The Immortal Game (Rook's Song) (23 page)

Bones feeling dense
r, less like his.  The Stacksuit can’t compensate enough.  Compression of his spine causing some pain.  Starting to get extremely dizzy now, even seeing spots in his vision.  Drops to his knees, and is just about to call Bishop and tell him to put the Sidewinder on autopilot and come and conduct a rescue, when finally, thankfully, the
g
’s start to ease up.  Now 3.8.  Now 3.5.  Sits down on his butt, collecting his breath.  Then, all at once, he can hear Badger’s voice. 
Resting is dying, pilot!

“Yes, sir,” he grumbles, hauling himself back up.  Dizzy as he is, resting in here might not be such a good idea.  Too many dangers in here.  If he passes out during a graviton spike, he might wake up pinned to a wall, low on oxygen, unable to breathe or call for any rescue.  He needs to get the job done and get out—

Something has hold of his leg.  Standing up, Rook leaps away, rips his leg free and aims his Exciter down at the thing.  Another corpse!  This one is less complete than the last, with its lower body missing, its upper body twitching, head bouncing side to side unnaturally, grotesquely.  Missing its waist and below, the living shell of a creature is crawling along the floors with its hands, scraping and clawing, dragging frozen viscera behind it.

“Rook, I see a spike in your heart rate.  Is everything okay?”

“I’m fine,” he says, walking quickly around the husk, giving it a wide berth.  “Just ran into a former resident.”

“Steer clear.  There will be more of them.”

Rook carries on down the dark corridor, moving as quickly as he dares, panning his rifle left to right, right to left, the light revealing spherical offices.  The doorways are great ovals.  It occurs to him that the walls in the corridors are slightly concave, as are the floor and ceiling.  Did the Ianeth people have a proclivity towards curved surfaces?  Did it fit their physiologies and psychologies more aptly than the hard right angles human beings seemed to prefer?  A question sometime for Bishop.

He steps over mounds of debris, and rando
m pieces of hardware that look to have been left in mid-assembly when the people here fled. 
Reminds me of Chernobyl after the nuclear plant meltdown
. 
In the middle of a routine day everybody just got up and got the hell out as fast as they could, and never came back
.

“I’m on the east side of the building now,” he informs the alien.  “Passing the offices you told me about.”

“Roger.  You want to proceed to the end of the hall and take a left.  About a hundred yards down you’ll come to another junction.  Take a right.  Second door on your left.”

“Copy that.  Proceeding down the hall.”  The halls are filled with junk that
has been sliding back and forth, back and forth, obeying the graviton tide for centuries now, like the debris of some shipwreck on the ocean floor, endlessly carried this way and that, smashing into each other and creating piles of smaller fragments and dust.  Some of this causes him to slip, which only adds to his struggle with the graviton tide.

Following the directions Bishop gave him, and the sonar scans on his HUD,
Rook passes strange cable junctions, and some sort of generator the size of a microwave and which is emitting intense radiation levels.  Rook checks the micropad strapped to his right forearm, reads the radiation levels
:
66,487 estimated mRem: 664estimated mS
v
. 
Jesus, that’s almost as much radiation as the discharged drive cores were giving off inside King Henry
.

Rook final
ly comes to a wide-open, almost cathedral-like room.  There are gigantic support pillars that are made of twisted alien steel, all of which has strange texts running along it in long, elegant lettering that is a series of swirling parallel lines with the occasional dots above them.  “Bishop, Rook.  I’m in the nest.  You copy?”

“Copy that.  The vault should be directly ahead of you.  It might be hidden behind the pillars.  Can you see it?”

