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

“The chancellor’s hesitation to do what was necessary with Captain Barão decades ago has put
all
our lives in danger.” She activated a Granville sphere, and around her and Antosha formed the Earth’s crust, above the Beimeni zone. Within the topography and depth measurements was scattered sparkling dust in all parts as deep as fifty meters and in some as deep as 1,250 meters. The dust hung less than 1,000 meters from the Granville sky above Beimeni City.

Antosha spread his hand gently over the dust, tapping on the particles like the strings of his deodar violin. “May the gods protect us …”

“Fuck the gods.” They never answered her prayers; not when she’d wanted to join the ballet; not when she’d wanted the chancellor to love her; not when she’d wanted to end his developmental system; and certainly not since she’d wanted to destroy the BP menace. “The Reassortment research team has communicated to the ministry and to the board that Reassortment seepage is accelerating to depths once believed impossible.” Antosha turned to her with a look that might’ve been fear. “Your work, my love,” she continued, “is now of utmost importance to the survival of the transhuman race.”

“And the chancellor is having second thoughts about me, is that what you’re afraid of?”

“I fear only that which is out of my control.” She eyed him, searching his mind. Unlike the chancellor, Antosha always seemed a mystery to her. “You never told me what happened to Gwendolyn Horvearth.”

Antosha put on the customary supreme scientific board member garb, a light blue robe with golden ties. “I lost contact with Gwen when Aera and Nero nearly escaped your dragnet—”

“
You
moved the Lorum orb to the City of Eternal Darkness, not me—”

“And we have the First Aera and we have Barão’s striker, do we not?” He waved his hand. “Gwen has been eliminated, I’m sure of it. The girl will turn up in the Archimedes and that will be the end—”

“Or is this the beginning?” Isabelle set a Beimeni beret, black with beige fabric woven into the shape of two human hands spread over the Earth, atop Antosha’s head. “It’s time for our … demonstration in Fountain Square, I think.”

Antosha agreed. Isabelle leaned beside him. “The Barão twin,” she painted kisses on his neck, “has a certain friend who thinks unpleasant thoughts of you.” She nibbled on his ear. “He poisons the girl’s mind.” She rubbed her face on his. “She’s been searching through the archives all day and thinks you’re her mother’s killer.” She looked at him. “What say you to this?”

“The giver of this lie is destined for Farino Prison, the receiver … ours for the taking.”

Isabelle smiled. She pulled off her robe, threw Antosha’s beret, and undid his robe with practiced hands. She jumped on him and wrapped her legs around him and kissed him as they crashed onto the rose petals.

Beimeni City

Phanes, Underground Central

2,500 meters deep

“First of three important items on the primary agenda today,” Chancellor Masimovian said, “is to congratulate Supreme Scientist Antosha Zereoue on his entry to the Supreme Scientific Board of Beimeni and on the reawakening of Dr. Kole Shrader in Boreas.”

All the board applauded, except Prime Minister Decca, who sneered. Antosha caught his eye and smiled.

Masimovian paused as a pair of keeper bots emerged with trays of wine. They rounded the mercury pool upon the Brezner Building’s rooftop to serve the now fifteen board members.

“Secondly,” Masimovian added, “I carry with me a z-disk from the ministry with their selection for the next supreme scientist of the Ventureño Facility covering Reassortment.”

He handed the z-disk to another keeper bot, which made its way around the mercury pool and set the z-disk upon a workstation. Masimovian activated it. A hologram formed over the pool: the words ANTOSHA ZEREOUE appeared beneath his likeness.

“By a vote of twenty-two in favor, seven opposed, and one abstention, Antosha Zereoue has the people’s confidence to resolve Reassortment. How does the board vote, aye or nay?”

A bot activated another workstation, ready to count the anonymous vote.

Prime Minister Decca pulled a toothpick out of his mouth and twisted his lips. “You cannot believe that Antosha Zereoue is befitting of a role as important as Supreme Scientist of the Ventureño Facility covering Reassortment.”

Decca commanded the board’s attention. Minister Tethys Charles nodded, as did Minister Genevieve Sineine and Supreme Scientist Dorian Knox.

“Please, Carillon, continue,” Masimovian said with outstretched hands.

