The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song) (14 page)

But Rook does not to rise to his taunt (if it
is
a taunt), and opts to stay on point.  “What about the
personal
sacrifice you made leaping onto my ship?” Rook presses.  “What about that kind of sacrifice?”

“My team and I ejected from our ships.  We saw an opportunity, and the field was clear of debris.  We matched your speed, ejected, and, with permission from our Observers and Managers, we made to come aboard.”  The alien shakes his head.  “There was very little margin for error on our part.
  Therefore, no sacrifice required.  We were virtually guaranteed success.”

“Yet, here you are.”

“I said there was
little
margin for error, not
zero
.”

“So, you would never sacrifice yourself
for something or someone else?”

The Leader makes a face, as if the very thought hurts him.  “
Why sacrifice, when you may plan ahead, get a feel for your enemy’s technological capabilities, and allow them to make all the foolish mistakes?  Such as sacrifice,” he adds.

The cold efficiency of the philosophy
is infuriating.  “So what are we?  If we’re smarter than termites and mold, if we’ve gone to the stars and mastered space travel, but we’re
not
as intelligent and wise as you people, then what are we, exactly?”

“A fluke,” the Leader says
simply.  His eyes pulse again with the same blue light as before.  “As random as the emergence of life itself.  Mutations occur.  This is natural in the evolutionary process.  Most mutations fail.  Some get further than others before they fail.  Humanity belongs to this type.”

Rook watches him.  Then, he does something that upsets the Leader.  He begins to laugh.  It comes out of nowhere.  None of us expect it, least of all Rook himself.  He laughs long and hard, until his sides are almost splitting.  Tears stream down his face.  He’s nodding at the alien.  He’s agreeing with him.  He understands him.  Everything the Leader has said has been so logical, how could one argue with it, especially in the wake of such clear results?

Hadn’t Rook’s drill sergeant told him that he could never argue with results?  Hadn’t his father told him that, too, when he tried to explain why he lost the chess tournament?  “But his defense was so
sloppy
!” he insisted in the ride home with his dad, after he suffered a quick defeat.  “You saw it!  Didn’t you see how he didn’t even
try
to develop his pieces at the start?  That’s the
first thing
you’re supposed to do!  He didn’t even try for control of the center!  Everybody knows that’s the
first
thing you do!  You have to control the central squares so you can move your pieces more easily, and cramp your opponent’s pieces!  He didn’t even try for that!  What was he
thinking
?”

“He won,
son,” his father told him.  “He beat you.  Accept it.”

“But that’s not—”

“He got inside your head, is all.  He didn’t do what you expected.  He declined your Queen’s Gambit, and after that he let you take a couple pieces.  He wanted to see what you were thinking, get inside your head.”

“Get inside my…?”

“You think too much about your pieces,” his father advised.  “Not enough about the person sitting across from you.  You’re playing them, not their pieces.”

“I
know
I’m playing a person.  Who else would I be playing?”

“Yourself,” his father replied.

“What?”

“You’re
making the mistake of playing against
yourself
.  You’re trying to think what
you
would do.  You’re very smart, and a very good player, but you need to learn how others think.  A good chess player thinks like his opponent.”  His father cast a worrisome glance at him.  “I know you like to win.  It’s your nature to dig your heels in; I saw that in you when you were young.  But you’ve got to…well, there was once a thinker named Sun Tzu.  They teach you about him in school?”  The boy shook his head.  “Well, he wrote a book called
The Art of War
.  In it, he said, ‘To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.’  It just means think about your opponent’s mindset.  Where’s he coming from?  What’s his method of approach?”

“
But I
am
thinking about my opponent’s mindset—”

“No,
you’re not.  Not really.  You’re looking at the board too much and thinking about what
you
think his next move
should
be.  You’re not looking at your opponent.  You’re not seeing his mind.”

“My opponent didn’t even know how to properly
align his—”

“Son,” his father
said flatly, after hearing this for the umpteenth time.  “You can’t argue with results.”

The truth was, he missed something
that day.  We all do it.  It’s the source of flaw and fault.

