The Gambit with Perfection (The Phantom of the Earth Book 2) (23 page)

Brody sprang to his feet. Whatever choices had brought him to this point, it would be his choices here and now that got him out of this mess. He rounded the cliffs—and gasped. Colorful light on all sides blinded him. He protected his eyes as he would from the Granville sun. The gold, scarlet, black, silver, and yellow radiant matter spun counterclockwise as it rowed up the cliffs and through the temperature inversions overhead, where clouds broke apart in many layers up the cliffs. He extended his hand, though he didn’t know how he would secure a sample or ascend back to the shuttle. He moved closer. He heard whispers.

“You shouldn’t have come here.”

“Who’s there?”

“You aren’t wanted here.”

“Verena?” He spun left and right and back and forth. “Nero?”

“I feel your fear.”

This was the answer to the mystery of Vigna and the mystery of Nero and Verena’s location. He turned toward the flowing metallic matter.

“I’m not afraid.”

The liquid fired out tentacles that pulled Brody into its current, and he flew up the side of the cliff, ever faster, through three cloud layers and into the landmass. He spun and twisted, and the liquid stripped his synsuit from his body.

My death is assured
, Brody thought. His body could never handle such a rapid change in atmosphere and pressure without protection.

He landed in a lagoon, gasping, heaving, but
alive
. How he survived he didn’t know. The air wasn’t as pure as on the Vignan surface, a bit more saline, but it was breathable. His eyes took in the gold, scarlet, black, silver, and yellow metallic substance that drooped down gemstone walls around the perimeter. Light blue, yellow, and green hues reflected off the interior’s crystals. It was as if he stood inside a geode on the Earth.

The organic substance that had carried him up the cliff slithered in streaks away from the wall.

Brody found a slab of stone and lifted himself onto it.

The substance bubbled and spun.

Through all his decades of travel and research, from the depths of Beimeni to the canyons of Earth, the mountains of Mars, the fiery hell of Venus, and the frozen oceans of Europa, Brody had never seen anything that compared to the insides of Vigna or this life form. It curled around him like a spider web until it covered him, completely and thoroughly, inside and out.

Brody choked and grabbed his throat.

He couldn’t breathe.

He fell to the ground and lay unconscious.

When he woke, he was descending even quicker than before, ever faster, into a tunnel, it seemed, and into a sea of stone, down through Vigna’s crust. The substance carried him faster, farther, until he lost all sense of time.

He looked up. Above him lay the bottom of Vigna’s crust, he assumed, a world of inverted peaks and valleys and mountains, pushed down into what must be the beginning of Vigna’s mantle. He was cocooned by another organic barrier, though this one allowed him to breathe, then thrown even deeper, where the wintergreen stone heated and melted, rising, falling in a convective manner. It crept up, cooled, sank, heated, rose, and fell, like him, toward the center of Vigna.

Brody assumed he’d traveled hundreds of kilometers into the exoplanet now, for he was surrounded by gemstones—diamonds, he assumed, though there was no way for him to know for sure. Transhumans could never survive here, not even in a synsuit. Somehow the current kept him alive. Down, down, down, kilometer after kilometer of heated wintergreen rock and finally into what seemed … liquid … a vast underground ocean! Slabs of Vigna’s crust folded atop one another, layer after layer of this exoplanet’s geological history for Brody to experience, until he descended even farther, closer to the center of the labyrinth, the edge of Vigna’s outer core, lit with molten radioactive hues, where bits of rock floated out toward the mantle’s underside, appearing not unlike upward-melting snow.

A corridor shifted in the snow, and Brody floated into the core.

Beimeni City

Phanes, Underground Central

2,500 meters deep

The preparations are complete,
Lady Isabelle sent, her arms raised, her chameleon cape fluttering around her legs and boots. She stood in the center of the Cerebral Core in the DOC to ensure a secure connection with her beloved Antosha.
Your voyage across the Infernus Sea is but hours away.

And my control over Project Regenesis, is that secured?
Antosha sent.

Not yet … soon.
Isabelle lowered her arms.

We must awaken Dr. Shrader at once!

