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

by Zen, Raeden

  Minister Kaspasparon neared and kissed Gwen’s cheek. “Lovely to host you during this special time. We’ve missed you.”

  “Pleasure, Minister,” Gwen said, holding both his hands. “Likewise, I owe all that I am to you.”

  “Nonsense, child, we didn’t compete in the Harpoons.”

  “You gave me a chance. You sent me to the Northeast.”

  “Indeed.”

  A keeper bot handed them glasses filled with Portagen champagne. They toasted. It pleased Gwen to see the minister looking well, the youthful glint of his eyes enhanced by the gemstones he wore.

  Later on, the wine hit Gwen harder than she expected. She and Marcel took to the dance floor, and he twisted her into his arms. When she looked up at him, she saw Captain Barão, his tousled hair, his unbuttoned shirt, sweat and saliva falling from his chin and lips, and behind him upon the wall as if part of a Granville illusion, Damy grabbing Verne’s wrists as he choked her—

  “What’s wrong?” Marcel said.

  “Nothing, I’m just a bit light-headed. All the wine …”

  “I don’t think it’s that—”

  “Mind if I cut in?” Kaspasparon said.

  Marcel bowed, and for the next song Gwen danced with the minister. When the ensemble’s chords were at their loudest, he leaned next to her and said, “You don’t have to help him if you don’t want to.”

  Gwen pulled away and froze. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  The guests danced around them, spinning and dipping.

  Kaspasparon embraced her again. “Someone so beautiful and so intelligent and so important to the lady and me shouldn’t be so terrified. You aren’t the Gwendolyn I remember after the Harpoon Auction.”

  “We all grow up, Minister, we all change.”

  “You don’t have to answer me here, or stay here now, though you can if you want. You’re welcome in this citadel—”

  “I’m a Harpoon Champion. My place is in Palaestra—”

  “Where you serve a killer, a great deceiver of our time, a man who means you harm.”

  “You’re wrong, he loves me, and he loves Beimeni, and he’s going to lead us all to the surface …”

  Her voice cracked, and she hoped to the gods Antosha wasn’t in her mind right now. After breaking away from the minister, she found she troubled to draw breath. The room spun around her. She steadied herself and tried to leave the minister, but he grabbed her hand and spun her around, her gown all swirls.

  “Tell me, sweet Gwendolyn,” Kaspasparon said, “when you poisoned Brody, was it forced, or did you willingly give your soul to Antosha Zereoue?”

  Gwen dropped his hand and slapped him.

  The music, dancing, and conversation ceased.

  Gwen twisted and rushed away from the minister. Her gown swept across the dance floor. “Marcel!” she said. “Juvelle! We’re leaving.”

  ZPF Impulse Wave: Isabelle Lutetia

  Beimeni City

  Phanes, Underground Central

  2,500 meters deep

  A Janzer division escorted Lady Isabelle and Chairman Gallegos over Cherry Hills to where Atticus swung his club, sending bright brown balls over the crimson fairway. Isabelle noted his perfect form, the tip of his right foot on the ground, his left foot planted. It was a shame he couldn’t run the commonwealth with similar alacrity, though if he could, he might not need her at his flank, where the skin was soft.

  “Bravo!” said his keeper bot. “Bravo, sir!” The bot clapped above its head.

  Atticus lifted his sunglasses as they approached.

  “Chancellor Masimovian,” Gallegos said, “pardon the intrusion, but I’ve been trying to reach you all day, and Isabelle—”

  Atticus took another swing. Gallegos ducked and dropped into the crimson grass. “I thought we were to meet later this afternoon,” Atticus said.

  Gallegos, still on his knees, pulled a z-disk from his pocket and held it up. “Chancellor, for your attention.”

  “Can’t you see I don’t have time for this?” He took another shot.

  “But, my chancellor, our data indicates that the commonwealth’s economy has fallen ill to recession for the last fifty-five days, an affliction we haven’t seen in more than one hundred fifty years. Not since the power disruption in Phanes back in 207.”