Humanity
missed something, too, and it failed.  It failed to defend itself.  It failed to develop its pieces before moving forward.  It failed to establish control over the center.  Its pawns failed to defend the king, and once that happens in any game, everything else falls apart.

A chime goes off inside the cargo bay.  The Leader looks up, mildly
interested.  Rook looks at him.  He’s finally finished laughing.  “I guess you ought to be flattered.  You’re the first guest to set foot on it.”

“On what?”

“King Henry the Eighth,” Rook says.  “We’ll be docking in five minutes.  Welcome to my humble abode.”

7

We remain with the Sidewinder for now.  The Conductor and the rest of his people are still expanding their search, so they might be a while.  And besides, things are developing here, in a section of the asteroid field that Rook has come to term
Magnum Collectio
(the Great Gathering).  Here, there is a congested patch of space like none other we’ve seen yet.  As ghosts, we may pass through it all, but it is no less a burden.

The Sidewinder glides lazily through the throng of mile-wide
asteroids and random pebbles.  One basketball-sized hunk of rock comes hurtling towards the forward viewport, and glances off the magnetic shielding like a ricocheting bullet, and almost as fast.

A little more than a hundred of these asteroids are baseball-sized, and are
currently emitting activity at extremely low frequencies. They tickle us, even in our incorporeal state.  They are more of the false asteroids made of mimetic clay, with high explosives embedded at the center: Rook has termed them the Wild Cards.  Along with various sensor shrouds, exhaust-masking cryogenic coolers mounted on the sides of King Henry VIII and Queen Anne, and twelve satellites camouflaged and hidden throughout
Magnum Collectio
(all of which were salvaged from various wreckages taken from Shiva 154e before he had to flee), the Wild Cards form the grid that protect his home from prying eyes.  His home, this enclave here, is humanity’s last refuge.  It’s the only place Rook has left to go, and thus, we who still haunt him must follow.

Rook taps a button.  “Begin log,” he says.  “Call sign Rook.  I have initiated contact
with the Cereb, and begun interrogations.  He calls himself Leader, and seems very confident that…”  Rook trails off, and sighs.  It is hard to go on. 
Who am I even recording this for?
  A question that returns frequently these days.  He sits for a moment, stares out the viewport, watches time and space slip by.  He stares so long and hard that he forgets to blinks, and his eyes begin to water.  Finally, he blinks, clears his throat, and finishes.  “He seems very confident that his people will find me, and finish me off.  He…he has indicated that I am the last.  I held out hope this long, but it appears…well, Cerebs don’t lie.  They just don’t.  It…it looks like I am the last.  The words I speak are the last humanity will ever have, and I think…I think I’m still in shock?”  He says it like a question, trying to wrap his mind around it.  “If not in shock, then…” 
Then what?
  He sighs.  “End log.”

The Sidewinder
moves smoothly through the cleft between the two halves of the Queen’s body.  It’s like passing through a dark, narrow valley—the rock split almost in two, creating a large V that had collected its own floating debris.

Rook has cued up some music to settle his nerves
.  He prefers very old music, pre-2000s.  There was something about that era, particularly from 1950 to 1995.  His father was a musician, and was enamored of the many musical revolutions and the sheer energy of that age.

SEARCH: CLASSIC BANDS: ERA/YEAR: 1986

ARTIST NAME: KENNY LOGGINS

ALBUM NAME: TOP GUN (SOUNDTRACK)

SONG TITLE: DANGER ZONE

Hands on the controls, his mind focused on his sensors and his eyes locked on the forward viewport, Rook sings along.  This part of the ride can be rather thrilling, as we soon find out.

“
Revvin’ up your engine,

Listen to her howlin’ roar
.

Metal under tension,

Beggin’ you to touch and go
.

Highway to th
e Danger Zone!

Ride into th
e Danger Zone!
”

Asteroids everywhere.  Moving through this field is exceedingly dangerous, as the random debris is in constant flux.  The Wild Cards part for the Sidewinder as it comes through, then assume their previous positions once the ship has passed.

