The Descent into the Maelstrom (The Phantom of the Earth Book 4)

by Zen, Raeden

  More requests for precepts, more glowing orbs, then Parthenia moved on to mathematical calculations, scientific facts, historical puzzles, Beimenian society, and on and on. Sometimes the orbs glowed green, and sometimes they spun red. By the twenty thousandth orb, Oriana’s head swayed, her eyelids heavy. A new query emerged:

  NAME THE PENALTY FOR AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR AGAINST A FELLOW BEIMENIAN.

  Oriana knew that Pasha answered correctly when the orb turned green. Although she knew the solution, she couldn’t bring herself to respond. A few hundred thousand queries later, the simulation ended. The twins exited the VR and dangled in midair. Lady Parthenia wasn’t there; she or the lord didn’t always remain in the simulator room for the entire session.

  Pasha looked over at Oriana. “Why would Father kill Mother’s lover the night of the Bicentennial?”

  “What do you mean?” Oriana asked. He’d barely spoken to her since the Trek, and never to talk about their parents.

  Pasha unlatched himself from his harness and helped Oriana out of hers. “I mean, if I were a Beimeni captain like Father was—”

  “Is,” Oriana said, “he’s in Farino Prison. Only Mother died.”

  “Right,” Pasha said. He lowered his head. “I would’ve killed him myself, I think, but I wouldn’t have done it on camera.”

  “You think Father’s innocent then?”

  “No … I don’t know …”

  They headed down the corridor together. “What do you think’s worse,” Oriana said, “to serve as a strike team captain only to end your life in the Lower Level, or never to have served at all?”

  Pasha thought about it. He looked up, and at the same time they said: “Never at all.”

  They ate lunch, four chickens slathered with macadamia oil, twenty-six eggs mixed with feta cheese and olive oil, a tub of pureed vegetables, and two liters of orange juice mixed with coconut.

  Then back into the harnesses.

  No correct door exists, but in order to choose you must solve a problem. Lord Thaddeus’s voice surrounded Oriana in a darkened room. I will present each of you with the same problem. Provide your answer, then choose. Abstain from using your extended consciousness.

  Oriana couldn’t focus. Why had Father killed Mother’s lover so brutally and publicly? And was this why the Summersets lied to her, because they feared what these feelings might do to her before the exams?

  No, she thought, don’t make excuses for them. They lied to me and Noria, and the lady slapped us!

  The room brightened when slits opened in the atmosphere, emitting white light. Then a puzzle appeared.

  Oriana Barão, the voice began, neither the lord’s nor the lady’s, but Marstone’s, to simulate exam day, can you transform Table A into Table B by exchanging only its rows and columns? If so, describe your procedure. If not, explain why.

  Oriana studied the tables. She transmitted, How am I supposed to solve this without extending my consciousness?

  No response.

  Oriana felt a surge of resentment. These enigmas favored Pasha’s skill set. She was his superior with palindromic puzzles, pulse guns, sai, nunchacku, shuriken, diamond swords—she outdueled him on her worst day. Why didn’t they ever train on Harpoon simulations that favored her strengths? It was no wonder he always won!

  She steadied, answered yes, and pushed the rows and columns in Table A the way she suspected they might fit into Table B. The tables lit up red again and again as she rearranged them. They reset over and over and over until Oriana communicated, No! It isn’t possible! Now let me pass!

  The tables still glowed and prevented her advancement.

  Upon further examination, she deduced a more logical, reasonable solution.

  Row exchanges preserve the numbers in rows, and column exchanges preserve the numbers in columns, but this isn’t the case in the choices you provided to me. The five box and the six box are in the same row in Table A but in different rows in Table B, so it isn’t possible to rearrange them by exchanging only rows and columns.

  The room illuminated, and three manual doors with golden handles appeared within golden outlines. Oriana stepped through the middle one into blinding brightness. The door slammed behind her and disappeared. She started. When she turned around, a new scene formed her reality.

  She walked along a rooftop looking down on a river below. Steep mountains stood across from her, layered, looking like stony steps. Water cascaded down from the mountain peaks, fifteen falls in all, into the river. To either side, rows and rows of buildings arched around the river and mountains, growing taller the farther back she peered. She moved into the open area on the roof.