  Thoughts of the Great Blackout of 207 brought a shiver to Isabelle. She’d been a Maiden of Masimovian that year, just ten years after Beimeni City had become the capital of the commonwealth. The Master of the Harpoons back then had kept the annual population growth rate at 2.5 percent, which was too low, in Atticus’s twisted worldview, to drive the annual economic growth of 10-plus percent he’d desired. When Isabelle took over the role of running the Harpoons in 226 AR, she bumped the population growth rate up to 3.5 percent (because the birthrate had risen to 4.5 percent and she didn’t want to send as many of her children to the Lower Level) and up, up, up over the decades to the present 8 percent, which was less than half the birthrate of 15 percent—both far too high. Isabelle understood that growing economies needed growing populations, increasing the supply of both workers and consumers, but the rate Atticus demanded, coupled with a theoretically eternal life span, was, in fact, unsustainable. His rule couldn’t end soon enough—

  The chancellor broke her unbidden reverie with another swing, another ball sent into orbit. Isabelle shook her head at Gallegos, who finally rose. Atticus caught her eye. “So now you bring messengers to bother me on my days off—”

  “Contrary to your opinion, your days off don’t run continuously.” She orbited the chancellor, her gown fluttering around her in the winds.

  Atticus handed his club to the bot and requested another. To Gallegos, he said, “You’re in charge of market quotas and the economy. Do what you’re skilled at doing. Get the consortiums in line. Raise salaries. Buy up surplus product. Expand the territories. Lower the concentrations of precious metals in the benaris and distribute them to the unemployed.” Atticus’s keeper bot handed him a water canteen. He gulped and wiped his mouth. “Sometimes I wonder if all that economic training has done you more harm than good.”

  “But, my chancellor,” Gallegos looked even sweatier than usual, “we’ve been doing all of those things since the insurrection deepened—”

  “Don’t! Don’t you ever, ever, ever speak that word!”

  “Apologies, Chancellor, since … the issues sprang up … we’ve been using our arsenal to keep the commonwealth afloat, but we’re not talking fifteen and some territories the way we were in 207.” Gallegos swiped the perspiration that dripped from his chin. “We’re thirty territories strong stretched over the continent. We need more Janzers. We need more security. I beg of you, my chancellor.”

  Isabelle eyed the chancellor, who sneered at her. “His words, not mine,” she said.

  Gallegos turned away the bot’s offer for water. “The attacks on the supply lines are part of the issue, my chancellor, but the economic decline seems more than cyclical to me, striking in its velocity, the contract market is crashing, and unemployment is rising at an unprecedented rate—”

  “Let me put it in a way I think you’ll understand.” Atticus pointed his finger not a centimeter from Gallegos’s nose. Gallegos looked down toward it, crossing his eyes. The sweat rowed down his face now. “You get this economy rolling again, or you’ll be rolling around in the Lower Level.”

  Gallegos eased backward. “But my chancellor—” The chairman stopped himself. He wiped a trembling palm on his silk cape. “I’ll do all what you ask, but if I could—”

  Atticus grunted and swiped his hand through the air. He cleared perspiration from his brow and swung. The ball ricocheted off to the side, into the cherry trees. “Gods damn it.” He flung the club. Isabelle didn’t flinch when he whipped around to her. “You lost Verena Iglehart! You! Not the Janzers! Now we have a strategist and a striker in BP control, with gods know how many more to follow, and you bring Gallegos here to beg—”

&nb
sp; “You should’ve let me kill Jeremiah Selendia when we had the chance.”

  “Up the security in Farino Prison.”

  Isabelle employed the finest engineers from Phanes along with twenty Janzer divisions to build a new vessel capable of making the journey across the Infernus Sea in the Lower Level. She would be sure it would carry Captain Barão to safety there, letting him rot until he died. The last vessel they owned had been destroyed; it had carried Antosha, and though he was injured when an explosion on the sea sank the vessel, he had survived, saved by Janzers riding rocketcycles, thank the gods.

  “I’m not losing Captain Barão—” she said.

  “Just like you’d never lose Jeremiah and Lady Verena? Up the security!”

