The Gambit with Perfection (The Phantom of the Earth Book 2) (12 page)

Now the Janzers escorted the Barão Strike Team from the transport to a hollowed cove labeled OUTFITTING, where Janzers and medical bots readied their interstellar synsuits. The synisms used in these suits emitted a magnetic shield that deflected radiation—in essence, the synsuits would protect the Barão Strike Team from the barrage of protons and electrons they would encounter when they entered and exited the exotic portals at the Lagrange points.

“Left leg,” the Janzers said in unison.

Brody and Verena and Nero lifted their left legs, then their right legs, with their arms extended at their sides. The Janzers attached the chest, back, torso, abdomen, arm, and neck plates. The boots followed. After the loud clicks and clacks and the grind of drill bits, the team looked much like Janzers.

“Helmets,” a Janzer ordered, and three of his comrades lifted the egg-like transparent helmets from the medical bots. The helmets differed from Janzer visors. They were designed by the Mosaic Consortium, equipped with synisms that separated carbon from oxygen and fostered a closed atmosphere suitable for transhumans.

A different Janzer escorted the team into Mission Control. Behind a thick layer of graphene sat the space engineers. Fabian Mariner, the Beimeni Commonwealth space general, rambled around the spherical aisles. He spewed orders, and his engineers telepathically adjusted the controls within the holograms above their workstations.

“Welcome, Captain,” Mariner said.

“Pleasure, General.” Brody bowed slightly, as did Nero and Verena. The
Cassiopeia
, its sharp edges, its dark skin made of carbyne, stood on the other side of a glass enclosure, its nose pointed toward the airlock.

The space engineers, arranged in concentric layers, one higher than the next, shouted commands, and the
Cassiopeia
materialized over a holographic pad at the bottommost layer. The engineers sent signals to the pad, and depending on the system checked, a different part of the ship lit up. Then the hologram transformed into the silo above the shuttle, leading to the surface.

A doorway cleared.

Heywood entered. He shook Nero’s and Brody’s hands, but when he extended for Verena’s, she didn’t accept. “Something I did?” Heywood said.

Verena cocked her fist. Brody slid between them. “We’re good,” he said, “ready to make history.”

Verena leaned on her left leg to get a better view of Heywood. “Why send us away now?”

Heywood crossed his arms and pressed his lips together tightly. “To explore an exoplanet that might prove habitable and research a new species that might aid your captain in his fight against Reassortment—”

“I think you’re lying.” Verena brushed Brody to the side with her hip and clutched Heywood’s transparent lab coat. She pulled his face to hers. “What did they tell you about this mission?”

Mariner hand-signaled a pair of Janzers to restrain her. Nero grabbed one by the arm, flipped him, and elbowed the other, shattering his visor. Two more divisions burst into Mission Control and surrounded the team, Reassortment batons and pulse weapons at the ready.

Blue light emitted by the Janzer weaponry engulfed Brody’s team.

Mariner’s lip was bleeding.

Medical bots cleaned Mariner’s face and injected him with uficilin. “I’ll ignore your violation of the chancellor’s precepts this day,” he said to Verena, “if your captain assures me this tantrum won’t prevent significant conversion on Vigna.” He glared at Brody.

“We will not be treated like tenehounds,” Brody said. “Call off these Janzers.”

Mariner hand-signaled the Janzers, then nodded toward the exit. They disengaged from Brody’s strike team.

The engineers peeked around their workstations.

Brody kept a hand on Verena’s shoulder. “You’re sending us forty thousand light years from Earth in a weaponless shuttle to retrieve a liquid sample we don’t understand, under duress from a Warning we didn’t deserve—”

“This is where you’re mistaken,” Heywood said. “We’re sending a
powerful
weapon to Vigna.” He shook his head. “Yes! You’ve only forgotten your strength—”

“I have not, and neither has my team.”

Brody eyed Heywood warily. He would never forget the scientists frozen near absolute zero, killed by him and Damy for relying too much on his skill with the ZPF, and Heywood knew it. He had been there that day. So were Antosha and Haleya. After a failed terrorist attack, they’d executed the Regenesis procedure to awaken one of the scientists. Brody thought they’d all learned a lesson in humility after the research team failed to plan for or react properly to malfunctions in the stasis tanks. Now he wasn’t so sure.

