The Gambit with Perfection (The Phantom of the Earth Book 2) (24 page)

“Conduct a structural diagnostic,” Isabelle said.

“Clear,” Arnao replied.

She and Arnao led two divisions of Janzers and tenehounds into the newly hollowed tunnel. It was as dark as smoke here without the Granville sky illusion, though not as hot as it should have been without proper coolant systems.

Silver targeting lasers shot from the Janzers’ and tenehounds’ eyes, crisscrossing in the darkness.

They passed beneath an archway, clearly an entrance of some kind.
At last
, Isabelle thought,
Blackeye Cavern
.

She had Zorian to thank for finding it, whether he realized it or not, for in her follow-up interrogations with him, she’d set her tenehounds on him, then rummaged through his brain impulses in the ZPF. He hadn’t developed the resistance to her methods that his father had, thank the gods. She found his thoughts dwelled on his family, while his consciousness was filled with the banned emotions, envy and jealousy and hatred, and the worst of all, depression. This was enough to send him to the Lower Level, or the surface, but unlike Hans, who’d garnered the BP’s respect, Zorian, it seemed, was more of a pariah. Her interrogations of other BP spies confirmed this. She concluded that to kill Zorian publicly or privately wouldn’t have the same psychological impact as killing Hans did. No, instead she searched deeper, deeper, until she found the brain impulses tied to a secret location, one with its entrance in Navita.

Now the tenehounds howled and thrashed their heads and jaws, as if attacking a terrorist.

Isabelle sprinted to them and shifted to infrared vision.

She thought she spied movement but found nothing. Granville spheres lined the walls. Were the visions illusions? Or were they Polemon?

Isabelle deactivated the nearest spheres and ordered her Janzers to handle the others.

Kill them all,
she sent to the tenehounds,
save only Cornelius for me.
They took off through two corridors.

Isabelle turned. She drew her pulse gun. The images forming in her vision looked like Polemon. She shifted to standard vision. Not Polemon, she realized, but synthetic glowworms slithering over the pillars and walls, programmed in a manner meant to deceive. Isabelle moved from one direction to the next, searching. The surrounding arches were etched with intricate carvings, the ramps strategically placed to enable easy escape.

The tenehounds and Janzers rotated in elliptical attack formations, as they were trained to do. They weaved around pillars, into and out of the exits and entrances.

I have movement in the northeast corridor,
Arnao sent.

Be mindful of their tricks,
Isabelle replied.

She summoned the Janzers. Hundreds, then thousands poured into the labyrinth with her as she descended.

Everywhere they went, all the walls and arches and stairs and ladders looked the same, and nowhere did they find the Beimeni Polemon. Had the BP been informed? She would send Minister Orosiris to the Lower Level if his interrogation proved it so.

A breeze struck her now, icy when it should’ve been hotter than the Earth’s deserts here. She followed the draft, pushing through the darkness, switching between infrared and night vision.

She fell through a false floor, twisting and turning on a smooth garnet slide until she smashed into the ground.

It was freezing cold. Her chest rose and fell in quick bursts, her breath releasing in clouds in the green hue of her night vision.

She heard a
hiss
emanating nearby and felt along the icy stone until she found what she could only assume was a pipe.

Gas,
she thought,
they’re pumping gas.

That accounted for the freezing atmosphere, potentially.

She connected to the ZPF and found Arnao. He’d fallen as well, separated from the Janzers and tenehounds that were also falling through the underground, all around her.

We’re ants in the farm
, she thought,
and there’s no way out.

She couldn’t climb, not without the proper gear. She wasn’t prepared for this.

A thought struck her, harder than a comet—she could fail.

She’d never failed, not in the Harpoons, not as a Maiden of Masimovian, not as Lady of the First Ward or Master of the Harpoons, and certainly not as Supreme Director of the Department of Communications and Commonwealth Relations.

I must endure for the people of Beimeni
, she thought.
I must save them from the Polemon menace
. She willed herself forward through the garnet tunnel, grasping at the cold, jagged walls.

Golden glowworms spread light into an open underground cavern. For certain, the terrorists had camouflaged this fortress well.

