Cassius chortled. “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 color. There was no doubt that Zaimur was behind it. 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 him dying.” He took a step toward her, but her aim snapped right back to him. She was only a few feet away from both of them.
“And yet, he’s gone,” 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.
Sage accused, “He claimed that you were behind what happened on Kalliope, Cassius. 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 weapon. “Fine. No more lies.” He stood straight. There was no reason left to hide the truth. “It was me, Sage. ADIM planted the bomb there in order to test its effects.”
She shuffled backwards, without letting her aim shift. Her hands began to quake. “Why?” she mouthed.
“Because he’s a monster, Sage!” Benjar said. He emerged from the wall with renewed confidence. “Even more died at Saturn. Hundreds of merchants on the Conduit. Thousands of Tribunal citizens on Titan. By the Spirit, one of your Tribunes as well.”
“If I’m a monster, then you made me that way, Benjar,” Cassius replied.
Benjar didn’t back down. “Shoot him down now, 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 touch you? Whatever I may be, I would never hurt you.”
“Would you both stop it!” Sage shouted. “It was all you,” she said. “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. To break shackles.”
“The lies never end with you, do they?” Benjar said. He took a long stride toward Cassius, again earning Sage’s aim. “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 by the throat and slammed him against the wall. Sage fired a warning shot just over his ear, but Cassius didn’t flinch.
“Or no, it’s not that at all is it?” Benjar said, his voice stifled by Cassius squeezing his throat. “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 coughed a few times, but stayed on his feet. “Yes, that’s it. For once you, the great Cassius Vale, was powerless.”
Cassius’ stomach churned. The day he watched Caleb’s ravaged body fall out of the transport with Sage flashed in front of him over and over.
Benjar leaned down in front of Cassius’ face. He wore his 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 of the metal balcony above and the bloody walls. His hand dropped to his pistol, and in a single motion he withdrew it and thrust it forward. The long, jagged blade fixed to the barrel sunk into Benjar’s chest. With his other hand he grabbed the barrel of Sage’s rifle and held it pointed towards the ground.
Benjar would’ve fallen but Cassius grabbed 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. 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. “You’re right about one thing, Benjar. I can’t blame you for his death. I’m killing you because you used my son as an excuse to remove me, and used his brilliant work like cheap propaganda.”
Cassius pushed Benjar against the viewport. The Tribune slid down to his knees, a trail of blood staining the glass.
“But I blame us for him being down there,” Cassius continued. “I blame every damned human in the Circuit for clinging to Earth as if it 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 a puddle of Benjar’s 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?”
Cassius reached up to his left ear and switched on the com-link connected to his six androids. “Now,” he said.
“Yes, Creator,” the androids replied. Their feed quickly became filled with static as they followed his orders and jumped into the Gravitum mines, one from the surface and five from their freighters, bombs in tow. They’d fall too fast for anyone to stop them.
Cassius stepped as close to the 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 the 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 the 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 of the blue seams which 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 wheezing 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 fingers across the glass. They were quivering.
“That is a beautiful sight isn’t it, Creator?” ADIM spoke into his right ear suddenly. “I think I am beginning to understand the human subtext of that word now.”
“ADIM, are you here?” he asked.
“I am all around you.”
All of a sudden a cluster of Tribunal fighters rose through space directly in front of the viewport. They didn’t have any pilots sitting in their dark cockpits.
“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 com’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 the Earth splitting through the haze of a firefight emerging between
the two fleets. The glimmering tips of both of the present New Earth Cruisers also entered his line of sight.
“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. It was not a difficult process reopening the lines of connection between the Enclave and all Tribunal vessels. Please, Creator, you must proceed to the White Hand immediately for safety. 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 Cardo Yashan’s ship 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 the Earth with him before they came together to rebuild the Circuit how he imagined it were going to die.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR—SAGE
A Spirit Broken
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 with his last few breaths and clinging on 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.
“If there truly is a Spirit,” Cassius continued. “Strike me down now!”
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 throughout the Earth, like the veins over Talon’s temples.
What is that?
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 ground just from the pure shock of it, but rose to her knees to see the rifts begin to sparkle and the Earth crack open.
The marvel Sage experienced was quickly replaced by horror. Chunks of the 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 which claimed his son’s life, Cassius Vale had destroyed the Earth.
She had to lean on her hands just to stay upright because she felt the room start to spin. The Spirit! It was an entity stronger than any planet, but it belonged to Earth; it was bound to it. It was the mother of humanity, and without Earth she 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!” she roared. She sprung forward and tackled 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 hold 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. She punched him until her knuckles were as bruised and bloody as his face and her arm was sore.
“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.
The Hound’s Paw shook violently, throwing her off of him. She slid across the floor toward the viewport, where exploding ships painted the whole of space orange. Beyond them the 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 Sage, 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 appeared through it, 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 miles 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.
Sage turned back to Cassius. He was panting and attempting to slide towards her. She crawled for his pulse-pistol which was lying on the floor between them.
“Sage,” Cassius rasped. “We have to go.”
“Why?” Sage whimpered, as her hand tapped the metal grip of the pistol. It took her a few second to be able to thread her fingers through the trigger. She lifted it, and aimed it directly at Cassius’ face.
“To show you, to show all of you, that Earth was no more than a planet.” He coughed, unable to lift his head. Blood dripped from his nose. “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 wrapped his bloody hands around Sage’s forearms. She held the gun steady, but he used her arms 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.”
The Hound’s Paw shook again. A pipe in the ceiling burst and warm steam sprayed out. Then a beam of light shot across the viewport, tearing through a portion of a Ceresian ship and continuing on to break 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 forced a bloody grin. He 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.
“No,” Sage realized. “You never planned on surviving this did you? 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 my father.”
“Nobody gets to choose their family,” Cassius panted.
“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 of 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.
“This isn’t you, is it?” Sage began to chuckle. “ADIM. Benjar was right. You are powerless after all.” She got to her feet and took a good look through the viewport. There were so many shreds of ships that the broken Earth was lost behind them. “I hope he kills us all. 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 bristled. “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, whipping her head around. “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 threw Sage off balance. She caught herself against a console and used it to propel herself toward Talon’s body. She knelt down beside him and 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 of his chin. He didn’t dare touch her.
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