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

by Zen, Raeden

  She knew that laugh. It came from a man who had called himself Jonyn but whom Cornelius Selendia’s mind had revealed to her as Zorian Selendia. She tried to enter his mind, but he impeded her. She saw him, down along the Block. Tall and muscular, he moved like a shark, swaying, searching. Tattoos swirled over his porcelain skin. The alloy chains attached to his belt and boots jingled. He smoked synthetic leaf, and the cloud obstructed Isabelle’s view of his face, but not his voice.

  I thought you might come here, Zorian sent.

  “Get out of here!” Icarian said.

  His slur had disappeared. Isabelle punched him in the gut and he puked. She turned. Her blood quickened, for Zorian had genetically poisoned Jeremiah for her, enabling his capture in Piscator Square. He might be of some use now. She took long, cautious strides. He was, like his brother Hans, as powerful as Jeremiah in the ZPF in some ways, less so in others. Unlike Hans, she’d not yet discovered Zorian’s weakness.

  His face took form after the smoke cleared, his aquiline nose and narrow forehead. He waved his colorful arms artfully, then took one knee on the wet ground, revealing the silver and teal tattoo of a spear around his neck. He looked at her knowingly, lowering his guard in the ZPF.

  Isabelle plunged into Zorian’s mind, where she searched and located his secrets with relative ease, but she questioned, for the first time, who deceived whom in this relationship.

  I can help you find them, Zorian transmitted, if you’ll allow me to.

  She holstered her pulse gun. “Cuff him.”

  Piscator City

  Piscator, Underground South

  Isabelle’s military transport eased into Katian Station. A Piscatorian couple with matted hair and crooked teeth held hands. They covered their eyes when dust lifted around the transport. The man yelled in the woman’s ear, and they scurried to the exit. Other Piscatorians turned away from Isabelle.

  Good, fear me, but respect me, and serve, serve the Great Commonwealth of Beimeni, she thought.

  Granville illusions to her left, reeds and cypress trees and water lilies; and to her right, a lake surrounded by thickets at twilight. She already felt the sweat on her back. The Piscatorians didn’t maintain as robust a coolant system as they should have, though not for lack of benaris—Phanes supported all the thirty territories. Isabelle assumed Minister Blaylock might be as corrupt as his predecessor, skimming funds. If so, she’d see him sent to the Lower Level. She sighed.

  They arrived at the Sixth Ward. “This will be a surgical search,” she told her Janzers. “Use tranquilizer darts. We need them alive.”

  The Janzers nodded.

  Isabelle despised visiting the shanty wards in the South; this one was no different. Half the structures looked like they might crumble, and while the Granville syntech functioned at the station, the night sky here didn’t have many stars. Synthetic torchlight danced along the walls. Zorian’s information directed her to the stone entrance of a clandestine apartment unit. She touched the DNA scanner on a stone pad beside it. ACCESS DENIED flashed. Isabelle requested a manual override and entered her universal access code. The unit’s opaque entrance cleared.

  The stench struck her, and she nearly collapsed.

  She covered her mouth and nose with her silk scarf and ordered her Janzers inside.

  In the center of the unit, a woman hung from a wooden ceiling fan, her body decayed. Isabelle stepped in. With one hand, she held her scarf tight around her face. With the other, she touched the woman’s dress and noted the smooth texture, the style, weaved with the finest Phanean designs, though this gown was Palaestran, as it puffed from the waist down, stitched with orange and brown boxes.

  A Janzer turned the body. Maggots crawled out of the woman’s mouth and slipped down the gown. Isabelle recognized her from Connor’s interrogation. She searched Marstone’s Database until a match appeared.

  MARIBEL HUNTER

  Prior to the interrogation, the database had suggested she’d perished in the year 347 AR. Someone in the BP had forged her file.

  “She was a Polemon,” Isabelle told a Janzer, “with Johann Selendia.”

  “What now, my lady?”

  “Has your team scanned the rest of the unit?”

  “They have.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing, no organic matter, no substructures, it’s empty.”

  “Then we leave,” she said.

