The Restoration of Flaws (The Phantom of the Earth Book 5) (7 page)

“Did everyone make it out of the Cavern?” Connor said.

“I’d rather not say, not here,” Pirro said.

Connor appreciated Pirro’s meaning and worried about Marstone as well, for the commonwealth had left his neurochip installed, for this purpose, he assumed, to listen to his thoughts and speech. He again shielded his mind the best he could. “What do we do now?”

The Janzers rumbled closer on their rocketcycles.

Nero looked upward. “We keep faith in our allies who will not forget us.”

Research & Development Department (RDD)

Palaestra, Underground Northeast

2,500 meters deep

Oriana climbed the Staircase to Heaven, the twisting red marble stairs that led up to the Huelel Facility, with her brother and the Holcombe Strike Team. It was good to travel without Antosha, without his smell, his voice, his shadow, but Dahlia and Mintel hadn’t spoken to them since Antosha’s declaration, and Oriana wondered how long this could last until it harmed the mission—or until Antosha harmed them.

When Ruiner broke the long silence, Oriana didn’t hear him. She was focused on Saturn and its rings and moons in the void of the Granville view beyond the staircase, and thinking about the mission, her brother, their new roles in the RDD, and what she would do to Antosha after they achieved significant conversion. And she worried about Nathan.

“Hey, Madam Champion,” Mintel said. He slapped his hands in front of her. “Cap’n asked you a question.”

“What’s with you?” Oriana said. “We’re on the same team.”

“Don’t you dare, you haven’t even begun.” Mintel moved onward up the stairs and joined Dahlia.

Don’t let him get to you
, Oriana heard. It was Pasha’s voice, without Marstone’s interference, the way they had communicated during development.
This is our time, our mission, and we must serve Beimeni. Ruiner asked you if you’ve met Heywood.

“Apologies, Captain,” Oriana said. “I haven’t.”

“Neither have I,” Pasha said.

“Distracted?” Ruiner said. “No doubt.”

He peered over the staircase’s banister with Oriana and Pasha. “I’ve been to Saturn often and so will you, gods be good.” He grinned at Oriana, a grin so wise, so reassuring, so authoritative that she imagined he could’ve been her father in another life, in another time.

“Supreme Scientist Heywood Querice is … unique. And brilliant. Don’t let his manners distract from the mission parameters. Listen. Answer his queries diligently and honestly, and if we’re lucky, we’ll only have a hundred more of these debriefings before the mission.”

“Yes! You’re just in time,” Heywood said, his long, dark green hair disheveled, his face twitching. “Take your seats.”

They sat around a pedestal topped by a Granville sphere, which synthesized an image of Earth. A golden lowercase letter
c
replaced the Earth and spun slowly back and forth. “The speed of light,” he said, “is where we begin with space travel.” Oriana transposed his instructions to her neurochip. “What about time travel? Must we travel at the speed of light to travel through time?” When they didn’t respond, Heywood added, “Yes! The answer is so simple, my friends. You’ve lived with a great example of forward time travel all your lives, you’ve experienced its power—”

“With Dr. Shrader?” Pasha said.

“Very good!” Heywood weaved his hands in elliptical motions. “Our ancestors cooled him in liquid helium, ceased the aging process, and did so to enable Dr. Shrader and his kin to travel
forward
through time. But did he travel faster than the speed of light?”

“No,” Mintel said.

“Yes! No … I mean, yes! When Supreme Scientist Antosha Zereoue awakened him from his coma, he in essence traveled hundreds of years through time. With athanasia and uficilin and our advanced regenerative capabilities, his body is congruent to his being, Before Reassortment, yet the world, After Reassortment, is like nothing he’s ever experienced. How will he react? How will he adjust? What mysteries does he hold the answers to?”

The lowercase
c
disappeared, and in its place flapped a sheet of black matter, one side over the other, and a tube extended to connect the top to the bottom. “Backward time travel.” Heywood swayed and scratched at his goatee. “This is the Timescape Mission’s goal, and it requires a different set of assumptions—”

“But backward time travel isn’t possible,” Oriana said. During development, all her physics lessons had suggested so.

