The Gambit with Perfection (The Phantom of the Earth Book 2) (17 page)

“—take a transport to the lake?” Verne said.

Damy hesitated. She glanced to the lake scene in the café. She was about to tell him no when Verne said, “I’d understand if you’d rather stay here, meet with the team—”

“I think I’d prefer to escape from the Piscos for a little bit.” In fact, she sought to escape her team, and Project Silkscape, if only for a while, not the Piscos, but she didn’t want Verne to know this. “It’ll give you an excuse to get out of those ghastly suspenders.”

Verne smiled, plucked his suspenders with his thumbs, and bounced on the balls of his feet. “I thought you said—”

“C’mon, I have something in my office you can wear.”

Palaestra Lake

Palaestra, Underground Northeast

Damy wore a prim violet silk dress and strapped sandals, while Verne dressed in a pair of Brody’s charcoal shorts and a gray cutoff T-shirt with the commonly recited strike team vows—FIDELITY WITH HONOR. LOYALTY AND PROTECTION—sewed into the back. Damy could tell Verne felt awkward in the baggy clothes, but she preferred this to his suspenders. Verne had seemed shy changing at her office, in her private bathroom. She found his modesty a bit surprising, and endearing.

They stepped out onto the boardwalk. The lake crawled with Palaestrans. Perfect bodies, styled hair, manicured and pedicured nails. Damy frowned when she overheard more ruminations over the mission, Beimenians who suggested Brody and his team would be sent to the Lower Level, who discussed their trades, who even hinted that Brody and Verena were sleeping together. She couldn’t escape, not even here!

She blocked them out, took controlled breaths, and thought:
The negativity is your enemy. The enemy is your negativity. Ignore the negativity and defeat your enemy.
She couldn’t lose her temper over rumors and innuendo, not without breaking a precept of the chancellor and her oath to the RDD, not without hurting Brody.

She found herself holding Verne’s hand, wishing it was Brody’s.

He looked at her through the corners of his eyes.

Damy felt his stare. She dropped his hand. They removed their sandals, then dipped their bare feet in the latte-colored sand, warm and lenitive, and Damy breathed in the salty air, remembering how much she loved Palaestra Lake, held above them by diamond and carbyne—the deepest man-made lake ever designed. She couldn’t recall when Brody last took her here, he was so busy with Reassortment and Regenesis, she with Project Silkscape.

Verne haggled with the keeper bots at the rental booth. He pointed to Damy, whose dress fluttered in the wind beneath her arms. She held their iced cappuccinos. She heard him say she was a nonresident and his guest. The bots said they had to charge more for them to bring the drinks. Another asked him to confirm his ward, and Verne touched his finger to the DNA scanner. When Verne was accepted, a bot snatched a twenty-benari coin from him, while another emerged from the back with their chairs.

Flanked by one of the bots, Damy and Verne walked beneath the lake. She admired it, the rush above, the peace below, the pillars, the forever Granville sunset that spread shades of yellow, red, blue, and violet over the sand.

They ambled over a quartzite path. Forever young golden palm trees shorter than Damy swayed around them. Verne found an unoccupied dune on an unoccupied sandlot near a bed of seaside goldenrod.

The bot set down their chairs and said, “You have two hours. Enjoy your visit.”

They thanked the bot. Damy sat and glanced up to the lake, its blue bioluminescence, the blurred image of the
true
sun, its rays distorted through thousands of meters of water molecules, turned inside out as if part of a kaleidoscope. The view beneath Palaestra Lake was the only true view of the surface from Beimeni. It was strategically placed between the Earth’s five Great Canyons, formerly called Great Lakes. They had dried up before the Second Hundred Years’ War.

Verne sipped his iced cappuccino and looked up. The bioluminescence turned green, and the seaweed lifted where fish swam to and fro. The lake was bombarded with radiation to protect from Reassortment seepage; the life inside it was created by Granville spheres scattered about.

“What do you think it would be like to sleep for a few hundred years,” Damy said, “and wake up in Beimeni?”

“You mean, what would I do if I was Dr. Kole Shrader and awakened to,” Verne spun his forefinger in the air, “all this?” He smiled sadly. “It’d be worse than any nightmare, any hell, any abyss imaginable, at least for me.”

