The Synthesis and the Animus (The Phantom of the Earth Book 3) (9 page)

“Jeremiah Selendia yields little incremental intel and, truth be told, has little life left in him, so I’ve shifted my focus to his eldest son, to Zorian Selendia.”

“Is he talking?”

“He continues to claim that he doesn’t know what went wrong in Navita.”

The truth was that the bastard claimed she’d delayed too long, allowed the BP time to escape. She’d prepared what she believed were flawless contingency plans with Lieutenant Arnao. She was to bring an end to the Evolutionary War, the guerilla war the commonwealth fought against the BP since 308 AR. Then something had gone wrong. When she and her army had arrived, the BP hadn’t been there and, worse, had booby-trapped the place. It had taken all her skill in the ZPF to escape and survive.

“I believe him,” Isabelle continued, “though I’m still formulating how he might be of use to us. It wouldn’t be helpful to kill him.” Unlike his younger brother Hans, Zorian didn’t have the BP’s love, but he did have their trust. “My mind-sweeps in Marstone’s Database suggest something large on the horizon, and I’d like to find out where the next attack will be.”

“Vile, ungrateful
terrorists!
” Atticus sucked on the pipe.

“There’s more, my chancellor.” Isabelle rubbed her hands together, thinking about how she’d been almost buried alive in Navita. “The BP is burrowing, farther and deeper and wider than we expected. The Janzers discover intricate tunnels throughout the commonwealth by the day—”

“How are they traveling, how are they communicating, how are they living outside our territories? Still!” Atticus threw up his arms. “Even after the destruction beneath Haurachesa! How is it that you haven’t stemmed their advance?”

Isabelle was, at first, speechless. Without her attacks on the BP, she believed they would’ve already taken Beimeni City and let chaos reign in the underground. Why couldn’t her eternal partner understand this! She sighed. She didn’t care about his legacy. She cared about maintaining peace and order and ensuring a smooth transition to the end of the Age of Masimovian, which had overseen more inefficient life and death than she would ever allow.

No, hers and Antosha’s rule would usher in a true age of tranquility and evolutionary advancement. An age where strict population controls and efficiently allocated resources would ensure the highest level of development for each new citizen registered in Marstone’s Database.
Resolve, moderation, and persistence,
these are the virtues of Atticus Masimovian, and I’ll make certain they lead to his undoing,
she thought.
And afterward, I’ll see to it that no baby is sent to a Lower Level!

“The tunnels are a labyrinth,” she said, “and they build new passageways as quickly as we map and destroy the old ones. We’re mining all the data we have for the last half year, connecting loops and paradoxes and searching for anything we missed. It’ll take another fifteen days—”

“We don’t have that long!”

“I suspect an attack on the Bicentennial—”

“Oh! Do you!” Atticus lifted the palm of his hand in front of his face. “Hullo, Atticus Masimovian, I’m your hand, and I think the Beimeni Polemon is about to bomb your Bicentennial celebration!” He rotated his palm toward Isabelle. “Gee, wonderful news. Maybe I should hire Danforth Diamond to destroy the BP.”

“How dare you! After all the progress I’ve made. You’re the one who won’t let me execute false flag attacks or kill Jeremiah—”

“Pull divisions from Farino. Pull divisions from Nyx. Pull divisions from the Permutation Crypt.” Atticus’s eyes narrowed. “The people need this celebration. It is of great importance to the commonwealth, and all who serve me, that it go smoothly.”

Blackeye Cavern

300 meters deep

“You were brave down there,” Arty said.

Then why do I feel so terrible?
Connor thought. He lifted himself out of the Cavern’s man-made lake onto the gravely shoreline. He’d just finished his thirty-third lap. Unlike his prior workouts, this one didn’t soothe him after his first Polemon strike. “We gave Captain Barão what he deserved,” he said, knowing this would be what his foster father would like to hear.

Arty grinned in that wise way he always had in their unit in the Third Ward of Piscator City, where they once had lived. He wore a sleeveless tunic. Bracelets and bands carved and painted with the BP’s regalia—a
Morelia spilota spilota
, a black-and-yellow dotted snake, an ambush predator—wrapped around his arms and neck and waist.

