The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song) (15 page)

It is in that moment that something occurs to him.  It occurs suddenly, and is quickly gone.
  It has the feeling of an idea that may return later for a visit, if it’s feeling neighborly.

Rook
hums along to Ludwig van Beethoven’s masterpiece, cues up the holographic screen of his micropad, and plays a bit of chess while he unbolts the compristeel cases, one at a time, and unloads them.

White knight moves to C3
.

Zero-grav has its various challenges. 
Rook floats outside.  He uses the steel guardrails to guide himself along.  The guardrails were constructed from pieces the Sidewinder’s fabricator produced.  Rook glides through the lit cavern.  Each of the cases contain other items he’s produced while on the go, more iron supports fashioned in the fabricator, so as to bolster the integrity of his growing structure.

Hi
s mind is split between his work, the chess game, and the Leader’s words. 
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?
  The idea from moments before returns to him, a bit more formed this time, yet still lurking somewhere in the murk.  Like a tongue returning to the empty socket where a tooth has been removed, his mind would return to this thought a few more times, picking at it.

Black bishop moves to G7.

It’s the best move
, he figures, floating back to the ship to gather another case.  With this move, he intends to allow White control of the center with its pawns, with a mind to challenge it with either the moves to E5 or C5.  All in all, a very complex and dynamic opening, favored by players like Mikhail Tal, Viktor Korchnoi, and, of course, Bobby Fischer.

Over the years, Rook has had a chance to study up on Bobby Fischer, the man
once held to be the greatest chess player that ever lived, all the way up until eighty years ago, when the Japanese player Akira Kimura had played a hundred games with a hundred separate Grandmasters, defeating all of them.  Back on Nomar 442b, just before Cowboy died, he imparted knowledge of this player to Rook.  Rook was much younger then, only twenty-one, and had spent most of his time idolizing Kimura and a handful of other modern players.

So many chess players
have come and gone since Fischer, he’s practically been buried in the congested annals of history.  While Rook was fleeing Nomar, hopping through various systems, he used the Ethernet to communicate with the few others out there also fighting for survival.  One week, while floating in a dead part of space, desperate for any human contact and feeling utterly alone, he decided, quite out of the blue, to look up Fischer.  What he discovered about the young player astonished him.

Born to Hans-Gerhardt Fischer and Regina Fischer
, a biophysicist and a teacher, respectively, in 1943, Bobby Fischer first learned to play chess with his sister at the age of six, reading the instructions off of his first chess set.  Seven years later, at thirteen years of age, Bobby Fischer won a “brilliancy” (a beautiful and spectacular game of chess) that was chronicled as the Game of the Century.

The story of
the game was simply incredible.  Fischer was playing against Donald Byrne, a man considered to be one of the strongest American chess players of the 1950s and 1960s, if not
the
greatest.  Byrne was White, so he had the opening move, giving him the statistical advantage.  Byrne opened with a noncommittal move; knight to F3, very simple, just seeing if he might control the center.  Fischer responded with knight to F6, basically just mirroring Byrne’s move.  From here, Byrne played pawn to C4, trying to gain a little more control of the center.  Fischer responded with pawn to G6, getting ready to
fianchetto
his bishop to the G7 spot that his pawn had just moved from.

With these simple moves, Fischer pretty much invited Byrne to establish a classic pawn “stronghold” at the center of the board.  Of course, Fischer
was merely attempting to
fianchetto
with his bishop (a piece known from “coming out of nowhere” in chess, especially in games Rook played with his father), which will target and undermine Byrne’s defenses at the center.

The next few moves
were fairly simple.  Byrne moved his other knight to C3.  Fischer moved his bishop.  Byrne moved his pawn to D4.  Fischer quickly castled on the king’s side.  Now, typically after this, a player in Byrne’s position would move his pawn at E2 to E4, but Byrne didn’t do this.  Instead of playing the King’s Indian Defense, Byrne opted to move his bishop from C1 to F4.  He did this because it was becoming known that Fischer was adept at playing to the King’s Indian Defense.

This was important, because it indicated that Byrne had been studying Fischer as a player, not just studying the pieces and game theory.  Just like Rook’s father told him to do.  “Think about the mind sitting across from you,” he said, time and time again until finally Rook, becoming frustrated with his inability to win
the major tournaments, stopped playing in them altogether.

Fischer: pawn to D5
; the classic Grünfeld Defense.  Byrne: queen to B3.  Fischer: pawn to C4, taking an enemy pawn (giving up the center for the moment, but it did remove the “tempo” from Byrne’s queen, meaning the White queen must waste a move on recapturing).

A few more moves that were pretty much to be expected,
just a few exchanges, the taking of a piece here and there.  Nothing exceptional.  That is, until Byrne maneuvered his king as such that he could get it into F1, which made sense because Byrne was still putting pressure on Fischer’s queen at B6, which Fischer had allowed to get cornered.  Byrne figured Fischer was going to play his queen somewhere, so he was just sort of waiting for Fischer to make that move.