  “We could just torture and kill him. Send him to the surface. No one would ever know—”

  “We will follow procedures this time. He was a supreme scientist of—”

  “Fuck your politics, and your procedures.”

  “My friends?” Gallegos said, still shaking. “If I may be so bold as to make a suggestion …”

  The chancellor and Isabelle turned together and said: “What, Gallegos?”

  “The supply lines between Palaestra and Underground East have suffered such damage that half are no longer traversable, and I’ve learned that many supply tunnels have been flooded in Underground West. What we need is more Janzers to complete the repairs—”

  “We have over a million Janzers spread throughout this commonwealth with another half million in Nyx and tens of thousands more in Farino Prison,” Atticus said. “Each Janzer costs five million benaris. Do you suggest we take on more debt? Is that what you would see me do? Run inflation beyond the twelve percent in your report?”

  Isabelle rolled her eyes. The Masimovian Administration had already accumulated debt well over 200 percent of Beimeni’s annual gross production, owed primarily to its own central bank.

  The chancellor blathered on. “What we need is for my departments to function, perhaps what we need is a new communications director—”

  “You bankrupted this commonwealth long ago,” Isabelle said. “What difference could another one and a quarter trillion benaris make? Or why not just force the production lines in Cineris, Phanes, and Farino?” On these production lines, engineers and scientists, along with existing Janzers, reverse engineered the chancellor’s DNA into his Janzer army. “Think about all the Beimenians you could put to work on such a vast project, my dear. Two hundred fifty thousand additional Janzers in Palaestra, and you’ll never suffer the embarrassment of another attack again.”

  “Gallegos.”

  “I will move forward with this plan with your permission.”

  Atticus blinked and raised his eyes as he searched his extended consciousness. “So be it. Borrow whatever it takes and get the production lines humming. I want this new army delivered to the supply lines and cities in Palaestra and Luxor in time for the Autumn Gala.”

  Ope City

  Ope, Underground Central

  A flock of synthetic marvellous spatuletails glided over the Crescent Building, named for its shape, hollowed at the base and curved to the sky. On the rooftop deck, Beimenians sat at bronze tables layered with iris lace cloth, Lady Isabelle and Zorian Selendia among them. A trio of flutists played and swayed. Their melodies danced along the rooftop.

  “I’m glad you still have wisdom,” Isabelle said. “I was beginning to wonder if I’d hear from you again.” The black-violet wig she wore clung to her face and chin. She thought it wise not to rely on the ZPF to deceive the populace, for Zorian was as skillful with telepathy as she was. She required her full concentration in his presence.

  “You didn’t have to torture Jeremiah,” Zorian said. “You were never going to get the information.” He adjusted his fedora. “I’d rather you killed him.” Zorian was dressed like a Ludfordian Consortium scientist in Ope, with an orange lab coat and blue synisms to color his eyes, even the whites of them.

  “I hope you’re not intimating how I should treat enemies of the state—”

  “Negotiations with the BP are impossible when all those captured by our government end up in the Lower Level, or dead, or beaten—”

  “I don’t negotiate with terrorists. I end them. Those in league with the Beimeni Polemon should understand their predicament.”

  “They do.”

  The artificial gusts that swept across the rooftop carried the smell of lavender and lilies. It wasn’t enough to sweeten the bitter taste in Isabelle’s mouth, thinking about what she’d heard from the Janzer who’d survived the Polemon strike in Permutation Crypt.

  “Do you understand?” She waited for Zorian’s reaction, probing his mind. He revealed nothing. She’d let him think her naive long enough. “Did you send me to that trap below Navita?”

  “I sent you to Navita, not to a trap. I can’t be held accountable if you misunderstood me.”

  Isabelle slammed the table into Zorian, and he spit out a chunk of crabmeat. “Do you take me for your whelp of a brother?” While soft, her tone was biting. Zorian’s face turned red. “I understood you quite clearly, you self-indulgent ant! I heard what you told Aera in the Crypt.” Zorian coughed, then leaned back, laughing. Isabelle wanted nothing more than to rip out his lying throat. “You won’t find it so hilarious when I send you to the island—”

  “I told the BP what they had to hear. You know Aera’s skill with the zeropoint field is beyond transhuman.”

