The Immortal Game (Rook's Song) (3 page)

Off we go, at breakneck speeds and beyond.  We pass by
a large, stadium-sized asteroid, with three smaller asteroids trailing in its wake.  From there, we bounce off of a scattered and dead nebula, and only seconds after that, we are passing through the accretion disc of a black hole, which is currently powering the quasar we come to next.  Turbulence.  Lots of it.  We are passing into a patch of space so dark…but wait…no…no, it’s not so black, is it?  There is a black sphere refracting what little ambient starlight is around it.

A rogue planet.

It hangs there, impossibly huge, having no parent star or sister planets, a titan without a family.  It is a low-mass brown dwarf, and a billion years ago it formed from the fragmentation of molecular cloud cores.

The meddling mind has been here before.  We can sense his impression.  We follow the trail
the Phantom’s mind left around this dwarf, and on into the blackness, deeper and deeper, to a large body a hundred light-years away.  Another rogue planet.  A gas giant.  We fly into the heart of the giant, shaking as we pass through the atmosphere of liquid helium, which undoubtedly caused
him
turbulence when he came through here.

Yes…yes, we can see the impression his ship left as it passed through…down, down, down…and there! 
Some sort of station, flying low inside, with energy shields still up, but those shields are weakening, and the station itself is close to being crushed by the gas giant’s gravity.  Yet still it remains, and it is alien in design.  Oblong, with dangerous-looking spires sticking out like spikes from either side.  A base of some kind.  Doubtless, some space station that the Phantom’s new companion told him about.  Perhaps they made a pit stop here before…ah, yes, there goes the trail.  Up and up, away from the gas giant.

Where is he going?

The trail leads far away from this rogue planet.  We traverse a black gulf two hundred light-years wide.  Across a field of black holes, through another nebula, and through the last asteroid field in the Milky Way.  Deeper than we’ve ever gone.  Perhaps deeper than the Cerebs have ever gone.  There’s nothing out here.  Absolutely nothing.

And then we see it.
  Another free agent, only this one is no brown dwarf, no gas giant.  It is a rogue planet made of rock—
terra firma
, as we used to say.  It’s so small that we almost miss it, being over a thousand times smaller than the brown dwarf we just left.  It stands alone, adrift, its only master the gravitational forces at the very center of the galactic core, but soon it might just be escaping even that.  It’s traveling at incredible speeds.  Something must have flung it, but that would’ve happened millions of years ago, and taken a tremendous power—an Event, the Cerebs would say—to make it happen.

We remain a healthy
300,000 miles away, because the trail ends somewhere around here.  The trail doesn’t take us into the planet…but it’s all over this space.  The Phantom is here, somewhere, circling this dark rogue.

There’s no moon—the speed
the planet’s going, it might’ve outrun any moons it had, leaving them behind, also adrift now—but there
are
satellites.  Supermassive artificial satellites.  Twelve of them: two at the north pole, two at the south pole, and four other groups of two arrayed around the middle in perfect geosynchronous orbit.  They’ve managed to keep up with the rogue planet, and they remain directly and unflinchingly above the planet at the same coordinates a thousand miles above the surface.  The satellites appear like silvery orbs, and they are enormous, each one almost one-seventieth the size of Earth’s Moon.

What is this?
we can’t help but wonder.

Then, we sense it.  The meddlesome mind, the paranoid creature with the soul of a steel trap, mistrustful and
tactical, ever seeking an angle.  We follow that paranoia to a slightly warped patch of space around the rogue planet.  Here we are, with a familiar sight.  The Sidewinder’s stealth systems are still switched on, and we pass through the refractive walls, feeling the tingling sensation of radio distortion.