  A pulse blast burst past her head.

  The concrete slab three meters from her exploded. She fell sideways and took cover.

  Shadows on the mountains and beneath the waterfalls, Oriana heard.

  The air around her feet illuminated in the shape of a case. When the case materialized fully, it held a pulse rifle.

  You may not advance until all the shadows disappear.

  Oriana flipped open the case and attached the scope to the rifle. She plucked the tripod and eyed a nook on the roof’s far side. She raced to it and tumbled as pulse blasts scattered behind her. She settled the rifle on the tripod and her shoulder, eased her right eye into the scope, and scanned the mountains. They were made of alloy rather than stone. A shadow sprinted behind one of the waterfalls. She inhaled deeply and thought of daybreak, the rising Granville sun she enjoyed with Pasha, that brief period of peace. She exhaled. She fired. The shadow rolled and fell through the water, then flipped down the ridges and into the river.

  More shots struck around her but missed. Oriana took cover. She steadied her view again and blew out the air from her lungs.

  Shadows in her sight. Running, steering, fleeting through the mountain of alloy and water. She squeezed the trigger. Echoes from the blasts encircled Oriana, disorienting her, but she held steady, and shadows fell from the mountain, one by one. She stood. The scenery around her bubbled and disappeared.

  She emerged on a steep, rainy hillside. A plateau lay above, rimmed with broom snakeweed, black sagebrush, and fragrant sand verbena. She spied Pasha climbing a rope. Ahead of her, again! She cursed him, dashed uphill, gripped a rope, and pulled her way up the bluff. Sweat streamed through her hair, around her face, and down her neck. When she crested the plateau, she was struck by gale-force winds and horizontal rainfall. Logs as long as the eye could see covered the ground. Oriana hurdled the first, second, and third, then splashed into the ground, blinded by mud. Her eyes burned. She scooped the muck from her face. Twisters formed in the sky but didn’t touch down. The downpour hastened, and she let the water clean her eyes.

  She hopped and sprinted, sprinted and hopped. By the fiftieth log, she ran parallel with Pasha.

  They moved, side by side, over a clearing layered with limestone and gravel. The rain stopped. They scooted toward vines that hung over a dale covered with rolling rocks and waterfalls and greenery. Oriana swung from vine to vine and inhaled the minty mist. At the other side, water and mud sloshed around her toes. She climbed the stones to another summit and sprinted to the edge, then dove into a river below. She popped up and sucked in the air and swam with all her strength, arm over arm, splashing her feet in the water, feeling as graceful as one of her mermaids.

  Oriana climbed ashore.

  Shards of sunlight warmed her body. Pasha dove into the river. She grinned. Call your birds or wolves on me now, she thought. She raced along a meadow lined with razor wire.

  I’m a champion.

  She crawled beneath the first rungs. A piece of her shirt ripped and her skin tore. She grunted and bled. I’m a champion. She trudged onward and darted down a ravine and up a gemstone path. At its end, the golden bell of the finish line hung from a golden arch, as tall as a mountain. I’m a champion. She smelled Pasha’s sweaty musk. Too slow, she thought, too late. I’m Champion of the Harpoons. Oriana smashed the bell w
ith her fist, and its ring vibrated across the virtual world.

  “Victory,” she said, “victory … victory … victory!”

  Pasha pushed his foot to the bell to halt its vibrations.

  “Getting slow out there,” she said, gasping. Streaks of mud and blood slid down Pasha’s face.

  He curled his lips. “I let you win.” He said it so soft and so sure that Oriana’s smile disappeared …

  … The simulation ended, and the twins dangled in the golden simulator room.

  “Like Reassortment you did!” Oriana swore. “I won. You lost. Admit it.”

  Pasha laughed bitterly.

  “To think,” she said, “you’ve never lost before. This must be hard for you.”

  Pasha unlatched. “Shut up, O.”

  “Get used to it!”

  Oriana’s ID number scrolled to the sixth slot on the leaderboard, while Pasha’s had dropped to eleventh.

