The Descent into the Maelstrom (The Phantom of the Earth Book 4) (17 page)

“Your mother would’ve been proud of the young transhuman man you’ve grown into,” Father said.

“Would she?”

Father nodded, swiping a tear from the corner of Connor’s eye, then he cleared the illusion, and nighttime on the Archimedes returned.

Connor took in the stars overhead, the hum from rafts and ships, the seaside smells, the scarlet vines and brick near the docks outside Pragia Village. It was hard to say which world was more illusory, this or the one he’d just come from.

“You’ve rested long enough,” Father said. He reclined again in his chair, with his hands behind his head. “Now row to Yeuron City, where we will take our rest and I’ll teach you more about the zeropoint field, before the final leg of our journey to the Great Falls of Navita.”

“Why can’t you use the field to power the boat, or teach me how to do it?”

“Once you’ve traversed the great underground Archimedes River by the will of your body and mind, what won’t you be able to accomplish?”

Connor groaned. He grabbed the oars.

Intraterritory Tunnels

Palaestra, Underground Northeast

2,500 meters deep

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you led us into a sewer,” Nero said. The smell dizzied his mind and caused gooseflesh to spread over his skin. He breathed through his mouth to avoid gagging.

“It
is
a sewer,” Aera said. “How did you make it through striker training?”

“Got lucky, I guess.” Nero stumbled after her. He couldn’t see anything in the dark.

From Cineris they’d traveled along the interterritory transport system to the Phanes Beltway and switched to a transport destined for Underground Northeast. Their faked credentials had been effective, as Aera assured him they would be. In Palaestra City, they gathered intel that Verena was awake and due to be transported to Farino Prison in ten day’s time. Nero noticed Aera saved additional data to a z-disk, but when he asked her about it, she didn’t tell him what it was.

“It must be a hundred degrees in here,” Nero said.

“Close to,” Aera said, “with high humidity—”

“We won’t survive.”

“You’ve lived too long in the climate-controlled commonwealth.” She knocked her fist on his chest. “You’re transhuman
.
You’re made for these conditions and worse.” She thrust a canteen into his gut. “Drink if you must.”

He swallowed a gelatin that should’ve tasted like honey but instead seemed like the mixture of feces and piss that surrounded him. “What is this?” he said. It did cool his throat and help him breathe. “How much farther must we travel?”

Nero heard nothing in reply, not even Aera’s footsteps in the muck. How did she move without stirring the air or the ground? Many times during their journey through the tunnels, Nero wondered if she had left him, same as he pondered now. Then she’d appear, push him left or right, and whisper, “
Go
,” and he went where she told him along the walls, feeling for his way.

He stumbled forward, assuming she’d course-correct him if he took a wrong turn.

Hours later, he’d long since lost his sense of smell and direction when Aera said, “We climb from here.”

She pulled down an alloy latch high above that allowed lime-green phosphorescent light into the tunnel. Nero didn’t realize she’d climbed so high, fifty meters from where he stood, in a tunnel within the tunnel.

They entered an RDD supply shaft full of wires, piping, and stalactites, then smoothed plastic. Vibrations from the maglev track buzzed around them. Lime-green light streaked along the baseboard. It was cooler, a fifty-degree decline in temperature at the least, Nero guessed. The smell had also improved, thank the gods.

A rumble vibrated his legs, stronger than the transport.

“Janzers?” he said.

“A friend,” Aera said, “a guide.”

“To the infirmary?”

She ignored him and pulled him into a cove beside the transport track, near alloy coils and wiring that hummed with electricity. “While you’re in those laboratories, wasting your time and taxpayer benaris, I’m down here, traveling through these tunnels, taking whatever I want, whenever I want—”

“You’re the synbio thief.”

Nero had long heard the whispers of the thief. It all made sense now. They said the thief arrived in the night and killed Janzers and scientists as easily as insects—he never imagined he’d travel with her. How his life had changed.

“I’m a survivalist … how often must I remind you?”

“Fair enough,” he said. The transport slowed to their location, and the opaque entrance cleared. Aera led Nero inside, where Pirro awaited, now as youthful as a Harpoon candidate. He wore a Janzer synsuit without the helmet and visor, his long salt-and-pepper beard gone, his mohawk hair dark, like his skin. “My boy, you look terrible.”

