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

by Zen, Raeden

  “Murray,” the wrinkled lips said, “Arturo.”

  His skin was as dark as the Portagens, Vivoans, and Opeans Connor had seen during his journey but wrinkled in a way Connor had never experienced. The old man bobbed his head, sitting upon a dilapidated couch, most of its insides on the outside. He poked his head this way and that and sniffed, eyeing Connor. He held a wooden cup as big as his head. Its foaming brew spilled over the sides. At their approach, he slammed the cup on the table in front of him and rose.

  “Procyon?” Connor said.

  “Ah, you’ve seen the pub,” the old man said. “My boy, call me Pirro. Pirro Koliner, at your command.”

  Your command? Connor thought. “Who are you?”

  Pirro didn’t answer. Gracefully, he bowed, grabbing his back with his left hand, finding his balance with the cane in his right.

  Connor followed the old man and Murray through narrow hallways lined with wooden planks that dripped with water. The air was hot and musty. Connor felt the sweat run down his back.

  It was slow going. Pirro slinked with his cane and dragged his feet. Connor had never seen someone so old. All he wanted to do was lift the elderly man, save him from this torment.

  “Mathias and Stanley,” Pirro was saying. He sighed. “Wilhelm, Nora, Adara, Luke, Becca, Nathan, Aislin, Jeremiah, Hans, the Tremadocis …” His breath gave out. “Our losses mount, no end in sight.”

  “Spoken true,” Murray said, “except for Luke, he survived the search and seizure in Yeuron, found Connor on the Archimedes, and helped him here—”

  “My father isn’t dead!” Connor insisted. He chewed his lower lip. “You mentioned the Tremadocis … that means Lady Ornella and Lord Razo …”

  “The Lower Level awaits them,” Murray said. “I’m sorry.”

  Connor looked at Murray, his face twisting with sorrow.

  “They knew the risk,” Murray said.

  And when Connor tried to speak, Arty interrupted, “We all know the risk.”

  “I hate Lieutenant Arnao, the Janzers, and the tenehounds,” Connor said. The Tremadocis treated well with him during his stay in their house of development. “I’ll kill them all for what they’ve done.”

  “I like your spirit, my boy.” Pirro straightened, lifting off his cane, then stroked his long beard. He turned to Murray, eyes wide. “Is he … Does he …”

  “No,” Murray said, “he’s underdeveloped. You know Jeremiah never wanted him involved.”

  Pirro snorted. “My boy, Connor was involved from the day he was born.”

  They inched through a limestone tunnel lined with golden bioluminescence, then entered a granite tunnel. Murray explained to Pirro how he’d instructed the commandos to accelerate removal of neurochips from the unskilled BP.

  “Only move that makes sense,” Pirro said. “For now, at least, until we find Jeremiah—”

  “Hold it,” Connor said. “How do you know my father? What did you mean when you said I’ve been involved from the day I was born?”

  Arty put his hand on Connor’s arm. “Calm down—”

  Connor pushed Arty’s hand aside. “How could you keep all these secrets from me? You, my father for so long, you had no right—”

  Pirro poked Connor’s leg with his cane. “You don’t speak to your elders that way.” Connor cringed, less out of pain than surprise. “We’ve seen more than you’ll ever know or understand. I was there when the Janzers invaded beneath Haurachesa, broke my leg, twisted the bones in my arms.” Pirro swung his cane, then found his balance.

  His tone shifted from one of anger to pain. “I tore my Achilles tendons and ligaments in my wrist during the escape with BP younger than you, through the Polemon passageways, could do nothing but vomit and wheeze when the roof caved in … and those around me succumbed to thirst … and gangrene and starvation …”

  Pirro bobbed his head and mumbled. He twisted around and moved on.

  “All will soon be clear,” Murray said to Connor, “quiet for now.”

  “Quiet,” Connor said, “that’s all you ever want from me! When will you accept me as a Polemon!”

  Pirro chuckled, a raspy sound. “Jeremiah’s boy, all right.” He swiped his beard and eyed Connor, cautiously. “Yes … I see him now. The child does look and sound a bit too much like Zorian.”