She searched the ZPF for her army. They were nowhere nearby. She rushed through another tunnel, frozen, feeling her breath catch in her throat, seeing it puff in bulbous clouds from her mouth. She wished she’d worn a synsuit, but she’d never needed one before.

Isabelle sprinted now, faster than she had even during her own Harpoon Exams. She turned left, then right up a ramp to another cavern, one that looked too similar to a place she’d previously entered.

She was trapped.

She put her hands on her knees. It wouldn’t end this way, it couldn’t. She would lead the people to the surface with Antosha at her side, and the people would chant her name.

She extended her consciousness, connected to her army, and used algorithms to determine viable options through the maze.

Isabelle couldn’t have said how far she traveled, turning left or right, climbing ladders, sliding down ramps, running from tunnel to tunnel. But finally, the cold dissipated, and her fear with it.

She found a Janzer division, which included a Blue. She requested another display of the underground from him. The labyrinth formed in her extended consciousness, a beehive of rooms above. Below, a message appeared, as transparent as polished glass, spelling the words built into hollowed sections of the earth, rooms shaped like letters.

Isabelle’s simmering rage rose to a boil. She sensed trepidation in the ZPF from the Janzers and tenehounds. She reached again for signs of any Polemon. Except for herself, Lieutenant Arnao, and the Janzers, she sensed no transhuman presence in these caverns.

A distant echo of screams and howls brought her up short. The sounds approached, getting louder. The Janzers and tenehounds were running, but from what?

Muddy water reached her feet, then her ankles.
A flood!

Even as the current swept her up and she struggled to keep her head above the thick, flowing mud, Isabelle understood. This was to be her retribution from the BP. She would drown, the same way she’d killed the terrorists below Haurachesa Territory, all those years ago.

The pressure from the current, pushed by the gas, shot her up through a garnet tunnel into what she could only fathom was a limestone pipe or a cutout in the labyrinthine fortress. Her cape ripped away from her shoulders.

She’d traveled so far and so fast. She prepared for her death, upon impact—

Boom!

Isabelle burst through the softened limestone wall and flew through the air in a geyser of stone, blood, and mud, one geyser among hundreds, rising, falling, like the spouts in the Athanasia Pool.

She splashed into the river.

She lifted herself out of the water, gasping, whipping her hair, which stuck to her face and neck, swiped the strands from her mouth, and splashed the muck from her eyes. She swam closer to the riverbank until she could stand, caught her breath, turned, and looked back. Tenehounds and Janzers were flying in spurts of muddy, bloody water from holes in the limestone all around her into the Archimedes. Not all stirred as she did. She wondered how many had drowned below.

On the river, shipping barges sent waves to the shore, and from somewhere nearby, hidden between the ships perhaps, came the faint sounds of a singer stroking the chords of his guitar.

Lieutenant Arnao catapulted from the wall, a shadow in the moonlight, and splashed into the river.

Lady Isabelle screamed.

She punched through the water and lifted herself ashore.

She tried to reach Antosha but could not.

She reached out to Atticus.
I have bad news
,
she sent.

His voice came back through Marstone.
So do I. An explosion on the Infernus Sea sank Antosha’s vessel during his crossing
.

Isabelle severed the link and collapsed into the Archimedes, hoping the river would hide her tears.

Research & Development Department (RDD)

Palaestra, Underground Northeast

2,500 meters deep

Damy and Verne arrived at the Nicola Facility’s first Janzer checkpoint and were waved through. “We could delay the
Deinotherium
’s birth until after Brody returns,” he said.

“Heywood’s calculations suggested he should have
already
returned,” Damy said. “We cannot delay any longer. After all these years, we don’t have unique prehistoric fauna or flora in the menagerie.” Life took time to synthesize, time she and her team didn’t have. And if they couldn’t speed up the gestation and oviparous processes, it could take another decade to produce all the species they required. Verne knew this as well as she did. “Why can’t you see the urgency?”

“I do see it.” Verne stopped walking, and Damy stopped with him. He reached for her hand, but she stepped backward. “I also see something else.”

