The Gambit with Perfection (The Phantom of the Earth Book 2)

by Zen, Raeden

  A doorway cleared.

  Heywood entered. He shook Nero’s and Brody’s hands, but when he extended for Verena’s, she didn’t accept. “Something I did?” Heywood said.

  Verena cocked her fist. Brody slid between them. “We’re good,” he said, “ready to make history.”

  Verena leaned on her left leg to get a better view of Heywood. “Why send us away now?”

  Heywood crossed his arms and pressed his lips together tightly. “To explore an exoplanet that might prove habitable and research a new species that might aid your captain in his fight against Reassortment—”

  “I think you’re lying.” Verena brushed Brody to the side with her hip and clutched Heywood’s transparent lab coat. She pulled his face to hers. “What did they tell you about this mission?”

  Mariner hand-signaled a pair of Janzers to restrain her. Nero grabbed one by the arm, flipped him, and elbowed the other, shattering his visor. Two more divisions burst into Mission Control and surrounded the team, Reassortment batons and pulse weapons at the ready.

  Blue light emitted by the Janzer weaponry engulfed Brody’s team.

  Mariner’s lip was bleeding.

  Medical bots cleaned Mariner’s face and injected him with uficilin. “I’ll ignore your violation of the chancellor’s precepts this day,” he said to Verena, “if your captain assures me this tantrum won’t prevent significant conversion on Vigna.” He glared at Brody.

  “We will not be treated like tenehounds,” Brody said. “Call off these Janzers.”

  Mariner hand-signaled the Janzers, then nodded toward the exit. They disengaged from Brody’s strike team.

  The engineers peeked around their workstations.

  Brody kept a hand on Verena’s shoulder. “You’re sending us forty thousand light years from Earth in a weaponless shuttle to retrieve a liquid sample we don’t understand, under duress from a Warning we didn’t deserve—”

  “This is where you’re mistaken,” Heywood said. “We’re sending a powerful weapon to Vigna.” He shook his head. “Yes! You’ve only forgotten your strength—”

  “I have not, and neither has my team.”

  Brody eyed Heywood warily. He would never forget the scientists frozen near absolute zero, killed by him and Damy for relying too much on his skill with the ZPF, and Heywood knew it. He had been there that day. So were Antosha and Haleya. After a failed terrorist attack, they’d executed the Regenesis procedure to awaken one of the scientists. Brody thought they’d all learned a lesson in humility after the research team failed to plan for or react properly to malfunctions in the stasis tanks. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  “Unlike so many decisions in scientific research,” Heywood said, “the choice here is simple. If you don’t achieve significant conversion on this mission, I shudder to think what the board and ministry might do—”

  “We’re ready, General,” a Janzer’s voice blared over the speakers. “Live feed to the Valley of Masimovian in thirty seconds.”

  Verena put her nose across from Heywood’s. “We’ll go to Vigna, and we’ll find that liquid and retrieve a sample of it, but don’t think for a microscopic second that we’re dumb enough to believe a word you say, or that we shudder with fear of punishment from the ministry, not after all we’ve accomplished.” She pushed past him.

  Brody and Nero followed. Nero smirked at Heywood as he passed.

  “Transmitting view of Mission Control,” said the Janzer voice.

  Inside the Cassiopeia’s massive hull stood three columns: the captain’s column positioned a bit behind the striker column on the left and the strategist column on the right. A Janzer latched in the team while Brody connected his consciousness to the shuttle’s artificial intelligence. He activated the control center beneath a Granville sphere connected to the ceiling, high above.

  Shuttle Captain to Cassiopeia, do you copy? Brody’s telepathic message looked like red neon lettering, which rotated in circles in front of him and his team, as did the reply.

  Copy, Shuttle Captain, Cassiopeia’s womanly voice sent, all systems are ready for launch, over.

  Brody brought up a view of Mission Control. Heywood pointed to the holograms where the Cassiopeia hung. The shuttle disappeared, replaced by a view of the Earth, the sun, and the moon. The general waved his arms, spewed orders to his engineers. At the end, Brody heard, “On to Vigna!” and the engineers replied together, “On to Vigna!”