  Zorian? Connor thought. He couldn’t remember when last he’d seen his eldest brother. “I’m nothing like Zorian.” His brother was violent, unreliable, and unpredictable. Murray had accused him of abandoning them in Beimeni City. Connor didn’t believe it. He couldn’t.

  “Perhaps,” Pirro said, “you’re not, or perhaps you don’t know who you are yet.”

  Connor had no idea what the old man was talking about, though he noted that Murray and Arty shared a look.

  “I’m Jeremiah and Solstice’s son,” Connor said.

  “So you are,” Pirro said. He moved on, and Murray and Arty followed. So did Connor.

  At another elevator, larger than the prior one, Pirro punched in a code on a digital display with his cane. He turned to Connor. “Hold the straps tight.”

  The elevator whooshed down, and Connor slid up the wall as if gravity had lost its grip. He lifted his arms over his head to cushion the blow with the padded ceiling, then landed with a thud when the elevator moved up. He crawled and struggled and steadied his grip on one of the straps. They stopped with a violent jerk. Connor breathed heavily and rapidly.

  “Ah, to be young … and dumb,” Pirro said. He shuffled out of the elevator.

  “You okay?” Murray said.

  Connor blinked and shook his head. “I think so.”

  “No broken body parts.” Murray searched as if the bruises already existed.

  “I’m fine. That was more intense than I expected, felt like a thousand meters or more in a submarine.” In their work as fishermen of the Block, Hans had trusted Connor with the essential jobs of navigation, camouflage, and retrieval even though he wasn’t yet a fully developed transhuman. But in his submarine, Connor always latched himself to alloy columns and had full control. “Are we near the surface?” he said. “Are we exposing ourselves to—”

  “We’re still about three hundred meters beneath the surface,” Arty interrupted, “secured from Reassortment and the commonwealth.”

  “It’s so hot,” Connor said, “I don’t know how long I can take this.”

  “It could be hotter still,” Arty said, swiping sweat through his short hair, “without the coolant we siphon from the commonwealth.”

  Connor knew about the commonwealth’s cooling pipes, including primary carbyne piping that ran from an arctic bay at Areas 55 and 51 to major cities, and secondary piping that spread to other cities and villages in the Great Commonwealth, which sent icy water cascading over burning stone. “Maybe you should steal more.” He wiped his brow and followed Murray and Arty along a limestone corridor lined with waterfalls, bright with green bioluminescence, and up a long flight of stone stairs.

  Pirro lagged, though not far behind. Midnight-blue hues revealed the summit. Connor climbed the last step and gasped.

  The grotto below was ringed with the largest crystals he’d ever seen, thirty meters long, as opaque as arctic ice, colored in many hues.

  And at the base, in the bazaar, what had to be hundreds of thousands or even millions of BP moved throughout endless aisles of tents, pillars, and tunnels.

  “Welcome to Blackeye Cavern,” Murray said.

  ZPF Impulse Wave: Broden Barão

  Unknown Time

  Planet Vigna

  Milky Way Galaxy

  Brody dreamed of the Red Planet.

  The Great Dog Star, a carbyne-class shuttle, settled in the desolate Martian landscape. It glistened beneath the sun, as did Candor Chasma Central Command, the terraformed, terradomed village filled with carbyne buildings, evergreen grass, and sinuous streams. In a courtyard in the middle of those buildings, Brody stood beside Antosha Zereoue.

  “Listen,”
Antosha said. “Can you hear it?”

  Brody connected to the ZPF, and he did hear faint sounds, the friez, friez, friez, friez, friez that emanated from the ansible, a crystalline pyramid taller than him, comprised of carbyne, garnet, helium, and an energetic core of liquid sodium that glowed with many colors. “Where’s the origin?”

  “Vigna, from the Lorum.” Antosha turned to Brody. “That it communicates freely and explicitly with us leads me to believe—”

  “It’s as advanced as we.”

  “More so, in some ways, less so in others.” Antosha paused. “My friend, now you will learn from me, experience this alien within the zeropoint field, within the ansible, the way I have.” Antosha raised his hands on either side of Brody’s head. Colorful particles erupted from the ansible.

  Brody felt the Lorum on the other end as if it occupied the same space as he, as if they transcended space-time together.