“Do you believe in the Legend?”

“I believe what I must, that this Dr. Shrader, whoever he is, was put in that mechanism for a reason, and I want to hope that whoever put him there had good reason.”

“Do you think he’s immune?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.”

“You sound like you care.”

“You know, you and I, beautiful Damosel, we’re not all that different.”

He paused, and Damy
was
curious where he was taking this, for she thought herself as opposite him as Jupiter to Mars. And he’d never called her beautiful before.

Verne pushed the sand around with a twig. “Sure, you’re Phanean and I’m Navitan.” The way he said
Phanean
made it sound like a curse. He leaned closer to Damy now, and she met his gaze. “You might be able to hide your feelings about this place from Marstone … but not from me.”

“I never said—”

“For a while I loved it too.” Verne plucked a few goldenrods and waved them around like wands, then handed them to Damy. “The sights and the sounds and the territories, Navita’s parades, Palaestra’s synism silos, the Fountain of Youth in Phanes.
Serve Beimeni, live forever
, they say. Well I say sure, I’ll live forever, problem is … all this,” Verne motioned his chin to the lake, “it’s all
fake
… you know it, and I think you loathe underground living as much as I do.”

Damy sniffed the goldenrod and feigned disinterest in his comments. She tried to remember the last time Brody had offered her a bouquet of any kind. Why was it so hard to find the time for each other when they shared a home and a bed?

“We were never meant to be so confined,” Verne added, “so controlled.” A seagull chick landed on the sand nearby. It twitched its wings and beak, and Verne smiled. Then it flew away. “We’re designed to expand, to explore, to advance, to love, to be loved … we’ll never have any of that down here—”

“We’ve failed in some ways,” Damy said, “but there have been successes. There has been conversion. There is hope still in the commonwealth and beyond. We’ve seen other planets. Brody’s team will lead us out—”

“Where, to the Earth’s surface, to death by Reassortment in horrific pain … no thanks, sister, I’d rather rot down here.” A gust kicked up, and Verne’s hair blew into his face. He pushed it aside. “So, you’ve been touring with the neophytes, what can you tell me about the RDD’s next victims?”

Damy laughed, for the first time with Vernon Lebrizzi. “They’re impressive,” she said. “There’s the one I mentioned, who interests me particularly.” Damy sipped her iced cappuccino and peered back up to the lake, hoping that Gwen wasn’t Noria’s daughter.

“What’s his name?” Verne said.

“
Her
name is Gwendolyn Horvearth, and I think she’s just the talent we need to get us through opening day.”

“What percentile did she perform in?”

Damy hadn’t yet conducted due diligence on Gwen, but she would not make the same mistake she had with Verne. “I’m not sure. Why don’t you check it out?”

Verne connected to the RDD’s and Marstone’s databases. Information normally restricted in Marstone’s Database was declassified for purchased Harpoon candidates. His eyes moved back and forth as he flipped through hundreds of thousands of pages of electronic data. “You’re sure her name’s Gwendolyn Horvearth?”

“I’m sure.”

“Here we go then,” Verne said, “birth year in 367, birthplace Seventh Ward, Transport City, Portage, Underground—”

“Central,” Damy said. Brody’s home territory and region.

“There’s more,” Verne said. “Gwen was left by her parents on the steps of a government building in Transport City with a cryptor that transmitted a message,
Please take care of her.
The administrators of Transport City sent her to the Portage Citadel, where Minister Kaspasparon sent a request to the developers at House Variscan, who—”

“Accept orphans,” Damy said, “and they developed her, the same as they did with—”

“Me,” Verne said.

And Brody and Nero
, Damy thought. Nero was also abandoned by his parents, something which Damy knew bothered him still, all these decades later.

“She was the champion, just like …” Vernon looked up, and they both said, “Brody.” Verne closed the file. “Do you think there’s anything to the commonalities? Or is someone just fucking with you?”

“Charming,” Damy said. She wanted to say that she wasn’t sure, that there
was
something about Gwen that seemed … off. But she held back. She’d given Verne plenty of reason to dislike Gwen by comparing them this morning. It was wisest to avoid handing him ammunition against her.

