The Gambit with Perfection (The Phantom of the Earth Book 2) Read online

  A new hologram formed upon the pad, one with crystalline cliffs and mossy stone. Trees as tall as mountains stretched into the clouds. The view zoomed past a clear river with what looked like sparks of electricity, down layers of waterfalls to a rock formation where the clear water mixed with a metallic fluid. The fluid flowed from a pool up a cutout in the stone and into the landmass, near geothermal vents. The fluid seemed artificial yet organic, a vivid combination of gold, scarlet, black, silver, and yellow; it weaved in a hypnotic pattern unnatural for its liquid composition.

  Research into the Vigna system had advanced far beyond what Brody knew. “You’ve sent probes?”

  “One probe,” Heywood said, “which took years to arrive at Vigna and sent but one transmission to Candor Chasma before we lost contact.”

  “Then send another to discern the Lorum’s status,” Verena said.

  “The chancellor,” Verena was about to interrupt, but Nero told her not to, “insists upon a landing.”

  “What is this … liquid metal?” Brody said.

  “Your striker is best fit for the high-altitude drop,” Heywood said. “Explore the mountain and jungle and the cliff formation among the clouds. Bring back a sample of this colorful liquid, and I assure you that the memory of your failed Jubilees will disappear faster than humanity did from the Earth’s surface.”

  ZPF Impulse Wave: Damosel Rhea

  Research & Development Department (RDD)

  Palaestra, Underground Northeast

  2,500 meters deep

  Damy observed the synisms fermenting before her, and those swishing side to side in tubes connected to silo vats. Beside the vats, robotics responded to Damy’s thoughts. She made adjustments, workstation to workstation, Granville sphere to Granville sphere, micromanipulator to micromanipulator. She would soon complete E. convert, a synthetic organism her team hoped would accelerate the process of transforming known genomes into those of extinct species based upon fossil remains—a unique challenge when compiling incomplete genetic material, but crucial to the completion of Project Silkscape, formerly known as Project Gemini.

  “The purpose of Project Gemini,” Chancellor Masimovian had declared in 342 AR, “is to learn about the origins of life, to better understand evolution and the processes that influence Reassortment.”

  Damy had nodded, though his comment lacked reason; where 95 percent of life on Earth consisted of just carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus, Reassortment wasn’t natural. It was a mirror organism with eight nucleotides and thirty-nine amino acids and had mutated in ways unpredicted by science; where it had once lived solely off human neural and blood cells, it had learned to live off sunlight and nitrogen, a disastrous event historians called the Reassortment Atmospheric Anomaly, for it had spread rapidly in Earth’s atmosphere and soil.

  “It is possible,” Masimovian added, “however unlikely, that an ancient form of man may possess resistance to Reassortment, a subtlety we might exploit.”

  Damy’s team had constructed earlier forms of Homo transition including Homo habilis, a species more than a million and a half years old that stood nearly a meter tall with a round jawline and narrow teeth; Homo rudolfensis, over a million years old and no more than one and a half meters tall with a hard brain case, a long face, wide teeth, and on and on to Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, and Homo heidelbergensis; but it was Homo neanderthalensis, Neanderthal Man, a species well adapted to cold weather and intense physical activity, that Damy’s team fully reverse engineered from fossilized genetic materials and the transhuman genome (a genome better acclimated to the deep Earth’s heat and pressure and mind-body-cosmos connection than any ancestral hominid).

  Damy and Brody had hoped that Neanderthal’s body—heavily muscled with larger heat-efficient brains—might react differently to Reassortment and yield insights that might further his research. Damy created the first synthetic protohumans, naming them Gemini, and at a conclave the discovery was deemed worthy of significant conversion. Damy still wore the Mark of Masimovian upon her neck. Though the Gemini succumbed as swiftly to Reassortment as the more evolved transhuman, the Mark gave Damy credibility within the supreme scientific board and provided Brody a viable, and in her opinion more humane source for clinical trials. Project Gemini evolved into Silkscape, an entertainment venture, with the Harsailles Menagerie: a garden for formerly extinct species, scheduled to open in the second trimester of 370 AR at the center of Silkscape City, Lovereal.

