The Synthesis and the Animus (The Phantom of the Earth Book 3) (29 page)

Farther on their journey, she said: “Go, go, go,” with a sense of urgency he’d not heard during this operation.

Nero turned. The Janzers’ shadows moved far down the tunnel. The ultimate parallelogram-shaped room before the pit lay ahead, according to Aera.

Jeremiah’s breaths were raspy, but at least he survived.
We have all the proof the ministry and board will need,
Nero thought, hoping that Brody and Damy had escaped the Bicentennial and Verena was safe in the RDD.

“Wait here,” Aera said.

“Where’re you going?” Nero said.

Aera dashed to the middle of the room, then telekinetically sent pulse grenades to the other end. She ran back, throwing her arms forward.

“Down!” she said. “Down!”

Zorian protected Connor, while Nero protected Jeremiah.

The blast shook the floor.

The Janzers neared.

The gash in the wall led into the void. Carefully, Zorian lifted Connor, handing him to Aera on the other side of the ruptured wall. After Zorian stepped through, Aera handed Connor back to him, then helped Nero with Jeremiah.

Once they were all through, Aera lit a flare. Solid ground. They were still inside the Crypt’s frame, but the maze was behind them. “Stay close,” she said, “watch out for unexpected drops.”

Nero felt the power of the coils in his boots. Jeremiah was light in his arms, but it would be difficult to move quickly, or survive, if the Crypt shifted.

“Hold it,” Nero said. They reached a part of hollowed earth where the alloy and granite ground was damaged. Nero turned sideways to get a better look. The pit seemed as if it might lead all the way down to the mantle. He extended his consciousness and measured the length to the other side at about 122 meters. “We’ll need a bridge.”

“I’m on it,” Aera said.

She knelt to the pit where the ruptured alloy gave way to the deep below. Then, telekinetically manipulating the plating and stone, she broke it apart, then put it back together, creating a bridge for them to cross.

Janzers streamed through the gash in the alloy wall, far behind them, yet too close.

Aera drew a pulse gun, one she’d apparently lifted from a Janzer in the holding cell, and gave them cover fire.

Zorian crossed with Connor first.

Pulse blasts flew past them, lighting the void. Aera halted her cover fire when the Janzers reloaded.

“Time’s up, striker,” she said. “Time to run.” She hand-signaled him, letting him know she was also out of ammo.

Nero rushed across with Jeremiah. When he reached the other side, Aera was beside him.

The Janzers charged.

“Let’s move,” Aera said. She dismantled the bridge, thrusting its pieces toward the Janzers. Then she sent her last three pulse grenades in their direction.

The team ran as fast as they could.

Explosions shook the ground beneath them.

Along the way to the rappel ropes, Nero said to Aera, “You fight in the way of the Elders, methods of movement in the zeropoint field this generation of Janzers are unfamiliar with,” he gasped for air, “methods I haven’t even seen in the instruction manuals, methods the Grakas don’t even—”

“And you fight like a little boy.”

Nero smiled. He glimpsed the ropes in his night vision, hanging like vines from above.

“We’re almost there,” Nero said to Jeremiah, “stay with me.” He could hear Jeremiah’s raspy breaths.

They attached the ropes to what was left of their synsuits, Jeremiah tethered to Nero’s back, Connor to Zorian’s, and shot upward.

On the way up, an energy wave passed above them, and an explosion rocked the supply tunnel, one only a pulse launcher could have executed. They whacked the walls in the pit and tangled and untangled.

Aera unsheathed her shuriken and drove them into the rock.

The ropes stayed intact, but the hoist was offline. Below them, Janzers started up the ropes.

“Uh, guys?” Aera said. “Normally I’d love to tow your asses, but I’m in a bit of a hurry today. Do you mind?”

Nero and Zorian unsheathed their shuriken and climbed.

When they crested the summit, a transport lay in pieces.

Embers danced in the dead air. A dead body steamed on the ground.

Zorian eased his brother against the wall.

Nero placed Jeremiah next to his son, then shed the rappel ropes from the pipes and threw them down the pit. Several Janzers screamed as they fell.

In the distance, six flares held by six Janzers moved through the supply shaft.

The shaft rumbled. Aera stopped.

“What was that?” Nero said.

“A transport,” Aera said.

“Which way?” Nero said.

“Hide!” Zorian said. “They’ll run us down.”

They grabbed Jeremiah and Connor and moved to the wall near the pipes.

