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

by Zen, Raeden

  Oriana extended her consciousness, but before she could work through a solution, she heard a voice in her mind.

  You’re going the wrong way!

  She started, turning her head. She didn’t see anyone else in the room. Nathan appeared to be solving another enigma at the submarine. The voice wasn’t Pasha’s or Nathan’s. She didn’t know whom it belonged to. Assuming it could be another candidate attempting to throw her off, she refocused and sent her answer to the holographic enigma: A solution exists if, and only if, n is even.

  A globe formed. Ceres, with its thin atmosphere, hung in the void. Oriana zoomed to the group of towers labeled CHRONOS-1 ENTRY; she zoomed in to the towers and the interior, to the AQUA SECTOR. She moved through the underground sea, down to the AMALGAM SECTOR.

  Did you make it?

  This was Pasha’s voice, for sure. She turned away from the glowing globe and grinned. He was talking to her again, and he was still in the Harpoons! This meant they could still have a top-tier performance, together. And nullify the Warning …

  I’m in the Aqua Sector, she sent. Where’re you?

  Trapped in the Amalgam Sector. Falcon has enlisted other teams. I don’t know how or why they’re helping him but they are. My team didn’t make it during the melee in the maze. I’m outnumbered and outgunned.

  How do I get there?

  Access the submarines. There’s a mapping system. It isn’t difficult to navigate or operate, but it’s dark beyond the dam. Find the Amalgam Gates and the tunnel that leads to the Amalgam Sector.

  Got it.

  And, O, watch out for …

  Watch out for what? Pasha? What do I need to watch?

  She startled when Nathan said, “Did you find him?”

  “I know where we have to go.”

  Nathan connected to one of the submarines and requested its transparent hatch to open. The hatch shimmered orange, pushed out from the center, and slid down the beak. Nathan and Oriana sat back to back in the seats. The hatch spun over the top, and the submarine rotated. She heard a loud beeping noise. The dam opened, and the submarine glided through it into a vacuum. The dam closed, and the alloy ground and turned. Water rushed in, lifting them. When the wall ahead of them opened from the center, water bubbled and curdled over the submarine and they plunged into the underground sea.

  They cleared the heated alloy rods, and the sea darkened. Nathan telepathically requested lights. A white headlight paved their way in the darkness, along their journey to the dwarf planet’s core.

  Oriana requested navigation to the Amalgam Gates. The sub swooped down at a forty-five-degree angle and turned.

  “Something rubbed over us,” Nathan said.

  “I don’t pick up anything on sonar.”

  “It happened again!” Nathan said. “Didn’t you feel that? Didn’t you see?”

  Oriana didn’t. She turned, looking at Nathan’s back from the corners of her eyes. Between his lost expression in the elevator and desperate voice presently, she wondered if he was losing his nerve.

  You have to get out of there, now!

  This was a deep voice, a man’s voice, not Pasha’s but the other she’d heard before. Now Oriana pondered her own doors of perception, and she hypothesized what the critical-reasoning session represented, what Ceres represented, and the historical consequences for Homo transition and synbio research, the research her parents had conducted in the RDD. What would she be if humanity hadn’t developed synbio? What would Beimeni do if it couldn’t grow all the organic and inorganic substances it needed for its survival?

  In this instant, within the depths of Ceres, Oriana understood the purpose of the second session of the Harpoons: to force the new adults of the Great Commonwealth to understand how precarious, how opportunistic, how humble was humanity’s role within the biosphere, for even in Beimeni, where nearly anything one could imagine could be made real, limitations existed.

  She thought about the commonwealth’s expansion, that for all the grand exploits of the Beimenian people, they were hindered by adjustments and changes within the crust. Collapses still occurred, as they had in the West.

  The submarine drifted farther into the dark. Oriana found herself thinking about Nyx, the destroyed territory. Had the Earth decided Angeles didn’t belong to man?

  “Oriana?” Nathan said.

  And this reasoning, of course, led her to Reassortment, for everything in the life of a Beimenian led to Reassortment. Was the organism truly man’s creation? Or was it, in fact, the Earth’s way of taking back the surface?