  Now Damy telepathically sent orders to the workstations, and thousands of cylindrical microscopes moved up and down, magnifying the genetic materials, accommodating Damy’s adjustments. She coordinated with the bots and the micromanipulators and fed the materials into the central synism silo. Damy’s bot assistant, Joanna—molded from an alloy to look almost transhuman—moved simmering vials and beakers.

  Damy blew out a big breath and swiped the sweat from her forehead. She dimmed the oval lighting overhead. Violet phosphorescent light filled the silo walls as she constructed the new genome, oligo by oligo.

  The opaque entrance to the Nicola Facility’s Fermentation Center cleared.

  Vernon Lebrizzi entered. Damy saw his reflection in the glass enclosure, his face looking like a rat’s, his hands in his transparent lab coat pockets. She exhaled. Why, why, why does he never listen, she thought. He’ll ruin my momentum …

  “You’re supposed to be on the surface,” Damy said. She clumped her hair in a fist.

  Biomat suits protected Beimenians during surface excursions. Though they failed 5 to 10 percent of the time, killing many RDD scientists, neophytes, strike team captains, strikers, aeras, and strategists, Vernon always found his way back to the Beimeni zone. Damy sighed.

  “Let the underlings collect specimens and die on the surface,” Verne said. “We’re too far behind.” He activated a workstation. “Why would you insist on my participation when we have so much to do, so close to opening day?”

  “I heard you’re the most efficient researcher the Aeronian Trading Center ever knew,” Damy said. “Did your reputation exceed your potential?” She adjusted synconvert’s DNA, and the cylinders hissed up and down.

  “I don’t know where you hear these rumors, Miss Damy,” Verne said.

  Damy turned away, face flushed. She hated it when he addressed her formally.

  “I’m your top researcher,” Verne added, “and this organism could be the breakthrough we’ve been searching for, accelerate our conversions, lead to—”

  “You’re in my way,” Damy said.

  “—the terrible beast you so desire.”

  The beautiful beast, Damy thought. The scientists who discovered Deinotherium Before Reassortment called it the “terrible beast” because of its huge size, odd appearance, short trunk, and unusual tusks, which looked like two massive fangs protruding from the lower jaw. Without viable genetic materials, resurrection of it had eluded Damy for many years. She didn’t need Vernon Lebrizzi to remind her of it. When she ignored him, Verne deactivated his workstation and requested water from Joanna, who brought him a glass.

  The balls on this man, Damy thought, now using Joanna in the middle of a synbio experiment!

  He slurped the water and dabbed perspiration from his face, then pulled back his transparent sleeve, glancing down. His armlet’s digital display showed information from the Aeronian Trading Center, colloquially known as “the pit.” Verne didn’t trade any longer, he assured Damy, but she knew he missed it like a lover. He still dressed like one of them, wearing button-down shirts, bow ties, and slacks held up by suspenders beneath his transparent lab coat. Damy despised the pit and the traders who operated there. She never would’ve taken Verne on her team if she’d known his origin. Never, never, never—

  “We’re behind,” Verne said, still staring at the armlet, “and the chancellor’s office demands at least two hundred living species prior to opening day.”

  “Opening day is two years off, Mister Verne.” Damy activat
ed another seven workstations to coordinate the organism’s synthesis. “We’re right on schedule.” While opening day was two years away, the creation of life took time, Damy knew, and synisms used to accelerate growth in transhumans didn’t always translate well to the DNA of other species, particularly prehistoric ones.

  Verne smiled. “Not for long, with that attitude.”

  “You should go,” Damy said. “They’ll be expecting you in Area 55.”

  “They can wait. I wanted to check on you, see how you’re doing … what with the mission …”

  “What in Reassortment’s name are you talking about?” Damy swore. The ivory cylinders stopped, as did the flow of enzymes and genetic materials.

  “You don’t know?”

  Damy swiped for his armlet, but he held it away from her. “Don’t look at me like that,” she said.

