The Restoration of Flaws (The Phantom of the Earth Book 5) (28 page)

Orange lights and ramps awaited on the far side. Oriana darted over the first one and hopped over the copper wall, climbing upward.

She rushed up the ramps and sprinted through another corridor, this one with smooth walls and an unfinished floor. She slowed, overcome with thirst and hunger, and requested sustenance from her synsuit. The needles penetrated her wrists. Cool liquids streamed up her arms.

She arrived at Aquatics.

A wall composed of an unknown alloy, indigestible for crushers, blocked her entrance to the crystalline archway. Oriana spied a card slot with a retinal reader beside an outline for a human hand. She adjusted her synsuit’s genetic signature to match Shrader’s and put her gloved hand in the void, her helmet near the reader.

“
Welcome, Dr. Shrader
,” a voice said.

The doorway opened.

Silver and sapphire light flooded the corridor.

My gods
, she thought,
it’s bigger than the Hexagon.

She stood before an underground sea, dark and murky, with a beachhead of creamy, velvety sand. The nearby walls consisted of an endless slab of polished quartzite, lined with screens, like Granville panels but not as large. Oriana peered to the horizon. She wondered how they could rotate something so massive. She extended her consciousness, entered Locust, and accessed the map. Aquatics
was
the labyrinth’s center of mass, meaning everything else, the ramps, the tunnels, the facilities, all rotated around it.

She shifted the map and located Triple Drop Cave. She would need to cross through Aquatics and traverse several sets of ramps and corridors on the other side.

Oriana waded cautiously into the water, pushed it around with her boot, and requested a diagnostic from her synsuit. She viewed the composition in her extended consciousness—chloride, sodium, sulfate, magnesium, calcium, potassium, bicarbonate, bromide, borate, strontium, fluoride, and dihydrogen oxide: poisonous salt water. It could kill an exposed transhuman.

She submerged chest deep and was about to push off when something wrapped around her leg, a feeler, a grasp not unlike what she had encountered on Ceres during the Harpoons.

It pulled her under.

She struggled, her body swarmed by alloy feelers that tugged and pushed with sharpened edges. Their failure to rip her apart didn’t deter them. They pulled her down into the abyss. Streaks of alloy and red lights passed by her like meteors.

The sapphire and silver light disappeared from her view above, replaced by red phosphorescence from the feelers below.

She couldn’t kick or swing, but a sensation around her, a charge within the ZPF, suggested the feelers were electrically powered. She requested an electromagnetic pulse from her synsuit.

The sea filled with light, and when it cleared, the red lights flickered and disappeared.

Aquatic weapons sank all around her. They resembled living creatures much less now that they were still.

Oriana swam freestyle to the wall and climbed its jagged stone face. She analyzed it and this composition was consumable. She set the crushers and held her fist to the wall. They burrowed a tunnel, which she climbed through. Hopping down to a crescent-shaped cavern filled with five sets of ramps, she brought up the view of the crescent in her extended consciousness.

The layout had changed, again. Locust was working against her, as Heywood had assured them it would.

Less than ten minutes to detonation.

Oriana’s breath grew shallow. After all her effort, after surviving Shrader’s attack in the shuttle, the descent with Dr. Marshall, and the fight with the Eastern Hegemony’s infiltrator, would it would be this maze that ended her?

The Fifteenth Precept rowed through her mind:
A commonwealth mission is honorable. Beimenians who fail to uphold such missions are dishonorable.

She pushed aside her forbidden thoughts and emotions. Everything she wanted—clemency for her father, Nero, and Nathan, the leverage to force Antosha to awaken Pasha—was still in reach. This was just a puzzle, not so different from the Harpoons. The laboratory understood it was under attack. It knew she had the Reassortment data, so it wouldn’t end its adjustments until it believed she was no longer a threat.

I must continue with the mission, I must succeed,
she thought.

Oriana blocked access to her neurochip, the way she would to prevent Pasha from hearing her thoughts. She extended her consciousness and entered Locust and communicated as if she were Dr. Shrader.

Error 1062. Duplicate entry,
Locust replied.