  She hung in the harness for a few minutes after he left, savoring the moment.

  Pasha wouldn’t talk to her at dinner. Oriana ignored him and helped herself to drumsticks, ribs slathered in mustard sauce, vegetable casserole, and rice pudding. She sat with the lord and lady.

  “How could there be a query without a solution?” she said.

  “The tables and doors?” Lord Thaddeus said.

  “You’ve never presented us a query without a solution, and I thought we’re supposed to have all the answers and that—”

  “Oriana,” Parthenia said, a note of tranquility in her voice that Oriana hadn’t heard since her early days of development, “you will find that sometimes the greatest challenges in our lives don’t have a right answer. Sometimes they have what seems right to us at the time we live through them.” She paused. “Yours and your brother’s potential is among the greatest we’ve ever encountered.”

  Thaddeus nodded. “All you have to do is learn to control your emotions. Control your anger and fear, and you will be unstoppable in the Harpoons.”

  Oriana looked down at her plate to hide her watery eyes. These were the first encouraging words they’d spoken to her since the Warning Communiqué. Perhaps they didn’t hate her after all.

  ZPF Impulse Wave: Cornelius Selendia

  Volano City

  Volano, Underground Northeast

  2,500 meters deep

  “Not too far now,” Father said.

  This was the fiftieth time at least that he’d said so. The eastern Polemon passageways were as dark as the ones outside Hydra Hollow in the west, but now Connor viewed the world through the ZPF. His father moved as if composed of a million stars, and the walls were as open as a void. He lugged a fifty-kilogram sack on his back, the heaviest load he’d carried since his time on the Block. That part of his life was not so long ago, when he and his brother Hans and his foster father, Arturo, had traveled underwater in the Gulf of Yeuron and caught enough fish to feed Underground South.

  Connor tasted the salty sweat that dripped from his head and created the scene in his mind: Piscator Reef, the starfish, the polychromatic blowfish, the squids with feelers longer than any transhuman. He floated amid the hard coral, smelled the sea and the earth.

  “Don’t escape too far,” Father said.

  “It’s too tight in here, now that I can see.”

  “Then don’t see.”

  Connor broke his conscious connection in the ZPF. Darkness returned. It reminded him of when he’d first traveled through the passageways between Phanes and Portage with Murray. He felt along the wall, pushed through the earth, not allowing himself to live in the past or the present. The future was all that mattered. And in this next battle, whatever it was, whenever it came, Connor would be ready.

  At the next supply cache, Father injected Connor and himself with uficilin, and they drank water and relieved themselves in an underground stream. Then off they went again, kilometer after kilometer in the dark and silent earth. By the time they had stopped at three more caches, Connor wished he was back rowing on the Archimedes.

  Only the gods knew how much time had passed when Father said, “We’re here.”

  He tapped in a pattern upon the wall, and it slid open, revealing a world Connor had never imagined. A golden Granville sun broke through a lavender sky dotted with cirrus clouds. Falcons circled slowly. The skywalks here differed from those in the South and the East, for they angled up or down to platforms supported by tall compressed diamond pillars. Water streaked with crimson bioluminescence flowed off these platforms over the columns and down the sides, as if the entire city were bleeding.

  “Volano,” Father said, “the place of dreams.” His tunic was soaked with sweat. So was Connor’s.

  Connor wiped his face with the back his arm. “The place that connects to the Island of Reverie,” he said, “is a place I would see destroyed.”

  “It isn’t this territory that killed your brother,” Father said, “though I admit it’s strange to be back here.” He closed his eyes and raised his head.

  “How will we move through here, looking like this?” Connor shook more perspiration from his arm.

  “Leave that to me.” Father gave Connor that mischievous smile he had whenever he used the ZPF in a manner Connor could not. “I’m very familiar with Volano.”

  “You worked here as well?” Connor tightened his boots and wrung out the front of his tunic.