It took much effort to get you back to the commonwealth.

Which I appreciate. But the Barão Strike Team will fail on Vigna and give the Lorum access to our genome. That should concern you, my lady.

Isabelle shook her head and folded her arms.
This evening will go down in history as the night when you returned to our great city to a welcome worthy of a supreme scientist, and the night the Liberation Front fell. Let that be enough for now.

I wonder if you truly understand the power of the Lorum.

I understand more than you know. We will discover what Dr. Shrader can tell us about the Reassortment Strain. But first we must mend your relationship with the people. It will take some time, after your exile.

The truth was that Isabelle didn’t know if the people would ever accept Antosha. If they didn’t, she’d be prepared to lead the Great Commonwealth herself.

I wonder if you’ve risked too much.

The gambit will succeed, my love.
Isabelle checked the time on her armlet.
Now I must depart for Navita, but I’ll return to Phanes in time for your arrival.

May the gods be with you.

Artemis Square

Beimeni City, Phanes

Isabelle counted four thousand Janzers and five hundred tenehounds. She could hear herself breathe in a place normally bustling with minstrels, commoners, shopkeepers, and aristocrats. In the First and Second Wards, cautious Phaneans watched from balconies and terraces, some nude, others dressed in silken capes or tunics. Isabelle nodded to the people, turning her head.
I will protect your way of life
, she thought.
I’ll ensure the great city never falls to the BP and anarchy
.

Tonight she would bring the Front to an end and fulfill her place in the commonwealth’s rich history. The city’s librarian bots would write how she saved the people from the BP, ushering in a new era of peace, prosperity, and the Beimeni way. They would write how she and Antosha led the people to the surface of the Earth. And the people would chant her name.

The Janzer lines parted, revealing Lieutenant Arnao. He bowed deeply. “My lady, the contingency plans are set. The equipment is in position, as is your army. We will deliver death to the Beimeni Polemon.”

Isabelle patted her former courier’s jaw. “Sometimes you’re not such a waste.”

She hand-signaled the Janzers, and in response they smashed their boots to the ground,
left, right.
They streamed across the square and onto North Boardwalk toward Tortonia Station, where military transports hummed, ready to depart.

The march to the transports reminded Isabelle of the departure prior to the invasion into Haurachesa Territory. For all the difficulty involved in its maintenance, Beimeni’s southernmost territory had been an important part of the commonwealth, once viewed as the launch point for expansion into South America. Though it had been inaccessible through the land at first, owing to seismic activity, Chancellor Masimovian demanded the RDD’s engineers find a way to penetrate the bedrock from the sea, and it was from the sea that Isabelle’s forces had entered Port Newland, then Hautervian City, and the maze of tunnels below.

She sighed. She had lost two hundred Janzers in that battle and expected similar losses below Navita today. A Janzer cost about five million benaris to produce, a significant figure in the Beimenian economy in recession. Isabelle seethed inside thinking about the better use of one billion benaris: investments in the commonwealth’s shanty wards, transport systems, villages, coolant piping, synbio research, and in Harpoon education.

Gods, how she hated the BP.

The Hautervian system of tunnels was not unlike those the Janzers had recently displayed for her beneath Navita Territory. She’d had the bedrock adjacent to and below Navita City searched before, but never so thoroughly. It took more than forty days from her and Atticus’s first conversation about Navita to gather the necessary tradecraft. She’d sent the Janzers under the guise of diggers, drawing up plans for an expansion of Navita Territory, a long-held wish for Minister Orosiris. Isabelle could have dispensed with the secrecy if she wished, but the last thing she wanted was to tip her hand to the Polemon, giving them time to run.

During the surgical searches, they’d discovered what they believed were the beginnings of a vast labyrinth, one that they hypothesized could hold hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Polemon. She’d ordered the Janzers to return to Phanes at once and indicated to Minister Orosiris that more detailed work would have to be done on the structural integrity of the territory prior to expansion.

Isabelle approached her transport, ebony and painted with doves. She latched herself next to Arnao and closed her eyes, imagining the Earth’s surface. The day she and Antosha breathed fresh air under
true
sky, this would all be worth it.