Rook moves behind a pillar for cover, cranes his neck around.  At the far end of the cathedral-room is a dusty steel door that looks big enough to guide a Brontosaurus through, and while the path up to it is treacherous with debris, it appears someone left the great door considerately un-barricaded—or else the debris all around it once served as a barricade.  “I think I see it.  Proceeding to door.  Stand by.”  He moves out of cover, hustles to the next pillar.  As he goes, the writing on each pillar catches his attention.  It strikes him how much it resembles Arabic.  It makes him recall very briefly Bishop’s strange exercise, the one that looks so much like push-ups…

…and f
or a moment, he wonders at just how much all species of sentient life appears to be so similar. 
Such universality, despite the many differences
, he thinks. 
Perhaps it’s like star formations
. 
The laws of physics make it so stars may look different, but they’re really made only one way, and they all behave the same at each stage of their lives
.  This spurs another inviting thought, and it concerns the principle of four. 
Maybe that’s not so strange a concept, when you think about
. 
After all, back on Earth, the Pythagoreans believed in the power of four, and they also believed—

Rook is interrupted from developing that thought further when sonar warns him of movement.  Off to his right.  Approaching fast.  Rook
turns to look, and just in time.  Twenty feet away and approaching fast, an Ianeth the size of Bishop is running towards him, swaying in the graviton tide, slipping in the debris and smashing clumsily into every pillar along the way.

“Contact!” he shouts.

Rook takes aim.  He got Bishop’s blessing to fire on his dead comrades, so he fires.  The particle beam slices through the Ianeth, but the behemoth just keeps coming.

Ianeth are notoriously hard to kill
, Bishop has told him repeatedly, and on that he wasn’t being deceptive.  It takes two more shots, the last one finally hitting the head, just where Bishop instructed him.  The husk suddenly goes lifeless, and falls limply to the ground. 
Right to the head
. 
Just like zombies
. 
Alien zombies
.  He chuckles, shaking his head in wonderment.

Humor dies fast, because now he’s got multiple signals.  Rook looks at his HUD, sees a swell of activity all around, some of them large, some of them small
, some from upstairs and some from below.  And they’re closing fast.

“Husk is neutralized, but I’ve got more movement all around me.”

“The light from your Exciter may have attracted a few down the hall.”

“I thought you said they were only activated by facial-recognition!”

“I never said
only
.”

“So you just neglected to tell me?!  How the
hell
did your people get so far along with the constant deception play like this?!”

“How did your people get so far without it?”
the alien counters.

Rook bites back a curse. 
Moving in a low crouch with his rifle up and aimed all around, he takes cover behind a pillar, peeks around.  Night-vision paints the cathedral-room in monochromatic green.  He spies a lumbering husk at the far end of the room, and it appears to be missing a foot, but is still limping along with purpose, coming straight for him with that huge and permanent Ianeth smile.  The graviton tide lurches one way, and the Ianeth slams into the far wall as Rook is forced sliding out of cover.

Not wanting to waste any power he doesn’t have to, Rook decides not to fire
on the husks he doesn’t have to, and rushes to the next pillar, battling 2.8
g
’s of gravity as he does so.  The sonar warns him of movement from behind.  He turns and looks back whence he came—the doorway from the stairwell is now jammed with two of the walking dead fighting their way through at the same time.  One of them finally pushes through, and unleashes a dam.  Three more husks enter, now two more, now six more.  They’re all in various stages of decay and disassembly, some staggering, some crawling, all of them twitching like an insect with half its limbs or a wing cut off, and all of them trending towards his hiding spot.

Rook is up and moving fast, temporarily taken off-balance by a slight change in gravity’s direction, which causes him to bump into a smashed computer terminal.  He leaps over the
junk, and lands and halfway twists his ankle, falling forward on his chest and sliding across the floor.

More movement from all around.  Rook
performs the hardest and most agonizing push-up of his life, the Stacksuit pumping up to maximum, the proximity alarm now ringing persistently in his ears.  He gets to his feet, and is almost grabbed by a husk before he fires directly into its face, sending in twisting to the ground.  Another Ianeth is on the ground beside him, skittering after him on all fours like a wounded dog.  He scrambles away, headed to the far end of the room.

And then, a particle beam lances out of the darkness.  It misses him by a wide margin, but slices one of the pillars overhead, bringing down superheated debris.

