The Immortal Game (Rook's Song) (24 page)

Rook moves over to a far wall, applies a plasma charge,
and wastes no time blowing it wide open.  On the other side is a short hallway, and he has to blow the far wall open there, as well.  When he does, and the smoke has cleared, Rook is once again staring out into space, at the upside-down world, and the Sidewinder is now climbing with its ass end facing Rook, the cargo bay door open.  “We’re all good here,” says Rook.  “Ready for main cable.”

“Copy that.  Stand clear.  Firing main cable.”

Rook gets out of the way, and the graphene tow cable fires out of the back of the ship.  He moves quickly to connect its magnetic grip to the graviton generator’s main body.  “This thing’s not gonna suddenly turn on, is it?”

“Negative
, it will require a lot of work on my part before it becomes functional.”

A few more seconds of work, checking his sonar for more signs of husks, and hurriedly finishing attaching the magnetic grip.  He steps away. 
“All right, she’s ready.  Take her away.”  As Bishop begins reeling in the generator, Rook moves to the doorway, kneels, and aims his Exciter around the corner.  Motion sensors detect movement all around, but there are all sorts of interference, so it’s hard to pin down exactly where all of the husks are.

“Generator main body is home,” Bishop calls.  “Firing tow cable again.”

“Copy, standby for more parts.”

Over the next ten minutes, they remove
eight solid pieces, the longest and most awkward one being the beam emitter.  The rod is about twenty feet long and a foot wide, and is much, much heavier than it looks, for it is filled with plasma coils and magnetic rings, as well as quantum particle oscillators that no human being ever dreamt of.

Everything seems fine for a moment.  No enemy fire, no sign of husks besides movement outside the corridor.  Then, gravity shifts slightly to one side and intensifies to 3.2
g
’s all at the same time.  This causes the beam emitter to try to go out through the hole in the wall longways, where it gets lodged.  Rook curses.

“Having trouble reeling in it,” says Bishop.

“That’s because the emitter’s got hung.  I’ll try to dislodge.  Stand by.”

“
Standing by.  Be careful.”

Suffering under the
g
’s, Rook moves over to the wall and tries to give the long barrel a push.  It doesn’t budge.  Sighing, he looks around for answers, finds a crack in the wall that promises to break off into a large chunk.  He dials up the power on his Exciter, then aims at the wall, five feet away from the emitter, and fires.  It takes three seconds of sustained particle-beam fire before the strange alloy heats enough to melt and finally break away.  When it does, it comes apart in a larger chunk than Rook imagined, and he leaps back.  Everything seems fine.

T
he emitter comes away successfully and dramatically just as gravity shifts again.  Rook is nearly brought to his knees as the gravity intensifies to a smothering 4.5
g
’s.  A moment later, a chime goes off on his HUD, and the motion tracker in the top-left corner shows movement just behind—

Rook
turns and brings his rifle to bear, but he’s too late.  The husk charges at him, lifting him off the ground, but the directional shift of gravity, combined with its momentum, makes it unable to stop.  When the dead Ianeth collides with Rook, it takes the wind right out of him, and sends them both flying out of the hole in the wall, out into the bottomless pit of space, earth “falling” away above them as they tumble into the bottomless pit of stars.

9

Freefall. 
The world escapes them.  The buildings on either side of the two plummeting combatants races by them.  Falling, falling, falling.  The star behind them gives them a pale spotlight by which their furious, silent scramble is illuminated.

The husk grapples at him, attempting to rip at his face.  Without a working brain it stupidly scrapes and claws and even bites.  Its massive mouth nearly swallows Rook’s helmet, and for a moment he’s staring down a frightening gullet. 
In the mad scuffle, Rook loses grip of his Exciter.  The Stacksuit helps him fight back, basic grappling skills taught to him at ASCA and not used since do give him some maneuverability, and he manages to slip under one of the husk’s arms and climb around to its back.

But Ianeth dexterity proves itself difficult to counter.  The husk manages to reach
backwards
, as though dislocating its shoulder, and grapples him much as it did when Rook was facing him.  Rook slams his head against the husk once, twice, thrice, hoping to dislodge something to affect its dead-man switch—

The husk twists its head almost completely around and smashes back at him.  Dazed, Rook loses his grip and the husk twists around to face him again, clawing, biting, smashing barbarically, grabbing hold of Rook’s arms and attempting to yank them apart.

Stars are spinning end over end.  Now the planet is above him, now it’s behind him.  On each turn when he faces space, Rook’s mind fights against the oblivion and the sensation of falling, such conflicting information.  Gravity shifts, moves them about in the sky, gives Rook butterflies in his stomach.  More spinning stars make him almost vomit.  Dizziness.  His body so exhausted.  The husk striking at his body, biting his visor…

We want to help him.  We wish that we could.  We want to reach out and remind him that he’s got other options.  We want to slap him and bring him back to the here and now.  We want to tell he’s still got the jet pack on his back.  Rook’s mind is so far afield, though, and his eyes are seeing things almost forgotten.