  She glared at him, wishing she could send him back to Navita City, with its sinuous underground streams that roved throughout the city’s layers, down the Great Falls into the Archimedes River. A massive leech for a massive toilet bowl, she thought.

  Much of Navita City’s walls were covered with holograms, rather than Granville illusions, the sole city built this way. The renditions contained information on trade contracts, or images of the goods, services, and events represented by contracts, such as cloned livestock, synthesized raw materials, synbio products, the pricing for candidates in the Harpoon Auction. There were contracts on the odds of a Jubilee, on how long a Jubilee would last, on the probability of a death anywhere in the commonwealth, and in which territory a death would occur; contracts on the probability of a Reassortment cure discovery, on the direction Lady Isabelle would first sling her hair at her next commonwealth holiday celebration, and of course, the contracts for shares of consortiums that traded on the Beimeni Contract Exchange.

  “What contract are you studying?” Damy said. He didn’t respond. “I command it,” she said, “I’m your supreme scientist—”

  She wanted to punch him when he flashed his teeth. “It’s not my place, if he didn’t tell you—”

  Damy grabbed Verne’s wrist and downloaded the contracts into her extended consciousness. She sifted through data on the viability of a Mission to Vigna. Beimenians placed their bets en masse; to do so was in their blood, she knew, and the bid-and-ask prices on the multitude of contracts for this mission flashed and moved up and down with the ebb and flow of information and emotions, fear and greed. Bids were highest on the so-called “Mission Fission” contract, the one that predicted the team would split apart, molecules emaciated by exotic matter. The team. The team. The team. The whites of Damy’s eyes expanded.

  BARÃO STRIKE TEAM

  She closed her extended consciousness, and her eyes. When she opened them, she said, “So, what did you bet on?”

  “The better question is why Brody didn’t tell you, why he—”

  “No, no, I’ve heard about your style. Your style benefits from transhuman death. What about your fiendish brethren down in Navita?”

  “Hey sister, I can’t help where I came from any more than you can.”

  “I’m not your sister.”

  “I was doing fine before they found me and sent me to the Northeast,” Verne said. His voice turned hateful. “I didn’t ask the Variscans for help.”

  Joanna told them to calm down. They didn’t listen, and now stood face to face. “I didn’t need their help—”

  “You’d be dead—”

  “—and I didn’t ask you to recruit me.”

  Damy drew back as if infected by E. agony, usually transmitted over the ZPF to transhuman DNA with a baton, which spread Reassortment-like pain signals throughout the body.

  Verne took his leave. When he neared the exit, he turned back and, with his glass in hand, said, “I don’t care about the pit anymore.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Damy didn’t know how much time had passed or how long she’d been sobbing. Finally, the tears slowed enough that she could rush to the restroom, wash her face, and sprint out of the Nicola Facility to an intra-RDD transport from which she tried to connect to Brody fifty times during the short journey to the Huelel Facility. He never answered, and the bots at the Huelel Facility told her he’d left hours ago.

  Hours ago, she thought, hours.

  She took an interterritory transport from Palaestra City to Beimeni City and dashed along North Boardwalk. She weaved between Beimenians in golden tunics and shawls, who waited, she assumed, for their turn to enter the Fountain of Youth, and Beimenians in tanned capes, selling synism vials, colorful and fragrant, until someone in a maroon cape crashed into her. Damy’s satchel flew off her shoulder and she fell. She looked up. The contents of her bag were strewn along the wooden planks: lipsticks and a compact, z-disks, access cards, a garnet bracelet, benari coins. Her bodysuit had torn at the arm, where a bruise was already forming.

  “Madam, please forgive me!” said the adolescent boy, an apparent Courier of the Chancellor.

  “Watch where you’re going on the boardwalk!” She collected her belongings. The boy lingered at her side. “No! Just go! Get away from us!”

  Damy said us out of habit, then wondered, Is there still an us? Why wouldn’t Brody tell me about a courier, about a Warning, a commonwealth mission?

