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

by Zen, Raeden

  Connor let his arm sag against the table. This was a lot to take in. Father the supreme scientist for Reassortment? Betrayed by Captain Barão? How could it be? But why would Murray lie? Connor wasn’t sure he wanted to know the truth anymore. He just wanted to go home and life to be as it had been on the Shore, the Block, and the Gulf of Yeuron with his submarine and Hans and Arturo, his foster father.

  “What do we do now?” Connor heard himself say.

  “Events have moved beyond our control in Underground West and South. Lady Isabelle is destroying the Front.” Murray unsheathed a diamond dagger and tested its edge, sharp enough to make his forefinger bleed. “We will need a skilled telepath on the inside—”

  BOOM!

  The hall’s mantle-stone walls burst apart, shaking the ground beneath their feet, shattering the glass table, sending them airborne.

  Owoooo, owoooo, owoooooooooo.

  Tenehounds, Connor thought. He coughed and pushed his hands beneath him, the rough garnet ground cold to the touch. He turned. Through the main hall’s broken stone wall appeared the shadow of a man, flanked by tenehounds.

  The smoke cleared and revealed Lieutenant Arnao. His chameleon fatigues changed shades to match the surroundings.

  Murray, on his hands and knees, grimaced and coughed. “Get out of here!” he said. Connor hesitated. “Don’t look back!”

  Owoooo, owoooo, owoooooooooo.

  Connor fled, his head low, rushing upstairs, past the house’s coolant falls.

  Up and around, up and around, up and around, the stairs coiled to a skywalk at the house’s highest point.

  Connor stepped out. The Granville stars and moon showed his way, but he dared not look down, so far down, to where he could hear tenehounds and Janzers searching, people screaming, sights and sounds that reminded Connor of Ypresia Village on the day Lady Isabelle found them. He recalled Minister Kaspasparon’s words: Have no doubt, she will hunt you. Could she be here along with her lieutenant? No, for he’d seen her on the panel at the launch celebration. Or had he?

  Connor dashed along the garnet skywalks in the village proper, where Opeans traveled during morning rush hour to the transport station, bound for one of the cities.

  He weaved through a colorful sea of lab coats, tunics, capes, and bodysuits, keeping his gaze lowered, out to the village exterior, where it was all vines and bushes.

  He pushed through the undergrowth, sought a way through the labyrinth of stone. If he could make it past the north cliffs, the wharf, and finally the bridges across the river, there was a trench he might reach in time, leading to the Polemon passageways.

  The sun began to rise behind him. He was traveling west, not north. He turned right and continued through the bramble, but a tenehound pounced in front of him, its sapphire, gray, and ultramarine fur raised over its back, its eyes like smoldering coals.

  It raised its nose and howled, as loud and terrifying as he remembered. No more tears, he thought, no more hiding.

  He grabbed a stone and flung it at the hound, then dashed through the vines to his left and took the skywalk to his right, northbound through a village building to the cliffs. The tenehound followed. Connor climbed the vines to the next level. The hound appeared below and jumped. It soared up and bit at his heels, but he managed to swing off to the side. He climbed faster. The hound sat and howled its dismay. When Connor reached the top, he ran toward the Archimedes. He could smell the river and the oak wood in the wharf below. He turned south. House Tremadoci’s garnet dome belched fire and smoke. Here and there shot spotlights, maroon and white.

  He climbed along a mossy ledge and onto a cobblestone walk that arced toward scores of bridges leading over the river, layered at various heights. Janzers awaited on the river’s far shore and in gunboats below. He saw a tenehound at the entrance to one bridge, then another, then another. The bridge closest to him appeared empty.

  “HALT, TRAITOR,” a Janzer shouted over loudspeakers.

  He’d been spotted.

  Connor dashed over the bridge. Midway across, he looked down. Water rippled from the Janzer gunboats, and with the mixture of moonlight and sunlight at the end of night, it seemed like a portal to another land, not a river at all. On either side of him, green mantle-stone bridges reflected the rising sun.

  Janzers and hounds neared on either end of the bridge.

