The Song of the Jubilee (The Phantom of the Earth Book 1) (15 page)

“And we can thank the gods for that.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it—” Connor lost his balance and fell out of Murray’s grip. He bounced off the side of the cocoon and fell on the ground. Murray helped him up. Connor coughed violently and sneezed, then steadied and turned to face Murray in the darkness. “I want to know everything,” Connor said. “I want to know about the Cavern, the Beimeni Polemon, the fever, everything.”

“I’ll tell you, sure, but first we need sustenance. Come.”

Connor again felt that out-of-body sensation, as if gravity reversed and he levitated up to the surface, where he and Murray stood upon the river as if it were solid granite. The Granville night wasn’t decorated with as many stars here. Murray helped Connor to the shore and uphill to the cliffs and into a cave.

“Welcome to the Polemon passageways,” Murray said.

Polemon passageways,
Connor thought. He didn’t even ask. He suddenly felt shaky again and couldn’t find the strength to talk. Murray guided him through the dark, dank, sultry caves that opened into caverns with limestone pillars, stalactites, stalagmites, and bioluminescent glowworms. Connor couldn’t tell if it was the fever or the passageways that made him feel so hot. He assumed it was a bit of both.

Murray pushed down a stalagmite, and the cave’s interior parted. Inside, an alloy box lay upon a limestone pedestal. Murray tapped its surface and it opened. White bioluminescence poured out, paining Connor’s eyes. The light dimmed, revealing syringes and canteens.

“Sustenance synisms, purified water, and uficilin,” Murray said, “delivered to us by the synbio thief.” He spoke as if Connor should know what this meant.

“The synbio …”

“Thief.”

“Who is?”

“Someone important to your family.”

When Connor prodded Murray, he refused to tell him more. “When will you all trust me?”

Murray didn’t respond. He injected Connor with a syringe labeled ESCHERICHIA SUSTENANCE, then handed him a canteen to drink. Connor smelled it first, half expecting it to be like the one Hans had given him. It smelled like minerals and the sea, and he thanked the gods that it tasted like water. In fact, it tasted better than anything he’d eaten or drank in days.

After he finished, he took one step forward before his nose dripped again, and the urge to puke stole his energy. He leaned over and heaved, then collapsed, shaking. The last thing he remembered was Murray’s sweaty face, his slicked mustache, the feel of Murray’s hands, slapping his cheek, and the sound of his voice, repeating his name …

… Connor awoke. He stood in a limestone tunnel. Yellow bioluminescence and cool water flowed down the walls near him. Not far ahead, the tunnel looked dark. He spun around. He was alone. Though he didn’t feel ill any longer, he felt as uncomfortable as he had the first time he telepathically operated his family’s submarine in the Gulf of Yeuron.

“Hello?” he said. No one responded. “Murray?”

Connor moved toward the darkness. The tunnel felt hotter. He looked behind him. A wall blocked his way. He twisted back to the darkness. He traversed the tunnel, feeling along the prickly, warm walls to steady his movements. His courage willed him onward, but uncertainty was creeping up in him. He heard nothing but his footsteps. He perspired profusely.

He couldn’t have told anyone how far he traveled, turning around corners, moving left or right, though there came a point in the labyrinth where he troubled to breathe, the air so hot and humid it felt like he swam along a tropical reef.

“Murray,” Connor said, more than once, sure if he didn’t escape at once he’d drop dead. The only response was his heartbeat, thrumming in his head. He kept moving. Sweat poured down his face. He felt a connection to the ZPF, a tingling that spread from his fingers to his chest and down his legs, and sensations like vibrations in his neurons and bones: a mind-body-cosmos connection more intense than anything he’d ever felt during sessions with Murray.

Suddenly his developer’s likeness appeared, haloed with green bioluminescence not unlike the type in Connor’s secret room in Arturo’s Third Ward unit. Connor wondered if he was there, in his bed, dreaming.

Communication within the universe occurs in the subatomic world.

Murray’s voice, in Connor’s head.

The brain perceives the cosmos and records reality of the world we live in through pulsating waves throughout the zeropoint field. The substructure that underpins the cosmos allows us all to connect to it, and each other, and any other living being instantaneously. The neurochip and mesh installed in your brain allows your transhuman connection to that substructure.