  “I’ve worked everywhere.” Father turned as if he looked upon another time, another place. “During the early transhuman trials, my team worked to find the Reassortment cure. I watched the depressed or fame-seeking volunteers perish instantly on the island.” He lowered his head. “Then a young neophyte named Broden Barão emerged from the Harpoons—a phenomenon in the exams, and the RDD scientists concurred that the Variscans had performed a miracle with the work they did on young Barão, developing him so late in his life. I agreed.” Father squeezed his forehead. “Vastar Alalia outbid me, but I won Broden Barão, in the end … and sealed my own demise …”

  “Murray told me you sought to unite the teams and the commonwealth for eternity.” Connor lifted a canteen from his supply satchel and took a deep gulp of the cool water, then splashed some of it on his face.

  “Oh, yes, that I did, though not the way I envisioned.” Father took the canteen and drank.

  “Did the Barão Strike Team betray you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “That’s not what you said to Lord Nero.”

  “I told him what he had to hear. The chancellor gave their captain the Regenesis project, and I was too blind to see Barão’s ambitions. By then, he’d already become popular with the public, met all the time with the Beimeni Press. Lady Isabelle arrested me for conduct unbecoming a supreme scientist, but Captain Barão didn’t, at first, seek control over Reassortment. He waited until 288 AR, after there’d been five or six more demotions.” Father laughed wanly. “He was the easy successor. Damosel Rhea didn’t even need to campaign for him.”

  “So you lied to Nero?” Connor didn’t sound surprised.

  “He seeks his captain. I seek justice upon the chancellor, and there’s one skilled telepath left in this commonwealth who can convince the people of his treachery and bind them to my cause.”

  “Not you?”

  “Captain Barão.”

  Connor waved his head. “Did you kill the commander Vastar Alalia?”

  Father hesitated. “No …”

  “Did Chancellor Masimovian?”

  “I don’t know …”

  He still feels the need to lie to me, Connor thought. He could sense his father’s feelings in the ZPF, the conflict within him threatening to split his consciousness open. Connor persisted. “You helped the chancellor rid himself of Vastar, so that you could have Captain Barão for yourself. Only the chancellor didn’t see the future the way you did. He saw the captain … as your replacement.”

  Tears welled up in Father’s eyes. This hurts him to admit, Connor thought, but is it pain from causing a
great leader’s death, or because his brother-in-development used him? Connor put his hand on his father’s sweaty arm. “What you did in the past for Chancellor Masimovian doesn’t matter. I don’t care. I’m not Zorian. I’ll always be on your side, Father. Now I need you to be on mine. I need you to believe in me the way Hans did.”

  “You have learned much on this journey.”

  The pride in Father’s face gave Connor confidence he’d not felt since he’d trained with Aera. “Let me contribute,” Connor said, “let me help you end this forever war.”

  “Come,” Father said, putting his arm around his son, “we must visit House Herzensella, where we will gather our strength and prepare for the northern strike.”

  They descended a steep path carved into the limestone of Volano Territory. Streams cut through greenery around them. By the time they reached the lowermost level, Connor’s tunic had mostly dried, though he assumed he smelled terrible. Down here, tents lined the edges of the thin, colorful coolant waterfalls that fell into the Archimedes. They slipped through the bazaar, past consortium representatives dressed in golden bodysuits, government workers in crimson capes with golden chains, and artists offering wares ranging from painted porcelain dishes to artistic Granville spheres projecting Venus. On the other end of the skywalk, a girl not much younger than Connor biologically, perhaps in early adolescence, dashed toward them. She looked like a Courier of the Chancellor.

  “An important message for you, my lords,” she said and handed Connor two benari coins with the forbidden phrase on one side—WE WILL STRIKE THE IRON FIST, FROM IT THE BLOOD OF OUR KIN WILL FLOW—the forbidden image, the Morelia spilota spilota snake, on the other. Connor handed them to Father, who telekinetically dangled the coins and twisted them apart. A cryptor, a diamond shard filled with the bacterium, E. cryptor, most often used by the Janzers at Fountain Square, but also used by the BP, was stored in one of the coins. Father set the cryptor into the vein on his wrist and it filled with blood, infecting him. He apparently deciphered the coded message delivered by the bacterium to his neurochip and nodded sadly.