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

*Candidates who do not receive a bid at the Harpoon Auction are sent to the Lower Level.

**As of 367 AR, 180,776,206 candidates have been sent to the Lower Level since the inception of the Harpoon Auction in 186 AR.

***Data from 368 AR to 400 AR is estimated.

Source: Department of Communications and Commonwealth Relations.

Solar System’s Population

*Years based on a combination of the Gregorian and Livellan calendars.

**Data from 368 AR to 370 AR is estimated.

Source: Campanian Consortium.

Solar System’s Population: Before and After Reassortment

*Years based on the Livellan calendar.

**Data from 368 AR to 370 AR is estimated.

Source: Campanian Consortium.

Solar System’s Population: After Reassortment

*Years based on the Livellan calendar.

**Data from 368 AR to 370 AR is estimated.

Source: Campanian Consortium.

For clearer versions of the maps, settings, and charts, please visit:
http://www.raedenzen.com/

Research & Development Department (RDD)

Palaestra, Underground Northeast

2,500 meters deep

Brody sat alone in an RDD transport after the Jubilee, encircled by the illusion of cumulus clouds, dark violet skies, and barren hills. The transport whisked through the maglev tunnel, and at a sharp turn his head knocked against the alloy latch that secured him to his seat. On impact he shut his eyes, and Johann of Piscator appeared. He relived the Jubilee, Johann’s wraith body, the twenty-two Reassortment research scientists who perished, their screams, the Jubilee in the Valley of Masimovian, the crowd’s song and their chants of “Magnificent Masimo!” and “Serve Beimeni, live forever!”

When were Johann’s dreams shattered? Why did he step forward? Did he truly volunteer?

After decades of research, sleep deprivation, and battles with the board and chancellor, the RDD scientists, and the Reassortment Strain, all Brody could cite for conversion were twelve consecutive minutes of survival on the surface. Johann’s run prior to his death was a record for a transhuman trial, to be sure, but utterly useless for
Homo transition
in the Age of Masimovian. Would he ever be able to request a conclave with the board? Would he ever achieve significant conversion, the highest level of scientific discovery, and earn the Mark of Masimovian?

Would he ever lead the people to the surface of the Earth?

Brody activated his recaller. This technology shielded his mind from the eye in the sky, Marstone, which could hear the thoughts, words, and dreams of every citizen. Or so Brody hoped. Having gotten his on the black market, he couldn’t be sure how well it worked. He cleared his head of traitorous impulses, just to be safe. But they had a way of returning.

We should not be at another Jubilee,
Damy had told him. His eternal partner was as wise as Brody was stubborn, he realized, wishing now that he’d done more to understand why so many volunteers in recent years had stepped forward to test their bodies against Reassortment. Was this a form of assisted suicide, or was it something sinister?

Serve Beimeni
, Brody told himself,
live forever
. And what did he serve? A commonwealth that called him the People’s Captain, and a chancellor who provided him more mercy than any RDD scientist in history, or did he serve nothing and no one?

Outside the RDD’s Huelel Facility, Brody breathed the vanilla air and let the artificial wind disperse Johann’s Jubilee and other visions and thoughts Marstone might deem unworthy. Nero and Verena stood not far away, his long-serving striker and strategist. They seemed deep in argument, the result of the failed Jubilee, Brody assumed, for Nero’s sense of humor often arose at the worst of times.

“… don’t,” Verena was saying, “you can’t be this insipid.” Her long hair shook from side to side. She spun around when Nero escaped her orbit to approach Brody. The men hugged. Verena sighed, and the redness drained from her face.

Brody knew they’d quarreled after the last three failed Jubilees as well.

The stress of failure is tearing them apart
, he thought. He was determined to bring them back together, to keep their hold over the Reassortment project and lead the people back to the Earth’s surface. He would keep trying. One day, he would succeed.

“So good to see you, Captain.” Verena bowed slightly, courteously, though Brody wondered what ideas she hid beneath.

He
could
find out, if he truly wanted, but he refused to overextend his telepathy. He had given in to temptation, if briefly, during the last supreme scientific board meeting—the one where Chancellor Masimovian all but decreed the commonwealth would proceed with a Jubilee—allowing the board’s thoughts to float into his mind. Yet he still hadn’t forcefully and maliciously intruded on anyone else’s consciousness since his former shadow and neophyte Antosha Zereoue lost himself to the quantum universe, and was exiled to the Lower Level for his crimes, fifteen years ago.

“Ready?” Brody said.

They nodded and headed up to the Huelel Facility, the slanted, rectangular palace with interwoven alloy and carbyne rods. Red marble stairs with low, jagged walls spiraled and slunk up to a deck two hundred meters off the ground. The way up the Staircase to Heaven, Brody knew, was as erratic as the mind of Supreme Scientist Heywood Querice, the scientist who led the facility’s missions.