  Lights flashed around Brody, but it wasn’t the ansible upon Candor Chasma. That was years ago, he realized, coming to. Where was he now?

  Orange bulbs flickered along the bottom of his helmet. The pings it delivered echoed like crashing cymbals in Brody’s ears. Verena dangled next to him. He couldn’t tell if she was alive, but she didn’t look conscious. He activated the shuttle’s Granville panels, lining the hull. The shuttle hung aloft, held, it seemed, by dark vines between trees as tall as Earth’s great trenches were deep. Brody panned the horizon, saw trees everywhere. There were thousands of them! Above, the magenta and cyan clouds intermingled with a blue sky, and below swayed an apparent temperature inversion, where more colorful clouds intermingled with streams of Vignan starlight scattered throughout trees and vines.

  How high up were they? Brody extended his consciousness. In the three-dimensional readout, he calculated the distance and determined their position: four hundred meters above ground level. He glimpsed the jungle floor, covered with colorful plants, bushes, flowers, and lichen splashed together as if from a Marshlandic holographer’s mind.

  A noise, faint initially, rose to a crescendo. It sounded like a million bees buzzing toward them. He turned. The largest insect he’d ever seen soared toward the Cassiopeia. Its wings were as long as the shuttle, and its eyes, rows and rows of eyes, bubbled around its head as it lunged and twirled forward. Its hundreds of legs all kicked, as if it climbed an invisible ladder, until it disappeared into one of the clouds below the shuttle, and the buzzing stopped.

  The ping, ping, ping noises in Brody’s helmet rang louder, and the orange lights blinked brighter until they steadied and Brody heard, “Atmosphere depleted,” a transmission from his synsuit. He flicked the lever on the side of his neck and removed his helmet. He inhaled Cassiopeia’s stagnant air. Verena’s helmet blinked and beeped, too. Brody could feel the current in his magnetic boots, so he unlatched and walked sideways from his column to hers. It looked as if he walked through the air from inside the shuttle. He pulled down a side compartment on the column and requested smelling salts. Hundreds of synism vials spun until one extended. He inserted it into Verena’s synsuit receiver. She awoke and gasped, and Brody helped her remove the helmet.

  “Where are we?” she said groggily. “Where’s Nero?”

  Brody didn’t answer. He deactivated the floorboard Granville panels and slipped to the back of the hull to search for their spare helmets and synsuits.

  He didn’t find them.

  “Where’s Nero?” Verena repeated. She staggered sideways over the hull to Brody.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He connected to the ZPF but didn’t feel his striker’s presence. He didn’t sense the Lorum either. He wiped snot from his nose. His face still felt as if he’d been burned and beaten. He injected himself with uficilin and healed.

  “We must search for him,” Verena said.

  Could they risk exposure? Break the Fourteenth Precept? The oxygen concentration on Vigna was far greater than on Earth’s surface and the terraformed Beimeni zone of the underground. Air pressure, temperature, and atmospheric gases were all manipulated by sophisticated piping systems, transplanted arctic water, and designer synisms, and while Homo transition wasn’t as fragile as its Homo sapiens predecessor, Brody pondered whether Vigna’s clime could prove deadly. A miscalculation of the atmospheric pressure and composition could mean the difference between thirty hours or three hours until oxygen poisoning, or some other toxicity he wasn’t tracking, would affect them. Some unseen pathogen may also end them.

  “So be it,” Brody said, “we’ll risk exposure, and we won’t leave without Nero. He wouldn’t leave us, dead or alive.”

  Verena nodded. She tied her long hair into a bun, threw on a supply pack, and handed one to Brody. He opened the hatch in the hull’s rear. Vigna’s air, cooler and fresher than any Beimeni river or lake, struck Brody, tangling his damp hair. He and Verena walked upside down on the outside of the hull, trusting the magnetic boots to protect them from Vigna’s gravity. He grabbed hold of one of the many vines that held the Cassiopeia in midair. It was about the width of a transhuman, with tough fibrous skin and little give. He wrapped his arms and feet around it, turned himself right side up, and climbed down to the tree trunk, where he implanted his shuriken. Verena followed and they began their painstaking descent.

