes went wide.
Sage was revealed as he fell to his knees, gagging on air, her wrist-blade sliding out of his spine. Zaimur tried to look back, to beg, but Sage knew where to stab to kill a man fast. She dropped his limp body and began to approach Cassius silently, a pulse-rifle aimed at him. In her expression, Cassius saw the same fury that had been present when she last held him at gunpoint back on Titan.
“Sage, it pleases me to see you alive,” Benjar said, doing his best impression of meaning it.
“Yes, I’m sure you’re thrilled,” Cassius remarked. His hand slid a few inches away from his pistol, but he didn’t dare go further. Staring into the barrel of Sage’s gun, this time he wasn’t so sure she wouldn’t pull the trigger.
“I remember all too well how much you adore the executors who fail you,” Cassius said.
“Fail me?” Benjar took a few steps forward, holding up his arms as if he were begging for mercy. “Sage has performed flawlessly. We’ve been trying to remove Yara Lakura for decades. And Zaimur Morastus? The Tribune will hail you as a hero for this.”
“Quiet!” Sage growled and shifted her aim toward him. Benjar almost leapt out of his robe. “Everyone else out!” Sage hollered to the few engineers remaining at their control stations. They watched anxiously, but they didn’t move.
“Get out!” The second time they stirred, almost tripping over each other as they descended from the catwalk and scrambled through the only exit.
Cassius chuckled. “I don’t think she did this for you, Benjar,” he said, his gaze falling upon Talon Rayne’s bloody corpse. The Ceresian looked like he’d been dead for days. His skin was gray as stone, and his veins had lost their bluish color. He had little doubt that Zaimur was behind it. He couldn’t even keep a good arrangement going.
Foolish young man. Impetuous, just like his father would’ve said.
“I’ve been trying to contact you after the Ascendant, Sage,” Cassius continued. “I assure you, I had nothing to do with Talon dying.” He took a step toward her, but her aim snapped right back to him.
“Yet he’s dead,” Sage said. “Talon came here to stop Zaimur from working with you.”
“You see, Cassius, even your new friends want to get rid of you,” Benjar sneered.
“He claimed that you were behind what happened on Kalliope, Cassius,” Sage went on, ignoring the Tribune. “That you caused all of this.”
Cassius exhaled. “It’s not that—”
“No more lies!” Sage stormed forward and buried the tip of her rifle in Cassius’ chest. “Was it you?”
Cassius lifted his hand away from his sidearm. “Fine. No more lies.” He stood straight and stretched his neck. There was no reason left to hide the truth. “It was me, Sage. ADIM planted the bomb to test its effects.”
Sage shuffled backwards, though didn’t let her aim shift. Her hands began to quake. “Why?”
“Because he’s a monster, Sage,” Benjar declared. He stepped forward with renewed confidence. “Even more died at Titan. Hundreds of merchants on the conduit. Thousands of Tribunal citizens of Edeoria. By the Spirit, one of your Tribunes as well, bless her soul.”
“If I’m a monster, then you made me that way,” Cassius replied.
Benjar didn’t back down. “Shoot him down now, Agent Volus, and I’ll pardon you of all your crimes,” he said to Sage. “You will serve as my new Hand. Yavortha could never compare to you. I see that now.”
“So she can be your pet again? Ignore him, my dear. Remember how he used to look at you? Touch you? Whatever I may be, I would never hurt you.”
“Would you both stop it!” Sage yelled, her chest heaving. She regarded Cassius, and the look on her face broke his heart. He stayed strong regardless. Many hearts would be broken before the world changed. It was as it had to be.
“It was all you,” she said to him. “No accidents. Everything meticulously planned just like the wires in my arm. Talon was right. You weren’t just trying to survive. You wanted this war. Tell me why.”
“I’ve already told you,” Cassius said. “To break shackles.”
“The lies never end with you, do they?” Benjar remarked. He took a long stride toward Cassius, again earning Sage’s aim. He winced. “It’s simple. You’re doing all of this to get back at me because you think I kept you from saving Caleb.”