Minister Decca stood. “Not twenty years ago, this man used the zeropoint field and illegal synisms, and all the telepathic methods with the CRISPR system outlawed by the board, which led to the deaths of no fewer than seventy-four scientists in the RDD—”

“That is a
lie
.” Antosha rose. “They knew what they were getting involved with, they knew my methods were … extraordinary.”

“Illegal is more like it,” Decca said. “Illegal then as they are now, and dangerous. You put the lives of too many scientists in the RDD at risk—”

“I reawakened Dr. Shrader in a fraction of the time my predecessors utilized to make zero progress, and at a miniscule cost—”

“You spent ten billion benaris! And you killed hundreds of volunteers along the way! Men and women with heirs and conversions worth more than all the gemstones hanging around your neck.”

“Traitors!” Antosha said. “Most of them part of the Beimeni Polemon, and they received exactly what they deserved.”

“You’re not fit to serve Beimeni.”

“I will fulfill the people’s dream to reemerge from the underground, that they can once again walk along a surface so foreign to them now it may as well be Pluto.”

Decca pulled a z-disk from his robe and slammed it on a workstation. A woman’s likeness overtook Antosha’s at the center of the pool. Her light violet eyes shimmered beneath the skylight’s rays. Her lips, curved and pink, opened, and she inhaled before she disappeared into a cloud of dust. “What about my daughter?” Decca said. “What did Haleya know about you?”

Antosha pulled the edges of his robe, and the chains that hung around his body clinked. The snowflakes in his obsidian eyes rotated. “You have no idea of what you speak, old man.” He pointed to the board. “You all know Captain Barão convinced her—”

“Antosha is the liar and the traitor,” Decca said, “and if you allow this man to lead the Reassortment research team, if you allow him to walk into the third position for the chancellorship, you will rue the decision.”

Decca strode a path to the exit and ignored cries from Chancellor Masimovian for civility and respect. The chancellor ordered his Janzers to secure Decca and return him to his seat. Decca threw his arms away from them and, on his own, sat in his spot near the pool. His face glistened with sweat, his taut bronze skin a shade of red.

“This board acts as a single unit,” Masimovian said, “and I will have order. We are all Beimenians, we are all one, and our decision to confirm the ministry’s selection on behalf of our people is our privilege. It must be treated as such. When you make your selection, aye or nay, keep in mind the challenges of the task and the failures of prior scientists—and the actions of those scientists.”

The board telepathically voted, and above its workstation, the keeper bot noted eight votes of aye, seven votes of nay.

“So it is decreed,” Masimovian said, “by appointment of the supreme ministry of Beimeni and confirmed by the supreme scientific board, that Supreme Scientist Antosha Zereoue will follow Captain Broden Barão as Supreme Scientist of the Ventureño Facility covering Reassortment.”

Minister Charles couldn’t hide the displeasure from his face. To Antosha, he said, “May the gods provide you wisdom at this most trying time in our history.” Several board members nodded gravely.

Antosha feigned ignorance. “I’m not sure I take your meaning.”

Charles looked to Masimovian, who said, “And finally, on the primary agenda,” his voice softened, “Reassortment seepage.” Masimovian and Charles shared with the board the latest details that suggested the rate of diffusion of Reassortment into the Earth’s crust had accelerated, with the strain now entering depths once thought utterly impossible.

“So you can see, young scientist,” Masimovian said to Antosha, “it’s more than glory that awaits you in the Ventureño Facility.” He paused, clasping his hands together. “It’s the survival of the transhuman race.”

“I understand,” Antosha said assuredly, “and unlike my predecessors, I’m up to the task.”

Conversation shifted from there to the minor items on the secondary agenda. After the sheep stopped bleating over benari and resource allocations and updates on their pointless projects, Masimovian adjourned the meeting. Decca dashed out of the chamber while the rest of the board leisurely drank from their glasses and reminisced about conversions, experiments, and other war stories from the RDD.

“Chancellor,” Antosha said, “may I have a word?”

Masimovian nodded, and when the last of the board passed through the exit, he put his arm around Antosha’s shoulders. They walked amiably next to the pool. “Isabelle convinced me to reinstate you,” Masimovian said, “and I agreed because I suspect you’ve learned from prior misdeeds. I believe in your potential. I understand your unorthodox methods drive your results.” He paused. “Was I wrong in these assumptions?”

