The Restoration of Flaws (The Phantom of the Earth Book 5) (18 page)

Connor made the Janzer closest to him throw his utility belt onto the island. He dashed to it, found the storage area with keys, took one, and twisted it into his collar. The green light that had enveloped him for so long disappeared, and Connor felt his full connection with the ZPF restored.

Aera and Nero moved closer to the food trays, slowly and ponderously, watching Connor.

He pushed his own field outward, over the Janzers.
Hans, Father, and Mother, please understand, I
must
use the ZPF this way …

Connor found his telekinetic connection in the ZPF—the one he’d unwittingly accessed in Permutation Crypt—manipulating the unseen waves of the cosmos. He sent a burst over the Janzers closest to him, knocking them from the rocketcycles.

The eels thrashed in the water below, sending their light up the sides of the islands.

The Janzers near the islands around him turned to him in unison, activating their pulse rifles.

Swiftly, Connor broke apart the chains that bound Aera’s wrists, ankles, and body. She fell to her knees.

He broke apart the island’s rock, turning it into pebbles, sending its shrapnel in a flurry and fury over the Janzers.

He dislodged them from their rocketcycles, and they fell into the murky lake. Again, the eels stirred below.

Millions of prisoners cheered.

More Janzers flowed closer to Connor’s island.

He hopped on the rocketcycle closest to him and accelerated forward. He sent another telekinetic burst through the ZPF, shattering the stalactites above, spraying the limestone over the Janzer reinforcements.

More shouts from the Polemon gave him strength.

Connor circled back to Aera’s island. “Can you fight with me?”

She nodded weakly. Gasping for air, she lifted herself to her feet. The chains had dug into her wrists, forearms, and ankles, leaving deep, bloody cuts.

Connor feared it had taken him too long to free her, to execute this escape.

No, he told himself, he couldn’t fail his people in the prison, or those scattered throughout Beimeni or in Hydra Hollow.

This might be their best chance, with the enemy dazed and disorganized in Farino Prison.

Connor sent the levitating, driverless rocketcycles to more islands, liberating Nero, then Pirro, then Charlene, and everyone and anyone he could find. He used the keys to remove their collars.

A new line of Janzers neared the Polemon, and Connor raised his arms the way his father would, showering them with limestone, killing many of them.

He felt more alive than he had in his whole life, the sensations from the ZPF flowing through him. He halted his attack and lowered his arms. His blood sang.
Was this what Zorian felt like?
Connor thought.
Was this why he lost his mind?

Now pulse fire crisscrossed over the prison islands. Death surrounded Connor, Polemon blown to bits by the Janzers.

He pushed his consciousness outward, expanding his quantum field. He found he couldn’t connect to the Janzers the way he’d hoped, for something, or someone, blocked him, though he couldn’t tell what.

It didn’t feel like the energy and power Antosha had used in Faraway Hall. It felt artificial, as if the Janzers were using their connection with the cosmos to prevent Connor’s field from influencing their minds—or as if they were adjusting to his attack, the way they were trained.

They’re focusing on my weakness, avoiding my strength.
Aera had taught him about Janzer battle tactics prior to the raid into Permutation Crypt. Connor couldn’t fathom which weakness the Janzers discovered.

Suddenly tens of thousands of them formed ranks upon the horizon, so far away in the enormous cavern that they looked like fireflies glowing in the dark, their diamond armor glistening beneath the glowworms slithering over the stalactites high above.

Connor’s telepathic fist couldn’t reach them there.

Nero neared Connor on his rocketcycle. “They’re adjusting,” the striker said. He looked like death, his face covered with sweat and dust, his tunic torn at his sides, blood streaking down his left leg.

“They’ve deduced the weakness in your plan,” Aera said.

She floated upon her rocketcycle on Connor’s other side. She looked no better than Nero, so thin that Connor almost didn’t recognize her.

“Which is?” Connor said.

“The eels,” Pirro said, bobbing behind Connor upon his rocketcycle, “you haven’t accounted for the eels—”

“The water!” a woman said. She leaned over the side of her island.

“The eels are rising!” a man said.

