The Immortal Game (Rook's Song) (35 page)

Crawlin’
around and around and around
…”

“I don’t…I-I-I don’t…I don’t understand,” Rook sputters.

“I told you,” Bishop says
, turning to him.  “Didn’t I tell you, friend?  Two is a pattern.  Did you honestly think we were alone?”

As they move closer, the creatures attach themselves to the hull, and Rook and Bishop feel the Sidewinder shake and shudder as it’s slowly brought under control.  They’re spun around, and suddenly they see the debris field racing away, all the gases and writhing tentacles become smaller, and smaller.
  He can see a giant burst of light thousands of miles off; the death throes of the flagship.

It seeps into Rook’s mind slowly, the reality.  The smile gets wider, the realization dawning.  Tears fall.  He weeps.  Then he
throws his head back, thumps his fists against his chest, and can’t stop laughing.

“
Somebody saaaaaaaave me!

And two warm hands break right through me;

Somebody saaaaaaaave me!

I don’t care how you do it!

Just stay!  Stay!

I’ve been waiting for you!
”

Thousands of miles away, the last signal of the Supreme Conductor is dying out.  In the end, he learned almost nothing from his mad dash for vengeance, but he did have enough sense to make one final recommendation: he admitted to his obsolescence, and recommended the data he sent be used to form a more perfect Supreme Conductor, one who will not buckle under such maddening contradictions that the Phantom represents, and one who will offer a true counter to the Phantom’s tactics.

The Colossus continues spreading, and consuming space.  Its expansion finally slows after a few hours, and its split core will cool over days.  The bulk of the organism will remain hidden inside that dark cloud for thousands of years to come, its limbs eternally probing the vacuum, selecting this morsel and that one, testing it as a food source.  Let us retreat now, lest it selects us.

15

Drifting.  Floating in a dream.

Exhausted, Rook sits in his pilot’s seat, eyes looking over the holo-display around him, saying nothing.  Behind him, Bishop moves about, busily pulling up what few systems are still operational
, making the most out of this miraculous moment.  They’ve spoken little.  Rook doesn’t feel quite up to having a lucid conversation just yet.  He can hardly stop staring out the viewport, looking at the tall alien beings that have anchored to their ship and have pulled him thousands of miles away.  He checks his systems—their heat signature matches the one that’s been in the Sidewinder’s wake for weeks now.

“They’ve been following us,” he whispers.

Bishop glances out the forward view, and nods.  “Most likely.”

“They remained hidden.  Even from us.”

“It explains why they haven’t been wiped out by the Cerebs yet.”

“You think…maybe they’re the builders of that…whatever-it-was?  The Colossus?”

“I would say it’s a, ah, safe bet?”

The Sidewinder shudders
, jostling his cracked ribs.  Outside the viewport, just beyond the elongated bodies hovering impossibly in the void, there is a large orb of light.  It’s growing in size, and has been for hours now.  “What do you think that is?”  He points.  The light is now taking on contours, resolving itself in the shape of an imperfect sphere, swelling and shrinking, swelling and shrinking.

Bishop glances out the viewport.  “I imagine it’s whatever system they use to achieve long-distance travel.”

“You think it’s how they travel the slipstream?”

“Affirmative, friend.”

Another hour passes.  The two of them say little, only working at getting systems back online.  Remotely, Rook controls the repair bot, which is banged up in the corridor outside, but is still working well enough to mete out hull sealant, replace aerogel insulation, and reroute power temporarily from other systems to bring life-support systems back online.  Rook is finally able to remove his helmet and breathe the Sidewinder’s atmo.

“The fabricator is badly damaged,”
he says, going over a few diagnostics.  “We’re gonna need a lot of raw materials to feed into the omni-kit to make the replacement parts.  Could take months before the fabricator can mass-produce what we need.”  He looks ahead.  “That is, if these guys don’t
eat
us first.”

Bishop gives him a look.  “You don’t believe they require—”

“It’s a joke.”  He snorts.  “No.  I don’t think they want to kill us, or else they wouldn’t have saved us.  The real question is, why save us.”

“I suspect the same reason I did.”

Rook looks at him.  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend, you mean.”

“Affirmative, friend.”