The transport whirred and slowed at their location.

“We must move fast,” Aera said. “Without a scrambler we have no way to—”

A pop echoed in the shaft as the entrance cleared.

“Stay with me,” Aera said, now poised to strike.

The tip of a cane poked out.

“Don’t fire!” Pirro peeked out from the transport, pulling his beard with his fingers. “You didn’t think I’d let you run around down here alone, did you, girl?” He jabbed his cane toward Zorian. “Oh no, he isn’t coming with us.”

“He is,” Aera said. “We’ll discuss it later.”

“What about Arturo?” Pirro said.

Nero looked at the dead, burned body. “He’s gone.”

“Oh, no,” Zorian said, “not Arty too …”

Aera and Nero turned to the pit, where a scraping noise echoed in the supply shaft.

“Move it!” Aera said. “We’ve got climbers.” She lifted Arty’s body, then sprinted to the transport.

“You were due back in Piscator two hours ago,” Pirro was saying as he powered up the transport, “so I set out, as we discussed. Set the walls to transparent and ran over a Janzer division, but not before they used the launcher—”

“Today, Pirro!” Aera said.

He stroked his beard and telepathically manipulated the transport’s controls. They whisked away from the pit.

“Murray captured?” Pirro said.

“He died in the cell block, defending Connor,” Aera said.

“How did you make it out?”

“We almost didn’t.” Aera looked at Connor, whose chest lifted and fell beneath his destroyed and bloodied synsuit. “We’ll have to talk about what happened sometime,” she turned toward Nero with a look in her eyes he’d not seen before, a bit of fear, a bit of concern, “but not now.”

Pirro brought a withered hand to his brow. “May the gods take old Murray and Arturo to a better place than here.”

Nero turned toward Zorian and Jeremiah.

The eldest son focused on his father, who was mumbling.

“Strike … iron … fist …”

“I’m sorry, Father,” Zorian said. He kissed his father’s bruised forehead. “It’s over …”

“Blood … will … flow …”

Halcyon Village

Dunamis, Underground West

2,500 meters deep

A morning Granville sun, shades of orange, blue, and yellow, reflected off Halcyon Lagoon. Seagulls fought over scraps along the synthetic white sands. Dunamisians strolled through markets, up the layers of cobblestone walks between compressed diamond support pillars and white marble buildings topped with golden or light blue domes. Beneath the largest golden dome, Lady Parthenia Summerset stepped into an elevator and descended through layers of alloy.

When the doors opened, she scurried through the main gallery lined with holographic murals, garnet chandeliers, pedestals topped by burning potpourri, and sconces filled with burning candles on the walls. She dashed down a spiral staircase to where Minister Kurt Kaspasparon waited for her beside Lord Thaddeus. Kaspasparon had arrived earlier without his guardsmen, wearing leather boots and a simple cape over a bodysuit. He didn’t look like a minister.

Lady Parthenia knew he’d negotiated Brody’s safe passage to House Variscan. But that had been over a century ago, and as far as she knew, Brody barely spoke to the man. What interest did he have in the twins?

“This is most … irregular,” she said.

Kaspasparon lowered his hood and bowed deeply to her. “Madam Developer, I thank you for your hospitality, and confidentiality, during these troubling times.”

“We’re out of time for courtesies,” Thad said. “We must begin.”

He pressed his fat thumb to a small box. The entrance cleared, revealing the Summerset’s legendary developmental facility. Thirty bluish-white oval bulbs glowed overhead in rows. A dozen robotic arms dangled from three tracks in the ceiling. Medical bots moved from open suspended incubator to open suspended incubator to holograms to workstations, dizzying in their speed. Polychromatic liquids flowed through tubes around Oriana and Pasha.

The air held a natural aroma, musky, dry but not untenable to Lady Parthenia’s taste. She sensed Kaspasparon’s discomfort. “What troubles you, Minister?”

“Biologically, they should be nearing early adolescence by now, no?”

“We’re a bit behind,” the lady admitted, “though I can assure you, they’ll be full-grown adults in time for the exams.”

“It’s not the exams that concern me.”

“These walls are impregnable. Oriana and Pasha would be safer nowhere else in the commonwealth.”

Kaspasparon folded his arms. “What happens when they leave?”

“They will be fully developed transhumans capable of feats far beyond anything you can dream of,” Thad said. He turned and conversed softly with a medical bot.