Verena and Nero moved apart, he distracted by the distant galaxies to the south with their plumes of green, violet, and yellow gases, she focused on the ascent.

They’d received recall messages that afternoon, pulling them off Reassortment for a strike team assignment. It came from the chancellor after they’d undergone quarantine procedures in Area 55—after Johann of Piscator and the twenty-two scientists had perished. Brody, who was traveling back to Beimeni City, to Damy, replied through Marstone:
Today’s clinical trial represented progress, a doubling in the survival time from the last Jubilee. I know my team is close to finding the solution to the Reassortment enigma, and so to force us to lead at great distance, even temporarily, will not serve the people—

You’re a strike team captain, but also a supreme scientist in the Great Commonwealth, Broden Barão,
Chancellor Masimovian replied.
I shouldn’t have to ask you twice.

Brody didn’t respond, for he knew Masimovian was right.
Fidelity and honor. Loyalty and protection.
These were the axioms of the legacy strike teams that protected humanity from Reassortment breaches and bedrock collapses before the commonwealth and its thirty territories existed, long before Chancellor Masimovian shifted this role to the Janzers. Brody would not revive the old wars, splintering the teams and the commonwealth.

He would not refuse the supreme chancellor of the thirty territories.

He’d connected to Verena and Nero and learned they also received the recall message from the Office of the Chancellor. They all agreed that a summons to the Huelel Facility meant the chancellor desired their participation in a commonwealth mission, which, depending on its location in the solar system, could take them from the Reassortment Research Center for years. If so, they’d name a custodian for the Reassortment project, someone trustworthy and capable. Damy was Brody’s obvious choice, though he knew she was least likely to accept, unless he could convince her to give more responsibility for her own assignment, Project Silkscape, to a lead researcher, her best being Vernon Lebrizzi, whom she despised.

The burnished red steps went on and on. Brody turned to Nero. “Any idea where they’ll send us?”

“Mars,” Nero said, the striker’s voice as sure as his stride. He looked away from the illusory sky and added, “Back to Candor Chasma.”

Candor Chasma was home to Central Command, Beimeni’s largest extraterrestrial research site in the solar system. With the ansible there, a skilled telepath could communicate across the cosmos as quickly as he could across the Earth. Brody had been working there when Antosha Zereoue picked up signals from the large exoplanet Vigna, discovered by Supreme Scientist Heywood Querice, in a distant quadrant of the Carina-Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way. (Heywood had named it Vigna because he hypothesized it harbored plant life and because it was part of a triple star system, analogous to
Vigna
herbs, which contain three leaflets.)

Antosha believed the signals indicated another advanced life form existed. He’d named the alien source of the signals the Lorum and concluded they didn’t use an ansible, but rather communicated through the zeropoint field (ZPF)—the quantum field that developed Beimenians accessed through their mind-body-cosmos interface—in a manner transhumans didn’t understand. Vigna was believed to have a magnetic field, which around the Earth disrupted the ansible’s transmissions and had forced the commonwealth to move theirs to Mars.

Antosha became obsessed with the Lorum, studying their signals, their use of the ZPF, and all its implications, though he never cracked their language, as far as Brody knew. In the end he grew desperate and abused the ZPF, ruining minds, people, families, all in the name of his research. After Antosha’s exile to the Lower Level, Brody vowed never to again deploy to Candor Chasma or have anything to do with the Lorum.

Brody shivered. “The chancellor wouldn’t—”

“Send us as far from the RDD as possible?” Verena said, “After
another
Jubilee failure, this one with our highest loss rate? Gods help us, Captain, twenty-two scientists …” The strategist held her stomach and looked as if she was reliving the carnage on the surface. She’d begged Brody to evacuate. Implored him to save as many scientists as he could after it had become clear they couldn’t save Johann of Piscator.

He’d refused to leave until the very end.

She turned to Brody, finding her voice. “Don’t you think he would?”

“I would think he’d prefer us to focus on improving the synbio Reassortment treatments.”

“It’s yet another sign that the strike teams have lost any resemblance of independence.” Brody heard this from his strategist often, even as he’d asked her many times to drop it. “If you let the chancellor act on this without the ministry’s approval,” Verena added, “the teams will never forgive you.”

“The politics don’t favor us,” Brody said, “and even if what you suggest is true, we don’t know yet what the chancellor seeks.”

“The teams—”

“Will understand—”

“—will think you’ve abandoned them.”

Verena’s words cut Brody in a way Reassortment could not. He squeezed his forearm, near the black and gold animated tattoo of a captain, strategist, aera, and striker holding hands, looking down upon the historic Livelle city-state. Aeras were female strikers, so named for the first woman to complete the striker training program over one hundred fifty years ago. She died before Brody was born, he was told, while the Livelle city-state was once the center of humanity, with the teams acting as independent protectors of the people of the underground.