  Brody took hold of Nero’s and Verena’s hands. They nodded to him, and to each other. Brody prayed this marked the end of their battle and the beginning of their significant conversion. The hull vibrated. The airlocks—gamma-ray shielded to protect from Reassortment seepage—opened, as loud as thunder. A message from Mission Control appeared.

  Barão Strike Team, you will launch into the infinite universe.

  You will use the zeropoint field to traverse the intergalactic system to Vigna. This journey marks an important milestone for man.

  Remember that you’re Beimeni’s representatives and you represent Earth. Do us proud.

  Serve Beimeni. Live forever.

  Brody squeezed Nero’s and Verena’s hands tighter. This won’t be our final mission together, he thought.

  The Cassiopeia reached the surface.

  The Granville syntech that constituted the inner walls, flooring, and ceiling of the Cassiopeia rendered the outside view of a valley surrounded by a forest and, in the distance, evergreen mountains.

  Stage 1.

  The rockets beside the Cassiopeia spewed fire and smoke that disrupted the view of sunrise in the valley.

  Stage 2.

  Try as he did, Brody couldn’t push thoughts of Damy out of his mind. Last night, she’d ordered Merrell to cook bouillabaisse with Piscatorian oysters and glazed Vivoan pork cheek, then taken Brody to bed for a lingering, sleepless night—and cried all morning. He sent her a message over the ZPF. She wouldn’t receive it until after the launch, courtesy of Marstone, but he wanted her to hear his voice one last time.

  Stage 3.

  The Cassiopeia escaped Earth’s gravity. Its depleted rockets fell into the thermosphere. The shuttle’s Granville panels filtered the sun’s radiance and projected the outside view. Brody felt like a bird, floating in the void. He saw swirls of clouds, a storm over the ocean, and lifeless mountains. He imagined what Beimeni would look like aboveground from this height, in a world without Reassortment, and it was beautiful.

  Stage 4.

  The Cassiopeia sped toward Lagrange point one between the Earth and the sun. When it neared the point of gravitational stability, the Barão Strike Team heard, Mission Control to Cassiopeia, you now have command.

  Copy, Mission Control, Brody transmitted. He turned to his striker. “Release the exotic matter.”

  Nero nodded. A small rocket carrying an exotic matter pellet launched from the shuttle.

  When it reached a distance of one thousand kilometers, the rocket exploded, showering the void with light and flame. The Barão Strike Team shielded their eyes, placing their arms across their helmets.

  When the phosphorescence dimmed, Brody beckoned Nero and Verena to look up. Where the dense exotic matter of the portal ended and the mixture of space and normal matter began, a dark violet circle marked the boundary. The circular boundary shimmered in a band radiating away from the center of the portal, changing from violet to dark blue at the outermost edge. Even at nearly one point five million kilometers from Earth, it formed a disk large enough to illuminate the planet’s sky, not unlike a small moon. When the exotic portal took full form, it looked less like a disk and more like a three-dimensional hole through space.

  Stage 5.

  Brody connected to the shuttle’s artificial intelligence, then to the ZPF in a manner he’d never done before, projecting his consciousness thousands of light years into space.

  He felt the artery in his neck pulsate with his heartbeat and heard a drumbeat in his head, louder, louder; and he understood that this noise was
the heartbeat of the universe beating inside him as he pushed further, further; and he manipulated the field, stronger, stronger; and darkness and light alternated in his vision, brighter, darker; and he couldn’t hear any longer and he collapsed the wavefunction of the exotic matter to connect the portal in Earth’s solar system with a star system two thousand light years away—

  Cassiopeia flew into the exotic portal and it, along with the shuttle, disappeared.

  ZPF Impulse Wave: Cornelius Selendia

  Mantlestone Village

  Ope, Underground Central

  2,500 meters deep

  “Look at this,” Murray said.

  Connor looked.