“Times are volatile,” the minister countered. “The commonwealth is … changing.”

“So it is.” Lady Parthenia looked down. “We could’ve taken on more candidates if we wanted to, but we didn’t.” She turned to the twins. “We’re dedicated to these babies. We’ve developed countless candidates over the decades, including Miss Damosel …”

Thoughts of Damy pained Parthenia still. She lost her thought. She and Thad had left the Bicentennial after the second act performances, but she’d seen the
Beimeni Press
report, the “Midnight Murders.” She had assured Damy she would protect her children and fully develop them into functioning Beimenian citizens.

She would fulfill her promise.

“I am sorry for your loss,” Kaspasparon said. He put his hand on the edge of Pasha’s incubator and patted it. “House Summerset’s quality work is renowned in the East and the West.”

The lady smiled and gave a slight nod. She pushed her fingers through Oriana’s hair, as soft as silk.
She has her father’s hair,
she thought,
his true eyes.
She bobbed her finger on Oriana’s button nose.
Her mother’s.
Pasha was chubbier than Oriana but had Brody’s dimple cheeks and his nose, small and sharp.

“I’d love to hear about the latest methods,” Kaspasparon said. “We don’t have many developers in Portage, and none as talented as you.”

“We use the premier implantation technology and procedures,” Lady Parthenia said proudly.

She hand-signaled the bots. They pushed the twins into an adjacent room behind a low plastic wall, attaching them to tubes and wires. A viscose green fluid filled the tubes and squirmed into their veins. Internal visuals of Oriana’s and Pasha’s cardiovascular and nervous systems formed above Granville spheres, looking like neon webbings over silhouettes. She reminded the minister how development had been done before the commonwealth had existed. In Minister Kaspasparon’s youth, the bots numbed newborn skulls but kept the babies awake during the procedures. They inserted millions of microscopic filaments, a thousandth of the width of human hairs, over the brains. They connected the meshes to the neurochips that functioned as transmitters and receivers to facilitate the transhuman mind-body-cosmos interface.

“Nowadays,” the lady was saying, “the surgeries are endovascular, no incisions, which lowers the risk for hemorrhaging and death.”

“Does that create other risks?” Kaspasparon said.

“Minimal,” Thad put in, “confined to the anesthesia injection.” He pointed to the bots. “What they’re about to do is steer the filaments through the network of arteries, veins, and capillaries that supply blood to the neurons necessary to enhance the mind-body-cosmos interface.”

“What’re they putting over their heads?”

“Helmets lined with thousands of tiny magnets that the bots manipulate to separate the filaments and send the mesh material to various parts of the brain. It’ll also allow them to place the neurochip.”

“What happens if you’ve done something wrong?”

“The bots would pull out the mesh the same way it entered.”

A hologram formed of the twins, illuminating the neurons of their nervous systems. The bots directed the surgery. Their telepathic communication led to adjustments in the meshes and the neurochips until the words PROCEDURE COMPLETE appeared, first through Oriana’s likeness, then through Pasha’s. The bots zoomed in on the twins’ brains and the neurons magnified to the size of a transhuman, electric impulses traveling as fast as light.

“The optic factors are now being installed,” Parthenia said, “manipulating and enhancing eye color and vision.” The neurons shifted again, and the traditional genetic code letters,
A
s,
C
s,
G
s, and
T
s, flashed beside the images. “They’re programming increases muscle mass with growth factors and a reduction in body fat.” Another shift and the screen sizzled crimson, while new layers of code floated beside the neurons.

Overhead, red bioluminescence winked—

A Granville sphere upon a pedestal in the center of the room activated. Above it was rendered the scene outside House Summerset: the Lady Isabelle led a Janzer division through the narrow, sinuous streets of Halcyon Village.

The bots continued, unhindered.

“No,” Parthenia said, “
no
…”

Isabelle forced open the golden doors to House Summerset. Wind blew out the candles that lined the main gallery.

“Impregnable?” Kaspasparon said incredulously.

Parthenia didn’t answer him. Her eyes narrowed. She looked livid. She had negotiated with Supreme Director Isabelle Lutetia regarding her candidates in the past. She knew an unsteady response—even after such disrespect of a forced entry without a communiqué—could mean the end of Oriana and Pasha, and, perhaps, her house of development. When Lord Thaddeus stirred, the lady grabbed his bulky arm. “I’ll speak to her myself.”