The Song of the Jubilee (The Phantom of the Earth Book 1) (7 page)

“Reviewing your notes?” she said.

“Not yet.” He sounded exhausted, but not startled, as if he’d known she were standing there behind him. Yet he didn’t turn to her.

Please, gods, protect him from his failures, and himself.
Damy could always tell when he lied to her. It seemed too easy for him in recent decades to do so.

Brody sipped. He still wore his official Beimenian suit pants, which normally went with a dark suit jacket lined with golden buttons down his left side. Instead of the jacket, he wore a gray cutoff shirt with familiar strike team axioms sewed into the back. FIDELITY AND HONOR. LOYALTY AND PROTECTION.

Damy rubbed her hand over his back, over the words, understanding the delicate balance he navigated between the commonwealth and the strike teams, which were designed, at first, to be independent protectors of the people in the underground. So much had changed over the centuries. The teams still consisted of three members, a captain, a strategist, and either a striker or an aera (a female striker), with neophytes selected for training during the Harpoon Auction, but the commander rank, the leader of all the strike teams, no longer existed. The teams were now overseen by Corvin Norrod, Supreme General and Director of Peace.

“You need sleep, my darling.” Damy massaged Brody’s shoulders. “You need your mind fresh to attack—”

“What I need is to find a way to stop Reassortment,” Brody said. He broke away from her grip, placing his steaming mug on the nearby pedestal, then faced her.

She hardly recognized him, his bronze skin too light, rippled with fine lines, his eyes lined with exhaustion.
His insomnia worsens by the day,
she thought,
and he looks like he hasn’t gone to the Fountain of Youth in years.

“What I need is a sustainable alteration of transhuman cells to confuse it,” Brody continued, “or a way to destroy it, or disable it, or—”

“A rested mind is a wise mind. A troubled mind is a weak mind.”

“I’m not troubled or tired. I’m determ—”

“You’re frustrated.” Damy rolled her neck in a smooth motion, and her bones cracked. “Understandably so, but you’re not alone.”

“That’s correct. I’m not alone. If I fail, Nero and Verena fail with me. When I make mistakes, my team dies with me. And you,” he glanced at her neck, where she wore the coveted Mark of Masimovian, “you don’t understand failure.” He turned from her, back to the square. “Nor should you.”

Damy stood silent, watching his movements from behind. Clearly, the trial had gone badly. But was Broden Barão, Supreme Scientist of Reassortment, truly jealous of her research skills? Or was he still angry she’d pushed him away from exclusively using transhumans on the surface? Masimovian’s Third Precept scrolled through her mind:
Jealousy is treachery. Treachery is culpable. Culpability is never questioned.
If it was jealousy Brody felt, a forbidden emotion, he’d become skilled at hiding it from Marstone and Lady Isabelle, though not from her.

She raised her hand to the synthetic tattoo on her neck, a black-ink bust of Chancellor Masimovian held by two phoenix feathers. Brody would earn his Mark, just like she’d earned hers. It was only a matter of time. But she understood, she remembered what it was like before she achieved significant conversion, the threshold a scientist must reach to receive the Mark. How desperately she had craved immunity to the demotions that plagued so many RDD scientists. Though most of these resulted from failure to achieve even proper conversion, a meaningful but less rigorous standard of scientific achievement, supreme scientists had been demoted, or worse, in the past, for failure to perform. Brody’s concerns were not unfounded. Still, having achieved that immunity they all strove for, Damy couldn’t say she felt more secure. Not really. But she was more aware of the true stakes they all played for, that the commonwealth lived and died as one.

Damy pondered her own project and the delays and challenges she’d faced lately, including a difficult researcher named Vernon Lebrizzi.
Vile market trader
, she thought. He’d somehow tricked her into recruiting him after the latest Harpoon Auction! She sighed. She’d not air her troubles. They seemed minor compared to her eternal partner’s. Part of her wished she’d never created the Gemini, which led to her Mark. Another part wished she’d found a cure before the chancellor forced her away from the Reassortment project. Though technically a promotion, her transfer to Project Gemini had ultimately led to her heading up Project Silkscape, an entertainment venture. Now her biggest concern was reverse engineering a menagerie of formerly extinct species by opening day in about two years.