  He jumped off the side. Darkness and bubbles consumed him. Gunboats passed over, or were they fish? He kicked off his shoes and swam underwater until he couldn’t any longer, gulped a breath, and descended again down into the warm, murky river.

  Gunboats circled still, and spotlights dotted the river close behind. He’d managed to get just downstream.

  The hounds jumped in.

  Connor found an outlet, a curved cave he hoped the hounds and Janzers couldn’t see. He curled as far back against the mossy wall as he could. He shivered, and his heart pounded. He was so thirsty.

  A gunboat cruised nearby. He pressed himself farther back, slipped, and rolled down a muddy slope. When he looked up, he saw a beam of sunlight in the entrance above. Darkness lay beyond him.

  He checked his pocket for Hans’s z-disk, which held information that could lead the BP to his father, Jeremiah Selendia. He instead found the Granville sphere Hans had given him last year—the one that could project his mother’s hologram. He held it in front of him. He wished he could activate it. He pushed his other hand down into several pockets in his bodysuit until he felt the small case in which Minister Kaspasparon had secured the z-disk. He smiled and exhaled.

  Connor heard tenehounds howl and turned up toward the opening in the cave. Shadows flitted across the sunlight.

  Quickly, he secured his mother’s sphere in his bodysuit, then moved over the stone, step by step, until he couldn’t see his arms and legs. He kept on, bumping and scraping against outcroppings. The mantle rock took many patches of his skin, no matter how much care he took. Exhaustion was creeping up on him, but fear was stronger. He kept walking. He didn’t know how long he’d been treading through the cave when he saw a shard of sunlight break through, revealing a tangle of moss and earth.

  He crawled toward it but fell asleep before he reached it.

  When he awoke, he didn’t know what had happened or why he lay over warm stone. His mouth was so dry. He reached for the patch of light that slit into the cave and pulled away a handful of waterlogged rock. Then he remembered. He searched his pockets until he found the z-disk and his sphere. He exhaled. He sat up and pried a chunk of stone from the wall, as soft as clay in this part of the cavern. Soon he’d made an opening wide enough to see through.

  The cave let out onto the wide Archimedes River. Water slipped gently against the wharf on the far side, where ships docked and traders set up tents for a bazaar. He looked out and saw pillars, domes, bridges, skywalks, seagulls, and the river filled with cargo ships and rafts, blue and green bioluminescence at its banks.

  Connor picked up a chunk of moss and brought it to his nose. It smelled like the sea. He cupped some water at the cave’s base and sipped it. The taste was mineral-like, but it would have to do. Now he heard rhythmic sounds, a guitar, and a man singing.

  A hallucination? Connor pondered.

  The song ended, and Connor heard, “Must be hot in there, no?”

  He scrabbled away from the opening and pushed his back against the clay. He waited for the howl of tenehounds, hardly daring to breathe. Nothing happened. He waited some more. Finally, he peeked out. A man sat upon a wooden catamaran, adrift. He wore beads in his hair. The look of his stubble beard and the way he set his hand on his knee reminded Connor of Hans.

  The man had anchored his catamaran, judging by the bits of moss and lichen that passed around him with the downstream current. The green sail fluttered in the artificial winds, but the catamaran persisted in its position. Benari coins flew from a passing boat into a gigantic fedora secured to the cross plank. Some coins splashed into the river, but the man would telekinetical
ly retrieve them. When another ship passed into view, Connor could’ve sworn the man winked at him. Then he started a new song.

  It was “At the Shore,” a melody Connor heard often in the taverns near the Block, though, he recalled, never when the Janzers patrolled. He had no idea how much time had passed inside the cave. He remembered eating handfuls of moss and feeling woozy. It was possible the moss had been hallucinogenic, like the mushrooms Hans told him about in Vivo, or he might have passed out from exhaustion. He hadn’t slept well since the Jubilee. Either way, he was vulnerable, and he couldn’t risk losing Hans’s z-disk to Lady Isabelle should this singer prove a commonwealth agent.

  No more tears, Connor thought again, no more hiding.

  The guitarist sang another Southern song, “The Fish and the Filly,” and a Western song called “When the Steam Rises.” More benari coins dropped from passing boats.