  “Oriana!”

  “Stay focused on the task,” she said.

  “You’re telling me? Have you heard nothing I’ve been saying?”

  Oriana shrugged.

  “How do you know we need to go to the gates?”

  “I just know.”

  “We’ll have less than an hour to find the scientists and escape, and we don’t know what happened in the Amalgam Sector. We don’t even know if the scientists are still alive!”

  “Trust me.”

  The submarine hovered over a water lock that spiraled open. As the maelstrom formed, the sub sank into a massive tube and landed lightly at the base. The lock lid closed, and water slid off the submarine. Oriana ordered the hatch to release. She unlatched, lifted herself out, and followed Nathan to a golden crescent-shaped door. He found a digital panel and accessed it.

  “Ready?” he said and drew his pulse gun.

  She nodded.

  Nathan telepathically activated the door, and it swung open. He slid to the side of the crescent, where the rounded edge provided him cover. He held his pulse gun with two hands as he scanned the area.

  “What do you see?” Oriana said.

  “Waterfalls and a reservoir with five carbyne suspension bridges. The bridges meet in the center at a disk. I detect no threats.”

  “I’m going in.”

  She spun into the cavern.

  Water streamed in sheets over stone layered with multicolored bioluminescent fungus.

  “A bridge is missing,” Oriana said.

  A sphere was illuminated at the disk. A calico cat swung its tail, purred, and yowled. It strutted in a circle and disappeared. In its place, a riddle formed:

  In how many ways can the palindrome

  WAS IT A CAT I SAW

  be read in the diamond-shaped arrangement you now view.

  You may start at any W and go in any direction on each step—up, down, left, or right—through adjacent letters.

  The same letter can be used more than once in the same sequence.

  Three chances to reach the correct answer, and only a correct answer will extend the bridge.

  I am a champion, Oriana thought. She extended her consciousness and rearranged the diamond and letters.

  A flash and a splash in the water drew her attention.

  What was the source of the disturbances? Not the waterfalls.

  “What’re you doing?” Nathan said.

  Oriana didn’t respond, for she found herself mesmerized by the water as it broke and rippled, as if stones dropped from above.

  She looked up but nothing fell. The water glowed with white-blue light, generated by what, she did not know.

  “I think I solved it,” Nathan said.

  The chains jangled on one of the bridges.

  “I solved it.”

  The sphere glowed maroon.

  “Damn it!”

  Oriana gasped.

  “Nathan?” she whispered, tapping his torso. “You have to turn around, now.”

  “Hold on, I’m there, a few more simulations and I’ll have it—”

  “Nathan! Turn around!”

  ZPF Impulse Wave: Oriana Barão

  Harpoon VR

  Ceres

  Nathan turned.

  “Holy shit.” He drew his pulse gun. “What do we do?”

  Oriana couldn’t decide whether the chains and splashing water and light and eyes were real.

&n
bsp; No, she told herself, too many pairs of eyes.

  Then better judgment prevailed, and she drew her pulse gun.

  The chains that held the bridges to the stone above shook, and the bridges swayed. She looked upon rows and rows of eyes—rusty, leaking eyes on cephalopods whose tentacles shimmered with blue-white bioluminescence and whose teeth, half as long as a pulse gun, dripped with yellow saliva.

  Pasha, we’re on the carbyne disk!

  No response.

  We’re surrounded by cephalopods, what’d we do? How’d you survive?

  No response.

  She thought about asking him for the solution to the palindrome, but that would break Harpoon rules.

  “How could complex life exist down here?” Nathan said.

  “Maybe it couldn’t. Might be a special treat just for the Harpoons,” she said. “The Summersets told us to be prepared for anything.”

  One of the cephalopods twirled its tentacles around the bridge ahead, swung atop, and slithered across. The chains clanked, and the bridges swayed again. The cephalopod bobbed, slid, glided, and narrowed its eyes. It swung its tentacles and left a transparent fluid along the carbyne.