  When she arrived at her unit in the First Ward, she searched her satchel for her access card but couldn’t find it. She squinted, blocked the glare of Phanes’s Granville sun reflecting off the blue-and-gray marble skywalk. She didn’t know if she forgot her access card in the Nicola Facility or lost it on the boardwalk. At her unit’s entryway, Damy telepathically initiated the DNA scanner, and a hologram materialized. It hollowed grooves for a palm and fingers matching hers. Damy pressed her hand into it.

  MISS DAMOSEL ACCEPTED

  INSERT ACCESS CARD FOR ENTRY

  Brody, can you hear me?

  No response.

  Brody!

  Damy’s calf muscles flexed. She pressed her hand to her head. Where could he be? INSERT ACCESS CARD FOR ENTRY still blinked above. Damy heard a crack and a snap—the sound of an entryway clearing. Her neighbor, Clara, emerged. She wore a silk gown that revealed her left breast, standard garb worn in Fountain Square.

  “You okay, Damy?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Damy said, “great.” She grinned. “Brody just likes to pretend we live Before Reassortment, or that we’re in Yeuron or Piscator.”

  Clara sniggered nervously and frowned. “I guess, I meant, with the Warning, are you going to be okay?”

  Damy turned pale, less from Clara’s tone than her meaning. She swiped her forehead. “Yeah … of course … we’ll be fine.”

  “Well, let me know if you need anything. I’m around.”

  Damy thanked her and waved. As Clara sauntered toward the elevator, Damy rubbed her eyes. The barrier cleared, and there Brody stood. He looked the way a Beimeni captain should, a sculpture of perfection, shaved, clear bronze skin, a sash across his chest and wrapped around his waist, his deep red-brown hair falling just above his shoulders.

  Damy glared at him, arms crossed, hands tucked under her elbows. “About time.”

  She stormed past him through the great room, down the hallway, and into the kitchen. The countertop and cabinets were etched from the earth, outlined with forest-green marble. Damy lifted three jugs of water out of a cabinet and placed them in the containment area, a vessel surrounded with synisms designed to convert gaseous carbon dioxide exhaled by transhumans to the solid form, dry ice, which cooled the contents, keeping anything placed inside fresh. She pushed a button and washed her arm in the marble sink.

  “You’re hurt,” Brody said. “Merrell, bring a vial of uficilin—”

  “No, I’m fine, a courier ran into me.”

  “Hey, slow down.”

  Merrell, their keeper bot, closed the case of uficilin vials and disappeared into the back rooms.

  “Look at me,” Brody said.

  She stared at th
e ground and exhaled before she looked. His bright blue eyes were placid. How did he stay so steady?

  “I’ve been selected for—”

  “A commonwealth mission, my friend Vernon Lebrizzi had the pleasure of informing me earlier. Some heathen derivatives trader tells me about a mission before my eternal partner, and now I get it, the chiding looks I got on the transports, at the Huelel Facility, on North Boardwalk, in Artemis Square, just now with Clara, I’m the last one in the gods damned commonwealth to know about this!”

  He moved his lips to her forehead, but she pulled away. “Forgive me, my love, you’ve been so … worried, and I didn’t want to—”

  “Tell me the truth.”

  “—hurt you. I don’t know how Verne or anyone found out about it.”

  “The balls on Chancellor Masimovian,” Damy said. “I’m so an—”

  “Annoyed, with me, I know.” Brody pointed to the ceiling, a common Beimenian signal that referred to Marstone, the eye in the sky. “Let’s sit.”

  “It’s not just about this … mission,” Damy said. “He asks you to cure Reassortment. He asks you to unfreeze Dr. Kole Shrader. Now he’s sending you away again—”

  “I’m honored to serve Beimeni,” Brody said, his expression serious, forbidding even, “and I won’t risk Dr. Shrader’s life until I’m sure we have all the tools we need, not after … the accidents.”

  Damy ran her fingers through his thick fiery hair, thinking about their failure to revive the scientists frozen near absolute zero, killing all those in stasis except for Dr. Shrader. “So this is my fault?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I just want to get out of here.” Her eyes moved back and forth rapidly, frustrated. “We’re never getting out of here, are we?”