The Gambit with Perfection (The Phantom of the Earth Book 2) (13 page)

“I don’t think he knows,” Connor said. “I met him once, on the Block.” Connor envisioned the scene. Captain Barão had seemed so grand, so kind, so perceptive with the way he moved, the softness to his voice, his genuine interest in Piscatorian issues. “He shook my hand that day. He told us how important our role was in the commonwealth, our supply of fish for the transhuman diet and all, how he hoped one day to lead us to the surface where we’d be free to explore the
true
shores—”

“You believed him?”

Connor had, though the fury in Murray’s voice checked him. He’d never heard or seen Murray this way
,
not even in Ypresia Village, where the Janzers had first captured them, or in the Valley of Masimovian when the tenehounds gave chase. It struck him that Murray had missed his shift on the Block the day Captain Barão visited.

“I want to see the true shores,” Connor said. “I want to emerge on the surface in the Gulf of Yeuron. I want to walk over the shores, the beach, and wiggle my toes in the true sands and catch fish the way men did Before Reassortment, in ships with sails that touch the true sky.”

“I dreamed like you do when I was an adolescent.” The hologram of Cineris City disappeared, replaced by the Island of Reverie. Murray rolled his hands forward as if he presented a great and horrid show. “Captain Barão’s latest
cure
failed to keep Reassortment from ripping your brother’s neurons apart. The organism ate his nervous system and altered the part of the brain that regulates pain and sent signals through his body no living transhuman has ever known.”

Connor didn’t know what to say. He knew he should hate Captain Barão as much as he did Lady Isabelle and her Janzers. The Janzers had killed his mother during a surgical strike when Connor was less than a true year old on direct orders from Isabelle, and Isabelle herself had captured his brother Hans. If she’d just left his family alone, Solstice and Hans would be alive, his father wouldn’t be held prisoner, and his eldest brother, Zorian, wouldn’t be estranged.

Connor just didn’t equate the captain with the commonwealth. He
did
despise Portagens, though, and Captain Barão was native to Portage.

“If the captain’s truly as vile as you say, why was he so kind with us in the South?” Connor asked.

“Words are only as true as the actions that follow them, Connor. The captain’s ambition is the reason your father and I lost our Palaestran citizenship. He’s the reason the commonwealth wants you dead.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“You deserve the truth, for once.”

Yes, I do
, Connor thought, and when his developer sat silent, he prodded. “Murray?”

“Your father wooed Captain Barão into joining his Reassortment research team. Jeremiah called him brilliant, imaginative, and diligent. It was none of these traits that forced his hand. It was politics.”

“Explain.”

“The strike teams were noble protectors of transhumans before the commonwealth existed, independent of the central government in the Livelle city-state and the scattered populace in the surrounding Underground Realm. They wore specialized, synthetic suits that protected them from the Earth’s heat and pressure, and the Reassortment bane. They responded to Reassortment breaches and structural collapses. Sometimes the suits failed, and they would die of Reassortment exposure, screaming louder than the gods, if the historians are to be believed. Before Atticus Masimovian rose to the chancellorship, humanity dwelled at depths near three hundred meters, but still the Reassortment scares continued. The strain seeped through the Earth’s bedrock. As a powerful minister, Masimovian forced the people as deep as the transhuman genome and technology then permitted, down to two thousand to two thousand five hundred meters inside the Earth.”

“Has there been a Reassortment scare since then?”

“No.”

“What does this have to do with the teams, and Captain Barão, and my father?”

“The chancellor didn’t trust the teams. He accelerated the creation of a new guard, one that would respond to his commands—”

“The Janzers.”

Murray nodded. “And Vastar Alalia, the strike team commander, didn’t want a war with the commonwealth. As Masimovian’s power grew, and the commonwealth’s territory expanded, Vastar ceded more and more control over the teams to the commonwealth, until his death in the year 273.”

“How did the commander die?”

“Chief Justice Carmen ruled it an accident, a biomat failure during a surface excursion.”

“You don’t sound like you believe it.”

“Do you?”

Connor didn’t know what to believe anymore. “Why didn’t the chancellor eliminate the teams after Vastar’s death?”