Operation Preservation
, Oriana thought,
of course
. The doctor and his colleagues would be sequestered in Livelle Laboratory by now, frozen near absolute zero. She
had
returned to the year zero, rather than 2 BR, as she’d feared.

Less than eight minutes to detonation.

Oriana assumed the identity of Dr. Isaac Marshall.

The system gave her clearance to view the Metamorphosis Program, unencrypted.

She overrode the safeguards with algorithms designed to maintain the integrity of Hengill Laboratory. She proved to Locust that the Reassortment Strain’s synthesis wasn’t stolen, as it believed, which is what she thought was driving the adjustments inside the laboratory.

Now Oriana refigured the map and found Triple Drop Cave. She requested ramp alignment. The facility reconfigured around her, and she sprinted up the ramps, along a corridor, up another set of ramps, across another corridor, faster than she’d ever run, hundreds and thousands of meters.

Less than six minutes to detonation.

The yellow lighting turned ash gray. Ahead, she saw the shimmering hues of Triple Drop Cave. The other end seemed as far away as Ceres, with three pits before her. She reached the first drop.

There was no way to cross.

Oriana shifted from organic to infrared vision and settled finally on ultraviolet. She found the invisible bridge over the pit, which appeared bottomless, from what she could tell.

With a ballerina’s grace, she swept across the invisible bridge to the mossy limestone ledge that lined the second pit. Hundreds of alloy chains hung from the stone, but whatever platform they might have connected to wasn’t present. She lunged for the first and slipped to the bottom of the chain. She hung paralyzed for a moment, then steadied and pulled herself up.

She swung from one chain to the next, across the second drop.

A thin ledge stretched across the third pit, which was deeper and longer than the other two. She shifted to standard vision and tiptoed across. There were no handholds, but she breathed and balanced like it was a Harpoon exercise. Finally, she arrived at the stone cliffs that led to the exit.

Less than four minutes to detonation.

Bright rays streamed over her. She shielded her eyes.

The mission was supposed to conclude well prior to daybreak. She must have been in the lab longer than she thought. Oriana pressed her boots to the stones, ignoring the protestations of her tired legs, and made for the cave’s entrance.

The light from outside shifted. She looked up, spied a humanoid’s movement.
The infiltrator
, she thought, not daybreak.

The light shifted again. A silhouette emerged, then swirling colors, dark blue and gray camouflage, and finally the form of Dr. Shrader. The Lorum synsuit spun counterclockwise and clockwise over his scowling face. Had he been the Eastern Hegemony Infiltrator, all along?

The doctor smashed his forehead into hers. She fell back into the cave and tumbled down the incline into a pool of spring water.

Not the infiltrator
, she thought, for the doctor’s speed and power were nothing like the thing she’d encountered in the lab, or anywhere else.

She stood in the water.
Doctor! You’re not acting like yourself!
she sent.
I don’t know what Antosha did or said, but he’s deceived you.

“He showed me the failed Regenesis procedure. The rest I found on my own.” His voice, synthesized by the Lorum, sounded nothing like the educated man with blue-green eyes she’d met not long ago. “Your father—”

“Erred in his judgment,” she said.

“
Killed
Luella. And now you’ve taken her from me again! You will die, too, like all the rest.”

Oriana drew her diamond sword just in time to meet Shrader’s Lorum blade. She spun and kicked, kicked and swung, but the doctor parried her strikes. Oriana grounded herself and swung again, this time making contact with his skin, but her sword slid down it with a flash, like metal upon metal. His sword met her synsuit, rattling her bones. She fell and rolled in the spring.

She glanced at a readout that flashed in her extended consciousness. Less than two minutes to detonation.

On the doctor’s next thrust, she grabbed his wrist with her good arm and broke the Lorum blade out of his hand. It landed in the water and swirled up and around his leg.

She leapt up to the cliff and stones that led up to the exit, but Shrader grabbed her foot and pulled her back into the spring. She twisted and dodged his Lorum dagger, then dealt him a roundhouse kick. He blocked her, spun, and elbowed her helmet. Oriana crashed into the stone.

The doctor pressed his forearm against her neck.

“Luella’s gone,” he said.

