by Zen, Raeden
Jeremiah had never mentioned a command in Portage to her, certainly not at the citadel, though that didn’t mean anything. Often she would find out about BP sympathizers, such as Minister Nex of Natura or Minister Portia of Gaia—ministers she believed were most supportive of Chancellor Masimovian—through Beimenians along her travels, not Jeremiah. Why he had trusted her to lead his people throughout the commonwealth but not with tactical strategy and other information remained an enigma to Verena. But when she searched her heart, she found she did trust Jeremiah. So she would take Jocelyn to the rendezvous point.
They traveled through the passageways for hours, at least, though it was easy to lose track. She could feel her body’s struggle. A spell of vertigo shook her. She kept thinking about Jocelyn.
Can’t fall, Verena thought, must stay awake.
She questioned why they hadn’t found a cache, for this was the longest (or it felt like the longest) time she’d ever traveled through the passageways to find one. The most likely scenario was the worst, and the one she knew was possible the entire trip: that Jocelyn, though confident and practiced in the Polemon passageways, was in fact looping through the same tunnels.
The urges for Verena to feed her gut and heal her wound were also having an impact.
Soon her light-headedness grew so bad it nearly prevented her movement. “Jocelyn,” she said, “are we close to a cache or the end of this passageway?”
Jocelyn didn’t respond.
Verena ripped a new piece of her fatigues and wrapped the cloth around her hand. She bit her other hand and concealed her agony.
“Not far now,” Jocelyn said. “There’s a secret wall on the other end of this tunnel.”
A few kilometers more, and Jocelyn and Verena found the cache. Verena injected Jocelyn and herself with uficilin. They emptied their bladders in the lavatory tanks and drank a few canteens filled with water. They chewed bars infused with sustenance synisms, all the supplies provided by Polemon spies, compliments of the RDD and Polemon scientists.
Their strength rejuvenated and Verena’s hand healed, they continued on for kilometer after kilometer in the darkness, where Verena, who continuously felt the wall for indentations and was continuously annoyed at the lack of them, believed more and more that she and Jocelyn were entombed.
She felt nauseated. The air thinned and she slowed.
“Almost there,” Jocelyn said.
Verena squeezed Jocelyn’s hand and marveled at how the child could so easily push aside her fear. She thought about where she had been at the biological equivalent to Jocelyn—in House Adao, safe, under development and enhanced, training, reaching for the precipice of transhuman capabilities—not participating in a guerilla war, not leading adults and children and elderly through a coffin labyrinth to safe houses.
When next they turned, a waterfall ahead of them streamed down the limestone, colored in hues of red and yellow intermixed. It looked like lava. “Here’s the slide,” Jocelyn said excitedly. She pulled Verena.
The strategist held the child in her arms as they plunged down and around, around and down, down, down, more than two thousand meters to the Beimeni zone. At last, they splashed in murky water that smelled like sulfur, then swam to the shore. They continued through sightless and soundless tunnels, on and on, turning left or right. Jocelyn moved assuredly through these Polemon passageways, also unfamiliar to Verena.
Verena didn’t know how long they’d traveled in the Beimeni zone when Jocelyn stopped.
“We’re here!” Jocelyn said softly.
Shards of light broke through the limestone.
“Where?”
“Gaia City, in Gaia Hills to be precise, near the ministry buildings—”
“I know where the hills are,” Verena said, exasperated. She couldn’t believe they’d traveled so far. She wondered whether Lady Isabelle’s forces could’ve traveled as quickly, or if they took a longer route.
Verena and Jocelyn crawled through a gash in the limestone that led to bushes on the side of a trail in the hills. The sight of a Granville morning sky—broken with night by nonfunctioning panels—had never warmed Verena’s heart as it did now. They slunk around the bushes. Verena peered back and forth, then dashed across the trail and spied the city.
In Earth Square, pocked with pits that curdled and fizzed, overlaid with mist from a massive geothermal vent, Janzers and terror birds marched in rows led by Lady Isabelle. Minister Portia awaited them with her Citadel Guardsmen, violet and aquamarine beads and jasmine flowers around her neck. The minister’s eyes seemed as if they were filled with earth and steam, but they didn’t reveal emotion. Her Citadel Guardsmen wore dark bodysuits and silk capes with diamond daggers and pulse guns holstered at their sides.