  On the way back to the transport, she pondered her approach to her next interrogation with Jeremiah Selendia, and how she might next utilize Zorian Selendia in her effort to locate Blackeye Cavern.

  ZPF Impulse Wave: Broden Barão

  Unknown Time

  Unknown Location

  Red emergency light filled the Cassiopeia’s hull. “Everyone okay?” Brody said.

  Nero and Verena nodded.

  Shuttle Captain to Cassiopeia, do you copy?

  “I’ve no contact with Cassiopeia,” Brody said.

  “Power’s out,” Nero said, “and I haven’t been able to connect to the shuttle since before you collapsed the wavefunction.”

  “Nor have I,” Verena said.

  A century passed in a minute.

  “This isn’t normal,” Nero said.

  “Thanks for stating the obvious,” Verena said.

  Brody said nothing. He stared at the soft red light, lost in thought. Mission protocols would soon require a manual override, though Heywood had implored them to remain latched until they arrived at Planet Vigna. Was the power outage owed to my actions or to a fault in the shuttle? he wondered. For while the Cassiopeia carried ample exotic matter for the journey, how could Brody course correct if the shuttle, rather than he, had malfunctioned?

  He recalled the quantum uncertainty principle, and Heywood’s conclave: Even the best pilot has only limited ability to travel in distance with accuracy. The farther a pilot wishes to travel, the less accurate she can be.

  Where did Brody send them? Could he bring them to Vigna or back to the Earth if he erred?

  The control center didn’t appear beneath the hull’s central Granville sphere, even though he requested it, while the hull’s panels also didn’t project the view outside the shuttle. No electronics functioned on the columns. Vibrations suggested they moved, though how fast, Brody couldn’t tell. They should’ve emerged at a Lagrange point in the CCCCm Q17895745.85-5450425.2 star system instantaneously.

  Brody didn’t know what had gone wrong.

  What’s Damy doing now? he wondered. How long would this time in space be to her?

  “So, is this it, Brodes?” Nero said. “We die … now, out here? Nowhere?” He dropped Brody’s hand.

  Brody didn’t know what to say. If he’d erred in collapsing the wavefunction, or caused damage to the shuttle, Mission Control might attempt a rescue. But with Mariner’s wounded ego, Antosha’s return, the Warning, Heywood’s odd behavior, in short everything going on politically in Beimeni, he wasn’t so sure.

  “We’re fine,” he said. He took steady breaths and guided his emotions in a positive manner. “This is all part of the plan.”

  Nero laughed and swiveled his head. “What if we’re above Earth right now and the traders who called it are drinking and celebrating?” Nero swayed as if transported to the scene. “Can’t you see them going wild in the trading pit, raising their bets on how long it takes for us to see the truth?”

  “Right,” Verena said, “the same traders who’ve been betting on our instant death. I’m sure they’re partying right now, and I’m sure I don’t care—”

  “Should we attempt a manual override?” Brody said to her.

  “Protocols say you must in twelve Earth hours,” Verena said.

  “Love,” Nero said, “how’re we supposed to know how much time’s passed when not even our wristbands function—”

  “Oh, I forgot, there’s never a serious moment in Nero’s world—”

  “It’d sure be a better world if I was running it, or at least if I was a lord—”<
br />
  “Maybe if you’d work more instead of going to lounges and smoking leaves, we’d make progress on Reassortment!”

  “Maybe you need to chill out more!”

  “Shut up!” Brody said. “Now I’m sick of this, the serum failed, not our research. When Reassortment crushes you, you can’t back down, you can’t crumble, you can’t turn on those you love, you have to fight. We’re not dead. We’re not near Earth.” Brody thought about the exotic matter. “You felt what I had to do to collapse the wavefunction.” He thought about the way his heart had pounded and how his sense of reality had shifted in unexpected ways. “The intensity and concentration necessary to eliminate the randomness in the quantum field and send us to the next star system compared only to—”

  “Using the CRISPR system to treat a transhuman exposed to Reassortment,” Verena said.