“Jesus!  One of them’s armed!  They’ve still got weapons!”

“Ianeth technology is made to endure,” Bishop replies calmly.

“I’m sure you’re very proud of that!” he yells, diving for cover behind a steel table, just as another shot splashes against the wall behind him.  Rook lands in a “speed kneel” position, raises his weapon, and fires at a horde of lumbering husks coming at him.  One husk is barely held together at the waist, and his particle beam slices it half.  He fires again, hitting two more husks directly between the eyes, and another gets hit in the chest and is sent spinning against a pillar.  Another shot glances across the face of one husk, yet it keeps coming.

Up and running, another green beam cuts through the darkness, and this one hits Rook on his left ribcage.
  His Tango armor’s high-frequency magnetic field disperses the energy, but there’s still some overheating, and he feels his skin burning just as he dives for more cover, this time behind a large steel cabinet.  It seems an impossible distance, gravity is now up to 3.9, and breathing is becoming very difficult.  It feels like an obese man is sitting on his chest.  Rook is exhausted and his spine and head are killing him.  Motion signatures all around him.  He’s being surrounded.

Fires another shot,
misses.  The
g
’s are still climbing.  Exciter is now heavy enough that it’s affecting his aim.  Grinding his teeth, breathing in through his nose and out through his lips, Rook takes aim again, and this time takes out a husk.  He takes cover a second later as a shot slices through the air where his head was one second before.

Suddenly, Rook feels an immense relief.  The obese man gets off his chest.  His spine decompresses probably two or three centimeters.  Gravity is down to 1.1, almost Earth-like.  Between the relief and the Stacksuit being dialed up to max, he’s never felt more spry in his life.  Rook is on his feet and
sprinting for the door, zigging and zagging behind cover along the way, readying the thermite and plasma charge before he gets to the door.  Once there, he applies both, runs ten feet back to take cover behind a pillar.  He watches the thermite superheat the crease between door and doorframe, and then detonates the plasma charge.  The explosion is soundless, but he “hears” it through the vibrations in his environment suit, and the door is strong enough that it’s barely torn open.  Rook lays down a suppressing fire as he moves to the door, barely squeezes through the gap, and runs down another corridor, takes a left, then a right.  For the moment, he’s lost his undead followers.

Another application of explo-gel gets him through a small set of doors.  He steps through, and into an enormous, spherical room the size of Yankee Stadium.  Gigantic cranes
reach upwards towards the floor out from the curved ceiling in front of him, looking like dusty mechanical hands reaching out of the grave.  They look like assembler arms, almost like you’d see at an old car manufacturing plant.  They cling rigidly to the ceiling, whereas all the furniture in the rest of the room has been tossed about by the whims of the uneven tide.

Panting, g
runting in pain, muscles trembling, Rook moves across the room with his Exciter up and at the ready.  Simply entering the room presents no difficulty; there are no husks, and no security measures.

“Status,” Bishop calls, in a tone that is so frustratingly calm
that Rook has to force himself not to curse the alien out.

“I’m in…the inner nest,” he pants.  “I’m in the…the room…you told me about.  Looks like an assembly room.”

“That’s it.  The generator should be somewhere inside there.  It will be in a few pieces, maybe as many as five, depending on how far along they were in the assembly.  The main body will be black and large and rectangular, but with rounded corners—”

Rook spots the device almost immediately. 
“Check!  Got it!”  He says, and begins moving towards the object.  It is indeed about a quarter the size of the Sidewinder, exactly as Bishop said it would be.  What he failed to mention was just how much it would resemble a piece of useless, twisted, black metal, and how awkward the pieces would appear.  There is no mistaking that the various pieces belong together—they are all the same style of charred metal.  The main pieces, as Bishop described them, are the induction stabilizer, collimator, containment field generator, particle accelerator, graviton rotator, quantum foam paralyzer, granular stabilizer, beam emitter, and emitter array.  One piece is a long rod, which Bishop explained as the primary beam emitter, the “barrel” for this would-be weapon.