As they reach the glowing sphere, it begins to fill their view, the viewport itself dims, shielding their eyes from the light.  Rook holds his breath as they are pulled through the portal.  Bishop takes a seat beside him.  Rook looks down at his sensors.  “Spacetime is being warped all around us at exactly one part per ten million.  You’re right, they’re guiding us into the slipstream.  But the way they’ve managed it…it’s different…it’s…”

“Beautiful.”
  The alien roots through more of their systems, drudging up enough power to reroute to arti-grav.

Rook smirks.  “Affirmative, friend.”

Six hours of travel.  They emerge into real space, a thousand light-years away and still being towed by the large aliens.  Looking at them more closely, without the craziness and mad glee of suddenly living to fight another day clouding his mind, Rook realizes he was probably wrong on his first assessment of the beings.  They don’t have two heads—the bulk of their bodies look to be some kind of bio-mechanical construct, like Bishop’s exo-suit, only taller and slimmer, and even more organic-looking.  The second head, the one situated in the stomach behind a transparent bubble, are the aliens themselves.  They’re blue, like their suits.  Their heads are tall and lean, their eyes bulbous and a translucent green, with a dim glow coming from inside.

Rook
sees almost no indication of electronics anywhere, either on their physical bodies or on their exo-suits.  An even closer look shows that their arms and legs merge almost seamlessly with the arms and legs of their exo-suits. 
It looks like the suits are growing
them
at their center
.

“What’s propelling them?” he asks, as much to himself as to Bishop. 
He studies a holo-display, looking at the energy readings bleeding off of the alien bodies.  “I mean, I don’t see any propulsion systems.  Nothing mechanical.  They also hacked into our systems and accessed my music files, selected a song, and played it.”  He looks back at the elongated bodies, shaking his head in wonderment.  “How are they doing it?”

“Perhaps we’ll find out.”

Two more jumps through more of these little “slipstream gates” and now they are in another wide patch of space, except directly ahead of them, nine million miles or so away, there is a bright purple, red, and white star, with a light-years-long jet of light shooting out of both ends.  They start moving towards it at about a hundred miles per second.  Traveling at this speed, it takes a little over twenty hours for the whole star to begin to fill the forward view.

The star is actually a star at its inception: it is being born.  What fills the Sidewinder’s viewport is a swirling mass of pink and dark-red gases b
eing forced together, tightly compressed.  Readings show that compression is heating up by the minute, and the AI estimates it has probably been doing so for three hundred thousand years, give or take.  The giant spinning disc is larger than the entire Sol solar system.  Gravity is crushing all the gases into a super-dense, super-hot ball of energy.  The light-years-long beams of blue light shooting out of the center are jets of gas being released out of the top and bottom of the star, caused by the release of immense pressure.  Meanwhile, gravity is still sucking in more dust and gas particles, which smash into each other, generating more heat.  Rook checks the baby star’s temperature: more than fifteen million degrees Fahrenheit.  At that temperature, atoms of gas are beginning to fuse together, releasing tremendous energy.

It’s the first time Rook has ever seen an emerging star.  He’s read accounts of the first explorers to venture into space using the slipstream
to watch a newborn star, two of which dared to come within a hundred million miles of such explosive energy, but none ever came this close. 
Another first for humanity
, he thinks, smirking.  What draws Rook’s attention most of all, though, is the space station hovering about a hundred miles ahead of them.

At least, he
thinks
it’s a space station.  A large, purple, translucent and bloated sack hangs there in the void.  The AI estimates it’s about twenty-two miles in diameter.  It also detects several octagonal steel containers dotted around the exterior of the massive sphere, and energy readings from those are staggering, as much as 190 petajoules pumping from each one.  The steel octagons appear to be generators, and they are the only steel structures he’s reading right now, for the sack itself is giving off a biological sign, and a strange soup of an atmosphere is detectable inside.  The sack itself appears to be supported by a strong lattice shell on the outside, and an icosahedron shell on the inside.

“It’s a geodesic
sphere,” Rook says.

Bishop looks down at a display.  “
A habitat.”

“Yes.”

One other thing grabs his attention. From that space station, the Sidewinder is getting a mind-boggling reading.  More than
three zettajoules
of energy are being focused by those octagonal generators, and that energy is being flung in only one direction: into the very heart of the baby star.

“Jesus.  They’re cooking that thing.  They’re…”

“Making a star.”

