The Synthesis and the Animus (The Phantom of the Earth Book 3) (14 page)

No, she told herself, this courier would become as valuable to her as Lieutenant Arnao had. “There’s only one way to find out,” Isabelle said. She massaged the sides of her neck with her forefingers, then eased her head back onto the towel and closed her eyes. “You’ll have to join me on a surgical strike.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“You will soon.” Isabelle received a Marstone ping from General Norrod and sighed again. He only ever contacted her with bad news. “Hush now, my sweet. I have an important call.”

Lovely to hear from you today, General.

You’ve got to see this.

General Norrod delivered the security video from the Port of Life, and the scene unfolded in her extended consciousness. A transport floated through a supply tunnel, slowed, and stopped at Gate 32A.

The transport’s ramp lowered.

Six Janzers telekinetically moved drums filled with synisms off conveyor belts. They separated the drums by type. One of the Janzers used hand signals to direct the rest of the division to the drums labeled C. PERFRINGENS SYN-B5.3 MINERAL CRUSHERS. They stood in a line and passed the drums from one to the next. Within a minute or two, they’d loaded forty-two drums by Isabelle’s count.

A Janzer on board the transport gave the halt signal, and the division on the ground stopped. He closed his fist—the departure signal. He placed his diamond-gloved hand on the screen: JANZER-D2753-13 ACCEPTED. SELECT YOUR DESTINATION. He tapped a box labeled PHANES TERRITORY. UNDERGROUND CENTRAL. RESOURCE DOCKS.

The transport’s ramp lifted. Its joints shrieked, and in the ramp’s shadow against the limestone wall stood a transhuman, a Polemon terrorist, it seemed, covered with chameleon camouflage. The terrorist moved as swiftly as a striker (or aera?), pushed off the wall with his or her boot, and flew over the hatch. The terrorist drew a diamond sword and thrust it, rapidly and elegantly, through the lead Janzer’s visor. In the interval during which an entire division of Lady Isabelle’s Janzers stood stunned by the conveyor belt, signals delivered from the transport shifted, becoming consistent with the use of a scrambler.

Finally, the Janzer on point rushed forward, but by then the entryway had snapped shut.

The transport disappeared through the tunnel.

Isabelle sat up.
We need new Janzers,
ones not so incompetent and as stupid as these!

Agreed, my lady. Keep watching, there’s more.

Another transport eased into the gate. The Janzer inside lowered the hatch, and one by one the Janzers on the ground loaded drums of C. PERFRINGENS SYN-B7.5 ATHANASIA. More camouflaged terrorists slithered against the wall, obvious on the video, but unseen and undetected by the Janzers. How this could be, Isabelle didn’t know. Perhaps they had developed new stealth technology or lifted it from the RDD, as they were clearly quite adept at doing.

The Janzer closest to the transport finally spied their boots, then the rest of them. He broadcast a distress signal to the nearest division. JZ3865 REQUESTING SUPPORT IN POLG32A flashed across Isabelle’s extended consciousness.

The Janzer lifted his pulse gun, and the terrorists dropped. Bombs exploded around the gate and filled the port with flashes, smoke, and debris. Janzers groaned and terrorists shouted. The cavern darkened.

Emergency maroon light winked in the port’s corners. The Janzers lowered their visors and mobilized to an elliptical attack formation around the darkened center. She heard the faint sounds of BP unsheathing their swords in the darkness. The Janzers drew their pulse guns and shuriken. They fired a salvo into the shadows, then charged. The melody of death followed.

A Polemon snapped a flare and moved her light over the pile of Janzers.

“Lift their weapons,” she said, voice muffled. The BP stuffed Reassortment batons, canteens, goggles, shuriken
,
pulse grenades, pulse rifles, pulse guns, everything they could find into burlap sacks. They loaded as many synism drums as they could before the rumble of reinforcements echoed into the port.

The BP hopped into the nearby transport and commandeered it.

The Janzer reinforcements arrived.

Late as usual
, Lady Isabelle thought.

One of them made his way to the track. He hailed the transport that hastened into the distance but received no response. He bent to his knee and positioned his pulse launcher on his shoulder, the scope over his visor. He pulled the trigger, and a thin wire shot toward the transport. An instant later, a ball of plasma traveled along the wire bridge and ignited, lighting the tunnel on impact.

