The Synthesis and the Animus (The Phantom of the Earth Book 3) (8 page)

The reality was that he wouldn’t find the cure in the next few hours in the desolation of the research center. He sucked in a breath of air laced with pleasing neural signals, grabbed his supply pack, and made for the exit. The Janzers deactivated the security system to let him through.

While waiting for a transport at the Research Superstructure, he gazed at the Granville stars overhead. Scientists in colorful lab coats weaved by, lost in their equations.

Another day, another failure
, Brody thought. He swiped his thumb to the side of an intraterritory transport.

Darkness descended.

Gasps and screams echoed through the station.

He heard a flick and saw flame and amethyst eyes in the dim light.

The light disappeared, replaced by the tremor of an explosion on the other side of the Superstructure. Before Brody could access the ZPF, a hand gripped his arm. He flailed. From behind, from above, from the side, he felt as if he were trapped inside a thimble. Then he was gagging from the stench of petroleum and chemicals thrust upon him. Something rapped his skull, and his mind faded.

He heard mumbling. At least two, maybe three or four men, or women? Brody couldn’t tell. He couldn’t see, could hardly breathe. His mouth had been gagged with something sticky, and his head was covered in some kind of hood. The fabric felt like wool. He reached out for the ZPF and failed. Then he noticed the cold touch of alloy around his neck.

A Converse Collar.

“Taste of your cure, Captain?” a man said.

His voice sounded scrambled to Brody’s altered senses. He felt a jolt in his rib cage, and suddenly, engrossingly, the sensation of a million needles thrust into his flesh, curling into his muscles, plucking the veins from his body.

Brody screamed.

“What was that? More?”

No, please, no
, Brody thought as he understood they were using a Reassortment baton. It struck his back, sending the instructions for the synthesis of
E. agony
into his brain’s DNA, and he couldn’t hold back his screams. It felt as if microscopic shuriken were tugging and slicing all the pores of his body, sawing in, out, left, right, up, and down.

Tears flowed from his eyes. He sweated beneath the sweltering hood. A knee or fist or hammer struck him, he didn’t know. He rose on his knees and fell with a thud.

The rod dug into Brody’s armpit. His body convulsed, and he flipped on his back. Now his fingers tingled, and his eyes rapidly opened and closed, closed and opened
.

Of course
, Brody thought,
my death shall come at the end of the weapon my research created, my proper conversion put to use in the batons, a deserved punishment for my failures.

He was rolled onto his back and dragged, his body tender, throbbing, stung with the stinger wedged in place.

They dropped his legs on a cool plastic floor. The floor hummed with vibrations, movement. Brody slid left and right.

He took a few complete breaths. He was on a transport, he realized, headed gods knew where. He reached again for the ZPF and again failed.

The transport’s speed increased. Brody slid across the floor.

A foot pinned him in the groin. He gasped.

“I want you to imagine the world when humanity dominated the surface.”

Brody heard the message as clear as Marstone, not as sinister as the other voice, but more powerful, intelligent. A woman’s voice.

“
I want you to think about the fucks like you who dug in places they shouldn’t have
.” The womanly voice.

“Dead! Gone!” The man’s voice.

Either a foot or a hand pounded beside his head.

“
Not nature
,” the woman said. “
Nature cleared houses, buildings, pollution, roads, transport tubes, playgrounds, monuments
—”

“Why are you telling me this?” Brody said, but the gag and hood muffled his voice almost entirely.

“Don’t speak! You don’t open that filthy mouth of yours unless given permission! Three hundred sixty-eight years After Reassortment, what’s it like up there now, what’s left?”

“Nothing,” Brody said, but it sounded like “Mu-hing.”

“Wrong answer!”

A turn. A slide. A smack. And Brody tumbled under the seats.

A hand grasped his ankle and pulled. “I don’t understand,” Brody mumbled.

“
This brings me to the Island of Reverie
,” the woman’s voice said. “
Three hundred sixty-eight years ago, what happened?
”

“Wawawa.”

“I can’t hear you!”

Brody was stabbed and jolted. A fresh flash of pain ripped through his bones and blood. He arched his back, convulsed.