“Why are you teaching me about the field again?” Connor said. “Why don’t you just show me how to survive?” Connor wiped his drenched face and dashed through Murray’s likeness, then turned. Murray reformed behind him.

“Am I dead?” Connor asked him.

Murray ignored him.
The consciousness of the transhuman mind is possessed with incredible power, Connor. Use that power now, Connor. Don’t give up, Connor. Come back to me, Connor.

Connor connected to the ZPF the way Murray taught him in the past and the present, feeling the pulsating waves as they moved up and down, left and right, swaying like a school of fish. He pushed his mind outward into the labyrinth and sensed a transhuman presence moving away from him. His heart raced. He followed. He felt the sweat roll down his spine. He smelled worse than the fishermen’s Block. He was drawn to the transhuman presence in the ZPF. He ran, slid, turned, climbed, and rose, like the heat from inside the Earth’s core, through the seafloor, into the ocean, pumping his legs, swimming faster than ever he did in the Archimedes. A hand breached the surface above him, under the water, surrounded by shards of sunlight. Connor pumped his legs, faster, faster, and reached for the hand …

… He felt as cool as he had below the sea, but Connor wasn’t swimming, he realized, coming to.

“A fever dream,” Murray said, patting Connor’s forehead with a damp towel. “How do you feel?”

“Normal,” Connor said, “perfectly normal.” He turned. They were still in the Polemon passageways. “How long was I out?”

“Four days, fifteen hours, twenty minutes, and thirty-four seconds.”

Connor couldn’t help but laugh. So did Murray. He injected Connor with uficilin.

A flash of relief spread through Connor. He sat up against the wall and accepted a canteen from Murray. They rested awhile.

Finally, Connor turned to his developer. “Why does Lady Isabelle claim to be a protector of the people on the one hand,” he brushed his forefingers over the swaying seaweed that decorated his forearm, “and hunt and kill the unregistered on the other?”

“I can’t pretend to understand Isabelle Lutetia.” Murray sipped loudly from a canteen. He handed it to Connor. “She’s Masimovian’s eternal partner and he hates your father.”

“Why?” Connor gulped the water.

Murray didn’t respond.

Connor sighed. He capped the canteen and set it beside him. “Isabelle accused me of being part of the Liberation Front and a Beimeni Polemon in the war against Chancellor Masimovian.” He remembered conversations with Jeremiah. “Father wouldn’t speak about the guerilla war,” Connor continued, “he just told me, ‘All the Polemon are unregistered, but not all the unregistered are Polemon,’ and ‘You are an illegal in the eyes of the government, Allesandro, since you’re not registered in Marstone’s Database, but you’re not a Polemon.’ He never called me by my true name.”

“The BP life is a difficult one,” Murray said. He rapped the limestone lightly with his fist. “You can’t escape this, and you can’t escape the commonwealth.” He looked down. “They killed those people beneath Hautervian City—”

“Father lied,” Connor said.

Murray ignored him. “They collapsed their home and flooded it, and two hundred seventy thousand BP suffocated or drowned—”

“You all lied to me!”

“That’s why your father didn’t want you near the Front.”

It made sense now, for the first time in Connor’s life: the arguments, the disappearances, the insistence that he remain in Arty’s unit all those years. Connor couldn’t help but think that if he’d been wiser, none of this would have happened. Father wouldn’t have been captured. Zorian wouldn’t have left them. Hans wouldn’t be running for his life.

“You should’ve exposed me to
E. evolution
sooner,” Connor said. He
did
feel a stronger connection with the ZPF, though he didn’t know if he could control it. “You should’ve turned me into a skilled telepath like my mother! Then I could’ve helped Hans or—”

“You might’ve acted like Zorian, who abandoned us in Beimeni City.”

Connor drew back at Murray’s accusation. “Zorian would never—”

“Hans didn’t want to say, but I saw it in his mind, through the field. That’s how he escaped in the DOP. Zorian broke into the department the way he’d done before, but he didn’t help us. He’s unreliable and emotionally unstable. You know that.”

Connor knew it. He’d seen Zorian fight with Hans or other fishermen at the bars near the Shore, and sometimes even on the Block. The way Zorian moved anything with his mind terrified yet intrigued him. “He hates me as much as he hates Piscator,” Connor said.