The Janzer flung the launcher over his shoulder and looked down. He tilted his head, then lifted what seemed to be a benari coin and turned it over. Carvings with the unmistakable mark of the BP focused in Isabelle’s extended consciousness—a
Morelia spilota spilota
, a snake no one in Beimeni would have ever crossed, but which she and all the Janzer divisions were familiar with. The Janzer flipped it over. Chiseled into the coin was the forbidden phrase:

The video fizzled and disappeared.

General Norrod spoke through Marstone.
This was worse than the Superstructure. A direct attack on a Palaestran gate. The BP’s emboldened, my lady.

How many casualties?

Seven of ours. A handful of theirs. Lost two transports. One destroyed, you saw, another in BP control. Gate 32A down.

Do you have tracking?

No.

What was the inventory?

Mineral crushers. Enough to hollow out a village.

I’ll check the neural feeds. Keep me updated.

Lady Isabelle signed off. She revealed no emotion, even as the pressure built in her skull. She pulled in a breath of roses and jasmine and new-mown hay and steam, and she dipped into the tub. The petals parted, then constricted over her. Underneath the water, she screamed. The petals atop the water curdled and rolled.

Isabelle lurched out and gasped as if she’d run a hundred kilometers.

“My lady!” Valentine screamed. “What’s wrong?”

“Everything.” A keeper bot handed Isabelle a robe, and she stepped onto the marble with water and petals dripping over her shoulders, down her back, off her calves, along her toes. “After you’re done here, get back to your homework. We’ll chat in the morning.” Tossing the robe aside, Isabelle darted to the dressing room.

The supreme director arrived at the Department of Communications in her chameleon fatigues and black boots, a Reassortment baton at her belt. She took long strides through the spherical Cerebral Core, its top a hollowed dome made of polished stone, its atmosphere artificial and cool. Sixty black bots stood around the rim, maintaining a security laser grid. The beams that shot from their maroon eyes could cut through granite.

She requested connection to Marstone’s Database, and the lasers cleared. Strutting to the ring in the center, which glowed with golden light, she held up her arms and looked up to the dome as it shifted to a starry rendition of outer space.

Welcome to the Cerebral Core of Beimeni, Lady Isabelle Lutetia. How may I be of service to you?
Marstone’s voice.

I want all data that contain key words and phrases, Polemon, BP, Jeremiah, Connor, Johann, Zorian, raid, attack, Bicentennial, Hammerton Hall, Port of Life, Athanasia, mineral crushers. Adjust search for emphasis on at-risk territories, cities, and villages.

Marstone hummed and began its search, in tune with her commands as no one else’s. For decades, Lady Isabelle had improved Marstone’s capabilities to monitor the citizenry’s neurochips and brain impulses—thoughts, spoken words, dreams, and subconscious ponderings in the ZPF. She’d recruited RDD scientist Antosha Zereoue, a purported master of telepathy, to aid in her quest to quell the safeguards the terrorists used to deceive her, the recaller among them. Antosha’s improvements led to more accurate searches, data, and coordinates to give her tenehounds and Janzers.

Prior to Antosha’s exile, they enhanced Marstone’s reach, shifted it from passive to active, in order to fully understand the commonwealth’s enemies. She discovered a top secret gathering of the Leadership in Piscator, including Solstice Rupel, the BP’s chief recruitment officer. After Lieutenant Arnao led the search and destroy that left Solstice headless, Isabelle expected the BP attacks to subside, but they didn’t, and after the implosion of a supply line from Vivo to Phanes years ago, Chancellor Masimovian had smashed his fist into a marble table so hard that he shattered every bone in his arm. “Find them and kill them! Do whatever it takes!” he said. “Give me the resources I require,” Lady Isabelle countered, “give me Antosha Zereoue!” It had taken some time and persuasion, but eventually she’d prevailed upon the chancellor, as she always did on matters of national security.

Marstone completed its search. Within the dome streamed brain impulses that contained thoughts, conversations, memories, ideas—all the inner workings of the transhuman mind from citizens as far away as Gaia and Marshlands and as close as Beimeni City. Hundreds of thousands of impulses floated before her, ranked by relevance:

IMPULSE FILE 876535643

Have you heard about the BP?