She put her hand on Brody’s. “Would the chancellor give your team more aid?” Brody’s alliance with Masimovian, once formidable, hadn’t seemed as strong in recent years.

“The chancellor has given my team more
mercy
than any other.”

“And you’ve given the people hope, or have you forgotten what the Jubilees were like before the ministry appointed you to Reassortment?”

“How long ago was that? How many other supreme scientists would’ve survived the number of failures I have?”

None
, Damy knew. She tried to convince herself the supreme scientist covering Reassortment differed. For unlike the other supreme scientists appointed exclusively by the Supreme Scientific Board of Beimeni, the thirty ministers of the Great Commonwealth also were required to approve—by a two-thirds majority vote—the supreme scientist covering Reassortment. In that role, Brody was third in line to the chancellorship. His job should be safe.

Then again, if the chancellor could demote the late Jeremiah Selendia, his own brother-in-development who had also been the supreme scientist covering Reassortment, couldn’t he do the same to Brody? The chancellor assured the board that Jeremiah, who’d been banned from the Fountain of Youth, had not lived very long following his banishment to Piscator Territory. How many more failures would the chancellor tolerate from Brody? How long could he live without access to the athanasia vapors in Fountain Square?

Damy now worried about her own brain impulses with Marstone ever digging in the ZPF inside her head. She framed her monologue, and speech, accordingly:
The chancellor doesn’t want to lose the strike teams, or the people, and so he’ll never demote Brody, never, never, never.
“Broden, you are the People’s Captain. You are the supreme scientist of Reassortment. The people trust you with their lives. You mustn’t let politics influence your policies.”

Brody’s cheek muscles flexed, pushing in his dimples, and he held his fist near his mouth.

Something awful must’ve happened on the surface
, Damy thought.

He squeezed his forearm, looking at the animated tattoo there, the mark of the strike teams. The black and gold ink formed into a captain, striker, aera, and strategist holding hands, swaying, looking down upon the historic Livelle city-state.

“The strike teams still love you,” Damy said. General Norrod might be the official leader of the teams, but Brody was the captain they all looked to for guidance and support. When Brody turned from the tattoo to her, she added, “As does your research team.”

“I’ll never take my teams to the surface again.”

“That would solve one problem but lead to many others. You can’t bring Reassortment into the commonwealth. How will you study it and find cures for it without being on the surface with it?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll have to figure something out, more enhancements to the biomat suits or expanded use of research bots.” He angled away from her again and stared at the square, toward a singer in the western amphitheater stage below. From this height, she looked like a dragonfly, her arms swaying like wings with her gown. Her voice carried, serenading the crowd below with a Phanean song called “Lifting Tears.”

“My darling, tell me what happened.”

Brody pursed his lips. “We altered the genetic code of the host cells, adjusted the machinery that translates Reassortment’s codons, and applied protective membranes to the blood, skin, eye, mouth, nose, ear, and neural cells, triggering an early immune response.”

“You’ve expanded your reach.” Damy was impressed, hopeful even. “Surely the result—”

“Wasn’t what I wanted.” Brody smiled wanly. “Reassortment crystallized the blood and consumed the central nervous system.”

Damy trembled. “How does it vex us still?” She hugged herself. “How fast is it reproducing?” She hadn’t asked him this in at least a trimester, maybe two. To be sure, all RDD scientists knew that replication of the
E. coli
bacterium and cousins, the vibrio—ideal biological platforms for bioengineering applications because of their speedy reproduction rates—could occur under lab conditions in less than twenty minutes. The speeds were limited by the rate at which a ribosome could make another ribosome; the Reassortment Strain did this far faster than natural biological systems.

“It’s not all that different from last year,” Brody said.

Damy pressed her lips together and raised her cheeks in a manner that said
bullshit.
“Tell me the truth.” She spoke the way she would as the supreme scientist of the Nicola Facility and Project Silkscape.

“Less than ten seconds.”

She gasped. “You must demand the chancellor issue a stay for
all
clinical trials until you’ve properly reworked the formulas and can better ensure survival—”

“You know I can’t do that.” He twisted back toward the square, now looking toward the stars.

“Brody,” she touched his shoulder, spinning him to her, “what is it, what happened? What’s wrong?”