Navita City

Navita, Underground East

Isabelle and Lieutenant Arnao stepped out of the transport at Induan Station onto the platform of a roofless station under a starry night sky. This city was unique in the commonwealth, layered down the limestone—not unlike the manner in which a city would’ve been built into a mountainside on the Earth’s surface—fortified with carbyne and diamond. The cold water from the commonwealth’s coolant piping flowed down the city’s layers, branching out into thirty-seven sinuous streams. The streams combined at the city’s midpoint, draining into the Archimedes as the Great Falls of Navita. Where Isabelle and Arnao stood near the city’s top layer, the air was humid, reeking like ocean and garbage, rising with the heat. Holograms along the walls depicted the bid-and-ask prices for contracts on goods, services, and speculations, the value of shares on the Beimeni Contract Exchange.

“I might stay a while after we’re done here,” Arnao said. His teeth settled on his lower lip, his eyes distracted by working girls along the station’s exterior. Isabelle ignored him. The girls and the traders they wooed disappeared when the first lines of Janzers marched through.

Farther down the city’s layers, the air still steamed but wasn’t as hot, and it smelled fresher, like forest greenery or moss, and the sea. Finally, they reached Serravalia Square, where the crashing falls drowned out all other sound, and where Minister Orosiris stood, looking like a mole rat with his guardsmen arced around him.

“My lady,” Orosiris began, smiling, “we are honored by your presence—”

Arrest him,
she sent to the Janzer at her side. The minister put up little resistance.
Proof of his guilt,
she thought.

She sensed unease in the city beneath the sounds of the flowing water all around her, above the smells of roasted Yeuronian chicken and seared Marshlandic goose, in the units in the wards built into stone and minerals, between the inner waterfalls in the city’s core. Everywhere, eyes peered at her, wishing her gone.
Oh yes
, she thought,
do fear me and serve the Great Commonwealth of Beimeni.

“Forward!”

Her chameleon cape and hair floated behind her in Navita’s artificial winds. Lieutenant Arnao marched beside her. They descended farther down the layers of Navita City, through the Aeronian Trading Center, “the pit,” where hundreds of thousands of traders lined the concentric rings, and trading contract symbols streamed around countless holographic spheres.

The traders didn’t seem to notice Isabelle or her army moving down the stairs, wide enough to fit twenty transports side by side. The stairs narrowed near the manufacturing consortiums, where the sound of alloy striking alloy grew deafening. At last, they reached the city and territory’s boundary, where the Janzer scouts had detected BP tunnels.

Isabelle requested her goggles from a Janzer. She wrapped them around her head and telepathically adjusted between ultraviolet, standard, night, and infrared vision. She would lead the first sortie herself, as she did for all surgical strikes.

She ordered a Janzer division to step forward. Their synsuits were lined in neon blue, signifying they were scientific specialists, trained in the use of ground-penetrating radar-radio waves and synbio technology, including mineral crushers. Their visors allowed them to see for kilometers through the underground; their tanks and the gloves they wore allowed them to burrow through the earth.

Show me what you see
,
Isabelle sent.

The renditions, blurry at first, refined into a new world in her extended consciousness: hollowed rooms and ladders, ramps built into the limestone, rows and rows of tunnels, deeper than she could have imagined.

Isabelle gasped. “Traitors to their own people,” she said under her breath.

It would be easier to flood them out here than it had been in Haurachesa, though no less dangerous. BP labyrinths were often easy to enter but difficult to exit, while the structure of the nearby city, and the territory, could be harmed if she erred. No, she wouldn’t risk so many lives in Navita. But wouldn’t give the traitors a chance to escape, either.

Tonight, she would bring the war to an end.

“Shall we proceed?” Arnao said.

“Kill them all, less the whelp. Leave him for me.” She shifted her goggles to night vision, and a green hue overtook her sight.

Arnao directed the Blues, who then activated their gloves.

Silver phosphorescent light drenched the cavern, followed by an orange burst. The Blues stood at the bottom of a hollowed tunnel that Isabelle calculated in her extended consciousness spanned 237 meters.