The Descent into the Maelstrom (The Phantom of the Earth Book 4) (28 page)

A pulse blast burst past her head.

The concrete slab three meters from her exploded. She fell sideways and took cover.

Shadows on the mountains and beneath the waterfalls,
Oriana heard.

The air around her feet illuminated in the shape of a case. When the case materialized fully, it held a pulse rifle.

You may not advance until all the shadows disappear.

Oriana flipped open the case and attached the scope to the rifle. She plucked the tripod and eyed a nook on the roof’s far side. She raced to it and tumbled as pulse blasts scattered behind her. She settled the rifle on the tripod and her shoulder, eased her right eye into the scope, and scanned the mountains. They were made of alloy rather than stone. A shadow sprinted behind one of the waterfalls. She inhaled deeply and thought of daybreak, the rising Granville sun she enjoyed with Pasha, that brief period of peace. She exhaled. She fired. The shadow rolled and fell through the water, then flipped down the ridges and into the river.

More shots struck around her but missed. Oriana took cover. She steadied her view again and blew out the air from her lungs.

Shadows in her sight. Running, steering, fleeting through the mountain of alloy and water. She squeezed the trigger. Echoes from the blasts encircled Oriana, disorienting her, but she held steady, and shadows fell from the mountain, one by one. She stood. The scenery around her bubbled and disappeared.

She emerged on a steep, rainy hillside. A plateau lay above, rimmed with broom snakeweed, black sagebrush, and fragrant sand verbena. She spied Pasha climbing a rope. Ahead of her, again! She cursed him, dashed uphill, gripped a rope, and pulled her way up the bluff. Sweat streamed through her hair, around her face, and down her neck. When she crested the plateau, she was struck by gale-force winds and horizontal rainfall. Logs as long as the eye could see covered the ground. Oriana hurdled the first, second, and third, then splashed into the ground, blinded by mud. Her eyes burned. She scooped the muck from her face. Twisters formed in the sky but didn’t touch down. The downpour hastened, and she let the water clean her eyes.

She hopped and sprinted, sprinted and hopped. By the fiftieth log, she ran parallel with Pasha.

They moved, side by side, over a clearing layered with limestone and gravel. The rain stopped. They scooted toward vines that hung over a dale covered with rolling rocks and waterfalls and greenery. Oriana swung from vine to vine and inhaled the minty mist. At the other side, water and mud sloshed around her toes. She climbed the stones to another summit and sprinted to the edge, then dove into a river below. She popped up and sucked in the air and swam with all her strength, arm over arm, splashing her feet in the water, feeling as graceful as one of her mermaids.

Oriana climbed ashore.

Shards of sunlight warmed her body. Pasha dove into the river. She grinned.
Call your birds or wolves on me now
, she thought. She raced along a meadow lined with razor wire.

I’m a champion.

She crawled beneath the first rungs. A piece of her shirt ripped and her skin tore. She grunted and bled.
I’m a champion.
She trudged onward and darted down a ravine and up a gemstone path. At its end, the golden bell of the finish line hung from a golden arch, as tall as a mountain.
I’m a champion.
She smelled Pasha’s sweaty musk.
Too slow
, she thought,
too late.
I’m
Champion of the Harpoons.
Oriana smashed the bell with her fist, and its ring vibrated across the virtual world.

“Victory,” she said, “victory … victory … victory!”

Pasha pushed his foot to the bell to halt its vibrations.

“Getting slow out there,” she said, gasping. Streaks of mud and blood slid down Pasha’s face.

He curled his lips. “I let you win.” He said it so soft and so sure that Oriana’s smile disappeared …

… The simulation ended, and the twins dangled in the golden simulator room.

“Like Reassortment you did!” Oriana swore. “I won. You lost. Admit it.”

Pasha laughed bitterly.

“To think,” she said, “you’ve never lost before. This must be hard for you.”

Pasha unlatched. “Shut up, O.”

“Get used to it!”

Oriana’s ID number scrolled to the sixth slot on the leaderboard, while Pasha’s had dropped to eleventh.

She hung in the harness for a few minutes after he left, savoring the moment.