It’s all part of the ship’s sensor shroud.  The shroud is a package deal, consisting of a short-range sensor jammer, as well as a DERP (Dedicated Energy Receptor/Projector), which not only soaks up energy at long range, but also links up to the sensor analysis grid.  That grid is made up of drones the pilot has sent out like retrieval dogs.  The shroud also consists of an OPG (outward plasma generator) that produces an effect of plasma stealth—it emits ionized gases to reduce the RCS (radar c
ross section) of a spacecraft.  Even the compristeel hull has panels that can slide to one side and extend mirrors that reflect the space around it, making it almost impossible to spot amid the void.

It is all more or less operational, exactly as when we last left it.  Or, actually, it might even be a little
improved
.  There aren’t as many bundles of cables hanging out of the walls where once a dozen panels were missing.  There don’t seem to be as many traps, either.  Now that there is a more active crew, traps would presumably only get in the way.  And the floor!  It gleams!  Now
that
is certainly an improvement.

One thing hasn’t changed, though. 
The same engraving as before is still etched proudly into the compristeel wall of the main hall:

Interplanetary Space Force

Eternity

Legacy

Humanity

And not necessarily in that order
, thinks the pilot, walking briskly past us.  We hardly detected him at all before he went stalking by.  The repair bot trundles behind him, sometimes extending its new pair of legs to maneuver around some tool or crate left in the corridor, then alights back onto its wheels, picking up an MRE wrapper as it goes, as well as metal shavings left over from repair work.

It’s him, of course.  Rook.  We’ve found him.  He glances over his shoulder, then stops dead in his tracks, squints as if he caught something in the distance.  Does he see us?  Does he see something else, something we cannot?  We may know his mind. 
Bulk heads
, he thinks. 
Need more sealant
. 
Thought I felt a draft, like atmo escaping
.  He makes a mental note to tell Bishop he was right about the bulk heads, then goes off to check the boards in the circuitry bay.

“Sealant,” he says to the repair bot.  “Make a note.”

“Compliance,” it says helpfully, following in his wake.

“So, plasma coils, talk to me.”

“All plasma coils have suffered decay, making it difficult to stabilize the magnetic plasma transference.”

“If we can’t stabilize transference we can’t make another jump anytime soon.”

“That is correct.”

Rook sighs, and steps inside the circuitry bay.  There are fewer cannibalized parts and wires here than when last we were here.  That is likely due to the omni-kit’s mini-fabricator, which Rook keeps strapped to his right hand. 
A little something he stole from the Cerebs.  He surveys the wires, taps a few buttons on the touch-screens, gets an idea of circuitry decay and starts making a list on his micropad of parts that need replacing.  “Communicate with the ship’s AI, see if there’s anything left in the Sidewinder’s fabricator, any materials at all that we can make into working plasma coils.”

“That is a laborious job,” says the repair bot.  “Requiring many rare elements that
we do not currently—”

“I know, I know, we can’t just go down to the parts store and pick up a new plasma coil.  I know they’re
exhaustive to make, you don’t have to tell me, just go and take a look, see what we lack.  I want a complete inventory of everything we have and everything we need in six hours.”

“Compliance.”

The bot rolls away, checking more circuits and dusting some plugs as it goes, leaving him in blissful peace.  Rook takes note of the main circuitry board, the quantum transistor, amplifier, battery relays, resistors, and capacitors.  It was one specific capacitor that had been giving them trouble lately.  No matter what they replaced it with—be it a capacitor of human or Ianeth design—it simply folded early during launch initiations.  The ship’s AI was having a problem locating the source of the problem, and Rook was likewise befuddled.  However, a conversation yesterday with Bishop had perhaps proven fruitful—Bishop was once a member of his species’ engineer caste, and had hypothesized that the problem wasn’t with the capacitors themselves, but with the influx of electrostatic energy the ship was trying to put through to it.

Presently, Rook
runs a powerful energy flow through the system, a wash of current that shows that, indeed, a current
is
being driven into the base of the quantum transistors.  Then, he attempts to adjust the energy flow, dampening how much he wishes to be stored in the electric fields, then inserts a new capacitor, and is unsurprised when it works flawlessly.

Son of a gun knows his stuff
.