My gods,
Damy thought,
does he know? Does everyone know I’m pregnant?

She clumped her hair in a fist.

Verne lowered his voice. “You’ve been pushing yourself too hard.”

Damy exhaled. “No, Vernon, Brody would want me to bring the beautiful beast back to the Earth, and he’d want me to work harder—”

“He’d want you to stay healthy.”

Yesterday evening at Phanes Hall, she had fainted during a Haydn duet. She didn’t know why she’d invited Verne to the show, or why he’d agreed to go. She’d seen it a thousand times, but last night had been different; she’d felt so hot in the hall, as if she were on fire. She’d used that as her excuse, but somehow Verne seemed to know she lied. She’d been so hungry lately, eating fistfuls of food, but yesterday she found she couldn’t eat at all. And though she hadn’t slept well since Brody departed, the last two nights she couldn’t sleep at all.
For my unborn child, I must not fail,
Damy thought.
I must complete Project Silkscape.

“The Barão Strike Team could’ve been back thirteen days ago. How many more days, or trimesters, or years might pass until they return?”

“You can’t lose hope.” Verne pointed to the Granville panels on the far wall inside the Nicola Facility.

Damy turned to it, longing to see the shuttle burst back into existence in the void at Lagrange point one.

“Until we receive an update from Supreme Scientist Querice,” Verne continued, “hope remains for a successful mission and the Barão Strike Team’s return. That’s all that matters.”

Damy nodded, thinking,
All that matters is my baby’s safety.
She would take better care, if not for herself, then for her unborn child.

They arrived at the last Janzer checkpoint. The Janzers cleared them for entry to the facility’s front end, where research was conducted without biomats.

“How many stillbirths have there been?” Damy said.

“Synconvert performs as expected—”

“Tell me, Vernon.”

“Twenty-eight, and though the twenty-ninth drew breath, it perished after only six minutes.”

“Then either synconvert
isn’t
performing, or the team isn’t.” Damy wouldn’t work on synthesizing extinct species’ DNA today. Today, she would handle the birth herself with her most talented lead researcher at her side, and she would not fail.

They moved over the base level where an abstract mural, a blob of colorful fishlike shapes, layered the ground. Damy telepathically activated the elevator. The levels changed every ten, from CHEMISTRY 01–10 to GEOSCIENCE 11–20 to ARCHEOLOGY 21–30 to ANTHROPOLOGY 31–40 to ZOOLOGY 41–50 to BOTANY 51–60 to PALEONTOLOGY 61–70. Her team of scientists, dressed in colorless lab coats, were scattered about at workstations spread on every level of the cylindrical facility.

She and Verne arrived at the top, Damy’s level. Many scientists turned their heads when Damy and Verne passed. At her workstation, larger than the rest, Damy activated Granville spheres on all the levels.

Her likeness appeared before her team.
Verne and I will now fertilize an Asian elephant egg in the synwomb,
she transmitted.

She telepathically shifted the view to the facility’s back end, where research bots prepared biomats and genetic materials according to RDD protocol.

Six bots arrived at Damy’s workstation, and with them, she and Verne sauntered to an arched entryway labeled FERTILIZATION CENTER.

Damy removed her lab coat and looked down. Her bodysuit hugged her contours. She hoped she looked a bit bloated today, rather than pregnant.

Verne troubled to undo his suspenders. Damy helped him, and when he too stood in his bodysuit, bots fitted them into their biomats; safety in such live experiments was Damy’s first priority, for all Beimenians understood the dangers of contamination breaches from synisms.

The bots cleared the entryway into the center. On the other side of a graphene containment vessel, upon an elevated turf-covered slab—which would make it easier for the baby beast to stand—micromanipulators and robotic arms surrounded the synwomb, a dark pink sack. Inside, Damy would bring the
Deinotherium
back to the Earth, the same as her team had done with Neanderthal Man, but in a fraction of the time.

“Bring up the Asian elephant genome.” These elephants were phylogenetically close enough to the
Deinotherium
.

The first iteration formed. She examined the genome.