The Immortal Game (Rook's Song) (9 page)

At the time, he stared at his father and wondered.  It was easy to think him a little too paranoid.  And he did.  After all, his entire life had passed without much incident, no major wars or famines, no worldwide pandemics, only advancements in technology that made life easier and easier, making his work on the farm easier and giving him more time to
study, read his comic books, and play in chess tournaments.  “I think we’re gonna be all right, Dad,” he told the old man.

Rook now recalls his father turning to him, smiling faintly
, and saying, “You’re probably right.”  He now realizes there wasn’t much hope inside the old man.  The smile was for his son, to encourage him to keep clinging on to his own faint hope. 
He didn’t believe I was right for a second
. 
He knew
. 
In his bones he knew it
.  If only he could speak to his father now, ask him for guidance, ask him what he thought his and Bishop’s next move ought to be.  If only he was a man of faith who believed in spirits, he might try and talk to him…

A soft chime.  He looks down and checks the diagnostics screen.  The repair bot has just sent a message directly to his micropad: the main drive’s energy attenuator is on the fritz. 
The show never stops for glitches
, he thinks, rising to his feet.  Those were his father’s words, used whenever a piece of farm equipment broke down.  On his way to the door, Rook wonders if the energy attenuator is a real problem, or if it’s something Bishop conjured.  He hates that he has to think this way now, but he needs all the friends he could get.

Always know your teammates
thoroughly before trusting them
.  Now here came some of Badger’s advice, creeping up from the past.  Sure, easy for the old man to say, but he never encountered the Cerebrals.  If he had, and if he had found himself left with no other help besides an Ianeth, Rook is willing to bet ol’ Badge would’ve reevaluated his philosophy.

When Rook opens the door to the cargo bay, he finds the Ianeth already there and che
cking his load-out.  Otherwise, he’s ready to go.  Bishop’s techno-organic body does not require him to put on a suit before exiting the ship—according to him, Ianeth “hatched” ready to survive in space and on any world that did not exceed 537° F and 6.4
g
’s of gravity.

Rook removes his
Nomex flightsuit, tosses it into a storage locker.  It takes him a moment to pull on his slim-fitting Stacksuit, and then pull the Tango armor on, and the atmo suit over that.  He checks his left gauntlet—this last month, and with Bishop’s help, Rook worked out a way to link the Cereb omni-kit to the OCC (operational control center) on his glove.  He taps a few keys on his wrist, activates both the STACS and the armor.

“Everyth
ing good systems-wise?” he asks Bishop.

“There were some endothermic/exothermic fluctuations.”

He nods.  “Another valve that needs replacing, huh?”

“Affirmative
, friend.”

From
the storage locker, Rook now removes a particle-beam weapon that Bishop built using scraps taken from Shiva-154e, right after the fight at
Magnum Collectio
.  It is a compact, snub-nosed thing about the size of a human assault rifle, black, lightweight, with a curved energy-pack receiver, and a grip and trigger suitable for human hands.  The alien said it was as close to a classic Ianeth design as he could get, capable of dialing down to two gigajoules and as dialing up as high as twelve gigajoules—about twice that of a barrel of oil when combusted.  Bishop dubbed it simply the Exciter.

Thunder rolls outside.

As he makes his way to the bay door, Rook checks the particle hand cannon—the ISF-issued pistol strapped to his right thigh in a tactical holster—and gives Bishop a thumbs up.  The alien learned long ago what that meant.  “Sealing cargo bay,” Rook says, tapping a few keys on his wrist.  Atmosphere is drained from the room.  “Disengaging arti-grav field.”  Artificial gravity switches off, and at once they both feel the pull of Kali’s extra .2
g
.  The Stacksuit compensates with back, neck and leg support, but the pressure on the body as a whole isn’t lessened.  Rook is just happy that Kali’s gravity is suitable enough for humans—it could just as easily have been 5
g
’s, since the Ianeth had no concern for that.

“Alright, stick close,” says Rook, just as the ramp is descending and the first waves of ash clouds
come whipping into the bay.  The winds are at twenty-two miles an hour and now come roaring inside, but since there is no atmosphere differential, there is no suction of air one way or the other.  They step down the ramp slowly.  Rook’s Exciter hangs from his shoulder by its strap.

However, he notices Bishop’s rifle is in hand, in a ready-low position.  The Ianeth’s rifle is a bigger, meaner-looking thing than Rook’s snub-nosed rifle.  It has a longer, more twisted barrel, which Bishop said allowed for more power.  Inside of it were exotic matter beams that accelerated
particles, amplified and focused them into a single beam, with numerous focusing magnetic lenses and coils pushing the energy down a dozen particle channelers.  He started building various versions of it weeks ago—the creature hardly needed sleep—and this is his most completed model.  It can be dialed down to three gigajoules, and dialed up to thirty-six gigajoules.  He calls it the Quickener.

“Expecting trouble?”
Rook asks warily.

The alien looks at him.  “Why do you ask?”

He points to the rifle.  “You’re holding it like you mean it.”

“I am the last of my kind.  The
Cerebral Calculators intend to subtract me.  It is not usually in our nature to be caught unprepared.”  He adds, “The last time we made that mistake, it cost us everything.  Now, I
am
everything.”

Rook nods, then takes the lead.  As soon as his foot touches Kali, the planet seems to reject him.  The world trembles.  A temblor, just enough to be noticed.  Through the vibrations in his feet and suit he can hear the faint rumble, like a long-dormant leviathan suddenly waking from a long sleep. 
Behind him, Rook hears one of the Sidewinder’s support struts squeak just a bit.

He looks at Bishop.

“It’s fine,” the alien says.  “Earthquakes are incredibly common here, as I said.”

But Rook now has reason to suspect everything his partner says.  “How powerful were the quakes on average when you were last here?”