  The cephalopods hissed, a sound that passed from one to the next to the next.

  They’re communicating, Oriana thought.

  They blinked and scraped their tentacles across the water. They splashed as if in a rally call—or a chow call.

  Oriana fired upon the nearest cephalopod, and the pulse blast detonated in what she believed was its skull. Its tentacles unwrapped from the bridge. The chain and what remained of its body splashed into the reservoir.

  “Cover me,” Oriana said, “I’ll finish the palindrome.”

  Oriana engaged her mind with the puzzle while Nathan took out the cephalopods with his pulse bursts.

  He ran down one of the bridges to draw their attention away from her.

  He took out one, two, three, four cephalopods, but more and more tentacles maneuvered over the chains, beneath the bridges, and around the center disk.

  The bridge he stood on jolted from the collapsing chains. He ran back to the center disk and took out two more cephalopods.

  “Oriana!” he screamed.

  “Almost there—”

  The diamond of letters shifted rapidly, Ms and Ss and Is and Cs moving in triangle shapes as Oriana worked through the solution.

  The sphere glowed maroon.

  Crank.

  A tentacle broke through the diamond lettering and smashed Nathan into Oriana. They lost their pulse guns in the reservoir. They flipped to their feet together and drew their swords.

  Oriana slashed the tentacles that attacked on her right. She turned left and stabbed a cephalopod between its yellow eyes, swung the sword clean through, and spun into another, then another.

  “There’re too many!” she said, while thinking about the palindrome.

  Nathan sliced through a tentacle that wrapped around his ankle. The cephalopod hissed louder than any other, opened its mouth, and flicked what Oriana could only guess was its tongue. It moved closer. Nathan spun and cut it in half.

  “It’s sixty-three thousand five hundred four!” she said.

  She moved closer to the palindrome and transmitted the solution.

  The sphere and diamond lettering glowed green, and a new bridge extended between two waterfalls. Neither Nathan nor Oriana noticed the slender tentacle that spiraled up her leg. With a whoosh and a splash, she found herself underwater, her sword still in hand, her body engulfed by cephalopod feelers. The suction cups kissed her helmet. And the strands, the hair! As full as a thicket, the sparkling bioluminescent tips swished around her, searched, and, she assumed, sought entry to her body.

  A cephalopod lunged out of the water and opened its mouth wide, its teeth sharp like daggers. Nathan flung a pulse grenade into its mouth as it chomped down. The grenade exploded, slinging a deluge of red, yellow, and green guts over Oriana’s helmet.

  More tentacles wrapped around her and pulled her under.

  She shouted and, with all her strength, twisted her sword through the tentacles. She spun through them, pumped her legs, found a chain in the reservoir, and pulled herself to the bridge.

  The water slipped off her synsuit and helmet and blurred her vision, long enough for another tentacle to rap her face. She fell across the bridge, rolled, and spun to her feet. Another tentacle clapped across her chest, throwing her backward as easy as dust. Another slammed into her back, and she cried out.

  She dug deep, deeper than she ever had before to find the strength to rise and evade the slippery limbs that swung all around her. Nathan bellowed as a cephalopod wrapped around him, chomping, hissing, spitting. Oriana charged and slashed its head. It fell off the side of the bridge.

  “You all right?” she said.

  Nathan nodded. They dashed down the newly extended bridge and jumped onto the ladder built into the stone, while cephalopod feelers squirmed around them.

  Oriana had climbed all the way to the top when white lights burst over her. She shielded her eyes with her forearm. When her vision adjusted, she could see the rim of a plastic tunnel.

  “Gods,” Nathan said, “I can’t see a thing.”

  “Give it a few seconds,” Oriana said.

  “We have less than thirty minutes.”

  They ran for what Oriana guessed was several kilometers until they arrived at a darkened cavern with an island in the center, surrounded by what seemed like a bottomless pit. She and Nathan craned their heads over the side.

  Below, an alloy bridge stretched across the pit.

  “Look,” Oriana said, “a ladder.”