…looking at Mom in the rearview mirror as he drives away…

…going through MEPS, getting the thumbs-up for enlistment…

…the first day of recruit training…

“Do you understand what’s at stake
, Recruit?” shouts the drill sergeant in his face.  “Do you know what you’re fighting for?  Look at me!  Look me in the eye!  You’d better get used to looking an ass-whoopin’ in the face, cuz this is what it looks like and there’s more where that came from up there!”  He points up to the sky.

…the first time he saw the Earth from space…so pristine…

…his Uncle Seth telling late-night stories about his time in ASCA…

…working on the farm and looking up at the pure, clear night sky, wondering what’s out there…

…Mom lifting him off the ground after he broke his leg jumping off the roof…

…hearing Badger’s last words, like ol’ Badge was right next to him…“Give them hell.”

…kissing Cindy Millsap behind the bleachers at the big game…

…the smell of autumn dew on the grass first thing in the morning…

…babies laughing…

They took all that away from us
.

…the crescent moon…the full moon…

…the greenhouses on Tyson 788b…

…zero-gravity training…

“Here is your SAFER III!” says the instructor.  “Today, you’re going to learn how to use it.”

My SAFER III
. 
The jet pack
…
I have a jet pack
.

…the massive aurora borealis on Hawking Beta-3…

…the last briefing before his final SERE test…

“
Now listen up boys and girls,” his instructor bellows.  “Whether you sink or swim today matters very little in the grand scheme of things.  The real fight begins after today, out there with the stars.  But then and now, you’ll be facing the same enemy.  Yourself.  Hunger, pain, loneliness.  These are your rewards for graduation.  But with these there is also hope.  And without hope, you will fail.  Without hope, you will die.  But it’s all in your mind, ladies, it’s all in your mind.  If you feed your hope, it will carry you forward.  If you feed despair, it will consume you.  The choice is yours, and your fight begins now.  Which one will you feed?”

…Mom and Dad stocking food, taking shelter…

…Mom overstocking water…overstocking…

She’s alive
. 
They both are
.

The idea comes quite out of nowhere, and it’s uncharacteristic.  As thorough as the Cerebrals could ever be, can they ever eradicate everyone?  One hundred percent of all humans, all Ianeth, all whatever else they had encounte
red?  Roaches survive nuclear detonations. 
Why not people?  Why not?

Like a seed, it grows.  Somebody had to survive. 
Somewhere out there, someone else made it
. 
Bishop said it
. 
Two is a pattern
. 
If I made it, if he made it, then there must be others
. 
Other humans
. 
Other races
. 
Where are they?

All at once, a promise.

I will find them
.

The alien is still beating at him, clawing at him.  Rook comes ou
t of his reverie, reinvigorated and screaming, laughing madly, as madly as he did in
Magnum Collectio
.  He lashes out, striking and grabbing hold of the alien husk’s joints, twisting, pulling, kicking and head-butting.  He finds an opening, scrambles to the husk’s back, manages to shimmy free for just one second, and before the husk can reach out at him again, he activates his jet pack.  In his scramble, in his exhaustion, in the severe beating he has taken, he forgot about it completely.  Until now.

The thrusters take him away.  They won’t allow him to fly, but they make space between him and his plummeting foe.  The husk twists silently in space like an insect with clipped wings, framed by the blue sun millions of miles away.

A chime in his ear.  His oxygen is nearing zero.  Very soon, he’ll be rebreathing spent air and—

“
Born down in a dead man’s town,”

Springsteen?

“The first kick I took was when I hit the ground;

You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much,

So you spend half your life just covering up;

Borrrrrrn in the U.S.A.,

I was
…
borrrrrrn in the U.S.A.
”

“Bishop to Rook, do you copy?”

“Uh, c-copy…yeah
, roger that, I copy! 
I copy!
” he sputters, watching the fortress world shrinking and spinning away.  Depending on the stream of the graviton tide he was passing through, he was falling between 200 and 480 miles an hour.  “Where…where the hell’ve you been?”

“I had to finish reeling in the emitter.  I couldn’t just let it drop and try to catch you.  If I had, it might’ve caught up to us both, fallen right on top of us—”

“Copy that!  Just get over here!  Where the hell are…I see you!”

The Sidewinder is above him (below him?) rushing up from the planet’s surface, slowing quickly to match his speed.  It comes alongside him, then pushes just slightly ahead.

“I’m going to cut the engines so I can get in front of you without roasting you,” Bishop says.  “Then I’ll drop the ship into freefall, open the cargo bay, and activate the anterior thrusters to slow the fall.”