The alien pauses for a moment.  We ghosts may know that the alien is searching for the right way to convey power in terms Rook will understand.  “The largest ever approached nine points on your Richter scale.”

“Jesus,” he said.  “That’s cataclysmic.”

“Affirmative, but we never had need to build on the surface, and we kept the underground installations away from most major fault lines.”

“Most?”

Bishop gives a shrug, a human gesture to convey relaxed admission.  “We had to remain near some fault lines so as to make our position more precarious, thus making it not an ideal place to hide, and thus more likely to confound the Cerebs.”

That notion settles in with Rook.  He knows that, before their end, the Ianeth were onto the same train of thought that he had developed after so much time
inside
Magnum Collectio
.  Deception and obfuscation became the only tactic that worked to prolong their species, they just didn’t develop battle strategies using that philosophy fast enough to hold any sway in the war.

Rook checks his OCC, brings up another atmospheric reading, and then connects to
the Sidewinder’s computer and commands it to jet spent gases, and then start filtering in some of the scant oxygen from Kali’s air.  The circulators, recyclers, and air-exchangers can only recycle the same oxygen for so many years.  Now that he is on the rare world where the ship won’t be pulverized by extreme heat or gravity, and also has some small oxygen content, he might as well take advantage. 
Every little bit helps us last a little longer
, he thinks.

Those words came from his mother…

Rook suddenly sees here there, carrying more food and water belowground to Dad’s shelter, stockpiling as much as she can on the eve of her son’s enlistment.  She didn’t know about his enlistment yet.  She didn’t know that, as she was asking him to help her take the rice down below and organize the canned foods, he had already decided.  Rook sees her plainly now across the gulf of time…sweating…fretting…hurrying…pushing locks of hair out of her eyes and wringing her hands, worrying that she forgot something…

“Mom, calm down,” he told her.  “Take it easy.  You’re stressing so much you’re gonna have another panic attack.”

“We can’t forget anything.  I still don’t think we have enough water—”

“Mom, we’ve got plenty.”

“What if they come here?  What if it’s like the other worlds?  We may have to stay dug in for a long time.”

“We’ve got plenty alre—”

“Every little bit helps us last a little longer,” she told him.

She was doing what a mother did, digging in and preparing the nest, getting a place ready for the family to wait out the storm.  She meant to dig in.  Her son opted to make a stand.  When he told her
that, and then explained his recruitment into the ASCA and ISF programs, there was an argument.  “Mom, look, it only makes sense.  I mean, I could be a real asset.  I studied astronomy and astrophysics at school for years—”

“You dropped out!”

“I know, I know, but I did really well in the simulators and I think that…Mom, I could be a help!  Pilots have to understand space, stars, and the…the…cosmic mechanics in order to be a good fighter pilot—”

“You’re going to be a
fighter pilot
?”

“That’s the plan—”

“Oh, God, it was bad enough I thought you were going to be a mechanic…or…or…or some kind of intel specialist, but a damned fighter pilot!  Are you
insane
, son?  Have you absolutely lost your mind?”

She was wroth with him, and called his father in to give him a talking to. 
Dad was just coming home from another grocery run, still intent on stockpiling.  The son had looked at the father, and something had been communicated.  Mom thought her husband would reason with their son, but Dad…

He knew
, Rook thinks, walking towards the cave entrance.  He can see the look on his father’s face when he stepped through the screen door, and saw his wife’s face, saw the tears, and perceived the argument that was going on. 
He knew already
. 
He knew what the fuss was about
. 
He knew what I decided
.

Kali grumbles again, this time a bit more insistently, pushing away the past and bringing him back to the here and now.  Rook looks to his left, and sees the Ianeth staring at him.  For a moment he can scarcely believe he’s looking at an alien.  He was just back on the farm, where no such weirdness existed…

Bishop is still staring at him.

Rook sighs and waves him on.  “
You take the lead, since you know this place.” 
Also because my eyes have a comparatively narrow view of the electromagnetic spectrum next to yours
, he thinks, switching on his visor’s night-vision.  It gets the job done, bathing everything in a monochromatic green while his HUD highlights trouble areas along the ground—at least, it tries to, his sensors are getting lots of interference from the environment.

Bishop just nods.  No
affirmative
this time.  He walks ahead, moving with as much grace as he did aboard the Sidewinder, which is more than can be said for Rook.

Despite the relative order that was created by this runway, the
surface of Kali is rocky and uneven, with crumbling bits of rock, and sudden pits concealed by sheets of ash that have collected, most of it probably from Thor’s Anvil off to his left, about a hundred klicks to what he’s dubbed the “east.”  As he makes his way along the runway, which has a slight incline, Rook glances away to the immense volcano.  A magnificent bolt of purple lightning lances through the clouds raging all around it.  A second later, he hears the booming thunder.  Beneath his feet, Kali shakes.

She doesn’t want us here
.

The thought scares him by how much he believes it.  He believes it on both a primal and logical level. 
As scientists long proclaimed, the universe by and large was always trying to kill us.  The vacuum of space would have intruded on Earth long ago if not for certain factors being lined up perfectly.  Most planets aren’t habitable; most of them don’t even have stable orbits.  Less than three percent of a gas cloud makes the all-important star for life to grow—that’s extremely inefficient star formation.  Climate changes happen too frequently and erratically on most planets for life to get a “footing” and start the evolutionary chain.  The list of problems goes on: galaxy orbits lead them inevitably towards deadly supernovae, most solar systems are a shooting gallery of asteroids and comets, and most places in the universe will kill life
instantly
due to extreme heat, cold, and radiation.  Even our home world wasn’t as habitable as most of us thought—more than two-thirds of Earth’s surface was completely uninhabitable by human life.