A Janzer division turned to the hills and Verena ducked.
“What is it?” Jocelyn said.
“Down,” Verena said softly. She waited. Did the Janzers scan the hills, or were they focused upon the nearby ministry building, searching for snipers?
Can’t back down now, Verena thought. She turned her head and, more stealthily, gazed upon the square, upon the Gaians (many of whom Verena knew were BP sympathizers) dressed in silk tunics and wooden slippers, who ambled here and there between the buildings and the shops and the merchants, all with eyes fixed to the square, on Isabelle and her raiders.
“What’s happening?” Jocelyn said. “I can’t see.”
“Shush,” Verena said.
Minister Portia bowed to Lady Isabelle, and they exchanged words. Isabelle hand-signaled a Janzer, who brought over a dead body—Jeremiah Selendia’s bloodied body—and dropped it like a sack in front of Portia. The minister covered her mouth. Gasps echoed. Isabelle and Portia exchanged more words, until the minister bowed again and handed her a pouch that Verena assumed was filled with benaris. Isabelle hand-signaled the Janzers again and blew a whistle, silent to transhuman ears. The terror birds stood erect. They all followed Isabelle. The invader force moved in sync, flowing around the minister, her guards, and Jeremiah’s dead body. The Janzers raised their knees high when they strutted out of the square.
One of the guards draped a cape over Jeremiah and rolled him into it, then lifted him over his shoulder. He followed Minister Portia, who sauntered up the green marble stairs lined with holographic fractal trees and into the ministry building. The Gaians turned away from the square, still milling about as if nothing happened, as if Jeremiah Selendia wasn’t slain, as if thousands of BP weren’t torn apart by terror birds or blown to bits by pulse weapons or sliced by shuriken—
“We should keep moving,” Jocelyn said. She tugged on Verena’s bloodied and dirty fatigues. “Gaia Citadel isn’t far.”
ZPF Impulse Wave: Broden Barão
Middle Zone
4,000 – 2,500 meters deep
Brody wasn’t sure how long they’d traveled through the limestone pits and caverns and tunnels outside of Region 7’s containment, but he knew a Janzer’s synsuit wasn’t designed for prolonged exposure at these depths.
And neither was the transhuman genome.
He and Luke sealed their Janzer helmets, and climbed, crawled, and trudged through pressure sure to crush and kill Homo sapiens, the ancestors of Homo transition, and likely to end a transhuman life within an hour or two.
Luke stopped lighting flares once they entered the alloyed corridor behind the mines, which led into a sewer system with carbyne pipes large enough to fit a Janzer division, side to side. From there, they climbed up through the limestone tunnels. Brody remembered the remnants of natural caverns in Palaestra that once stored fossil fuels, fuels developed hundreds of millions of years ago in forests that turned into lakes that turned into coal, but never had he experienced anything this extensive.
At the third nook, they stopped and lifted uficilin and sustenance vials from their Janzer packs.
Brody motioned with the handheld drill to remove his diamond glove to inject himself, but Luke stopped him.
“Not
here, bub, you’ll burn.”
Luke injected the synisms into Brody’s forearm intake. Brody felt the synsuit’s needle penetrate a vein near his elbow. Warm fluids flowed through his arm.
Luke did the same to himself.
“How much farther?” Brody said. “These synsuits can’t hold much longer.”
“We’ve traveled eight hundred meters so far.”
“Our coolant systems won’t last to the commonwealth.”
“They don’t need to,” Luke said. “In two hundred meters we’ll near the barrier of the Beimeni zone, where the piping systems will reduce the heat and pressure—”
“But we still won’t be in the commonwealth.”
“Captain, you have to trust me. I haven’t led you astray.” Luke ignited a flare, secured it to his wrist plate, and moved up the limestone tunnel. Brody followed close behind. The flare fizzled, but in its place, colorful lighting emerged. White bioluminescence streaked down the pit’s walls, around a tunnel, into a cavern.