  Captain Barão was about to launch into outer space from Outer Boundary Village, where the Granville sun rose upon the horizon. It was still dark in Mantlestone Village, an area made of aluminous peridotite and garnet, mantle rock pushed into the crust, hollowed out with mineral crushers by the Janzers, layered with moss, wintergreen vines, and lichen. Moonlight streaked through the skylight windows of House Tremadoci’s main dome, a safe house along the Underground Passage. The Tremadocis gathered presently with the rest of the village in Sheinstone Square.

  The chancellor had declared a commonwealth holiday in honor of the launch, a tradition Connor didn’t understand. What difference did it make if the people gathered and watched the chancellor in the Valley of Masimovian? The stupid speeches all ended the same, with chants for the chancellor and an immortal life of service he never believed in.

  He turned back to Murray. “I don’t care about commonwealth missions. I don’t care about the commonwealth—”

  “This isn’t just any mission,” Murray said. He sat next to Connor at a glass table. Prior to the launch, he’d been manipulating a three-dimensional map above a Granville sphere at the center of the table, working out their next move on the journey to the East. “Much as I hate this man,” Murray continued, “it might be he’ll discover a new planet for us all, where we could live on the surface again and start over.”

  Start over. Connor liked that idea. Start over with his family intact, on a planet where he didn’t have to hide and run and have nightmares, where he could link to the ZPF and not fear his connection would attract a tenehound. He felt the back of his scalp where the stubble grew and pressed his fingers across the healed skin where the medical bot had removed his neurochip. It itched now more than it had at first, many days ago when he’d awoken up in Portage Citadel. He and Murray had feasted that morning on grilled polenta topped with spinach, poached eggs, and hollandaise sauce, Jurinarian potato pancakes with Haurachesan salmon and mascarpone-chive cream, wild mushrooms, taleggio, and truffle butter. Connor could hardly move afterward. After breakfast, Murray had offered Connor some fluid from an eyedropper, called Vitamin T, that he said would help mask any residual scents, genetic or other, from the tenehounds. He’d let Murray dab one drop into each of his eyes. The liquid had burned, then cooled, then burned again. Occasionally, it still itched, too.

  “Don’t scratch,” Murray said, swatting at Connor’s hand.

  The two Beimeni Polemon were dressed as father and son in tanned, hooded capes. Beneath the capes, they wore bodysuits to hide their animated tattoos projected by synisms in their skin cells.

  Connor had lost much of his muscle to the journey. He doubted he could still lift sharks on the fishermen’s Block, a thought that made him angry. “Why do you hate the People’s Captain?”

  Murray deactivated then reactivated the Granville sphere. Above it, he rendered images of a sullied infirmary in Jurinar Territory, a mass grave in Lovereal, a Janzer strike in Yeuron, a Janzer search in Nexirenna, another Janzer strike in Cineris, Janzers lined behind Lady Isabelle, her diamond sword in hand, a cape covered with a phoenix fluttering around her. “This is what the People’s Captain condones. It’s what he serves—”

  “I don’t think he knows,” Connor said. “I met him once, on the Block.” Connor envisioned the scene. Captain Barão had seemed so grand, so kind, so perceptive with the way he moved, the softness to his voice, his genuine interest in Piscatorian issues. “He shook my hand that day. He told us how important our role was in the commonwealth, our supply of fish for the transhuman diet and all, how he hoped one day to lead us to the surface where we’d be free to explore the true shores—”

  “You believed him?”

  Connor had, though the fury in Murray’s voice checked him. He’d never heard or seen Murray this way, not even in Ypresia Village, where the Janzers had first captured them, or in the Valley of Masimovian when the tenehounds gave chase. It struck him that Murray had missed his shift on the Block the day Captain Barão visited.

  “I want to see the true shores,” Connor said. “I want to emerge on the surface in the Gulf of Yeuron. I want to walk over the shores, the beach, and wiggle my toes in the true sands and catch fish the way men did Before Reassortment, in ships with sails that touch the true sky.”

  “I dreamed like you do when I was an adolescent.” The hologram of Cineris City disappeared, replaced by the Island of Reverie. Murray rolled his hands forward as if he presented a great and horrid show. “Captain Barão’s latest cure failed to keep Reassortment from ripping your brother’s neurons apart. The organism ate his nervous system and altered the part of the brain that regulates pain and sent signals through his body no living transhuman has ever known.”