“I blame her.”

Aera shrugged.

“Why didn’t you pick us up in Palaestra City?” Nero said to Pirro.

“Couldn’t. Too much surveillance requested by your friend,” Pirro said. Nero looked bemused. His sweat mixed with the muck on his crinkled face. “Minister Tethys Charles, my boy.”

Aera slid a trunk to Nero. “Open it.” He did and picked up a fresh bodysuit. A Janzer synsuit lay below it. “Get dressed.”

“How do I know I can trust you?” he said. “You nearly killed me twice—”

“Three times, if we’re keeping track—and remember this, striker, if I wanted you dead, it would not be near, it would be permanent.”

Nero nodded. He noted identical trunks splayed throughout the transport, labeled with genetic materials and synisms. “You’re taking us to the Port of Life?”

Neither responded. Pirro smiled primly and held up a box drill toward Aera. “Suit up, missy.” He tightened the torso, leg guards, shin guards, back, and shoulder plates around Aera. Then he started on Nero.

Once the drill quieted and the smell of scorched alloy and diamond faded, Nero said, “The gates will be guarded; we’ll be caught for certain.”

“We’ll be placed on the conveyor belts and sent to the RDD storage area,” Aera said. She tapped his Janzer visor. “Ultraviolet vision will be a must.”

Pirro lifted a syringe with a glowing crimson fluid.

“You’re not injecting that into me,” Nero said. He didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t look good.

“Do you want to save your beloved or not?” Pirro nodded to the trunk. “If you would, striker.”

Nero said a quick prayer and climbed into the trunk, crossed his arms as if he lay in a coffin. Pirro injected the fluid into his neck. His vision blurred as Pirro brought the trunk’s lid over his head.

When Nero awakened, a Janzer stood over him. The visor lifted and revealed Aera’s amethyst eyes and the tight seam of her grin. Nero exhaled. She put her forefinger over her mouth and hand-signaled him in the language of the Janzers, which he had learned during his striker training. That had been over one hundred years ago, and he wasn’t sure if she was telling him to keep his mouth shut or roll over. He assumed she meant the former.

She helped him out of his trunk.

The storage area was massive. Infinite rows of supply trunks and robotic arms surrounded them. The arms moved up and down like pistons, scanning trunks and sorting them with magnetic tips to magnetic conveyor belts. On the far side, a pair of ravens circled over a marble bust of Chancellor Masimovian. Behind them, security beams crisscrossed over an archway leading into the Huelel Facility.

Aera disappeared amid the trunks, cylinders, alloy arms, and conveyor belts and reemerged near the Janzer division, where she crouched and lowered her visor. A mist emanated from her body, and as the Janzer division surrounded her, they dropped, one by one. The mist dispersed. Aera took out the cameras with her pulse gun and activated a Granville sphere.

Nero ran to her.

“You might’ve told me—”

The look she gave him could crush carbyne.

She manipulated the data streams in the sphere.

A
ker-twink
sound drew Nero’s attention to the archway. The security beams had cleared.

“Let’s move,” she said.

Nero knew these halls, for he’d traveled them often to gather the genetic materials his team required for Reassortment research. He never thought he’d break into them as a Polemon terrorist, but then many events over the last three years seemed unbelievable to him now. Thirteen Jubilees—live clinical trials of medical serums against the Reassortment Strain upon the surface of the Earth—all by “volunteers” he later learned were BP terrorists; the Mission to Vigna across the galaxy; the discovery of the Lorum alien and establishment of an intergalactic alliance; the meeting and accord with the BP; the Bicentennial and the raid in Permutation Crypt; and now here Nero stood, a strike team striker in name, a Polemon in truth and deed.

He and Aera examined the RDD itinerary at a workstation.

Nero gasped. “We’re too late.”

“They moved up the timeline,” Aera scrolled through the holographic readout, “but we might still catch her in the Superstructure.”

“What’s your plan? They’ve stepped up security since you nabbed Brody in there.”

Aera adjusted the holograms to a map of the RDD. Elevators from their present location led into a crescent pathway with entryways to the back-end research centers, where much of the work on the front end was synthesized.