“
They all died
,” said the voice, low and womanly, “
and after three hundred sixty-eight years, an alloy jungle has given way to a real one.
”

There was more muddled conversation. Brody breathed in swift, rapid strokes, his body fighting the mirage of Reassortment.

The transport slowed, and he slid downward.

He was dragged a ways, on his belly. Then the hood lifted from his head. A golden moon ringed by thick clouds and leafless trees appeared upon Granville panels. Brody shut his eyes. The tape was ripped from his lips, and he was lifted upright by the lapels of his bloodstained lab coat.

His head tipped to the side, his eyes closed. “Why … you tell … me? What … I … do?” His lips bubbled with spit, and saliva dripped from the corners of his mouth, mixed with snot and blood. He had a terrible bitter taste in his mouth.

“Open your eyes,” the man said.

Brody moved his head about, his eyes shut, the light painful.

“Do it!”

Brody opened the left one, disturbing the slow-forming bruise that had cropped out. He opened his right. His vision blurred, then brightened, revealing three silhouettes of transhumans. He blinked, painfully, and they came into focus. One seemed adolescent, a boy, his body tattooed, sharp facial features. He didn’t look like a fully developed transhuman. The man looked spindly, also splayed with animated tattoos. And the woman—the way she twirled her shuriken was as mesmerizing to Brody as her voice had been.

“We ask you,” the spindly one said, “because you feed our people to that organism, you sonofabitch!”

He punched Brody with the butt of the baton, knocking him unconscious.

Beimeni City

Phanes, Underground Central

2,500 meters deep

Lady Isabelle stepped over the marble ground of the tower’s Grand Salon, her lavender silk skirt twisting around her body and bare feet. She felt beautiful, sensual this evening. Antosha had told her how the dress complemented her hair and eyes, then taken it off, slowly. Yet there was no amount of contentment an audience with Atticus Masimovian could not unravel, she knew from experience.

She crossed under an arch onto the terrace, where the chancellor waited.

“Is Hammerton Hall not the most magnificent architecture in all of Beimeni?” Atticus said.

“Why no, my chancellor.” She ran her fingers over his back on her way to the balustrade. “It could never compare to your tower.”

Atticus didn’t seem as if he heard her. He was looking out at Hammerton Hall, which stood beneath the Granville sky in all its glory. Designed by architect Wilhelm Vanderslooten in the 200s, dedicated in honor of the hundredth year of Chancellor Masimovian’s rule in the year 268 AR, the hall featured a combination of majorelle-and maya-blue outer beams, two hundred meters tall, topped by an opulent roof garden, the Dream Forest. A pond where black swans swam sat amid the trees and lime bioluminescence, overlaid by a white marble bridge, surrounded by statues of former leaders and entertainers. The performance area on the third platform, notable for its marquee performances, featured an overhead trellis that simulated the acoustics of an indoor performance hall.

Isabelle pushed her hair over her shoulder. It smelled of coconut oil and was still a touch damp from her bath. Atticus reeked of sex, most likely with his maidens, though one never knew. “What made you summon me here on this steamy night?”

Atticus wore a maroon cape and cashmere slippers, traditional resting garb. His hood fluttered around his neck, and his thick curly hair waved in the gusts. Sweat dotted his forehead. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a glowing slab of fluorite stone carved with Beimenian glyphs. “Do you know what this means?”

“The ministers offered you that curio as their first gift, did they not, for the Bicentennial?” The chancellor held up the stone. She snatched it and made a show of feeling its weight in her hand, then set it back. She took two crystal glasses from a diamond cart and filled them with Loverealan wine and raised her glass. “To two hundred years in the Age of Masimovian,” she said.

May it end as grandly as it began,
she thought. They clanked their glasses, and she swallowed the sweet and tannic wine made in the depths of Silkscape City. She didn’t feel as ill as she had when she’d arrived.