  “Yes,” Brody admitted. He swallowed the painful thoughts of the last Jubilee. “But I was thinking about the ansible on Mars and instantaneous intergalactic communications.” He remembered bits of his conversations with Antosha there, unable, or perhaps unwilling, to grasp his memories from that time in his life. “I was thinking about the Lorum.” Part of Brody hoped the Lorum survived, somehow, and part of him wished they were dead with justice served upon them for what they did to his former friend. He closed his eyes and, using the ZPF, pushed his consciousness out into space. “We’re truly not near Earth,” he repeated. He bit his lower lip. “I can’t sense our people, or Marstone, or …” He couldn’t bring himself to say Reassortment.

  “Fair enough,” Nero said. “I can’t sense them either.”

  “Okay.” Verena nodded. “So what’s our next move?”

  “We didn’t ask for the Reassortment Strain, but we must rise above, meet the great challenge of our time—”

  “I meant here, now—”

  Suddenly the Cassiopeia’s power returned.

  The Granville panels lining the shuttle revealed a portrait of a world Captain Broden Barão wouldn’t soon forget: the first world he, or any transhuman beside his team, had traveled to outside the solar system.

  “Well then,” Nero said, “I guess we proved the traders wrong.”

  “Oh my,” Verena said, “would you look at that …”

  The Cassiopeia orbited a faint red star in CCCCm Q17895745.85-5450425.2 beside a cold Neptune, an exoplanet with a mass about eighteen times the Earth’s. Seven moons and a colorful band of rings revolved around the exoplanet. The red star loomed in the distance, as did what Brody assumed were two additional exoplanets. The team floated awhile.

  Brody conducted a diagnostic with Cassiopeia. “I figured out what caused the power outage,” he said. He broke his strategist and striker’s spacedream. They turned to him. “A strong stellar storm at the coordinates we jumped to, Cassiopeia reports, high energy particles streamed from the star, disrupting the electronics in the shuttle.”

  “We’ll have to be more careful going forward,” Verena said.

  Nero agreed.

  Brody found the next Lagrange point. “Damn it.”

  “What now?” Verena asked.

  “The viable Lagrange point is two Earth days away. We’re going to have to be more precise, or this trip is going to take a lot longer than fifty days.”

  When they finally neared the Lagrange point, Brody said, “Release the missile.”

  Nero connected to the Cassiopeia, and a small rocket fired from the shuttle. The process repeated, with Brody focusing his mind on collapsing the wavefunction at CCCCm Q17895745.85-5450425.2 and the next star system, and the next, and the next, with the team operating in perfect synchronization with each other, the Cassiopeia, and the quantum universe: Verena confirmed the quantum particle locations and wavefunction calculations; Nero executed the formation of the exotic portal; Brody connected his mind to the ZPF, collapsing the wavefunction; and the Barão Strike Team traveled through space-time at faster-than-light speeds unprecedented in the history of mankind.

  Along the way, they passed an exoplanet with bubbling blue clouds and sea-green landmasses hanging between blue and orange stars; a world with a deep azure hue, the result of molten silicate glass rain in the atmosphere, which scatters blue light; an Earth-like world with copper-colored clouds; a super Jupiter with twenty moons; exoplanets in singular, binary, and multiple star systems, some embedded within flattened disks of gas and dust where exoplanets formed or where exoplanets collided; white, blue, yellow, orange, and red stars.

  Now the shuttle hovered at the Lagrange point beside a hot Jupiter in the CCCCm E49725674.57-8731594.7 star system, approximately twenty thousand light years from the Earth and from Planet Vigna. Brody estimated roughly fifteen days had passed on the Earth. He’d have to quicken his pace going forward, if he could keep his eyes open. He’d barely slept along the way.

  “Captain?” Nero said, awaiting the command for the next rocket launch.

  When Brody bobbed his head and closed and opened his eyes slowly, Nero added, “Brodes, I’m ready when you are.”

  “Hold on.” He stared at the hot Jupiter. The exoplanet’s atmosphere twisted and turned, resembling the way Brody’s mind and body felt.

  Verena could tell. “He’s fatigued,” she said to Nero. “Captain, you need rest, you need sleep.”

  Brody tried not to laugh. He hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in decades. “No,” he said, “we must continue, we must retrieve the sample and—”

  “Mission protocols—” Verena said.