  Connor didn’t know what to say. He knew he should hate Captain Barão as much as he did Lady Isabelle and her Janzers. The Janzers had killed his mother during a surgical strike when Connor was less than a true year old on direct orders from Isabelle, and Isabelle herself had captured his brother Hans. If she’d just left his family alone, Solstice and Hans would be alive, his father wouldn’t be held prisoner, and his eldest brother, Zorian, wouldn’t be estranged.

  Connor just didn’t equate the captain with the commonwealth. He did despise Portagens, though, and Captain Barão was native to Portage.

  “If the captain’s truly as vile as you say, why was he so kind with us in the South?” Connor asked.

  “Words are only as true as the actions that follow them, Connor. The captain’s ambition is the reason your father and I lost our Palaestran citizenship. He’s the reason the commonwealth wants you dead.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “You deserve the truth, for once.”

  Yes, I do, Connor thought, and when his developer sat silent, he prodded. “Murray?”

  “Your father wooed Captain Barão into joining his Reassortment research team. Jeremiah called him brilliant, imaginative, and diligent. It was none of these traits that forced his hand. It was politics.”

  “Explain.”

  “The strike teams were noble protectors of transhumans before the commonwealth existed, independent of the central government in the Livelle city-state and the scattered populace in the surrounding Underground Realm. They wore specialized, synthetic suits that protected them from the Earth’s heat and pressure, and the Reassortment bane. They responded to Reassortment breaches and structural collapses. Sometimes the suits failed, and they would die of Reassortment exposure, screaming louder than the gods, if the historians are to be believed. Before Atticus Masimovian rose to the chancellorship, humanity dwelled at depths near three hundred meters, but still the Reassortment scares continued. The strain seeped through the Earth’s bedrock. As a powerful minister, Masimovian forced the people as deep as the transhuman genome and technology then permitted, down to two thousand to two thousand five hundred meters inside the Earth.”

  “Has there been a Reassortment scare since then?”

  “No.”

  “What does this have to do with the teams, and Captain Barão, and my father?”

  “The chancellor didn’t trust the teams. He accelerated the creation of a new guard, one that would respond to his commands—”

  “The Janzers.”

  Murray nodded. “And Vastar Alalia, the strike te
am commander, didn’t want a war with the commonwealth. As Masimovian’s power grew, and the commonwealth’s territory expanded, Vastar ceded more and more control over the teams to the commonwealth, until his death in the year 273.”

  “How did the commander die?”

  “Chief Justice Carmen ruled it an accident, a biomat failure during a surface excursion.”

  “You don’t sound like you believe it.”

  “Do you?”

  Connor didn’t know what to believe anymore. “Why didn’t the chancellor eliminate the teams after Vastar’s death?”

  “Atticus Masimovian has controlled humanity inside a phantom Earth for two hundred years. For very good reason: he understands the importance of advancement, but also of traditions, and the teams held sway with the people. And the teams loved Broden Barão from the day Vastar named him a strike team captain.” Murray swiped his unshaved face. “The way you do.”

  Connor chewed his lip but didn’t respond. He turned toward the imagery of the Valley of Masimovian in Beimeni City, where the crowd cheered the ascent of the Cassiopeia through the silo.

  Murray deactivated the panel. He rendered into view a meeting with Father and the Barão Strike Team in Palaestra Citadel, full of marble and onyx statues and light and life. The illusion surrounded them. Captain Barão, Strategist Iglehart, and Striker Silvana shook Father’s hand, one after another. “Your father’s recruitment of Captain Barão and his strike team after Vastar’s death was meant to align the teams with the commonwealth forever.” The meeting in Palaestra disappeared.

  “Captain Barão betrayed your father.” Murray paused. “He turned Jeremiah in to Lady Isabelle and took over the Reassortment project.” Connor twisted his face, breathing hard. Murray leaned closer to him. “Captain Barão banished the legacy Reassortment research team from Underground Northeast, including me.”