Thinkin
g about the alien, Rook recalls their chess game.  They recently started a new one, and he realizes he has yet to make his move.  He pulls up the game on his micropad, sees that Bishop is White and therefore went first.  He’s moved one of his knights to H3.  Rook smiles. 
He’s still not getting it
, he thinks.  That is a poor first move, putting White’s knight in an inferior square, far too passive, and unnecessarily wasting a move.

To answer that
move, Rook pushes his pawn from E7 to E5, giving his queen an open diagonal line to shoot along.  He was already seeing several moves ahead, and, knowing how Bishop tended to play, Rook felt he already saw the three primary scenarios this game would follow.  He would checkmate Bishop in fourteen moves, fifteen at most.  The alien understood war, combat, but only from an engineer’s perspective of repair, or trouble-shooting.  Despite having a capacity for intelligence that was undoubtedly far superior to any human ever had, and understanding so much about tactics, it seems Bishop has a problem seeing the relevance of strategy in a game—or, perhaps that was all Ianeth?

He makes a mental note to advise Bishop on how to develop his pieces more intelligently, and to remind him that in the opening of a chess game, one should never move a piece more than once, at least not before move ten or so.

A red light turns on in the upper left-hand corner of his micropad.  Rook taps it, and a small image appears, along with a message:
SENSOR ANALYSIS COMPLETED
.  Rook walks to the nearest comm station and activates the ship’s intercom.  “Bishop, meet me in the cockpit, we’ve got our first full scans.”

A second later, he receives a
short reply.  “Affirmative, friend.”  The alien’s translator box sounds a bit better.  Bishop has worked a great deal on the Cereb translator, adapting it to his physiology and even implanting it deep in some sort of subcutaneous pouch his species was bred to have—little pockets left open for future techno-organic chip upgrades.

Rook does one last scan of the main circuitry board, pulls up a diagnostics screen, and follows the source of the previous electrostatic overcharge, follows it all the way to the main engine’s AI computer.  The engine’s computer has several thousand petaflops of processing power, and was built to continually learn as long as it lived.  It is constantly having a debate with itself concerning Quantum Slipstream Theory, learning as it goes, its knowledge
growing exponentially each day.  Rook, just like every saboteur, was first taught how something works properly before learning how to destroy it, yet even still, he knows the problems of the Sidewinder are fast outpacing his and Bishop’s ability to keep up, despite the strides they’ve made together, and despite the wonderful omni-kit they’d taken from the Cerebs.

This in mind, he turns and walks towards the cockpit
, passing the forward hold where the shower and bathroom are, and he reminds himself that the shower also needs to be looked at—it now alternates between hot and extremely hot water.  Before that, though, Rook passes the number two hold, which once kept an old friend, the only other human besides himself, and now houses the hydroponic greenhouse box.  The eye above the cockpit door scans his vascular ID and approves him, and the doors shunt open.  Inside, he sits at the pilot’s seat, and looks out through the forward window, seeing his bearded reflection looking back at him through the alkali-aluminosilicate sheet glass.  The beard is sharply trimmed, at least, though of course it would never have passed military inspection.  Neither would the ISF badge on his arm and breast, both faded and frayed. 
Need to flash-forge some thread and fix that
, he thinks.

That makes him smile, because the thought instantly brings about an image of Badger.  Ol’ Badge.  It hurts to think what he’s done to survive, and what he did to Badger…
But the old man asked for it
, he tells himself for the umpteenth time. 
He wanted it
. 
He told me to do it
. 
At least, in a manner of speaking
.

That has been little solace, and hardly kept him going these last few months.  Mostly, Rook just tries not to think about Badger, the man who loved shouting at people to show his care, the man who screamed angrily even when he was giving praise, the man who loved double entendres so much he’d delighted in giving Rook his call sign, relishing that the snot-nosed recruit had assumed the name reflected only his love of chess, never guessing it was a pun on how green a
rookie
he was.