“We have to get out!” said another man.

More screams followed. Connor turned, searching. The lake’s level
was
lifting, for the electric bursts from the eels spread higher, higher, higher, as if their pulses were a geyser.

What did I do?
Connor thought. He couldn’t move, though he didn’t know why. Was it fear or anger that stalled him?

Neither, it seemed, for he was paralyzed, shaking from a zeropoint energy shock wave sent out from the eel closest to him!

His teeth clattered, and though he struggled to turn, he noticed the Polemon near him were also stunned.

Two eels flew out of the lake then, like sea serpents, their mouths wide, their eyes focused upon their prey over the island nearest to Connor. Their bodies looked like gigantic slugs. They had no teeth but didn’t seem to need them, for they swallowed the Polemon whole, then glided over the island, slipping back into the lake.

The water was still rising, with waves that roiled the islands, like an angry beach before a hurricane.

“We must retreat,” Pirro said. “We cannot fight the eels!”

“No!” Connor said. “I won’t give in, I can’t give in.” He broke apart the stalactites, firing them through the eels like harpoons, killing one, two, three, four, so many, but even as he downed them, more eels emerged, flying it seemed, swallowing Polemon as if they were shrimps.

“You must stand down,” Aera said. “There will be another opportunity, if we survive.”

The eels were everywhere.

Connor couldn’t have said how long the high tide lasted or how many eels he killed or how many Polemon were eaten, but when it ended, he and his comrades huddled upon a single prison island.

Through the shadows and lights and dust, a Janzer division neared them on their rocketcycles.

Connor and his allies held up their hands.
We surrender,
he sent, while wishing he could kill all of them.

One placed a new Converse Collar around his neck, a collar equipped with a differing set of frequencies than the one he’d worn before, and brought him back to his island.

It surprised Connor they didn’t punish him, some way. Did they think letting him live with the dread of his failed escape sufficed? Did they know how much he was torn apart inside, knowing thousands of BP had died because of him? Or perhaps they knew he’d die in some worse manner, anyway.

Connor sat against a boulder on his island, pondering these questions and more, staring at Aera, held down again by many chains. She’d lost additional weight in the days (or nights?) that passed, more of her hope. After the failed escape, the Janzers never traveled in pairs, or even in a single division; two Janzers might be taken, but twelve or more, in these conditions, would not be defeated. And they replaced Connor’s collar each day, sedating him during the process; he didn’t have enough time to find that crack in the collar’s field he’d discovered the day the eels attacked.

Instead, Connor and his comrades settled into their situation. He learned to savor his conversations with Nero, Aera, and Pirro. Initially, no one divulged details of their lives—fear of Marstone and reprisal from the chancellor ever present. This despair soon gave way to the reality that they were going to die, so what difference did it matter if Pirro told stories of the trading pit in Navita, or if Nero talked about adventures on the surface of Earth or Mars?

Aera’s stories were the ones Connor savored most. Whenever she eased against the boulder on her island and spoke, he perked up a little. Presently, she leaned against the boulder and yawned, and Connor said, “Why did the chancellor exile you from the commonwealth?” He’d always wanted to know and assumed now as good a time as any to ask her.

“It was early on in the Age of Masimovian,” she said weakly. She paused, cracking her neck. Her wounds suffered during the attack in Nyx had healed, but she looked like a skeleton dipped in candle wax. She coughed, then continued, “They tested modified synisms capable, they hoped, of creating docile, loyal, dangerous protectors the chancellor believed crucial to securing his power.”

“The Janzers?”

“Yes, when they perfected the serums and enzymes, the sterile Janzers were cloned from Masimovian’s DNA and trained as protectors of the chancellor, loyal to whoever wears the Pendant of the Chancellor.”

“How does it work?”

“It whispers to a specific gene infused within the Janzers. Whoever speaks into the pendant controls the Janzer race.”

“What did this have to do with you?”

“It would be several decades before the scientists in Palaestra perfected the Janzer race. When the new chancellor assumed power, he was nervous about the teams that existed before his coup. He decided they were not the ideal force to protect law and order in the commonwealth.