Pasha wouldn’t talk to her at dinner. Oriana ignored him and helped herself to drumsticks, ribs slathered in mustard sauce, vegetable casserole, and rice pudding. She sat with the lord and lady.

“How could there be a query without a solution?” she said.

“The tables and doors?” Lord Thaddeus said.

“You’ve never presented us a query without a solution, and I thought we’re supposed to have all the answers and that—”

“Oriana,” Parthenia said, a note of tranquility in her voice that Oriana hadn’t heard since her early days of development, “you will find that sometimes the greatest challenges in our lives don’t have a right answer. Sometimes they have what seems right to us at the time we live through them.” She paused. “Yours and your brother’s potential is among the greatest we’ve ever encountered.”

Thaddeus nodded. “All you have to do is learn to control your emotions. Control your anger and fear, and you will be unstoppable in the Harpoons.”

Oriana looked down at her plate to hide her watery eyes. These were the first encouraging words they’d spoken to her since the Warning Communiqué. Perhaps they didn’t hate her after all.

Volano City

Volano, Underground Northeast

2,500 meters deep

“Not too far now,” Father said.

This was the fiftieth time at least that he’d said so. The eastern Polemon passageways were as dark as the ones outside Hydra Hollow in the west, but now Connor viewed the world through the ZPF. His father moved as if composed of a million stars, and the walls were as open as a void. He lugged a fifty-kilogram sack on his back, the heaviest load he’d carried since his time on the Block. That part of his life was not so long ago, when he and his brother Hans and his foster father, Arturo, had traveled underwater in the Gulf of Yeuron and caught enough fish to feed Underground South.

Connor tasted the salty sweat that dripped from his head and created the scene in his mind: Piscator Reef, the starfish, the polychromatic blowfish, the squids with feelers longer than any transhuman. He floated amid the hard coral, smelled the sea and the earth.

“Don’t escape too far,” Father said.

“It’s too tight in here, now that I can see.”

“Then don’t see.”

Connor broke his conscious connection in the ZPF. Darkness returned. It reminded him of when he’d first traveled through the passageways between Phanes and Portage with Murray. He felt along the wall, pushed through the earth, not allowing himself to live in the past or the present. The future was all that mattered. And in this next battle, whatever it was, whenever it came, Connor would be ready.

At the next supply cache, Father injected Connor and himself with uficilin, and they drank water and relieved themselves in an underground stream. Then off they went again, kilometer after kilometer in the dark and silent earth. By the time they had stopped at three more caches, Connor wished he was back rowing on the Archimedes.

Only the gods knew how much time had passed when Father said, “We’re here.”

He tapped in a pattern upon the wall, and it slid open, revealing a world Connor had never imagined. A golden Granville sun broke through a lavender sky dotted with cirrus clouds. Falcons circled slowly. The skywalks here differed from those in the South and the East, for they angled up or down to platforms supported by tall compressed diamond pillars. Water streaked with crimson bioluminescence flowed off these platforms over the columns and down the sides, as if the entire city were bleeding.

“Volano,” Father said, “the place of dreams.” His tunic was soaked with sweat. So was Connor’s.

Connor wiped his face with the back his arm. “The place that connects to the Island of Reverie,” he said, “is a place I would see destroyed.”

“It isn’t this territory that killed your brother,” Father said, “though I admit it’s strange to be back here.” He closed his eyes and raised his head.

“How will we move through here, looking like this?” Connor shook more perspiration from his arm.

“Leave that to me.” Father gave Connor that mischievous smile he had whenever he used the ZPF in a manner Connor could not. “I’m very familiar with Volano.”

“You worked here as well?” Connor tightened his boots and wrung out the front of his tunic.

“I’ve worked everywhere.” Father turned as if he looked upon another time, another place. “During the early transhuman trials, my team worked to find the Reassortment cure. I watched the depressed or fame-seeking volunteers perish instantly on the island.” He lowered his head. “Then a young neophyte named Broden Barão emerged from the Harpoons—a phenomenon in the exams, and the RDD scientists concurred that the Variscans had performed a miracle with the work they did on young Barão, developing him so late in his life. I agreed.” Father squeezed his forehead. “Vastar Alalia outbid me, but I won Broden Barão, in the end … and sealed my own demise …”

“Murray told me you sought to unite the teams and the commonwealth for eternity.” Connor lifted a canteen from his supply satchel and took a deep gulp of the cool water, then splashed some of it on his face.