Brody entered at Luke’s side.
They stepped between stalagmites, beneath stalactites shining with dark green and white hues. Through the filter, Brody inhaled a humid, mossy smell. Quartz walls wrapped around them, streaked with impurities that transformed parts into sapphires as blue as the sea. Farther in, the impurities turned the quartz into emeralds, and farther still, into rubies.
At a clearing wider than the Infernus Sea, steam rose from vents surrounded with magma. Heat blurred the granite pillars. It reminded Brody of Planet Vigna.
“We must cross,” Luke said.
Brody gulped.
They hopped from stone to stone, careful to avoid the magma across this burning plain.
“Your movements are swift for someone exposed to the Lower Level for so long,” Luke said. “You’re really not like other captains, are you?”
“I don’t know what I am anymore.” Brody sidestepped a magma stream and hopped onto a stone island. Luke helped him balance. “You came here from Beimeni?”
Luke didn’t answer. Brody caught up to him. “Do you know what happened to my children?”
“The commonwealth developed them, same as the others, to compete in the Harpoons.”
For some reason, this didn’t give Brody relief. “And Antosha Zereoue, where was he when you left?” The smoke in this part of the cavern obscured their view. They fanned the air around their helmets and located the next slab of rock, then jumped. “Luke, I must know.”
“He bid first for your daughter,” Luke said. Brody nearly fell into the magma. Luke held him upright. “Hey, bub, one false move down here and you’ll never see her again.”
“She’s alive? You’re sure?”
“Last I knew, she was on her way to the Neophyte Dormitories in the RDD, Madam Champion of the Harpoons.”
Madam Champion, Brody thought. He wished he could’ve been there, wished he and Antosha hadn’t spread so far apart. He wished he weren’t here, in this underground cavern with its sinuous streams of magma and granite pillars, but with his daughter and son. “What about Pasha?”
“Not sure, I departed before the Front received intel on the boy. What is it with you and Antosha? Why would he poison your strategist and your eternal partner?”
They leaned against a spherical granite boulder.
“Antosha Zereoue was my finest neophyte,” Brody said, “and a … close comrade. I loved him and Haleya Decca, his eternal partner, as much as I love … loved … Damy. We all worked on Regenesis and Reassortment for many years, but after we accidentally killed the scientists frozen near absolute zero, the chancellor’s patience thinned. He deployed us to Candor Chasma Central Command on Mars. He told us, ‘The time away from the commonwealth will serve you well.’
“Antosha was convinced he meant to demote us all, send us out of the RDD for good, to the Lower Level, or even the surface. But that didn’t happen. Chancellor Masimovian named Supreme Scientist Nasha Ele custodian of the Ventureño Facility and the Reassortment project in Beimeni, and Antosha and my team focused on our Reassortment research and the ansible on Mars.”
Luke nodded. They resumed their trek across the burning cavern.
“Why didn’t they ever build an ansible on the Earth?” Luke said.
“Earth’s magnetic field interferes with it. Mars’s core froze a long, long time ago, so the ansible functions there. Anyway, Antosha picked up signals from a distant world, from a species he suspected communicated across the cosmos, from an exoplanet with a magnetic field.”
“Vigna,” Luke said.
Brody agreed. “Antosha called the species the Lorum. He was obsessed. He probed the Lorum’s signals endlessly, convinced he’d deciphered its language, confident he could send his consciousness to Vigna.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“To discover its genetic composition. If it was more advanced than Homo transition, Antosha thought he could reverse engineer pieces of its genome into ours and establish a genetic resistance to Reassortment.”
“What happened?”
“Antosha never transmigrated to Vigna, and Nasha made little progress on Reassortment. Chancellor Masimovian recalled us to Beimeni, and we continued our work on Regenesis and Reassortment in the RDD until that day on the island.” Brody paused, for the memory of Haleya Decca on the Island of Reverie stung almost as bad as his memory of Damy in the Dream Forest. Almost.
He stopped. He couldn’t look at Luke. “I didn’t know she was down there …”
“Where?”