“Copy that!  I’ll
see if I can use the SAFER to catch up!”

The alien uses the Sidewinder beautifully, like a bird with perfect instincts of flight.  The nose is pointed out towards space, and Bishop masterfully steers the ship so that its momentum will carry it in front of Rook.  The engines are cut.  The Sidewinder coasts in front of him.  Its reverse thrusters activate, and he engages his jet pack’s forward thrusters. 
It’s going to be a rough landing
.

He slides inside the cargo bay, now cluttered with the huge generator parts.  His entry isn’t lovely, the graviton tide sways both his trajectory and the ship’s.  He bangs his head against the roof a second before he smacks against the beam emitter.  “I’m inside!  Close bay door!”

“Copy that.  Closing bay door.”  A few seconds later, it’s done, and Rook is holding tight to a safety grip along the wall.  “Hold on, I’m going to slow our descent before reasserting arti-grav.”  He starts to feel the
g
’s.  It takes several minutes to get to safe enough speeds where Bishop can switch artificial gravity back on—to do it sooner might’ve caused Rook immense trauma.

“Arti-grav in three, two, one…”

Everything smashes to the floor, including a few cases full of MREs.  Rook smacks hard against the floor and lets out a baneful moan.  Then a sigh.  And a laugh.

“All systems clear.  Exiting graviton tide in ten minutes.”

He’s still laughing, as well as wallowing gratefully in the simple, gentle,
gorgeous
1.0
g
.  The ship shudders a deal, fighting against the limits of the graviton tide.  By the time they’re completely clear of the reverse-field, Rook is finally getting to his feet.  He feels as if he’s made of feathers, and peels his environment suit off, then his armor and Stacksuit.  With each layer gone, he feels that much more rejuvenated. 
Like a freakin’ butterfly, free of its cocoon at last
. 
I’m ready to fly
.  He’s still laughing.

The door at the far end of the room hisses open, and the Ianeth comes walking over to him, as though there was no hurry in the universe, no need to worry over Rook’s injuries or near-death experiences.  He does, however, offer a hand when Rook staggers over to a wall.  “How do you feel?”

“Like hammered shit, thank you for asking.”

“We’ve got all the pieces.  Some minor parts might need replacing, but the omni-kit ought to be able to supply those.”

Rook feels like punching the Ianeth square in the face, but feeling relieved at the rescue, he settles for clapping him on the back instead.  For a moment, he’s emboldened by their progress.  Despite their disparate philosophies, the teamwork has been solid, and their association has started to show some promise.

T
he two of them head up to the cockpit, Rook wincing the whole way and Bishop giving him the occasional hand.  They cut through the far-flung debris field again, then plot a course back to Kali.  The drive core is cycled up.  The forward laser begins bending spacetime.  A few minutes after that, they’re yanked through the slipstream vortex, headed towards Kali.

At the controls, Rook is moving through some standard diagnostics checks when he hears a chime.  Looking down at his micropad, he sees that Bishop has volunteered another game of chess.  He smiles, shaking his head, and makes the opening move. 
The Ianeth remains silent for a time, running through plans for assembly their new weapon, then puzzles over his next move in the game.  “I gotta ask, why Springsteen?”

Bishop looks up from
the holographic chessboard.  “Why not?  It was in your playlist, wasn’t it?”  He makes a move, then taps a few keys on a holo-screen.

“Yeah, but…why that song particularly?”

“It was a sudden choice.  I imagine it reminds you of where you come from.  Does it?”

Rook nods.

“I thought so.  And you told me that it’s important to remember where you come from.  I thought it would keep you calm, bring you back to the familiar, inspire you.”

Rook nods again and looks back at his controls.  Then, something catches his curiosity.  “What inspires you, Bishop?”

The alien looks at him.  “Me?”

“Yes.  I mean, chess and music are what I’ve got.  What about you?”

Bishop is very still.

“Let me guess, it’s not usually appropriate to ask such questions.”

“No, it isn’t.  Like deception play, most things that are most precious to us are best left unspoken.”  He’s silent for a moment.  “But in the interest of cultural exchange, I’ll allow it this once.”  The alien taps a few more keys, then turns to face him.  “My Progenitor said it was important to diversify.  Though I was bred to be an engineer, there are different sub-types of engineering I might’ve gone down—social, economic, structural, and so on.  His approach to instructing was to watch a child play, see what its natural interests were, its natural talents.  From this, he said, would emerge the exact nature of the child’s gift.  My talent was singing, and so…what’s funny?”

“You!  Singing?  Get out!”

“I don’t see why that should be odd.  As we’ve seen, sentient species tend to share almost every major physical and cultural trait, even if it is expressed differently.”