“Don’t you dare speak his name!” Cassius roared. In an instant he grabbed Benjar and slammed him against the wall. Sage fired a warning shot just over his ear, but, unlike Benjar, Cassius didn’t flinch.
“Or no, it’s not that at all, is it?” Benjar said, not backing down. “It’s because you couldn’t save him. No matter what you did.”
Cassius’ hand went numb. He felt like he’d had the wind knocked out of him. He dropped Benjar and stumbled backwards as far as he could until he bumped into Sage’s rifle.
Benjar straightened his clothes. “Yes, that’s it,” he said, pressing toward Cassius. “For once you, the great Cassius Vale, were powerless.”
Cassius’ stomach churned. The day he watched Caleb’s ravaged body fall out of the transport with Sage flashed through his head like a recording on repeat. His expressionless face. The blood. So much blood.
Benjar leaned down in front of Cassius’ face. He wore his famous grin, like he’d just won a war. “At the mercy of the Spirit, just like the rest of us.”
Cassius screamed at the top of his lungs, eight years of rage spilling out all at once. It echoed throughout the command deck, reverberated off the catwalk above and the bloody walls. His hand dropped to his pistol, and in a single motion he drew it and thrust it forward. The jagged blade fixed to the barrel sank into Benjar’s chest. With his other hand he grabbed the stock of Sage’s rifle and pushed her aim towards the ground.
Benjar would’ve fallen, but Cassius took him by the collar and held him upright. He whipped his head around. Even though the rifle was in Sage’s artificial arm, she couldn’t free it from Cassius’ grip. His work appeared damaged. With one tug he was able to rip it away and throw it at the wall.
He pulled Benjar’s face close. “Do you want to see how powerless I am?” he asked. He dragged Benjar toward the command deck’s viewport. Sage followed, as if caught in a trance.
“Unhand the Tribune!” someone shouted, quickly followed by a burst of pulse-rifle fire.
A bullet sliced across the meat of his shoulder, but whether it was out of love or protective instinct, Sage pushed him out of the way, knocking him and Benjar to the ground.
An executor pressed toward the room, a stowaway from Benjar’s shuttle. Her non-Tribunal armor gave her away, but also her look. She looked like Sage eight years earlier. Red hair, fierce, young. A new pet for Benjar to toy with.
Sage took cover. Cassius scrambled to grab Benjar, bullets clanging off the metal floor. He rolled over with the Tribune, then used him as a human shield to aim over. With Cassius using Benjar as a human s
hield, this new Sage couldn’t risk firing at him. In that moment, Cassius returned fire, nearly missing her head, and forcing her back into cover.
He quickly adjusted aim and shot the locking mechanism, causing the door to slam shut. It wouldn’t last long. The door already seemed beat to hell, patched up and dented. It wouldn’t last long against an executor who was armed to break through. But Cassius didn’t need long.
“You’re right about one thing, Benjar,” he said, catching his breath and dragging Benjar up to his feet. The Tribune whimpered in pain. “I can’t blame you for his death. I’m killing you because you used my son as an excuse to remove me. Then you used his brilliant work like cheap propaganda.”
Cassius pushed the Tribune along to the right, out of view of the command deck’s entry, until he hit the side of the viewport. Benjar slid down to his knees, a trail of blood staining the glass. He pawed at his wound, as if in disbelief that a Tribune could bleed.
“But I blame us for him being down there,” Cassius continued. “I blame every damned human in the Circuit for clinging to Earth as it if should be more meaningful to us than any other rock out here. We’ve grown beyond it!”
Cassius turned to Sage. She was staring at Benjar’s pooling blood. “Do you want to know why I’ve done what I’ve done, Sage? What I gathered the Circuit’s greatest powers here to see?”
Reaching up to his left ear, Cassius switched on the comm-link connected to his six androids and said, “Now.”