“What a year,” Atticus said, setting his glass down on a pedestal. “What a
year!
” He lifted Isabelle in the air and spun around with her. Her glass flew over the side of the balustrade, and she laughed like a girl in development, and for a second she remembered why she’d once loved him. “Smashing the records of Harpoon qualifiers,” he continued, “unprecedented rates of conversion! A healed economy! A dying BP! New hope with Reassortment—”

“With Regenesis, you mean.”

Atticus released her and pulled his sleeves down his arms. “So long as Antosha doesn’t stir the RDD the way he did last time, then yes, we have hope to meet Dr. Kole Shrader.” He picked a pipe up off a liqueur bar, lit it, and eyed Isabelle suspiciously.

“Lady Verena and Lord Nero should’ve worn biomats in the Regenesis Chamber. You cannot blame Antosha for a synism breach of containment when RDD scientists break protocol—”

“Perhaps it
was
an accident, as you suggested.” Atticus smiled and turned back toward the hall, pointing to it with his palm open. “Isabelle, this is the year of the Bicentennial,” he said, pronouncing each syllable. “The elite will gather, here, in my honor!”

She sighed. She hated him most when he summoned her in this kind of mood. “It
shall
be grand, my chancellor.”

She was thinking about Dr. Shrader’s awakening, not the Bicentennial, and the knowledge she and Antosha would gain from him about the Reassortment Strain, including its origins and humanity’s downfall—and how they could use this to pursue an evolutionary apex.

Atticus poured a new glass of dark-looking liqueur. Isabelle smelled licorice. He sipped it. “Do you know why I instituted the Harpoons?”

“For the good of the commonwealth—”

Atticus laughed and puffed his pipe aggressively. “If I told the people that I would send those inferior among us to work fifteen-hour days doing nothing of importance, and trudge in circles and inhale air not fit for rodents and sift the ashes of the dead and scum until their final hour, what would they say?”

Isabelle poured her own drink. She swirled it, eyeing the chancellor. The chatter in Marstone’s Database had turned ominous of late—an attack on the Research Superstructure executed, Captain Broden Barão reported missing. What could Atticus be so pleased about?

“I think we should be more interested in keeping as many Beimenians as we can in the thirty territories, developing each child to their full potential, in that way improving our research in the Beimeni zone as we strive to return to the surface—”

“What if I didn’t tell you that you would be placed in such an underworld,” Atticus said, ignoring her, “but instead provided you the means to escape. You work, you learn. You perform, you advance. You lose, you leave.”

“A mirage.”

“A prism.” Atticus moved his forefingers in an arched shape as if to form the image in a way she would understand. “Devoid of the Harpoons and the Lower Level, we’d have no conversion. Devoid of conversion, no athanasia. Devoid of athanasia, we’d have no Fountain of Youth. And without the Fountain of Youth, we’d have nothing. And as for those ungrateful souls who seek to destroy what I’ve built—”

“What we’ve built,” she said, her voice a whip.

Atticus studied her thoughts. She revealed nothing of her plans with Antosha. “Tell me about this … attack on the Research Superstructure … Isabelle, tell me what progress you’ve made on that, and on the BP.”

“No casualties reported from the RDD infirmary, but the damage to the Superstructure was extensive. It will take twenty or thirty days to repair.”

“Will the RDD scientists have passage to their facilities?”

“Some will have longer commutes, but all the facilities will maintain access.”

“Have you found Captain Barão?”

“No. His neural feed disappeared from Marstone’s Database at the time of the attack. Miss Damosel doesn’t know where he is, I checked her thought log. Whether he lives or dies should matter not to us, Atticus. He has failed you for too long. This is a sign from the gods. We should end his term on Reassortment.”

The chancellor swiped his goatee. “The people cannot have their captain taken from them—”

“Not by you—”

“Not by anyone. The commonwealth’s psyche is fragile right now. I feel the people at all times, their thoughts and dreams flow through me like my own blood, and I know they cannot handle the stress of losing their captain. I will speak no more of it. What have you done about the Beimeni Polemon?”

Isabelle set her drink on the tray. “The supply lines are the least vulnerable they’ve been in years, and I’ve assured General Norrod the DOC will install sensors and cameras so as to coordinate defenses with the Janzer divisions—”

“That wasn’t what I asked—”