“He doesn’t hate you. He’s just confused.” Murray lifted Connor’s chin. “Your potential
is
limitless … but only if we survive this, only if we make it into the citadel.”

“Is it far from here?”

“It’s right next to us.”

This was a slight exaggeration, Connor soon learned. He questioned his sanity more than once as they moved through narrow, lightless tunnels. They stopped and slept, more than once, upon what Connor could only guess was moss. Whatever it was gave this part of the tunnel an oceanic smell that reminded him of Piscator Shore. He longed to go back there, to be in his submarine again, a hunter amid the reef. He even dreamed of Piscator Reef. When he awoke, Murray injected him with more sustenance synisms and offered him a canteen.

They moved through the deep dark for what Connor assumed was fifteen days, or more, until finally they arrived at a pond filled with emerald bioluminescence, sitting at the base of a spiral limestone staircase. After the first thirty steps, the burn from lactic acid in his legs stalled him; after a hundred twenty more he felt like he couldn’t walk.

At last, he saw an exit, or was it an entrance? Connor couldn’t tell. Inside hung curtains decorated with dragons, and caves as colorful as the ones they’d passed through on their way here. Carbyne coolant pipes snaked up and down along the walls. There also stood a man unlike any Connor had ever encountered. His medium-blue hair was a thicket, his complexion bronze, his dark yellow eyes could light a fire, and his face was hard, as if wrapped with a mask of stone instead of transhuman skin. He wore many layers of emerald robes with thick gemstone chains tied at his waist.

“Connor,” Murray said, his arm outstretched, “this is Minister Kurt Kaspasparon, longtime friend of your father’s and longtime ally of the Liberation Front.”

Kaspasparon bowed, and only then did Connor realize just how tall the minister was. “Did Hans make it here?” Connor said.

Kaspasparon stared right past Connor, making eye contact with Murray.

“No more lies,” Connor said, “no more hiding. Tell me what happened to Hans.”

Murray said, “He’s been sent to Reassortment Hall.”

Area 55

Boreas, Underground North

2,500 meters deep

“You’re about to embark on the most treacherous journey of your lives,” Brody said. He stood in front of the ten replacements for the scientists who had perished during the last Gemini trial. Nero and Verena told him they’d handpicked the top researchers in the back end of the Ventureño Facility, where a group of ten thousand scientists, who never traveled to the surface, conducted work vital to the success of the team in the front end. They assured Brody this group had first-class telepathic talent and experience using the CRISPR system and recombinases to manipulate and edit DNA and genomes. Brody wasn’t so sure—they appeared as if they’d not yet received their first doses of athanasia at the Fountain of Youth.

“I can’t assure you that all of you will survive,” Brody added, “but I can assure you that should we fail, many will survive to conquer the Reassortment Strain another day.”

He always repeated this to the scientists prior to their first surface excursions. He’d heard it from his former mentor, the late Jeremiah Selendia, in 273 AR during his first trip to the Island of Reverie. As a strike team captain, Brody had already traveled to the surface, but on that particular excursion he traveled as a newly minted RDD scientist, and Jeremiah had instilled in him more respect for Reassortment than he’d felt before. Brody hoped it did the same for those with whom he worked.

The scientists saluted him, then bowed. “Now go get fitted into your biomats,” Brody said, “then circle up with the rest of the team in Alalia Hall.”

“Yes, sir,” they said together, then jogged to the research team’s fitting room.

Brody joined his striker and strategist in the strike team’s fitting room, where Janzers and research bots secured them into their biomats. The room’s walls were made of carbyne, much like the rest of Area 55, one of the three primary structures with direct, protected access to the Earth’s surface. The other two were in Peanowera Territory’s Mission Control and Volano Territory’s Reassortment Hall.

Beneath the bright lights, Verena was wrapping her hair into a bun. She smiled at Brody and bowed primly to him.

Nero stood next to her, his arms extended as a bot set adhesives to his arms and shoulders. He also bowed slightly to Brody.

Brody gave his strategist and striker curt nods, then prepared for the fitting. A Janzer asked Brody to step into a biomat and lift his arms. A bot applied adhesives to Brody’s bodysuit, then pulled the biomat up over him and sealed it. Verena conducted a safety diagnostic. She checked the supply of atmospheric synisms in the helmets, the temperature control inside the suits, and the robustness of the mid layer designed to protect them against the Reassortment Strain.