Heywood smiled. “Young neophyte,” he stared at Ruiner before he shifted his attention back to Oriana, “you will expand your mind from what you believe, and believe me when I assure you that we solved the conundrum.” Oriana scrunched her brow. “Yes! We solved the mysteries of exotic matter and superluminal matter!”

“I don’t believe it,” she said.

Nothing she’d learned suggested it was possible to create either. At the same time, Oriana knew that except for Reassortment, much of the RDD’s work was conducted in secret—and wasn’t always part of the official record, or historical lessons—the primary reason most candidates in the elite houses wanted to be bid for by an RDD consortium.

“I assure you we discovered the methods to generate superluminal matter,” Heywood continued, “and when it’s combined with exotic matter at the Earth’s and sun’s Lagrange points, the result is an achievement of a lifetime! Of a lifetime, I tell you!” Heywood pulled down the side of his lab coat from his neck, revealing part of the Mark of Masimovian there and on his upper back. “Now it’s time for you to earn your Marks, all of you—”

“Not us,” Mintel said. He jerked his head sideways, without looking at the twins. “We’re here to train them.”

“Yes! So you are,” Heywood said, “so you will.”

“How do you know you can apply this technology to our tangible world?” Pasha said.

Heywood swung back to the holograms. The flaps of black matter disappeared, replaced by Area 55, its aboveground circular carbyne platforms upon cylindrical towers. The Flag of Beimeni shivered from watchtowers, manned by research bots.

Oriana and Pasha watched, riveted, as the
Voltaire
emerged upon the surface of the Earth. It launched and soared toward the sun, to Lagrange point one where it moved into a stable orbit. A rocket released from the side of the shuttle and a distance displayed at one hundred kilometers, then five hundred kilometers, then one thousand kilometers, then the rocket exploded, forcing the exotic matter into a dense pellet. At the same time, a stream of light labeled SUPERLUMINAL BEAM passed from the side of the
Voltaire
through the middle of the dense pellet. A portal took shape. It shimmered with violet phosphorescent light, radiating away from the center, turning dark blue near the edge. To the right of this imagery, a new rendition formed, that of the Earth and a body of land labeled ICELAND and closer still to an island within an island in a lake called THINGVALLAVATN, where a portal of violet and blue light emerged, melting the snow around it, revealing grass and soil.

The twins turned from the island back to Lagrange point one, where the lower hatch on the shuttle opened. Down fell a surveillance bot. Then the
Voltaire
froze, and upon the island the bot burst from the portal. The bot scanned the terrain with various viewers—infrared, ultraviolet, organic—and took in a gulp of air. Then it plunged back into the portal. The shuttle shot into motion again, back toward the Earth, while the bot fell from the bottom of the portal at Lagrange point one. Thrusters on its boots sent it hurtling back to the Earth, where it eventually entered a high-altitude skydive. As it neared the surface, it released a parachute from its upper back. It landed. A strike team swooped in to retrieve it in their helicopter, then returned to Area 55.

“Yes!” Heywood said. “A mission established with the use of surveillance bots. We sent two bots with Captain Micaella Lidesien’s strike team, and in two cases the tests allowed for rejection of the null hypothesis, that backward time travel wasn’t achieved.” Oriana exchanged a look with Pasha. “We’re sure the alternative hypothesis is valid. We achieved backward time travel.”

“How can you be so sure?” Oriana said. This was all so foreign to her. The superluminal beam, a tachyon beam, would be extremely difficult to create. And if Heywood did, in fact, create a tunnel through space-time, it must’ve been at an astronomical cost—there’d be no way they’d have a third chance.

“Tests of the atmosphere proved the unalterable truth!” Heywood was saying. He waved his forefinger in the air.

“Reassortment transformed Earth’s atmosphere,” Mintel said, “and if you two weren’t so green, you’d at least know that.” He held his head in his hand and shook it.