  That was true enough. Aera had eluded her for nearly one hundred fifty years. Still, Isabelle was tiring of Zorian’s game. She pulled the table away from him. “What do you want?”

  “To lead one of the great halls and surrounding districts, as a lord. Lord Zorian Selendia.” The pronouncement slipped smoothly off his tongue. He sipped his wine. His eyes drifted over the city skyline. “A lord of Nourenisa District or Olenaris District, in Ope.”

  “If you hold up your end, I will see it done.” Isabelle extended her consciousness. “I presume you have the details.”

  “The BP stronghold is in the East. There you will find its senior Leadership, including my father and Pirro—and if you’re lucky, Aera as well.”

  Isabelle lost her concentration, and her extended consciousness faltered. “What do you know about Aera?”

  “That will cost you.”

  “I could kill you right here, right now.” The truth was that Isabelle didn’t know what she could or could not do to Zorian Selendia. His consciousness permeated the ZPF omnisciently and uniquely. Could she risk arresting him now, only to fail?

  Zorian stabbed a toothpick into a green olive, making a show of pushing it into his mouth. “But you won’t.”

  “Tell me everything.”

  “She’s working with my father.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “She has no weakness that I could distinguish, except maybe that her thoughts dwell on her past. Seems my father helped her through the trauma of the collapse, and she sees herself in his debt.”

  The flutists were joined by trumpeters. Their melody rose to a crescendo and concluded, followed by applause and the sound of silver tapping glass. When the hum of conversation resumed, Zorian said, “That could be trouble for you.”

  “Where’s the entrance?”

  “There’re multiple modes scattered in Navita. But you can’t just walk in. They find you. The labyrinth I solved is being altered as we speak.”

  Isabelle pulled up a map of Navita City in her extended consciousness and stilled the Great Falls. She panned over the rolling water of the city’s inner layers. A white circle penetrated the walls to the elevators and pedestrian paths. She felt a chill race down her spine. Memories of her near death beneath Navita City surged forth, quickening her heart. “Do you think I’m going to rush into Navita again, make the same mistake, you fool? We’ve searched the caverns of Navita thoroughly, with no signs of what you—”

  “You searched like a Beimenian.”
Zorian waved his hand as if it were a diver. “You thought they’d dig down. You never imagined they would dig up.” He swallowed another olive.

  Isabelle grimaced, for Reassortment permeated the Earth’s bedrock at depths that shouldn’t have been possible: the traitors could be risking the commonwealth’s integrity with this stronghold. “Your BP heathen brethren risk over three hundred million lives in the commonwealth. What is it Jeremiah seeks? Power? Justice? For what exactly? He broke the law, not us.”

  “You don’t have to tell me, my lady.” Zorian sipped his wine and slathered Vivoan goat cheese over a cracker. He crunched it and grinned. “I hate them as much as you do.” He washed down the food with his wine. “The commonwealth is crawling with BP, my lady.” He shivered. “Their connections permeate your government, they’ve infiltrated the private consortiums and every crevice of your power—”

  “And I will destroy them all.” Isabelle was beginning to enjoy fantasies of how she would dispose of this arrogant pup, once his usefulness was spent. But she checked her thoughts, lest he sense them and give her false intel.

  Zorian winced. He ate a pickle and took another sip of wine.

  “Where’s their next target?” she said.

  “The Front doesn’t trust me with such details any longer.”

  “Is there another stronghold beside the one in the east?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “There’s only one way to know if I can trust you.”

  She pushed the plates covered with scraps of salmon and pork bones to the side and reached her fingers across the table, the synisms that colored her nails lavender leading the way. “Take my hands.”

  Zorian grinned and did as she requested.

  She hated that she couldn’t simply read his thoughts as she did with most Beimenians. He somehow blocked her, almost certainly by use of the ZPF. She could get around a recaller at close range. Zorian’s skills with the ZPF were different than Jeremiah’s, and, in some ways, more powerful.