“It’s a start for what he’s done to his own people, son.” Arty rubbed his nose, which looked pointier than usual, perhaps because of all the weight he’d lost on his journey east from Piscator to the Cavern. He’d escaped prior to the Lady Isabelle’s surgical search there in the first trimester.

Connor picked up his towel off a granite boulder and dried his chest and back, then glided the towel down his swim trunks, knees, and ankles. He’d been muscular prior to his escape from Piscator, his body built from lifting sharks and seafood in nets each day on the fishermen’s Block. The journey from Piscator to the Cavern had taken much of his excess weight, though with the constant workouts since he’d arrived, he was starting to gain some of it back. It felt good to have more strength.

He looked out over the lake filled with cool water from the commonwealth’s piping system and splayed with blue-green bioluminescence streaking out from the shoreline. Prehistoric fossils engraved the sides of the cove and the limestone pillars that supported it beneath the Earth’s weight. A waft of warm air swirled around him, chilling him a bit, smelling musty, like a swamp, bringing forth memories of Piscator Territory. He thought about the time Captain Barão had visited the South.

The captain had traveled to the Block this past year, just before the peak fishing season there, and given a rousing speech to the fishermen. He assured them he’d guide their return to the surface, where they could hunt on the sea the ways the men of the
old
world did, on ships with sails, safe from the Reassortment Strain, after he found a cure. How Connor had loved the captain that day, and how that feeling had curdled in his gut after his developer and longtime friend, Murray Olyorna, had told him of the captain’s betrayal of his father.

“Can we believe nothing the captain says?” Connor asked.

“I’m not sure we can,” Arty said. He loosened one of the bands on his arm. “He received the first bid during his auction. The champions are all the same, from what I’ve seen over the decades.”

Connor wouldn’t have a clue about this. He hadn’t been registered within Marstone’s Database when he was born, so he wasn’t given professional care by a house of development, and he had never competed in the Harpoons. Instead, his older brother Hans had treated him with a synism called
E. evolution,
designed to alter his DNA, shifting his genome further down the
Homo transition
spectrum, closer to
Homo evolutis.
It was a rugged method of development utilized by the BP, and the infection it led to induced an intense fever, something unknown to any registered transhuman, whose immune systems destroyed 99.9 percent of known, natural pathogens. When the fever had struck him, Connor hadn’t been sure he’d survive it, first while in captivity in the Department of Peace, then on the run through the Polemon passageways. It was in the passageways that Murray had helped him recover, and it was later on during their journey to the East, just before they were separated in Mantlestone Village, that he’d told Connor the late Vastar Alalia had bid first for Captain Barão during his auction in 260 AR.

Now Connor dried his long hair with the towel, then curled the towel around his neck. “So you’re suggesting that all Beimenians who receive the first bid are betrayers and liars.”

“They’re all ambitious.” Arty set his own towel on the boulder where Connor’s had lain. “And worse, Captain Barão has great skills with the zeropoint field to go along with his physical, mental, and interpersonal know-how—”

Connor tilted his head. “So he’s a lot like my father.”

“In some ways,” Arty admitted. He looked away from Connor, as if he searched the limestone and granite for the right response. Or as if he didn’t believe what he’d just said. Connor couldn’t decide.

“In the ways that matter,” Arty continued, “in protecting the unskilled and underprivileged the way a strike team captain should, in having respect for his fellow transhuman man, no, no, no, Connor, your father is very different from Captain Broden Barão.”

“Do you think he’ll help us?” Connor slipped into a fisherman’s bodysuit, worn from heavy use on the submarines in the Gulf of Yeuron.

“I don’t know. He and Jeremiah were once close. Captain Barão understood the commonwealth’s politics, particularly after Vastar died … particularly after the teams accused Jeremiah of killing him.”

Connor thought on this. He’d heard the circumstances of Vastar’s death differently from Murray, who’d made it seem as if the commonwealth had killed Vastar, not his father, not the Reassortment Strain.

“Did my father kill him?” Connor said.

“I doubt it.” Arty removed the regalia from his arms and swiped beads of sweat from his face. “Your father was outbid by Vastar during Barão’s auction.” Arty again paused, as if he searched for the right words. He shook his head. “That sort of thing happens all the time.”

He isn’t sure,
Connor thought. He pondered how he might use this information to gain Captain Barão’s trust. Murray told him the chancellor sought a permanent alliance with the historical strike teams. Did the chancellor kill Vastar, framing Jeremiah? Or did Jeremiah kill Vastar, blaming the Reassortment Strain? Connor’s head ached. He rubbed his forehead.

