The Gambit with Perfection (The Phantom of the Earth Book 2) (21 page)

A brothel?
Connor had heard about such establishments in Piscator, though Hans never let him go to any of them. For an instant, he thought he’d misunderstood the purpose of this rendezvous location until the dark room was illuminated. It looked different than what he expected. Clouded walls swirled with white and gray phosphorescence.
A hurricane,
Connor thought, and in the eye stood his foster father, Arturo. Or at least a man who he thought resembled Arty. In Piscator, his corpulent body might have been built with the blubber from a whale shark—this man looked fifty kilograms thinner and less sweaty than usual in his silk tunic.

Connor hugged him fiercely. “I’ve missed you.” He broke away, still not quite recognizing the Arturo Andretta who had raised him in Piscator City’s Third Ward. “Hans didn’t let me say goodbye, though I wanted—”

“You survived the fever,” Arty said. “When Murray told me about your bravery in Mantlestone Village, I knew you’d find your way. And here you are, the first Polemon to escape from Lady Isabelle’s grasp! Now that’s the best news the Front has heard in years. And, I hope, the start of more good news to come!”

Arty palmed Connor’s face, where a bit of stubble had formed during the journey east. “I’m sorry about your brother.”

No more tears,
Connor thought, biting them back. “What’s next?”

“We take the elevator,” Murray said. He entered a code on the booth, and it spun back in place. An obsidian wall reemerged.

They ambled inside the elevator. It moved diagonally up through the earth.

They ascended for a long time, until Connor’s belly ached from the movements. How close to the surface were they headed? Would they risk Reassortment exposure in the underground? Connor cringed, remembering Hans’s screams.

The elevator stopped, and the doors opened.

A Cyon sighting
, Connor thought, staring wide-mouthed at an old man who looked similar to the youthful man he’d seen images of in the pub, the man he’d heard so much about on his journey to Navita Territory. His salt-and-pepper beard drooped over his tunic, his back concave.

“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.

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.