“The commonwealth expanded westward all the way to the ocean where coolant piping would connect from the Pacific to Livelle City. My mother and father, engineers on this vast project, were among the first settlers in Angeles, the newest territory, built over warnings from many of their colleagues.” Aera paused. “I was their fourth child. All their other children had received bids by local consortiums and also lived in Angeles. It was right after the Harpoons. I had returned to visit my family prior to my assignment to one of the government-run consortiums in the RDD. Our world collapsed. The rescue crews worked tirelessly to save us, and they found me. My curse, I thought, was that only I survived. Some called me blessed …” Aera shivered.

“My Harpoon performance impressed many, none more so than then-Lieutenant Norrod, ever the loyalist to Atticus Masimovian, who recommended me to the Thithonian Consortium, which bid for me early in the auction. I entered the striker training program and was the first woman to complete it. Soon I became the best known of the strikers, and the teams and the commonwealth began to refer to women strikers as aeras.

“It was about that time, around the year 220, when Chancellor Masimovian asked Supreme Scientist Ahab Janzer to test his new serum on me.”

“The chancellor feared your power.”

“He feared everything, so they sent me to the City of Eternal Darkness, to the quarantine laboratory—”

“Where Antosha placed the Lorum orb.”

Aera nodded. “They performed experiments on my body, injecting the Janzer serums, gene therapies, into me, and I suddenly had the strength of many aeras and strikers. My mind clouded, and although the serum was designed to alter the part of my consciousness that guided my free will, it didn’t work. I lost my ability to access my memories but didn’t respond to the chancellor’s pendant as expected—”

“So, you mean, he couldn’t control you?”

“Right. And that was the end. Ahab sent a team of mercenaries to kill me, but they failed, and I escaped through the caves around the city, through Nyx’s supply tunnels, and …”

Aera had appeared tired by that point. Her eyes sank, and she licked her split lips.

“Enough talking for today …”

She fell asleep. Connor noticed that Nero and Pirro also slept.

He sagged against a boulder, sitting upon the ragged limestone. He turned, mesmerized by the electricity from the eels as it flickered between the islands beside him.

Research & Development Department (RDD)

Palaestra, Underground Northeast

2,500 meters deep

“This might be too much for Dr. Shrader,” Oriana said to Ruiner.

The Hive was quiet, even with thousands of neophyte shadows beside their aeras and strikers. The treadmills hung still, the walls dark but for the light around the arena, where Dr. Shrader stood in the Lorum synsuit, its colors swirling over his body’s contours and his face. It gave Oriana a chill to watch.

“I didn’t approve,” Ruiner said, “and Antosha will have himself to blame should he lose the Legend, before or after this mission.”

Antosha
does
risk much
, Oriana thought. His mischievousness, it seemed, knew no bounds. Oriana often thought of his kiss, what he did to her body, how she’d desired the man responsible for her father’s exile, her mother’s death, and her brother’s coma. What type of power in the ZPF could sway her that way?

Then she remembered the woman’s voice, the woman who danced for Antosha. Oriana asked him only once about her, and it was the only time she sensed sorrow in him. He didn’t answer, and she didn’t broach the subject further.

Dr. Shrader moved into the arena. Three Graka training bots approached, their bodies covered with carbyne plates, spikes in their grasp, maroon slits for eyes. They surrounded the doctor and crouched, moving almost like transhumans. Shrader held out his fist and through it formed a spike of his own, colored like the Lorum. When one Graka struck with its foot, the doctor dodged left and swung his spike. He swept the first Graka to its backside. The doctor spun into another Graka, lifted it, and squeezed its neck until its eye slit darkened. He threw it into the third Graka.

Oriana heard gasps from the teams who watched.

The two remaining Grakas danced in tandem, and Shrader met them stride for stride, punch for punch, swing for swing.

This was how easy it had been for Pasha in the Lorum synsuit, but he had trained for the Harpoons for thirty days. Antosha had developed Shrader over just a few days prior to this battle. To invite the teams and their apprentices suggested Antosha knew his protégé was ready, but Oriana hadn’t expected the doctor, who could barely walk not long ago, to prove so deadly.