“Reassortment Hall.” Brody turned to Luke. “After Haleya Decca died on the Island of Reverie during a Jubilee, Antosha died—in a way—and so did our friendship. He blamed me for what happened. He’s been bent on revenge ever since.”
They arrived at the limestone on the other side and climbed into a tunnel, where water trickled down walls lit by golden flecks. “Are these gemstones real,” Brody said, “or an illusion?”
“The Janzers built the Lower Level near a mantle plume that brings the gemstones from places in the Earth transhumans couldn’t mine. Seems they missed this cache.”
“Could the Janzers have dug into the mantle?”
“Not likely, bub. It’s easier to develop a ship to plunge into the sun than it is to design one to travel to the center o’ the Earth.”
Brody thought on this and his pact with the Lorum. He recalled their hunger, their desperation.
He often hoped he’d imagined it all. He couldn’t fulfill the treaty anymore, even if he wanted to. And for all Brody knew, the last of the Lorum was now in Beimeni, in the orb he retrieved, the rest of it starved to death.
Luke seemed well versed in science, and the commonwealth, but his accent wasn’t of the Northeast. Brody pondered who had sent him.
“So, you’re not Palaestran?” Brody said.
“I told you I’m Gaian, now and forever, bub.” Luke struck a new flare. “Come, we’re not far now.” He helped Brody up to the first ledge. They climbed upward.
Sometime later, their synsuits malfunctioned. Luke removed Brody’s first, then Brody Luke’s. They slit their bodysuits at their knees and waists for ventilation and carried the Janzer packs over sweaty skin.
It was an oppression, like walking through Luxor for days. Brody didn’t think he could finish the journey. “We should be dead,” Brody said. “There can’t be sufficient oxygen.”
“We’re close enough to the commonwealth’s depths,” Luke said. “But I’d keep moving if I were you. If we stop now …”
“We die,” Brody finished.
If we stop, we die. Those were Brody’s words on the Impossible Stairs, and after surviving more trips over the stairs than he could remember, amid the smell of burning rock and death, it seemed possible he’d imagined his whole life in Beimeni. Perhaps this was how life had always been, and how it would end, in these claustrophobic tunnels where no Beimenian would ever tread.
“You infiltrated the Lower Level for the BP?�
� Brody said. He scrabbled to the next cliff. Luke helped him up.
“I followed orders, for Jeremiah Selendia.”
“Did he … say why he sent you?”
“Told me the commonwealth will need its captain in the final days o’ Masimovian’s rule.”
The cavern tightened here, with limestone columns not much taller than they. Brody kept moving.
“Did he tell you about Antosha?”
“Oh yeah, he said he done you wrong. Antosha’s a different sort though, isn’t he? No ordinary telepath, kind of like you.”
“Like me,” Brody agreed. “In some ways.”
Luke lit another flare.
The cavern opened, and the temperature cooled noticeably as carbyne piping from the commonwealth’s coolant system twisted and turned through the cave. This one was made of limestone, upward sloping, with stalactites, stalagmites, and fossils. Brody found he lacked the strength to talk, and Luke must’ve felt the same, for he no longer spoke.
When Brody felt the burn in his muscles, as if he couldn’t move any longer, when his mouth felt so dry he thought his throat must be an oven, he heard the sound of water falling over stone.
Luke sparked a new flare. “Here.”
Brody cupped a handful of the warm underground stream. He threw it over his face and body. He drank and licked the wall. Its taste was metallic, delicious.
Luke led him into a new tunnel. Sparks flew off the flare when he waved it. The round bulbs overhead hung dormant, as did the long bulbs behind glass upon the walls. They moved swiftly. Brody’s senses revived as his dread lessened.
They reached a fork Brody recognized. “We’re going in circles.”
Luke moved his hand over his sweaty face and drenched hair, swiping his mouth. “Hold this.” He handed Brody the flare and pulled a z-disk from his Janzer pack. His eyes lifted as he scanned the contents, then he lifted a scroll with schematics.
Brody glanced at them, too. “Why didn’t you look at that before?”
“Bub, I know my way through these Middle zone tunnels the way you know Beimeni City. They’ve changed something, or—”