  Later on, Verena called down to him, “How much farther?”

  “Less than a hundred meters,” he said.

  In the time it took for them to reach the ground, some clouds broke apart, allowing aquamarine and scarlet rays to break through. Vigna’s three stars weren’t as bright as Brody expected. The white star was setting in the east, the orange star hung above it in the eastern sky, and the blue star trailed in the western sky, partially obscured by oblong wintergreen tree leaves.

  “This way,” Brody said. He unsheathed his diamond sword and cut through plants of various hues, many as tall as he. Amphibians twice the size of tenehounds slithered over nearby stones, their golden eyes opening and closing with dark shudders.

  They’re afraid of us, he thought. As soon as they perked their heads, they’d disappear into the brush.

  Brody pushed aside an orange leaf four times the length of his body.

  Verena slipped through, pulse gun at the ready.

  “We’re clear,” she said.

  He rotated around her, and on they went through the jungle. Brody connected to the ZPF. Nero, where are you? He also searched for the Lorum, for the signals he’d heard in the ansible, all those years ago, but all he heard were the twick, twick, twick sounds of what he presumed were Vignan insects and small animals.

  Verena used her sword to cut through the brush.

  There was no sign that Nero survived the drop or that the Lorum objected to their presence.

  What’s it waiting for? Brody wondered.

  Now new sounds, a pripit, pripit, pripit and iria, iria, iria emanated everywhere it seemed and reminded Brody of his surface excursions to lands near Earth’s equator, with the difference that these noises sounded … timed, as if the fauna and perhaps the flora communicated in ways he didn’t yet understand. He should be able to hear conscious beings in the ZPF, yet he couldn’t discern a disturbance here. Was Vignan life formed in a different manner, one not connected to the ZPF?

  Shadows stole over him and Verena.

  A flock of flying creatures gusted overhead, whipping wind through the leaves and trees. Their wingspans stretched many meters, and their orange and yellow claws were as large as Brody’s head. Their dark green eyes searched and searched. Verena aimed her pulse gun upon her forearm.

  “Wait!” Brody said. She breathed heavily, and he knew she was using her extended consciousness to target them. “They’re not acting like predators.”

  “How would you know a predator on Vigna?”

  “Listen.” The birds sang as a chorus with highs and lows and all the tones between, as if they were a Beimenian orchestra.

  And Brody could feel them in the ZPF, their energy flowing from the sky to
the ground and over him. “Stand down,” he said, “they’re not a threat.”

  Verena lowered her weapon. “They’re … spectacular.”

  The birds continued onward, splitting the shards of light that broke through holes in the colorful cloud layers.

  “Do you think the Lorum would harm Nero?” Verena said.

  “I don’t know. Antosha told me that he believed it evolved differently than humans. Where our species formed from Earth’s life elements, the Lorum evolved … in stranger ways, from different elements, in a manner he and I were only beginning to learn when …”

  “He lost his mind.”

  Part of Brody wished Antosha still conducted Reassortment research, for he’d learned more about Reassortment and Regenesis during those years than at any time before or since. Verena had warned him about Antosha’s experiments with the ZPF, the ways he was using the quantum field to enhance the transhuman genome—the side effects of Antosha’s work, the delusions, murders, suicides, manipulations—Brody hadn’t listened to her. He’d only found out the full extent of Antosha’s crimes during Chief Justice Carmen’s hearings.

  “Did you hear that?” Verena put her hand in front of Brody and scanned the forest. “Over there.” She nodded.

  Brody extended his consciousness and calculated distances between the trees, the geometric leaves that looked electrified, and a narrow stream.

  “Something’s here,” Verena said.

  “Where?”

  “Again, did you hear him?”

  Brody didn’t hear anything except for the chirps and rustle of unseen wildlife.

  “Nero?” she said. “Brody, I see him! I see him!” She flew through the brush, out of Brody’s sight.

  “Wait, Verena!” He sprinted after her, but when he orbited the tree trunk, she wasn’t there. “Verena?” He peered at the vines, the sky, the leaves, the amphibians that scurried into streams and slithered up trees. “Verena!” He rummaged through the moss and lichen and leaves and cleared the wildlife with his sword.