  They climbed down the ladder to a path, which led to another tunnel. On the opposite side, beyond a maze of mining equipment, hung holographic lettering:

  AMALGAM SECTOR

  “This is it,” Oriana said.

  Pasha, where are you?

  “This is what?” Nathan said.

  Oriana didn’t answer him. A voice in her mind said, He’s there. It was a man’s voice, similar to before, more disturbing to her presently. She turned back to the red and violet tunnel. No, not there, the other way. She turned toward a circle of robotic arms on the other side, where the AMALGAM SECTOR sign hung. There …

  She debated whether the voice might be her own, a part of her subconscious, influenced by the Cererian core. Or was this a message from another candidate, leading her and Nathan into a trap?

  “What do you think?” Oriana said. “Which tunnel?”

  Nathan leaned against the stone wall, regaining his breath. “I think we’re too far from the scientists with too little time. We’ll never get them out, not now, but it doesn’t seem as if anyone else will either.”

  “That wasn’t what I asked.” For reasons Oriana did not understand, her discomfort melted from her and she said, “This way,” and headed toward the Amalgam Sector sign.

  Nathan sprinted with her down the corridor. They turned left and right and climbed ladder after ladder. When they neared what seemed like an opening, they slowed. The mineral walls glistened sea blue. The Eastern Hegemony scientists stood behind a glass enclosure high above.

  “That’s far enough.”

  Oriana recognized the voice, even as the person’s likeness blurred in her peripheral vision, near a slew of robotic arms and wires.

  Oriana turned and drew her pulse gun.

  Falcon Torres held a pulse gun to Pasha’s helmet.

  Ursula Dearborne, Gaia, and other candidates Oriana recognized from the night in the café, the boy with the skulls on his arms among them, emerged as well.

  “Take them out,” Ursula said.

  “One more step and I win—” Oriana said.

  “Not another word!” Gaia said.

  Oriana flinched, less from Gaia’s message than from her tone, a combination of hatred and hopelessness that ran contrary to the Gaia she knew earlier in development. She used her mind-body-cosmos interface to control her e
motions, the way the lady and lord had taught her.

  She turned to Falcon, studying his stance, his essence in the ZPF, and his grip on Pasha. He must fear her, she assumed, or Pasha would already be dead.

  Then she wondered why, if his team had discovered the scientists, they would delay so as to allow her an opportunity. Why didn’t they end the critical-reasoning portion victorious, Falcon an obvious champion? What were they waiting for?

  Then she glanced to the base of the glass enclosure that trapped the scientists, where a holographic rendition comprised of fourteen different shapes and colors rotated. It looked like complex origami. What did it mean? What enigma could elude House Variscan candidates?

  Kill them.

  The voice echoed in Oriana’s head. Her heart raced.

  “Oh look,” Ursula said, “the coward from the first day of classes is back.” She sashayed to Oriana.

  “One more step and I send you and your friends back to the halls,” Nathan said.

  Ursula raised another pulse gun, now with Oriana and Nathan in her sights.

  Kill them.

  “It appears we’re at an impasse,” Oriana said as she tried to ignore the voice inside her head. “You can’t solve the final riddle, and therefore you cannot be true Harpoon Champions—”

  “You’re a pathetic, desperate excuse for a Harpoon candidate,” Falcon said, “but that doesn’t mean I’ll make it easy on you.” He shifted his pulse gun toward her.

  Pasha ripped at Falcon’s arm, and the pulses bounced off the icy stalactites above. Shattered bits rained over them.

  Oriana roundhouse kicked the pulse guns out of Ursula’s hands.

  Nathan rolled and fired upon Falcon’s posse, sending two of them back to the halls. Gaia sent a pulse through Nathan’s head.

  Kill them.

  Oriana caught Nathan in her arms. His essence in the Harpoon VR disintegrated.

  Ursula guffawed.

  Kill them.

  Oriana holstered her pulse gun and held her sword with one hand, pointing it at Ursula and Gaia. They fired pulse after pulse, but Oriana deflected the blasts with her blade, like the First Aera. She sprinted to them.