“Atticus Masimovian has controlled humanity inside a phantom Earth for two hundred years. For very good reason: he understands the importance of advancement, but also of traditions, and the teams held sway with the people. And the teams loved Broden Barão from the day Vastar named him a strike team captain.” Murray swiped his unshaved face. “The way you do.”

Connor chewed his lip but didn’t respond. He turned toward the imagery of the Valley of Masimovian in Beimeni City, where the crowd cheered the ascent of the
Cassiopeia
through the silo.

Murray deactivated the panel. He rendered into view a meeting with Father and the Barão Strike Team in Palaestra Citadel, full of marble and onyx statues and light and life. The illusion surrounded them. Captain Barão, Strategist Iglehart, and Striker Silvana shook Father’s hand, one after another. “Your father’s recruitment of Captain Barão and his strike team after Vastar’s death was meant to align the teams with the commonwealth forever.” The meeting in Palaestra disappeared.

“Captain Barão betrayed your father.” Murray paused. “He turned Jeremiah in to Lady Isabelle and took over the Reassortment project.” Connor twisted his face, breathing hard. Murray leaned closer to him. “Captain Barão banished the legacy Reassortment research team from Underground Northeast, including me.”

Connor let his arm sag against the table. This was a lot to take in. Father the supreme scientist for Reassortment? Betrayed by Captain Barão? How could it be? But why would Murray lie? Connor wasn’t sure he wanted to know the truth anymore. He just wanted to go home and life to be as it had been on the Shore, the Block, and the Gulf of Yeuron with his submarine and Hans and Arturo, his foster father.

“What do we do now?” Connor heard himself say.

“Events have moved beyond our control in Underground West and South. Lady Isabelle is destroying the Front.” Murray unsheathed a diamond dagger and tested its edge, sharp enough to make his forefinger bleed. “We will need a skilled telepath on the
inside—
”

BOOM!

The hall’s mantle-stone walls burst apart, shaking the ground beneath their feet, shattering the glass table, sending them airborne.

Owoooo, owoooo, owoooooooooo.

Tenehounds
, Connor thought. He coughed and pushed his hands beneath him, the rough garnet ground cold to the touch. He turned. Through the main hall’s broken stone wall appeared the shadow of a man, flanked by tenehounds.

The smoke cleared and revealed Lieutenant Arnao. His chameleon fatigues changed shades to match the surroundings.

Murray, on his hands and knees, grimaced and coughed. “Get out of here!” he said. Connor hesitated. “Don’t look back!”

Owoooo, owoooo, owoooooooooo.

Connor fled, his head low, rushing upstairs, past the house’s coolant falls.

Up and around, up and around, up and around, the stairs coiled to a skywalk at the house’s highest point.

Connor stepped out. The Granville stars and moon showed his way, but he dared not look down, so far down, to where he could hear tenehounds and Janzers searching, people screaming, sights and sounds that reminded Connor of Ypresia Village on the day Lady Isabelle found them. He recalled Minister Kaspasparon’s words:
Have no doubt, she will hunt you.
Could she be here along with her lieutenant? No, for he’d seen her on the panel at the launch celebration. Or had he?

Connor dashed along the garnet skywalks in the village proper, where Opeans traveled during morning rush hour to the transport station, bound for one of the cities.

He weaved through a colorful sea of lab coats, tunics, capes, and bodysuits, keeping his gaze lowered, out to the village exterior, where it was all vines and bushes.

He pushed through the undergrowth, sought a way through the labyrinth of stone. If he could make it past the north cliffs, the wharf, and finally the bridges across the river, there was a trench he might reach in time, leading to the Polemon passageways.

The sun began to rise behind him. He was traveling west, not north. He turned right and continued through the bramble, but a tenehound pounced in front of him, its sapphire, gray, and ultramarine fur raised over its back, its eyes like smoldering coals.

It raised its nose and howled, as loud and terrifying as he remembered.
No more tears
, he thought,
no more hiding
.

He grabbed a stone and flung it at the hound, then dashed through the vines to his left and took the skywalk to his right, northbound through a village building to the cliffs. The tenehound followed. Connor climbed the vines to the next level. The hound appeared below and jumped. It soared up and bit at his heels, but he managed to swing off to the side. He climbed faster. The hound sat and howled its dismay. When Connor reached the top, he ran toward the Archimedes. He could smell the river and the oak wood in the wharf below. He turned south. House Tremadoci’s garnet dome belched fire and smoke. Here and there shot spotlights, maroon and white.