Oriana couldn’t breathe, but she pushed against his forearm, even as she felt the life drain out of her.

“All you had to do was fall out of the shuttle, but you wouldn’t go, wouldn’t let me help the West achieve victory with the Reassortment Strain, wouldn’t leave me to my Luella! And now she’s
dead
… and now you’re dead.”

Oriana turned her attention inward. She searched in the ZPF for that place she’d accessed with Antosha when he kissed her, when he took her to Candor Chasma, and when he connected with Shrader, the part of the ZPF she’d accessed with Minister Furongielle. When she found the quantum waves and felt the energy flow through her, she wrapped the field around herself like a cape. She spun her consciousness around Dr. Shrader …

… And she now stood barefoot on a braided rope as wide as a Beimeni transport, dressed in a silk nightgown that matched her pajamas during development.

Was this her afterlife?

The rope bridge led to a castle. Its black stone towers sat atop a wide slab of limestone that floated in midair, twisting down into a cone below. Ravens circled overhead, near a crescent moon. A murky sea curdled far below. A bridge with arches extended over a sinuous river, far away from her and into the horizon. Red lightning danced among the clouds.

Oriana stepped forward. She felt a sense of urgency at remembering the bombs, but something told her time moved differently here. At the castle, the drawbridge lowered. Gusts of wind that smelled of death twisted her gown around her body. She crossed into a courtyard filled with the skeletal remains of transhumans, birds, foxes, and hounds. There were maggots, rats, ravens, a tree in the center, hollowed and dead, pulsating with electric blue lines. She gasped.

This was her nightmare.

Had she seen the future? She had no control here, no more than she had that day in her suite when her Granville panel created similar sights and smells.

Shrader appeared on the bridge’s far end, in the Lorum synsuit. “You have great courage bringing me here,” he said.

Oriana closed her eyes, raised her arms, and let her mind fill with energy from the ZPF.

Guide me
, she thought,
show me what’s necessary.

The doctor sprinted toward her.

She put up her hands and threw her head back. “Kole Shrader, you have no place here.” She clapped her palms together, and an invisible force sprang over the courtyard, like a seismic wave through the Earth. “I separate you from the Lorum.”

A gale-force wind rushed over her, this one smelling of mountains. “I prevent you from doing harm unto yourself or others.” Rain poured from the sky, and red lightning crashed around her. “I separate the Lorum from you and bind your mind forever.”

The clouds swirled and descended around the doctor, who guffawed in a manner more like Antosha’s than his own. A chasm opened between Oriana’s legs. She hopped to Shrader’s side.

How can I have so little control?
she wondered.
Is this not my own mind?

She concentrated. The clouds hardened around Shrader, but shards of silver phosphorescent light broke through the encasing and it burst. The doctor raised his arms and pulled in the light. The castle disappeared with the moon, and Oriana lay against the mossy stone, half in the water, half out, blood dripping from her nose.

Less than one minute to detonation.

Shrader stood in the spring, blended with its colors and the moss. He released signals, sounds similar to those he’d used in the shuttle when he had attacked her and Ruiner. High-pitched, piercing as it disrupted the waves in the ZPF. The world came and went, the pain in Oriana’s head as if Reassortment twisted in her brain.

She felt him reach into her mind and steal the synthesis of the Reassortment Strain.

She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t stop him.

Beimeni River Tunnel

Xerean, Underground North

2,500 meters deep

“Xerean City,” Connor said, reading the fiery bioluminescent signage on the side of the river tunnel, “the sunstone city.”

Beneath the city and its moniker, the sign also said 10 KILOMETERS and beneath that, MINISTER MUERINITI WELCOMES YOU. Small chance for that, Connor thought, for the minister’s crackdown on the BP was among the fiercest in all the Great Commonwealth. He turned to Pirro, striding at his side across the top of Beimeni River. “How do you think my father’s sister-in-development will react when I ask for her surrender?”

Pirro knew of whom he spoke; they’d talked about the powerful Northern minister at length along the way. “My boy, she’s more likely to cut off your balls and feed them to her giant ground sloths than she is to let you pass. I told you in Santonian—”