Heywood sucked in his lower lip and looked at Ruiner. Oriana suspected what he was thinking, that she and her brother weren’t ready for a commonwealth mission. Why did Antosha insist on their participation? Why put the Timescape Mission at risk?

“We know all about Reassortment,” she said, looking to Pasha. She turned back to Heywood. “So we’re to go back in time and destroy the Reassortment Strain?”

“Gods, no!” Heywood looked mortified, his eyeballs bulging so far out that Oriana thought they might pop.

Mintel put his hand on Ruiner’s shoulder. “Cap’n, this isn’t going to work.”

“Such actions are impossible within the timescape,” Dahlia said.

“Impossible,” Heywood agreed.

“Time is laid out in its entirety,” Ruiner said, his voice so wise, so calm, so unlike Mintel’s and Heywood’s that Oriana almost believed him, “with all past and future events located there together.”

She wouldn’t give in. She’d learned much about physics and theories of time during her development. “That could also be interpreted to mean this mission is a part of the normal timescape,” Oriana said, “a reversal, a change that we—”

“Our studies don’t suggest that,” Heywood said. “We can achieve superluminal travel and maintain a portal through space-time with exotic matter, but we don’t believe we can influence the worlds on either end, and life on either end should proceed as if no split occurred.”

Pasha looked at the bot in the hologram, then back to Heywood. “If this is a reconnaissance mission,” he said, “why send a strike team? Why not use your bots?”

“Antosha believes that if we understand the synthesis of the organism, if we understand how it first reassorted itself, we can conquer it. All we’re doing is bringing back the pure data.” Heywood lowered his eyes. When he raised them, he rendered the Earth and the Beimeni zone, above which appeared dusty, phosphorescent particles.

“What is this?” Ruiner said.

“The Reassortment Strain is seeping ever deeper,” Heywood said, frowning, “ever closer to the Great Commonwealth.”

Oriana felt her stomach turn. She’d heard about the horrors of Reassortment exposure during development.

“Then this mission is of utmost importance,” Ruiner said. He looked at his strategist and aera, who nodded.

“Yes!” Heywood said. “It will be the mission they remember us for.”

The cause
, Oriana thought,
is worthy, even if it is an unworthy man I serve, but in the end, I will cut Antosha for what he did to my parents.

A valley replaced the rendition of the Earth above and around the Granville sphere, with steam rising from the ground. In the distance lay a lake beneath the clouds, its surface flat, calm, reflective, the division between water and sky obscured.

“Where is this?” Oriana said.

“Iceland,” Ruiner said, “been there on many a surface excursion.”

“Yes! Though you’ve never experienced the part of it I’m about to show you now.” The view moved underground, where a set of copper ramps materialized, connected by a matrix of tunnels. One of the ramps enlarged, and the view zoomed through a corridor to a hexagonal room labeled PRIMARY RESEARCH FACILITY.

“This is the Hengill Laboratory, the most advanced research facility of its day, protected by the Western Hegemony Guard and supervised by an artificial intelligence they called Locust.” The hologram shifted to different rooms and tunnels. “The facility’s protection includes four points—”

“Hold it,” Mintel said. He huffed. “You’re planning to send an inexperienced striker and strategist into a guarded subterranean synbio installation during the
war?
”

“Yes! That is what we’re going to do,” Heywood said, “because that’s what Supreme Scientist Antosha Zereoue ordered, and should you interrupt me again at this most critical juncture of the debriefing, I’ll submit to him a report on your insubordination.”

Mintel folded his arms and mouthed to Ruiner,
Don’t do this.
Ruiner gave a stealthy nod and put up his hand.

What the heck is this guy so afraid of?
Oriana thought.
What could this place have that the Harpoons didn’t?

“The first layer of protection is the inspectors at the Hengill Power Plant’s primary entrance. We also believe this is the main mode of entry for the engineers and scientists who arrive each day. The second layer,” a husky man in camouflage with a slender gas mask rotated in front of the map, “is the Western Hegemony Guard. Though not as agile or powerful as Janzers, strikers, or aeras, don’t underestimate their military and martial arts capabilities, or their sheer numbers—could be thousands of them in there.