He climbed along a mossy ledge and onto a cobblestone walk that arced toward scores of bridges leading over the river, layered at various heights. Janzers awaited on the river’s far shore and in gunboats below. He saw a tenehound at the entrance to one bridge, then another, then another. The bridge closest to him appeared empty.

“
HALT, TRAITOR,
” a Janzer shouted over loudspeakers.

He’d been spotted.

Connor dashed over the bridge. Midway across, he looked down. Water rippled from the Janzer gunboats, and with the mixture of moonlight and sunlight at the end of night, it seemed like a portal to another land, not a river at all. On either side of him, green mantle-stone bridges reflected the rising sun.

Janzers and hounds neared on either end of the bridge.

He jumped off the side. Darkness and bubbles consumed him. Gunboats passed over, or were they fish? He kicked off his shoes and swam underwater until he couldn’t any longer, gulped a breath, and descended again down into the warm, murky river.

Gunboats circled still, and spotlights dotted the river close behind. He’d managed to get just downstream.

The hounds jumped in.

Connor found an outlet, a curved cave he hoped the hounds and Janzers couldn’t see. He curled as far back against the mossy wall as he could. He shivered, and his heart pounded. He was so thirsty.

A gunboat cruised nearby. He pressed himself farther back, slipped, and rolled down a muddy slope. When he looked up, he saw a beam of sunlight in the entrance above. Darkness lay beyond him.

He checked his pocket for Hans’s z-disk, which held information that could lead the BP to his father, Jeremiah Selendia. He instead found the Granville sphere Hans had given him last year—the one that could project his mother’s hologram. He held it in front of him. He wished he could activate it. He pushed his other hand down into several pockets in his bodysuit until he felt the small case in which Minister Kaspasparon had secured the z-disk. He smiled and exhaled.

Connor heard tenehounds howl and turned up toward the opening in the cave. Shadows flitted across the sunlight.

Quickly, he secured his mother’s sphere in his bodysuit, then moved over the stone, step by step, until he couldn’t see his arms and legs. He kept on, bumping and scraping against outcroppings. The mantle rock took many patches of his skin, no matter how much care he took. Exhaustion was creeping up on him, but fear was stronger. He kept walking. He didn’t know how long he’d been treading through the cave when he saw a shard of sunlight break through, revealing a tangle of moss and earth.

He crawled toward it but fell asleep before he reached it.

When he awoke, he didn’t know what had happened or why he lay over warm stone. His mouth was so dry. He reached for the patch of light that slit into the cave and pulled away a handful of waterlogged rock. Then he remembered. He searched his pockets until he found the z-disk and his sphere. He exhaled. He sat up and pried a chunk of stone from the wall, as soft as clay in this part of the cavern. Soon he’d made an opening wide enough to see through.

The cave let out onto the wide Archimedes River. Water slipped gently against the wharf on the far side, where ships docked and traders set up tents for a bazaar. He looked out and saw pillars, domes, bridges, skywalks, seagulls, and the river filled with cargo ships and rafts, blue and green bioluminescence at its banks.

Connor picked up a chunk of moss and brought it to his nose. It smelled like the sea. He cupped some water at the cave’s base and sipped it. The taste was mineral-like, but it would have to do. Now he heard rhythmic sounds, a guitar, and a man singing.

A hallucination?
Connor pondered.

The song ended, and Connor heard, “Must be hot in there, no?”

He scrabbled away from the opening and pushed his back against the clay. He waited for the howl of tenehounds, hardly daring to breathe. Nothing happened. He waited some more. Finally, he peeked out. A man sat upon a wooden catamaran, adrift. He wore beads in his hair. The look of his stubble beard and the way he set his hand on his knee reminded Connor of Hans.

The man had anchored his catamaran, judging by the bits of moss and lichen that passed around him with the downstream current. The green sail fluttered in the artificial winds, but the catamaran persisted in its position. Benari coins flew from a passing boat into a gigantic fedora secured to the cross plank. Some coins splashed into the river, but the man would telekinetically retrieve them. When another ship passed into view, Connor could’ve sworn the man winked at him. Then he started a new song.