Rook runs yet another diagnostics check.  The ship’s collision-avoidance system seems to be working at nearly full
efficiency, guaranteeing no unwanted bumps or scrapes.  He taps a few buttons, flips a switch, primes the torpedo pod.  It fired its last torpedo eight years ago, and since then has been used to jet extra supplies over to Queen Anne.  The Queen functions as a secondary supply depot—as commonplace as collisions are in this field, Rook learned a long time ago never to put all his eggs in one basket.  His supplies are therefore split between the King and the Queen.  The radar-guided pod will float down to Queen Anne’s “north” side and deposit a few supplies into a crater that runs almost a mile deep.  There, Rook maintains a cache.

Presently, he taps a few
more buttons, sending a signal over to the nuclear mass drivers on each side of the Queen, telling them to run a systems check.  The thrusters of each mass driver were placed there some thirty years ago, by asteroid miners who planned to take some of the choicest morsels from the asteroid field.  Now all but consumed by the Cerebs and Rook himself.  Such enormous thrusters were sometimes placed on a large asteroid, at enormous expense, if it was considered dangerous and could possibly interfere with such mining.  The thrusters could be activated to move the asteroid in any direction.  It cost a handsome sum for companies to produce the mass drivers and place them on an asteroid, and it was a technique that became outmoded as soon as more nimble ships and better deflector shields were developed.

Rook discovered th
e derelict thrusters on the Queen some years ago, and immediately concealed them with sensor shrouds that he salvaged from other damaged Sidewinders.  He used them from time to time, activating them remotely, keeping the Queen from colliding with her King.  Though, he tries not to do this too often, because the enormous power it takes to move the Queen, once activated, cannot be concealed even by a sensor shroud.  If a Cereb luminal ship happened by while he was using it, his largest and most important caches would be discovered and obliterated, and he likely with it.

Over the years, he’s placed smaller caches
throughout the asteroid field.  At times, he’s had to retreat deeper into the field for weeks on end, too concerned about leading his pursuers to his base camp.

With the supply pod safely on its way to Queen Anne, the Sidewinder begins to circle around the smaller half of the asteroid and approaches King Henry VIII.  The landing cycle takes three minutes to run through.  As Rook adjusts the roll, the Sidewinder’s computers begin to
opine, as they often do, that really he ought to try to adjust his rate, and that his yaw isn’t quite right, nor his pitch for that matter.

“
Headin’ into twilight,

Spreadin’ out her wings to tonight
.

She got you jumpin’ off the track,

And shovin’ into overdrive
.

Highway to th
e Danger Zone!

I’ll take you right into th
e Danger Zone!
”

Seven asteroids float about, all of them as false as the Wild Cards, only these are much bigger; about four times as big as the Sidewinder.  Each one is covered in the same shape-shifting mimetic clay, and contains a high-powered automated turret that fires a particle beam at ten terajoules  of energy, roughly twenty-five percent of the power unleashed on Hiroshima when the A-bomb went off.  They were once sentry satellites, placed in high orbit above the Eye of Shiva, the farthest moon from Shiva 154e.  Rook salvaged them eight years ago, only had to repair one.  He nicknamed them the Seven Dwarfs: Sleepy, Happy, Dopey, Sneezy, Grumpy, Bashful and Doc.

Rook
rolls the Sidewinder over and pulls back on the cyclic, increasing the Sidewinder’s descent rate.  He passes into a narrow opening on the King’s surface.  A hole was bored straight through it, probably by some ancient miners, splintering off into various other pitch-black caverns.  At first, this cave looks as nondescript as any other, but after a few twists and turns, the Sidewinder kicks on its lights and we begin to see small cylinders hanging from the ceiling, no longer than a human arm.  Motion sensors, all of them.  Just now, they only detect the Sidewinder.

Deeper and deeper into the lair.

The Sidewinder comes close to a complete stop, the reverse thrusters halting forward momentum, while the portside thrusters control the yaw and creates a flat spin.  He turns down a cavern, moving slowly, testing the darkness as one might test the water’s temperature with their toes.  One never knows when a random boulder-sized asteroid may ricochet into these tunnels.

Deeper and deeper.