“Follow me,” she said.

She led him to an elevator and the Huelel Facility’s back end, where scientists in synsuits operated particle accelerators and examined radioactive isotopes. From there, they took an RDD transport to the Research Superstructure, filled with thousands of scientists on the move. The Superstructure was supported by compressed diamond pillars, alight with a Granville sky and sun.

Aera and Nero moved elliptically, like Janzers, through the Superstructure. She attached a violet-tipped alloy pin to several olive marble archways as they crossed underneath. What was she doing? Creating a perimeter? To what end?

“Don’t kill these scientists,” Nero said.

Aera kept going—one, two, three, four, twenty more pins.

Along the structure’s vast square, beneath central archways from which polychromatic chandeliers hung, a division of Janzers escorted Lady Verena Iglehart. She stopped and turned—toward Nero, it seemed to him.

His heart quickened. He so desired to contact her, right here, right now, but dared not. A Janzer pushed her back, and she trudged forward. Her hair was wrapped in a bun, revealing her slender neck, and the Mark of Masimovian—the black ink forming the bust of Chancellor Masimovian held by two phoenix feathers. Verena had been right about everything, Nero reflected, the Jubilees, the Vigna mission, the teams’ loss of autonomy, and Antosha.

If only we’d listened to her,
he thought. The last time Nero had seen her awake, her chest had been covered with blood beneath her skin, brought on by Antosha’s genetic attack in the Tomahawk Facility. She looked worn, her wrists latched with cuffs, but she was alive, the coma behind her.

Nero broke formation from Aera, but she grabbed his wrist.

Know your enemy, striker,
she sent.
Your enemy is present in large numbers, but not in the most opportune location.

Should they survive this, Nero would find out how she avoided Marstone in the ZPF. He didn’t take her meaning, but he knew that Janzers moved in pairs when not in their division formations, so he followed Aera at her side. He also knew that during times of duress, the Janzers would consciously connect, acting with a collective mind: they would know who didn’t belong and arrest them.

Verena and her escort were in the middle of the Superstructure now.

Nero and Aera circulated the center archways. He noted several divisions on the perimeter sending hand signals across the way.

Who are they?
is what the Janzers asked.

“Whatever you’re doing,” Nero said, “do it faster. They know. They—”

“Shut. Up.”

Verena arrived at the back of the line for the transports. Her Janzer escorts fought through the crowd.

Scientists, some familiar to Nero, made way.

Nero moved toward her. Aera stopped him in front of the marble statue of Chancellor Masimovian, near the transports.

Verena was so close now, Nero might grab her himself. “Aera—”

She held up an alloy plate, thinner than a benari coin, the width of her palm, and pressed a glowing violet button at its top. The bottom shot out to lengthen it.

Lasers shot out from the pins in the archways. The Granville sky turned from day to night, and night to day again in a rolling motion, as if the Earth spun faster, faster, like a twister.

The scientists screamed.

Janzers pushed toward the center and gathered into attack formations as scientists scurried toward the Superstructure’s rim and outer tunnels.

Verena turned, as did her Janzer escorts. The crowd around them disappeared.

Now we execute together, striker,
Aera sent to Nero.
Initiate ultraviolet vision
. He did so and bright phosphorescent light overtook his vision.

Aera slapped the alloy plate shut, and the pins she’d implanted exploded.

The Granville day turned to night, and the center arches collapsed onto the Janzers.

Gasps and screams echoed in the Superstructure.

In the blue hue of Nero’s vision, he spied the Janzer division that surrounded Verena.

The Janzers widened and rotated in their attack formation. Aera engaged, twisting one of their necks.

Another disengaged from the formation, carrying Verena to the transports.

Nero tried to mimic Aera’s methods with the ZPF, the way she fought in Cineris.

Though he couldn’t match her speed or fighting acumen, he sideswiped, downswiped, uppercut, over and over, felling three Janzers, the way he had in Permutation Crypt.

On the fourth, he locked his legs around it the way Aera did to him, and threw the Janzer into the one that carried Verena.

Verena fell, screaming, feeling for the ground, unknowing in the dark.

Red bioluminescent light emerged in the Superstructure, and Nero disengaged his ultraviolet vision.