“Of course not, my chancellor,” Antosha said. “I serve you and I’m honored by the privilege and prestige you and the board and ministry have bestowed on me.”

One of the bots grabbed Antosha’s and Masimovian’s empty glasses and handed them freshly filled ones. “That’s good to hear, because troubling news has reached me regarding your former lab assistant and campaigner. Where is Miss Gwendolyn now?”

“I haven’t been able to locate Gwendolyn Horvearth, but she’s no threat to the commonwealth, or the board, my chancellor—”

“The Kaspasparons will not let this rest.” Masimovian swiped his goatee. “They allege wrongdoing.”

“Their grief blinds them from the truth that their foster daughter was mentally unstable, incapable of managing the challenges of the RDD.”

“I hope you’re right.” The chancellor sipped his wine. “How soon until you can begin new clinical trials? We have the potential for many, many Jubilees. It would be grand for one to end as successfully as your demonstration in Boreas.”

“I will solve Reassortment, just as I solved Regenesis, with skill and speed and devotion to my craft. When I vanquish humanity’s weakness against the plague in the paradise, your dominion over all the Earth shall be assured.”

Research & Development Department (RDD)

Palaestra, Underground Northeast

2,500 meters deep

Oriana was on the terrace of her suite when her front door slid open. She turned away from the view and saw the man who was now to her the vilest man she’d ever laid eyes on—no longer the beautiful scientist she’d first met. He stepped out onto the terrace, and his fur-rimmed cape fluttered over his silver synsuit.

“There she is,” Antosha said, “my Harpoon Champion, in the
flesh.
”

He extended his hands. She didn’t take them, and he tilted his head.

“Who let you in here?”

“My dear, I own you, I can enter your suite whenever I wish.” He lowered his hands. “You missed our morning meeting in the lobby. What could’ve been so important as to explain your absence?”

“Quit the bullshit.” Oriana lowered her voice, folded her arms, and leaned forward. “I know what you are—”

“And what am I, Madam Champion?” He strutted around her, his head turned, something in his eyes she didn’t want to discover but that she didn’t fear.

“You’re a supreme scientist,” she said, “a great mind in a great commonwealth, and a great deceiver in a time of turmoil—”

“You speak like a neophyte who thinks she knows all, but you haven’t lived long enough to understand the commonwealth’s troubles. The conversions that I’ve achieved have never been matched and never will be. That’s not deceit, that’s reality—”

“What about my family? My mother?”

“The whore.” Antosha caught Oriana’s wrist before her hand could whip his face. He
tsk
ed and squeezed her arm. She thought he might break it before he released her. “In your eagerness to unearth my past, did you discover Vernon Lebrizzi?”

Verne, the trader from Navita, the illegal orphan developed into a phenomenon performer in the Harpoons last year by House Variscan—and an apparent romantic interest of her mother’s. “I know all about Verne—”

“Do you?”

“I won’t participate in this commonwealth mission.”

“Oh,
yes
, you will.”

“I’ll go to the Office of the Chancellor if I must!”

“The chancellor might not want to listen to you.” Antosha lifted a Granville sphere from his pocket. He set it upon a golden pedestal atop the balustrade. Above and around it, a blurred hologram formed. “Madam Champion, in your research, did you find … this?”

Millions of Beimenians roamed on towerlike islands with faint electric light emanating between them. Janzers on airborne rocketcycles weaved around them.

“Let me clear your view.”

The holographic rendition zoomed to Lord Nero Silvana in chains, bandages over part of his head. Oriana recognized his facial features and what was left of his mohawk. Minister Noria Furongielle had showed her holograms of him and her father, and told her about their development in House Variscan.

“What’s this?” she said.

Antosha waved his hand as if he were a Marshlandic magician. The hologram shifted to a line of Beimenians in bodysuits who trudged beneath stalactites aglow with holographic burning salamanders. Thousands and thousands of them made their way to a row of elevators where Janzers paired with strange birds stood. The image zoomed in on a man, his head shaved, his eyes dark, his face drawn. Surely, this man
was
her father. She recognized his image, but what had he turned into?