  A foe would’ve already seized me by now, Connor thought.

  This man didn’t have the look of a Southerner, or the accent, and his skin wasn’t dark like the Portagens. There was something familiar about him.

  Connor pushed his way through the opening in the clay and fell into the Archimedes. The water felt much colder than the morning he’d escaped.

  The singer set down his guitar, pulled up the anchor, adjusted the sail, and the catamaran sped furiously to the riverbank. He helped Connor aboard, then threw a blanket about Connor’s shoulders. “Quick now, bub, wrap this around.”

  Connor looked down. He couldn’t see his own arms or legs. “What?” he said.

  The guitarist smiled. “Handy, eh, Connor? Keeps the unfriendly eyes at sea, so to speak.” Connor’s body went rigid. “No good,” the man continued. “I’ve got you at a disadvantage. I know you, but you don’t know me. I’ve got a few names I go by, but those who know me best call me Luke, Luke Locke, of Gaia, friend o’ your father’s and o’ the Front, here to see you on to the Great Falls.” He bowed, then lifted his guitar and sat again in his wooden chair. He strummed the chords for another tune.

  Connor tucked the blanket over his head. “How did you find me? What happened to Murray, and to the lady and lord of House Tremadoci?”

  “No time, bub, you wrap in that blanket, good and whole, and you’ll stop shaking.”

  Luke finished his verse and let the song settle. Another raft floated by, followed by a shower of benaris.

  ZPF Impulse Wave: Isabelle Lutetia

  Piscator Shore

  Piscator, Underground South

  2,500 meters deep

  A military transport painted with a phoenix feather slowed into Shore Station. The entrance cleared, and Lady Isabelle and a Janzer pair strutted out. The illusion of a hard coral reef surrounded them, visions of algae and sea grass with jellyfish, crustaceans, sea turtles, snakes, stars, limestone skeletons, and remnants from elk horn and brain coral. Her peplum dress, infused with chameleon synisms, adjusted to make her blend in with the scenery, while her Piscatorian-designed silk scarf fluttered in a gentle breeze.

  The Piscatorians parted from them as if they were a disease.

  I didn’t miss this place, Isabelle thought. Her last visit here had been when she’d led the assault on the BP enclave in Haurachesa Territory. Sometime in the years between 305 AR and 315 AR, the BP had built a stronghold beneath Hautervian City, sucking resources from the territory, endangering the settlers in that city, and also in Port Newland. Lady Isabelle destroyed and flooded the substructure, ensuring the survival of Haurachesa—and sending a message to the BP in other territories to never consider stealing precious resources from the commonwealth. The fact that her intelligence reports and mining of Marstone’s Database suggested they’d procured a new stronghold called Blackeye Cavern angered her more than Chancellor Masimovian ever could. Didn’t these vile BP care about the Beimenians who followed the rules, and wanted to live long enough to see the Earth’s surface? Would the BP let the majority perish so that their wretched way of life might survive?

  Isabelle wouldn’t allow the BP to destroy the world.

  Ten Janzer divisions arrived in additional military transports and set themselves into rows behind her. She rested one hand on the hilt of a diamond sword, the other on her Reassortment baton, which were holstered into her belt on either side of her waist. One of the Janzers whispered in her ear, “Up there, my lady.”

  Above the reef and a school of damselfish, two tattooed Piscatorians poked their heads from a hole in the Granville panels. They chatted, softly and excitedly, then disappeared.

  “Piscos,” Isabelle swore. How they disgusted her, their tattoos, their stench, their implicit support of the former BP enclave beneath Hautervian City across the Gulf of Yeuron. She held her fist in the air and hand-signaled to the Janzers, clad in their synsuits. “Forward!”

  She led them along a burnished limestone promenade toward the Block. The Janzers smashed their boots in a drumbeat, left, right, left, right, left. Knees high, chests out, batons attached to their belts. They held activated pulse guns, with diamond swords lashed across their backs.

  Isabelle raised her left hand and flapped it. The Janzers methodically slammed the ground and stopped. The walls here didn’t display the undersea illusion. Instead they displayed holographic advertisements, and in some stones bioluminescent synisms displayed the Second Precept, designed to encourage economic output: SUFFERING IS QUESTIONING. QUESTIONING IS DESTRUCTIVE. DESTRUCTION IS NEVER INEVITABLE.