He looks at Bishop.  “Have you ever seen such tech?”

The alien stares ahead in silence for a moment.  “Negative, friend,” he says at last.  “Not even close.”

“Your people never encountered these…whatever they ares?”

“No.  I have no records of them.”

“Really?  You’re not just messing with me?”

“I have no records of them,” he repeats.

For the moment, Rook decides to let it go.  If Bishop is still playing at a deception game, it does litt
le good to force the point now, there’s much more to concern him at the moment.

Closer and closer they come to the geodesic sphere, and as they do, they see a portion of
it split open, looking like an amniotic sack being ripped, and they pass through it.  The sack closes behind them, and they have to pass through six more layers, each one containing a web of interconnecting lattices miles long, supporting geodesic domes roughly twice the size of the Sidewinder.  A network of little habitats. 
Homes
.

Light comes from everywhere,
from the “skin” of the sphere, and even from inside the latticework branches, which have a membranous skin, through which light is emitted from crooked lines that look like giant varicose veins.

A few minutes of traveling deeper into the sphere brings them to one of those lattices, where they are guided, alighting on one of these membranous branches, just beside a dome.  The beings release their hold of the Sidewinder and
glide away like jellyfish riding an invisible tide.  Ahead of them, though, a dozen more of the creatures are walking directly towards the Sidewinder.  “The welcoming party,” Rook says.

“I suppose so.”  The Ianeth looks at him.  “The air outside is close to what you can breathe, but not exactly conducive.  I recommend putting a new filter and air pack in your environment suit before we step outside.”

“Yeah.  Affirmative, friend.”

Two minutes later, the cargo bay is opening, and they descend the ramp together.
  Side by side, they approach the welcoming committee, with Rook limping and holding his injured ribs.  Twelve of the aliens are coming, each one well over twice Rook’s height.  They move slow and with grace, no jerky insect-like motions such as Bishop exhibits.  Their eyes are deep and inquisitive.  They approach without any sign of caution. 
They don’t fear us
, he thinks.  For some reason that gives him pause.

Once beyond the Sidewinder, Rook has a moment to test his buoyancy—beyond the ship’s arti-grav field, they now stand
on a hard, undulating platform. 
It’s breathing
.  Surrounding him are countless platforms extending outward from the latticework shell like spider webs, and though some of them are vertical or diagonal relative to where Rook stands, the creatures walking on them nevertheless remain upright and walk along them without hindrance.  Audiences are gathering at the edge of every platform, looking down on them.

A check to his HUD tells
Rook that the gravity here is .7
g
. 
That’s near Earth-level gravity, but this thing isn’t big enough for that
. 
It must have arti-grav generators, but where’s all the power coming from?

The aliens stop a few feet in front of them, towering over.

Rook stares up at them, feeling like he’s stepped inside a fever dream.

Finally, one of them extends one of its many tentacles, which splits into ten others, and at its center there is a small bulb.  It starts emitting flashes of light, oscillating rapidly between different colors.

Over their open channel, Bishop’s voice comes into Rook’s helmet.  “I think they’re trying to communicate.”

“Clearly.  What do you figure?  They speak through, what, interpretations of light spectrums?”

“I would say so.”

Rook looks up at them, opens his arms outward, shakes his head.  “We don’t understand.”  He realizes his voice is probably muffled inside his helmet, so he turns on the helmet’s microphone.  “We don’t understand.  Do you, uh, have ears?  Can you hear me?  Do you understand spoken language?”  He feels incompetent at the moment.  For all the training he received at ASCA, they never once prepared him for making friendly conversation with a newly-found sentient
race.

More bulbs are extended from the other beings, and suddenly the platform
comes alive with lights.  It comes from both the aliens and the pulsating membrane they’re standing on.

“What’s happening?” he says.

Bishop looks at him.  “If I had to guess?  I would say they’re conversing amongst themselves.”  He points at the ground, which oscillates like a strobe light.  “I imagine they’re communicating with some sort of central hub, and this platform is how they relay light and electrical signals.”

Energy readings are off the charts.  The light within the platform intensifies.  Then, a transmission comes in over his radio, and it’s coming from the Sidewinder.  Music. 
He forgets the name of this particular band.  The song cues up a plethora of different instruments before finally the lyrics begin.