Oh, yes.

Do you think it’s real?

I do.

It’s so frightening.

I hear they steal you in your sleep—

No, no, they pull you out of the transports—

If you refuse to join them, they’ll abuse you or kill you—

Hey you two, shut up in there! You know they listen to everything!

IMPULSE FILE 986535446

The BP are everywhere and the BP are nowhere.

IMPULSE FILE 896535243

Gods damn it!

What happened?

Fucking Polemon thieves! Fucking, fucks!

How many containers this time?

An entire gods damned trimester’s worth!

IMPULSE FILE 472535243

You don’t remember what it was like! You don’t know! We need Chancellor Masimovian—

Terry, they took our son! And now he’s gone! He’s dead!

We’ll find another way! We’ll have another son! No to the BP! No to the BP!

IMPULSE FILE 876423752

Why should I join the BP? All they offer is more work and hardship. Best case a trip to the Lower Level. Worst case a trip to the surface. No thanks.

IMPULSE FILE 877535857

Did I imagine the episode? Or did I travel to an underground dwelling separated from the commonwealth, an unwelcome BP guest?

Marstone, bring me the likenesses connected to the impulses referenced here.

“I’ll be damned,” she said.

Captain Barão floated beneath IMPULSE FILE 877535857. He wore his official Beimenian garb, a dark suit lined with golden buttons down his left side, a Beimeni beret on his head, his hair curled around his ears.

Marstone, requesting a priority connection with Chancellor Masimovian.

Atticus Masimovian received and accepted your connection.

Why would you interrupt my pleasure hour?

Lady Isabelle rolled her eyes. She hoped he might catch a deadly, incurable venereal disease and ease her and Antosha’s ascent as rulers of
all
the Earth.
I’ve made a critical discovery, my dear.

You found the BP enclave?

Chatter implicates Captain Broden Barão as a potential coconspirator with the Beimeni Polemon—

You needn’t interrupt me with this—

I must arrest him—

You must end this obsession with Captain Barão—

Your indifference will be the end of us. The BP—

Listen to me very carefully. Don’t you dare destroy the people’s psyche prior to the Bicentennial. I will deal with the People’s Captain at a time and place of
my
choosing.

He disconnected.

Isabelle telekinetically cracked part of the dome above. Bits of it showered over her.

Blackeye Cavern

300 meters deep

Connor bench-pressed a hundred and twenty kilograms and grunted with the latest repetition. Five more repetitions and he dropped the granite barbells on the ground, chipping the limestone. He sat up, the sweat sliding down his face and around his animated tattoos, which presently appeared as a school of starfish over his chiseled back.

Aera’s strike on the Port of Life had been successful, liberating enough mineral crushers to execute the raid on Permutation Crypt. It annoyed him that she wouldn’t let him go to the RDD with her. He might’ve been able to help the BP who had died.

Or I might’ve died with them,
Connor reflected. He opened and closed his fist, flexing his forearm, wondering how far he could push his transhuman body without developmental synisms. He’d asked Aera to retrieve these synisms for him prior to her strike, though Arturo insisted she could not. “It’s a huge risk to administer those synisms without the proper facilities,” he’d said, “and no developer, not even those on our side, would risk doing so inside their walls. Development is heavily regulated.”

The benefits from
E. evolution
carried him only so far, and without the latest technology, he could only develop so far. Instead, he was forced to train without accelerants and boosts his competitors, and the Janzers, benefited from. Yet his meditations and physical training helped him grow stronger, faster, and smarter by the day. Though at times, like now, he felt frustrated, consumed by uncertainty about his skills against the Janzers and fear for his father’s survival in Permutation Crypt. And it seemed to Connor he’d have accomplished a lot more, maybe even helped his father evade capture, if he’d been fully developed years ago, somehow. “There’s more to it than just synism injections,” Arty had assured him. “You’ve seen what happened to Zorian.”

The more Connor learned and thought about Zorian’s behavior, his fights with their father, his jealousy of his brother Hans, his unexplained anger and telekinetic violence, his rants and brawls with commandos—the more Connor understood that his father had done what he thought was right: protect his youngest son from the dangers of the ZPF, given the family’s unique and powerful connection; and protect the Polemon objectives if he should be captured by the commonwealth.