“Oh, yes, that I did, though not the way I envisioned.” Father took the canteen and drank.

“Did the Barão Strike Team betray you?”

“Not exactly.”

“That’s not what you said to Lord Nero.”

“I told him what he had to hear. The chancellor gave their captain the Regenesis project, and I was too blind to see Barão’s ambitions. By then, he’d already become popular with the public, met all the time with the
Beimeni Press
. Lady Isabelle arrested me for conduct unbecoming a supreme scientist, but Captain Barão didn’t, at first, seek control over Reassortment. He waited until 288 AR, after there’d been five or six more demotions.” Father laughed wanly. “He was the easy successor. Damosel Rhea didn’t even need to campaign for him.”

“So you lied to Nero?” Connor didn’t sound surprised.

“He seeks his captain. I seek justice upon the chancellor, and there’s one skilled telepath left in this commonwealth who can convince the people of his treachery and bind them to my cause.”

“Not you?”

“Captain Barão.”

Connor waved his head. “Did you kill the commander Vastar Alalia?”

Father hesitated. “No …”

“Did Chancellor Masimovian?”

“I don’t know …”

He still feels the need to lie to me,
Connor thought. He could sense his father’s feelings in the ZPF, the conflict within him threatening to split his consciousness open
.
Connor persisted. “You helped the chancellor rid himself of Vastar, so that you could have Captain Barão for yourself. Only the chancellor didn’t see the future the way you did. He saw the captain … as your replacement.”

Tears welled up in Father’s eyes.
This hurts him to admit,
Connor thought,
but is it pain from causing a great leader’s death, or because his brother-in-development used him?
Connor put his hand on his father’s sweaty arm. “What you did in the past for Chancellor Masimovian doesn’t matter. I don’t care. I’m not Zorian. I’ll always be on your side, Father. Now I need you to be on mine. I need you to believe in me the way Hans did.”

“You have learned much on this journey.”

The pride in Father’s face gave Connor confidence he’d not felt since he’d trained with Aera. “Let me contribute,” Connor said, “let me help you end this forever war.”

“Come,” Father said, putting his arm around his son, “we must visit House Herzensella, where we will gather our strength and prepare for the northern strike.”

They descended a steep path carved into the limestone of Volano Territory. Streams cut through greenery around them. By the time they reached the lowermost level, Connor’s tunic had mostly dried, though he assumed he smelled terrible. Down here, tents lined the edges of the thin, colorful coolant waterfalls that fell into the Archimedes. They slipped through the bazaar, past consortium representatives dressed in golden bodysuits, government workers in crimson capes with golden chains, and artists offering wares ranging from painted porcelain dishes to artistic Granville spheres projecting Venus. On the other end of the skywalk, a girl not much younger than Connor biologically, perhaps in early adolescence, dashed toward them. She looked like a Courier of the Chancellor.

“An important message for you, my lords,” she said and handed Connor two benari coins with the forbidden phrase on one side—WE WILL STRIKE THE IRON FIST, FROM IT THE BLOOD OF OUR KIN WILL FLOW—the forbidden image, the
Morelia spilota spilota
snake, on the other. Connor handed them to Father, who telekinetically dangled the coins and twisted them apart. A cryptor, a diamond shard filled with the bacterium,
E. cryptor,
most often used by the Janzers at Fountain Square, but also used by the BP, was stored in one of the coins. Father set the cryptor into the vein on his wrist and it filled with blood, infecting him. He apparently deciphered the coded message delivered by the bacterium to his neurochip and nodded sadly.

He handed a pouch of benari coins to the BP spy. The girl dashed to the other side of the skywalk and up into the bazaar.

“What’s the meaning?” Connor said.

“An unfortunate turn of events.”

Father said no more. He led Connor through the city, up the skywalks and down to the platforms, some as large as villages, others only the size of a single building, to the other side of the city. Along the way, Connor noted something he hadn’t seen or noticed before: Granville day and night blended together intermittently, and taupe patches replaced the atmosphere that covered the massif over the horizon.