“Unlike so many decisions in scientific research,” Heywood said, “the choice here is simple. If you don’t achieve significant conversion on this mission, I shudder to think what the board and ministry might do—”

“We’re ready, General,” a Janzer’s voice blared over the speakers. “Live feed to the Valley of Masimovian in thirty seconds.”

Verena put her nose across from Heywood’s. “We’ll go to Vigna, and we’ll find that liquid and retrieve a sample of it, but don’t think for a microscopic second that we’re dumb enough to believe a word you say, or that
we
shudder with fear of punishment from the ministry, not after all we’ve accomplished.” She pushed past him.

Brody and Nero followed. Nero smirked at Heywood as he passed.

“Transmitting view of Mission Control,” said the Janzer voice.

Inside the
Cassiopeia
’s massive hull stood three columns: the captain’s column positioned a bit behind the striker column on the left and the strategist column on the right. A Janzer latched in the team while Brody connected his consciousness to the shuttle’s artificial intelligence. He activated the control center beneath a Granville sphere connected to the ceiling, high above.

Shuttle Captain to Cassiopeia, do you copy?
Brody’s telepathic message looked like red neon lettering, which rotated in circles in front of him and his team, as did the reply.

Copy, Shuttle Captain,
Cassiopeia
’s womanly voice sent,
all systems are ready for launch, over.

Brody brought up a view of Mission Control. Heywood pointed to the holograms where the
Cassiopeia
hung. The shuttle disappeared, replaced by a view of the Earth, the sun, and the moon. The general waved his arms, spewed orders to his engineers. At the end, Brody heard, “On to Vigna!” and the engineers replied together, “
On to Vigna!
”

Brody took hold of Nero’s and Verena’s hands. They nodded to him, and to each other. Brody prayed this marked the end of their battle and the beginning of their significant conversion. The hull vibrated. The airlocks—gamma-ray shielded to protect from Reassortment seepage—opened, as loud as thunder. A message from Mission Control appeared.

Brody squeezed Nero’s and Verena’s hands tighter.
This won’t be our final mission together,
he thought.

The
Cassiopeia
reached the surface.

The Granville syntech that constituted the inner walls, flooring, and ceiling of the
Cassiopeia
rendered the outside view of a valley surrounded by a forest and, in the distance, evergreen mountains.

Stage 1.

The rockets beside the
Cassiopeia
spewed fire and smoke that disrupted the view of sunrise in the valley.

Stage 2.

Try as he did, Brody couldn’t push thoughts of Damy out of his mind. Last night, she’d ordered Merrell to cook bouillabaisse with Piscatorian oysters and glazed Vivoan pork cheek, then taken Brody to bed for a lingering, sleepless night—and cried all morning. He sent her a message over the ZPF. She wouldn’t receive it until after the launch, courtesy of Marstone, but he wanted her to hear his voice one last time.

Stage 3.

The
Cassiopeia
escaped Earth’s gravity. Its depleted rockets fell into the thermosphere. The shuttle’s Granville panels filtered the sun’s radiance and projected the outside view. Brody felt like a bird, floating in the void. He saw swirls of clouds, a storm over the ocean, and lifeless mountains. He imagined what Beimeni would look like aboveground from this height, in a world without Reassortment, and it was beautiful.

Stage 4.

The
Cassiopeia
sped toward Lagrange point one between the Earth and the sun. When it neared the point of gravitational stability, the Barão Strike Team heard,
Mission Control to Cassiopeia, you now have command.

Copy, Mission Control,
Brody transmitted. He turned to his striker. “Release the exotic matter.”

Nero nodded. A small rocket carrying an exotic matter pellet launched from the shuttle.

When it reached a distance of one thousand kilometers, the rocket exploded, showering the void with light and flame. The Barão Strike Team shielded their eyes, placing their arms across their helmets.