  The destruction of the BP is inevitable, Isabelle thought. She ambled to the Janzers guarding the Block’s entrance.

  We’re here to meet with Icarian, she sent. The milky glass entrance cleared.

  The fishermen stopped their work when they saw her. Conversations silenced. Icarian, who had slurred his instructions for a recent landing in one of the docks, lifted his gut and slipped a flask into his muddied trousers. Isabelle approached him. The seaweed stench nauseated her. She could feel the eyes that followed her. A dock shield opened, and water from inside the containment unit flooded out. A flapping tuna rolled over her boot. She hissed and kicked it under the Block, the arced stone on which the fishermen prepared the meat for the commonwealth’s markets.

  “Good day, my lady,” Icarian said. He bowed deeply. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your presence?”

  “To Reassortment with your courtesies,” Isabelle swore. She placed her hands on the base of Icarian’s workstation. Above it, holographic images of the docks, submarines, Piscator Reef, Gulf of Yeuron, and Homeria Sea fizzled. “Give me your hand.” His fingers warmed hers, but he stank of the sea, a rotting sea.

  I’m interested in the activities of Zorian, Johann, Arturo, Murray, and Connor, fishermen of Piscator.

  I don’t know who they are.

  You will tell me what you know, or I won’t hesitate to arrest every man and woman in Piscator.

  Icarian gasped. I don’t know. I swear it! He telepathically searched file after file, the images forming and disappearing above his workstation. He burped. She smelled the booze on his breath. Perspiration dripped down his long forehead into his eyes.

  Let’s talk about Johann of Piscator, the last volunteer for our Jubilee. Who’d he associate with on the Block? Isabelle transmitted Hans’s image to Icarian’s extended consciousness, and impulses in his brain flashed, like the night sky during a storm.

  “I don’t know, my lady,” Icarian said, slurring.

  You’re a lying, sniveling, traitorous coward. I don’t know why they ever let you in the RDD, and the arrests are on you, you forced this, you caused this—

  “Wait!”

  Icarian copied Hans’s image and dragged it to his application for the registration data of the Block. Images popped up, and a red slash appeared across the face of every nonmatch. Tens of thousands of photos flashed and slashed and blinked and departed. No matches. Now he frowned at the appearance of a green check mark next to TEAM 451. He put his head down. Team 451. The top team on the Block, my lady.

>   “Show me.”

  Hans, Connor, Zorian, Murray, and Arturo’s images materialized, with the names:

  FARKAI CROWENER

  ALLESANDRO ARMOND

  JONYN XEENO

  NORMANO OREANERYS

  PULTE FRUISER

  Icarian requested a visual. Above his workstation, the arced Block with its undersea docks built into the Earth’s bedrock where it met the ocean rotated and zoomed into Team 451’s location.

  Empty.

  Aliases, my lady, they used aliases, and they aren’t here, and I didn’t lie, and you must believe me. Mercy! I beg you! Mercy for the Block! Mercy for Piscator!

  Isabelle extended her consciousness, examined the holograms, and transmitted data, requesting Marstone’s aid. She discovered brain impulses that suggested Icarian knew the BP had penetrated the Block. She dropped Icarian’s hand and stepped away from him, then unsheathed her diamond sword and held its tip beneath his chin.

  “No! I’ve … I’ve given you … please …”

  His voice gave out when the flask popped out of his belt and bounced along the ground. He now begged Isabelle’s forgiveness, his words incomprehensible. Isabelle lowered her sword and he coughed. He cleared his throat and spit. She gave a hand signal, and a Janzer stepped forward with shackles in his grasp. He latched them around Icarian’s wrists and ankles.

  The Piscatorians swooned and mumbled.

  Isabelle heard their thoughts and sensed their dismay that Icarian, their leader, their friend, was likely about to be shipped off to Farino Prison, from which no one ever escaped, as she made sure the commonwealth knew.

  A deep-voiced laugh made her start. She sheathed her sword and drew her pulse gun.