Rook must slow down again, this time adjusting his pitch, heading straight up into a cavern above our heads.  He initially explored this asteroid for a whole month, working out a twisting path so it would be difficult for skirmishers and seekers to find his camp.  Of course, if a Cereb luminal ship ever finds the King, it won’t matter how deep he goes.

The cockpit is filled with an alarm.  It’s okay, though, it’s just a warning to Rook that proximity mines have been detected.  He merely needs to transmit his IFF signature (Identify Friend or Foe
), along with his ship’s transponder code to the mines embedded into the walls.  Once the mines have this, they deactivate, allow him to pass, and reactivate once he’s well beyond them.

Deeper and deeper.

The Sidewinder makes one more adjustment to yaw, turns down another cavern, and proceeds on the final leg of its odyssey.  The King is riddled with these wormholes, some of them jagged with stalagmite-like teeth, others smooth and non-threatening.  Rook selected one area amid this labyrinth for its many possible escape routes.

When he finally
reaches base camp, where everything has been bolted down (no artificial gravity here), he sails clearly over it and flares suddenly to shed the remaining speed.  The Sidewinder glides down to the area he’s designated as his landing pad.  Sensors detect him, and a few halogen lights cut on to outline the landing zone.  The Sidewinder touches down softly, its landing gear fitting neatly into magnetized clamps that have been drilled into the rock. Rook stands up from his seat, does a brief scan to make sure all is right with his campsite, and then powers down the engines.

While flying, the computer has made another move on the chessboard.  He looks at it, and realizes
the computer is two moves away from a checkmate.  He resigns, sets up another game, and has it transmitted to his micropad so he can play while working about the base.  The computer is White this time, so it goes first, and the game opens with the classic King’s Indian Defense: White pawn moves to D4, Black knight moves to F6, White moves another pawn to C4 and Black pushes a pawn to G6.

The first order of business is to offload some of the m
aterials that the Sidewinder has been making in its own fabricator, which is mounted to its belly.  There is only so much stuff it can make these days.  Much of the asteroid field holds the same elements, so variety is hard to come by.  The fact that the fabricator is breaking down doesn’t help much either, but what it gathers and creates, basic screws, though not very strong, and iron plates that can be used to fortify sections of his base, are welcome.  “Never look a gift horse in the mouth.”  That was his mother’s advice to him, echoing down through the decades, still giving him guidance.

Rook
pulls on his environmental suit, activates the atmosphere, and tastes the acrid metallic air.  Actually, it’s not so acrid as it used to be.  He’s gotten used to it.  About a year ago, he realized he could no longer recall what real air smelled or tasted like.

He
cuts the music off, goes to check on Badger and make sure he’s strapped in, switches off artificial gravity inside the ship (so that there’s no distortion when he steps outside), and then heads down to the cargo bay.  His prisoner is bolted tightly enough that he isn’t floating or moving much at all.  Rook has his sidearm clipped to his thigh, and moves cautiously towards the Leader with his hand on the grip, ready to draw it if he has to.  The Leader seems resigned to his bonds, and doesn’t move as Rook injects him again, putting him out.  Rook undoes the bonds, and places the Cerebral in an environmental suit of his own (Badger’s old one).  It ought to work, since the physiology between the two races is very close.

Rook
floats the alien to the bottom of the ramp and ties his bonds to a guardrail as he cues up “Moonlight Sonata.”  It’s a somber piece that fills Rook with other memories of home.  Soft breezes and even softer nights.  Time spent on the farm, looking up at the starry sky, dreaming of one day swimming through it.  The song is ominous, though.  Portending the end of humanity?

Rook’s unconscious
requiem for us, perhaps?

After leaving the Leader behind, he can’t get the image of
the black, pulsating eyes out of his head.  Nor can he forget the creature’s words. 
And there is another problem with your race, of course
, the Leader said to him. 
Sacrifice
.  When asked how he could be a soldier and yet not understand the concept of sacrifice, the Leader responded so matter-of-factly, like an adult not understanding why a child can’t grasp it. 
Why sacrifice, when you may plan ahead, get a feel for your enemy’s technological capabilities, and allow them to make all the foolish mistakes?
 
Such as sacrifice
.