When the phosphorescence dimmed, Brody beckoned Nero and Verena to look up. Where the dense exotic matter of the portal ended and the mixture of space and normal matter began, a dark violet circle marked the boundary. The circular boundary shimmered in a band radiating away from the center of the portal, changing from violet to dark blue at the outermost edge. Even at nearly one point five million kilometers from Earth, it formed a disk large enough to illuminate the planet’s sky, not unlike a small moon. When the exotic portal took full form, it looked less like a disk and more like a three-dimensional hole through space.

Stage 5.

Brody connected to the shuttle’s artificial intelligence, then to the ZPF in a manner he’d never done before, projecting his consciousness thousands of light years into space.

He felt the artery in his neck pulsate with his heartbeat and heard a drumbeat in his head, louder, louder; and he understood that this noise was the heartbeat of the universe beating inside him as he pushed further, further; and he manipulated the field, stronger, stronger; and darkness and light alternated in his vision, brighter, darker; and he couldn’t hear any longer and he collapsed the wavefunction of the exotic matter to connect the portal in Earth’s solar system with a star system two thousand light years away—

Cassiopeia
flew into the exotic portal and it, along with the shuttle, disappeared.

Mantlestone Village

Ope, Underground Central

2,500 meters deep

“Look at this,” Murray said.

Connor looked.

Captain Barão was about to launch into outer space from Outer Boundary Village, where the Granville sun rose upon the horizon. It was still dark in Mantlestone Village, an area made of aluminous peridotite and garnet, mantle rock pushed into the crust, hollowed out with mineral crushers by the Janzers, layered with moss, wintergreen vines, and lichen. Moonlight streaked through the skylight windows of House Tremadoci’s main dome, a safe house along the Underground Passage. The Tremadocis gathered presently with the rest of the village in Sheinstone Square.

The chancellor had declared a commonwealth holiday in honor of the launch, a tradition Connor didn’t understand. What difference did it make if the people gathered and watched the chancellor in the Valley of Masimovian? The stupid speeches all ended the same, with chants for the chancellor and an immortal life of service he never believed in.

He turned back to Murray. “I don’t care about commonwealth missions. I don’t care about the commonwealth—”

“This isn’t just
any
mission,” Murray said. He sat next to Connor at a glass table. Prior to the launch, he’d been manipulating a three-dimensional map above a Granville sphere at the center of the table, working out their next move on the journey to the East. “Much as I hate this man,” Murray continued, “it might be he’ll discover a new planet for us all, where we could live on the surface again and start over.”

Start over.
Connor liked that idea. Start over with his family intact, on a planet where he didn’t have to hide and run and have nightmares, where he could link to the ZPF and not fear his connection would attract a tenehound. He felt the back of his scalp where the stubble grew and pressed his fingers across the healed skin where the medical bot had removed his neurochip. It itched now more than it had at first, many days ago when he’d awoken up in Portage Citadel. He and Murray had feasted that morning on grilled polenta topped with spinach, poached eggs, and hollandaise sauce, Jurinarian potato pancakes with Haurachesan salmon and mascarpone-chive cream, wild mushrooms, taleggio, and truffle butter. Connor could hardly move afterward. After breakfast, Murray had offered Connor some fluid from an eyedropper, called Vitamin T, that he said would help mask any residual scents, genetic or other, from the tenehounds. He’d let Murray dab one drop into each of his eyes. The liquid had burned, then cooled, then burned again. Occasionally, it still itched, too.

“Don’t scratch,” Murray said, swatting at Connor’s hand.

The two Beimeni Polemon were dressed as father and son in tanned, hooded capes. Beneath the capes, they wore bodysuits to hide their animated tattoos projected by synisms in their skin cells.

Connor had lost much of his muscle to the journey. He doubted he could still lift sharks on the fishermen’s Block, a thought that made him angry. “Why do you hate the People’s Captain?”

Murray deactivated then reactivated the Granville sphere. Above it, he rendered images of a sullied infirmary in Jurinar Territory, a mass grave in Lovereal, a Janzer strike in Yeuron, a Janzer search in Nexirenna, another Janzer strike in Cineris, Janzers lined behind Lady Isabelle, her diamond sword in hand, a cape covered with a phoenix fluttering around her. “This is what the People’s Captain condones. It’s what he serves—”