“Yes, Creator,” the androids replied. Their feed quickly became garbled with static as they ostensibly followed his orders—they could do nothing else. They jumped into the gravitum mines, one from the surface and five from their freighters hidden in the clouds, bombs in tow. They’d fall too fast for anyone to stop them.
Cassius stepped as close to the viewport’s glass as he could get. “This is the truth, Sage,” he said. “If there truly is a Spirit, strike me down now!”
Cassius closed his eyes, but nothing happened.
When he opened them again, a series of bright blue streaks began to cut jagged lines across Earth’s surface. They grew brighter and brighter, and then countless bluish blades of energy sliced out from the planet like the rings of Saturn. They expanded so far that a few of them nearly reached the Hound’s Paw, and then, as Cassius shielded his eyes from the light, they were drawn back to Earth.
His whole body tingled, and he wasn’t sure if it was due to the weapon or his own exhilaration. One by one, all the blue seams that had formed around the planet cracked open, and the planet split into massive chunks. At their center was a swell of darkness through which random bolts of energy coruscated.
Cassius wished he could hear the sound of the planet cracking, but the sight itself was the most beautiful thing he could imagine. A single tear dripped down his cheek as he watched the fragments of Earth slowly distance themselves, revealing its glowing mantle and bringing all its buried gravitum to bear.
The little air left in Benjar’s lungs slipped through his lips as he stared at the last thing he’d ever see. Sage was already on her knees, her mouth and eyes stretched open as far as they could go.
Cassius reached out and ran his quivering fingers across the glass.
“That is a beautiful sight, isn’t it, Creator?” ADIM spoke suddenly into his right ear. “I think I am beginning to understand the human subtext of that word now.”
“ADIM, are you here?” Cassius asked.
“I am all around you.”
A cluster of Tribunal fighters rose through space directly in front of the viewport. At first Cassius feared they’d fire, but then he realized that none of them had pilots.
“You must evacuate onto the White Hand,” ADIM said. “Zaimur Morastus’ ship is no longer safe.”
The Hound’s Paw lurched to the side. Bolts of rail fire lanced across the viewport and hit one of the larger Ceresian ships in view. The Tribunal fighters turned around before a Tribunal frigate came into view, firing in every direction. The comm’s chatter throughout the command deck grew even louder, but nobody sounded concerned with Earth anymore. They were asking for battle commands.
“ADIM, what are you doing?” Cassius asked. He could barely see Earth splitting through the haze of a firefight emerging between the two fleets. The glimmering bows of both the present New Earth cruisers also entered his line of site.
“As I said, I have taken control of your protocol from Joran Noscondra in order to remove all of your current enemies and protect you from future ones,” ADIM said. “It was not a difficult process re-establishing the lines of connection between the Enclave and all Tribunal vessels. Please, Creator, you must proceed to the White Hand immediately for safe exodus. You are in the center of the conflict.”
Before Cassius could respond, the Ascendant fired its rail gun directly through the command deck of the Viridian. The top of Cordo Yashan’s flagship split open, but as it did, it fired off missiles at the nearby Ceresian warships.
ADIM was in control. All the people Cassius hoped would be watching the fall of Earth alongside him, before they came together to rebuild the Circuit to be free, were going to die.
25
Chapter Twenty-Five—Sage
For some reason, the blood of Tribune Vakari seemed redder to Sage than any she’d seen before. It was smeared across the glass of the Hound’s Paw’s viewport, covering the blinking lights of a few Ceresian warships out in space.
She’d spent her whole life thinking he was invincible, a direct servant of the Spirit’s will. But there he was, dying like any other man, wheezing his final breaths and clinging to a few more seconds of precious life.
“This is the truth, Sage,” Cassius said from somewhere beside her. She was so entranced by seeing Benjar like that, that she’d completely forgotten about the man she’d stayed on the Hound’s Paw to see, or the new executor who’d barged in looking so much like her, or Talon, or the Circuit. There was only her dying master.