At least she isn’t Noria’s
, Damy thought. She recalled Gwen’s leadership, her enthusiasm, her persistence, her intelligence, and her arrogance during the tour. Just like Verne. And herself. Damy pondered the conversions she could achieve with Gwen and Verne on her team. Then another idea struck her.

Brody’s success on Vigna should ensure more time, but not endless time for his team, and a resource like Gwen, obsessed with terraforming, might be just what his team needed to send humanity back to the surface.

“I assume we’ll request her placement on Project Silkscape?” Verne said.

“No,” Damy said in a tone that bit, “the Reassortment team needs her more than we do.”

“Don’t they have enough?”

“Reassortment is the great challenge of our time, not Silkscape—”

“We’re behind schedule!”

“Submit a request for Gwen’s placement on Reassortment. This is my command, my decision, and it’s final.”

Verne gave her a long look, and complied.

Beimeni City

Phanes, Underground Central

2,500 meters deep

Lady Isabelle stood within the hollowed dome of Marstone’s Cerebral Core. Sixty black bots surrounded her, inert, the Core’s laser security grid deactivated. She raised her arms and connected to the ZPF. The dome filled with galaxies and nebulae. The Milky Way spiraled above, then the solar system. The view blurred when she focused on Earth, sending her consciousness deep inside, four thousand meters deep, to the Lower Level—and her sweet Antosha’s mind.

When will I find myself outside the boundaries of this Lower Level,
Antosha sent,
back in Phanes where I should be, with you?

Not soon enough.
Isabelle’s speeding heart calmed. She felt warm and beautiful, hearing Antosha’s voice. It had been two trimesters since they had last spoken.
Why hasn’t the Controller allowed you access to the zeropoint field?

Part of Antosha’s sentencing included routine injections of
E. barrier,
a synism that disrupted the transhuman mind-body-cosmos connection. But Isabelle paid the Controller tens of thousands of benaris for his cooperation—and agreement that he miss injections now and then—assuring him that her conversations with Antosha were a matter of national security regarding the campaign against the Beimeni Polemon. She promised the Controller she’d force Chancellor Masimovian to allow his return after they won the war, one of many lies she’d told him over the years. If he continued to disobey her, she might have to find another catspaw to run the Lower Level.

The Controller thinks he works for the good of transhumans and the commonwealth.
Antosha’s voice softened.
He
mistakenly believes his power is granted by the chancellor. The great fool doesn’t understand where true power is derived—

The genes.
Isabelle finished his thought, as she often did.

I long to return to Beimeni, complete my work, and lead the people back to the surface with you.

Isabelle placed her hand against her chest, over her golden phoenix.
As the gods intended.
She didn’t believe in the Twin Gods, for they’d never answered her prayers. But she knew Antosha held faith in them. He’d visited the Spa of Delphi often when he lived in the Beimeni zone.

What news from the commonwealth?

Heywood sent the Barão Strike Team to Vigna.
Isabelle twisted one of her golden rings, then held up her forefingers, examining her nails and rings.

I thought we agreed that might not be wise.

Isabelle dropped her hands to her sides.
To achieve perfection we must have the Lorum. You admitted so—

I told you we need the Lorum’s
DNA
.
Antosha paused.
Though I yearn for the Barão Strike Team to suffer, slowly and painfully, either during a failed jump through space-time or at the hands of the Lorum, I would have preferred to study the alien from a safe distance, from Mars, to fully assess its weaknesses, to develop my skills in transmigration and translate its chromosomes—

I had no choice.

With close contact, the Lorum may now learn our flaws.

The transmissions disappeared from Candor Chasma!

This is fraught with risk.

I had to adjust when the chancellor delayed your return.
Isabelle put her hands on her hips.
And the Barão Strike Team’s continued failure with Reassortment and Regenesis cannot go unpunished!

It won’t. What of Jeremiah Selendia?

Secure in my new prison, soon to be joined by his sons.

Isabelle received a Marstone summons from Chancellor Masimovian. She ignored him.

Tell me about Jeremiah’s capture, tell me about … his sons?

Much has happened since we last spoke, my love. Jeremiah has three illegal heirs. The eldest, Zorian, was the Polemon named Jonyn I told you about. The fool thinks I’ll grant him clemency for cooperation. He infected his father with
E. barrier
for me. You should’ve seen Jeremiah when we surrounded him and he couldn’t access the field.