  “Aren’t relevant in this case,” Brody said. “Not when Antosha will soon be in the common—”

  “Brodes,” Nero said, and when Brody turned to him, looking through bloodshot eyes, “she’s right.”

  Brody groaned. It might’ve been the first time his strategist and striker agreed on anything since they had launched. Overruled, he ordered the Cassiopeia to initiate the dream sequence. The team’s columns moved parallel to the hull, and an outer casing closed over them, like a clamshell. Brody closed his eyes and felt an injection of slumber-inducing synisms. But pharmaceuticals in space worked no better than in the commonwealth, it seemed; his lethargic mind wouldn’t shut down.

  His musings, safe from Marstone’s reach, shifted from thoughts of Damy to the Reassortment and Regenesis projects, to the strike teams in the solar system, to the Warning, and of course, to Antosha’s return to the commonwealth. Nothing occurred in Beimeni without reason in Brody’s experience. The laws governing the commonwealth, derived from the Formation document and Masimovian’s precepts, behaved much like the laws of nature: they applied to all transhumankind, typically in unforgiving ways.

  How then could Antosha find his way back to the Beimeni zone from the Lower Level? Why would the chancellor risk losing the teams by censuring the Barão Strike Team? Was Masimovian truly intrigued by the possibilities of Vigna, the first up-close encounter with life outside the solar system, the potential for a new Earth? Or was the mission a distraction to ease Antosha’s promotion to Project Reassortment?

  Brody would not find the solutions here, now, twenty thousand light years from the Earth, he decided. All he could do was secure the sample of life from Vigna and demand a conclave. He closed his eyes. He didn’t know if he’d slept or how much time had passed when the dream sequence ended. He felt icy liquids enter his veins on his arms and legs; amphetamines, sustenance, and intravenous fluids. He heard Nero and Verena moaning awake. The columns that held the team rotated to their perpendicular positioning with the floor.

  “Rise and shine,” Brody said. Verena and Nero yawned. “I guess sleep is the only way to keep you two quiet.” He smirked, as did his strategist and striker. “When you’re ready,” he said to Nero, “check the integrity of the exotic matter and condition of the missiles.” And to Verena: “Conduct a diagnostic on my calculations for the wavefunction of the next ten worlds, including Vigna. One mistake—”

  “—and we end up anywhere,” Verena said.

  “Or not c
lose enough to the relevant Lagrange point, which could delay us—”

  “—and give Antosha time enough to campaign for his appointment to Project Reassortment,” Nero said.

  “We can’t let that happen,” Brody said.

  Verena and Nero nodded agreement, then their eyes moved up and down in quick repetitions as they examined data readouts in their extended consciousnesses.

  Brody connected to the shuttle, activating the Granville syntech. The opaque walls, floor, and ceiling adjusted, revealing the view outside. Brody squinted. Cassiopeia, he sent, filter the light and bring up the map of the galaxy and our positioning.

  The blue starlight dimmed. On one side of the shuttle, the hot Jupiter’s colorful gases churned in its atmosphere as if part of a rolling tide. On the other side, the blue star loomed like a gigantic eye, ominously bursting with solar flares as if to say, You’re not wanted here. Brody would gladly oblige, for while the hot Jupiter whipped around its star every five Earth days, he had no plans on remaining here that long.

  The Cassiopeia rendered the Milky Way Galaxy on Brody’s command. It dangled in the middle of the hull with its arms spinning around the supermassive black hole at the center like a celestial hurricane. Planet Vigna and its three stars lay in the Carina-Sagittarius arm, twenty thousand light years from the CCCCm E49725674.57-8731594.7 star system.

  Ten arced red lines formed from planetary system to planetary system, representing the ten jumps through space-time Brody would execute to reach Vigna, with an average of two thousand light years per jump. He focused upon the Vigna system, pondering if life there could lead to a renewal of life on the Earth’s surface. How much time had passed on Earth? How was Damy doing? Did she resurrect life necessary for Project Silkscape? Brody cleared these thoughts and others, focusing on the wavefunction in the next star system, CCCCm X46782167.67-2179452.2.

  He turned to Nero. “Release the exotic—”