“How do you feel?” Arty said.

“Never better.” Connor pushed his hands through his long, wet hair and wiped his nose.

The truth was that he felt utterly ill, but not for reasons he’d expected. To be sure, the Polemon strike had enthralled him, traveling through the commonwealth’s supply lines into its coveted Research & Development Department, unseen and undetected, the excitement in the Superstructure, ambling among the throng of scientists, dressed like one of them in a bodysuit and lab coat, deceiving the Janzers and Marstone and by extension, the Lady Isabelle. How proud even Zorian would’ve been of him!

Connor couldn’t remember when last he’d seen his eldest brother. Zorian often chided Connor for his underdevelopment, but Connor learned later on that the real reason Zorian disliked him was because he blamed him for their mother’s death. Solstice had died protecting Connor during a Janzer search and destroy mission in Piscator.

Connor squeezed the Granville sphere in his pocket. It felt like a small, polished gemstone. Whenever he activated it with the ZPF, the photogenic synisms within rendered his mother’s likeness. What would Solstice think of him now, if she still lived? Connor wondered. Then he thought about Hans. His older brother had tripled as his father, his mentor, and his best friend in the commonwealth—until he had died on the Earth’s surface during a commonwealth Jubilee. Would Hans think Connor as brave as Arturo suggested? Would he approve of what they did to Captain Barão?

Connor closed his eyes, reliving the scene at the Superstructure. Captain Barão had swayed beneath the marble arches, looking like death, exhausted and oblivious to the danger that surrounded him. The plan had unfolded the way Connor and Aera had designed it. Luke Locke and Brooklyn Harper, Polemon spies, blew a hole into the coolant piping near the Montauk Facility, drawing the Janzer reinforcements away from the Superstructure. By the time the captain neared the intraterritory transport tracks, the Janzers who guarded them had gone to secure the facility. Aera telepathically ignited the charges, disabling the Granville sky, turning the Superstructure into a gigantic underground tomb. Connor fitted the Converse Collar around the captain’s neck as Aera slipped the hood over his head. It had all happened so fast. The adrenaline had pumped through Connor like it never had before.

And he realized his heart was pounding now the way it had then—

“You don’t look so good, son,” Arty said. “Are you sure you don’t need sustenance, or uficilin, or—”

“I’m okay.” Connor licked his dried lips. He felt sweat dripping down his neck and back. The Cavern was shallower in the Earth than the Great Commonwealth, but it didn’t have as robust a coolant system.

“I’m just concerned about my father, and the plan, and Captain Barão’s willingness to help us after …”

After Aera and Murray beat the commonwealth sense out of him,
Connor thought, unable to say it.
It’s something Zorian would’ve done, not Hans, not me …

“Is it true what Murray said,” Connor continued, diverting his thoughts, “that the captain’s been demoted, with Antosha Zereoue promoted?”

Arty knelt to the lakeside shoreline, dipped his forefingers in the water, and moved his hand around in gentle circles. The bioluminescent water streaked out concentrically. “That’s what they say.”

“All Murray told me was that Captain Barão and Antosha hated each other, and that neither was a friend of the Liberation Front. Will this changing of the guard alter our operation to save my father?”

Arty stood and wiped his hands together. “It’s a bit chillier than normal, isn’t it?” He dried his hands.

“Arturo, I must know,” Connor said.

Arty sighed. “I don’t know a lot about Antosha.”

“Why do he and Captain Barão hate each other?”

“Some say the captain felt threatened by Antosha, his shadow apprentice in the RDD.” Arty flipped the towel over his shoulder, then turned to Connor. “Some say he grew jealous of Antosha’s research skills and that to destroy him,” Arty moved closer to Connor, “the captain killed his eternal partner, Haleya Decca,” he put his hand on Connor’s shoulder, “upon the Island of Reverie … during a Jubilee.”

“Just like Hans,” Connor said.

He pressed his lips together, scrunching his face. He looked mortified. He felt something swell within him that he did not feel when he spoke to Murray about Captain Barão. It might’ve been anger, or fear, or a combination of both.
How could Captain Barão tell us he loved us all? How can I trust this villain to help me save my father?