“If there truly is a Spirit, strike me down now!” Cassius pronounced.
Sage ignored him, unable to look away until suddenly Benjar’s blood started to look purple. She got closer to the glass and saw a web of blue rifts forming across Earth’s surface, like the veins over Talon’s temples.
Staring at the bright rifts began to hurt her eyes, but she kept them open until a wave of energy sliced out from the planet. She was blown back onto the floor just from the pure shock of it but rose to her knees to see the rifts begin to sparkle and Earth crack open.
The marvel Sage experienced was quickly replaced by horror. Chunks of Earth drifted away from its molten core, and in an instant the terrible truth came to her. Revenge against the Tribune was always a charade. The true focus of Cassius’ vengeance was against the one entity he could never touch. The one thing he could never understand.
To extinguish the Spirit that had claimed his son’s life, Cassius Vale had to destroy Earth.
Sage had to lean on her hands just to stay upright because she felt the room start to spin. Her heart cried out for the Spirit. It was an entity stronger than any planet, but it belonged to Earth, bound to it. It was the mother of humanity, and without Earth, Sage wasn’t sure what would happen. She half expected to turn into ashes and disappear.
She crawled, but the ground beneath her hands and feet was shaking. The walls of the command deck seemed to be closing in around her.
“Sage, we have to leave,” a muffled voice said.
Is that you? Her human hand groped at the darkness. She gasped for a single, elusive breath, over and over again until she was finally able to vomit. Her stomach emptied and air rushed in.
“Sage, we have to leave!” the voice repeated, this time more urgently. Then something landed on her shoulder.
Her head snapped around, and with her lungs working, she was able to focus on the face hovering in front of her. A face full of wrinkles and framed by gray hair… Cassius.
“Cassius!” Sage thundered. She t
ackled him to the floor. He threw up his hands to defend himself, but it wasn’t enough. She stretched her artificial arm to full length so that it wouldn’t budge, and used it to keep him down. Then she punched him across the jaw with her human fist as hard as she could.
“Why!” she screamed. She punched him again, and again, and again. Until her knuckles were as bruised and bloody as his face.
“Why!” she yelled again. She pulled his face toward hers with her artificial arm and slammed him back down. “Fight back! Fight back!”
He tried to say something, but all that came out was a bloodied clump of teeth. His face was a mess of contusions, but his dark eyes never wavered. He stared at her the entire time, even as she wound up and hit him in the jaw one last time.
“Why?” she cried.
A snap hiss drew Sage’s attention. The door to the command deck opened, and the executor entered. Her aim swept from Sage, down to Cassius.
“Where is Tribune Vakari?” she demanded.
A laugh escaped Cassius’ lips. Sage didn’t let him go, but her eyes flitted toward the Tribune’s corpse.
“No…” the executor gasped. “No!”
As she fired at them, the Hound’s Paw shook violently. She was thrown against a wall hard. Sage lost her grip on Cassius and slid across the floor toward the viewport, where exploding ships painted the whole of space orange.
Beyond them, Earth drifted further apart, blue strings of energy dancing around the core as if they were a swarm of angry specters with nowhere to go. A Tribunal fighter positioned itself in front of the glass, its entire arsenal of weapons aimed at Sage.
“ADIM, no!” Cassius groaned. He dragged himself across the floor until he was in front of her, holding out his trembling palm. Blood dribbled down his chin. “Hold your fire.” He coughed a gob of red into his hand and rolled over to fall against the glass.
A Tribunal frigate rose into view, half of its missiles firing at a Ceresian warship and the rest at a cloven New Earth cruiser. The Ceresian warship blew into pieces only a few kilometers away, fragments of its hull peppering the Hound’s Paw’s viewport. A large piece of its unstable engine hurtled toward Sage and Cassius, but a second Tribunal fighter darted in its path and sacrificed itself before it could break the glass.
The Circuit: The Complete Saga Page 72