He inclined his head, not looking at her. “We lost seven scientists in the dome, and another three on the way to Area 55.”

Damy had lost count of how many RDD scientists had died during surface excursions, inside and outside terradomes. No one knew how Reassortment corrupted the domes or why some biomat suits failed and others didn’t. She did know that Brody’s official reports to the Office of the Chancellor often cited a lack of proper protocol for biomat suit closure rather than biomat suit malfunction, which would implicate his research team—and could lead to further demotions, exiles, imprisonments, even death.

“I’ve seen too many good people die on the surface,” he said, “too much suffering …”

“Stop using the Gemini, stop using transhumans in these clinical trials. Find another way.”

“There is none.” The left side of Brody’s face twitched. He closed his eyes and rubbed his cheek. “My telepathic connection is far stronger with transhumans. For the next volunteer, I’ll work harder, longer, be more efficient. I’ll improve the odds of survival in a way you know I cannot with the Gemini.”

The RDD didn’t seem to lack for volunteers for transhuman trials to test treatments against the Reassortment Strain, particularly in the last three years. Damy wouldn’t give in. “The commonwealth has witnessed enough death! You must accelerate a request for more aid from Phanes!” The commonwealth’s Central Government District was in Beimeni City of Phanes Territory. From there, Chancellor Masimovian distributed tax revenue based on recommendations from his council of economic advisors.

Brody shook his head doubtfully.

Part of Damy agreed with him, though she didn’t admit this. Her eternal partner had gone over budget on the Reassortment project decades ago. How many more billions of benaris could he spend? Would more funding and talent even matter? For while Brody, Damy, and most of the RDD’s scientists knew how standard proteins worked and the way mirror proteins folded, it was the combination of the two, the mirror molecules combined with ever more complexities and encryptions within the Reassortment Strain, that no transhuman, not even Supreme Scientists Broden Barão and Damosel Rhea, could predict.

Red rose petals lofted over Artemis Square, which masked the humid, sometimes putrid smell of underground living. The petals were sprayed by fans at the top of several compressed diamond pillars that supported the city under the Earth’s weight. Damy remembered the days when they, too, floated, becoming supreme scientists, winning the love of the people. The
true
sky seemed the limit.

When did it all go so wrong?

Brody glanced out toward Phanes Lake, lost in thought or his extended consciousness, she couldn’t tell. Damy stepped away.

“I’ll never give up,” he said.

Rose petals landed on the floor between them. One dropped into Damy’s outstretched palm. She eyed the flex in Brody’s shoulders, which sat closer to his ears than the last time she’d seen him. She knew she could help, if only he’d let her. “Come to bed …”

“I’ll adjust the formulas, I’ll have a new synbio cure ready in days, I won’t stop until I lead the people,” Brody drifted to her, “with you, back to the surface.”

She brushed her hand through his long, thick hair and hugged him. In his ear she said, “I have no doubt you will, Captain, but not tonight.” She kissed him. “Tonight you’ll sleep.”

Piscator City

Piscator, Underground South

2,500 meters deep

Hans lifted his pack, adjusted the strap over his shoulder, and stepped out of the intracity transport near the Third Ward. He looked up. Granville starlight and sunlight mixed in the early morning, glistening off the polished limestone buildings, which were connected by skywalks and weaved among the compressed diamond support pillars. Water from the commonwealth’s cooling system flowed down the sides of some of the buildings to the city’s archway aqueduct and to the canals that drained into the Archimedes River. Along the skywalks and the aqueduct, more Janzers than Piscatorians roamed. The Janzers held out their scanners, searching, Hans assumed, for BP.

Closer to him, the pale-skinned and tattooed Piscatorians didn’t seem to care. They were only beginning to waken, buying their morning fix. Hans could smell the breakfast steaming from the food carts: eggs, bacon, and sausages; toast, blackberries, raspberries; raw salmon and eel; juices and espresso. His mouth watered, then dried when he spotted more Janzers marching. Six divisions intermingled with the Piscatorians, too many on the skywalks and on the city’s streets for him to leave with Connor from the city. He gritted his teeth. He’d have to leave from Piscator Shore. During the peak fishing season, Hans hoped the ratio of Janzers to Piscatorians would be far lower there.