But Fischer didn’t do that.

What happened next was what most chess players of that era called the greatest sacrifice in the history of the game.  Rather than move the queen, Fischer moved his
bishop
to E6.  Many people saw this as a horrible mistake at the time.  It even astonished Byrne, who took Fischer’s queen, for how could he not?  The queen is the most powerful piece in chess, after all, it can move in any direction it wants, combining the powers of the bishop and the rook, so to remove it from the board means you’ve just come a great deal closer to defeating your enemy.  Fischer elected to move the bishop and leave his queen in the spot where he
knew
it would get taken on Byrne’s next move.  It was something that most people thought was a rather stupid move.

Byrne didn’t see the lure.  He only saw a mistake.  He probably figured there was something else Fischer was playing at, he just didn’t know
how
big of a ploy this was.

Then, Fischer’s ploy suddenly dawned on Byrne and everyone else.  He moved his bishop to C4, and basically started a “windmill” tactic
. Devouring all of Byrne’s pieces.  He did this because Byrne’s king happened to be in F1 at the time of the queen’s sacrifice, and therefore
had
to move back to G1, out of the way of Fischer’s bishop—it was a forced move, since the king was in check and it is an illegal move in chess to allow your king to remain open to attack.  But then Fischer moved his knight to E2, which once again forced Byrne to move his king, this time
back
to F1, so that it couldn’t be taken by the Black knight.  But that Black knight then moved up to gobble a White pawn at D3, once again forcing Byrne to move his king
back
to G1, since the knight’s move left him exposed to the bishop at C4.

On and on the eternal checks went. 
The knight came back to E2, once again putting the king in check, forcing the king to come back to F1, then the knight moved to C3, once more putting Byrne’s king in check by the rook remaining at C4.

Bobby Fischer
conducted a maelstrom of attacks and checks no one saw coming.  This was only possible because, in the game of chess, the king must never be left exposed.  The player with the threatened king
must
move to protect the king.  It’s automatic, it cannot be helped.  This particular windmill tactic was only possible because Fischer did something others perceived early on as stupid, including his opponent: the sacrifice of the most powerful piece in chess, the queen.  Fischer won because he understood both the mechanics of the game, its pieces, and the mind of the man sitting across from him.

It was humbling
for all chess players.  Almost as humbling as the one hundred victories of Akira Kimura, and his sacrifice, which was now, in a way, considered an even greater sacrifice than Fischer’s.  Kimura had sacrificed his queen and both rooks, just so he could lose a game against the then-world champion Yuri Dmitriyev, who had only ever lost two games in his career.  Kimura did this, he said, so that he could see his opponent’s response to such lunacy.  When he replayed him the next year, Kimura defeated Dmitriyev in a brilliancy, and never lost another game to him after that, or to anyone else for that matter.  It gave rise to the saying, “Kimura sacrificed his one king to save all his others.”

As Rook moves his crates over to the campsite, and connecting them to chains so they didn’t just float off, he wonders about the minds of such thinkers.  Certainly it
is proof that mankind had Calculators of their own, perhaps even Conductors. 
We just didn’t have enough of them
, he laments. 
And none of them in politics or military
.

At one point, he loses control of a case, which apparently wasn’t sealed adequately, and
it opens up and spills tools, spare parts, and a few precious MREs.  “No!  Damn it!  No!”  He struggles to gather them up.  It takes him a few minutes, bouncing off of walls and floating down the cave to gather them.  When he finishes, he’s panting.  He feels himself begin to chuckle.  Then, it becomes more than just chuckling.  The laughter comes from his mind.  Echoes.  Echoes from us, the ghosts of humanity, talking to him, telling him to join us here in the ever-after.  This is contradicted by the whispers from his father and mother, telling him to never give up.  “Is that all you got?” his father told him when he came home with an F on a school report, during one semester in high school when he’d been particularly lazy.  “I mean, if that’s all you got, that’s okay, I just thought you had more.”

It was the right thing to say at the right time.  And it was the right thing for Rook to recall.  He stops laughing, regains composure, and floats back down to the
Sidewinder.  He gathers up his prisoner, and floats over to the campsite.

The site itself is
dominated by what appears to be a giant white balloon.  They were called habitats, specifically DSHM (Deep Space Habitat Module), for those times when a pilot was stranded, or if a deep-cover operative needed to keep a low profile on a moon, asteroid, or some dead planet.  It started out as just an inflatable balloon stuffed inside a steel box the size of an average piece of luggage.  A separate steel box contained extra equipment, such as small power generators, faucets, tubes, water recyclers, et cetera.

Inflated
, the thick sheet of annasali-latex is over a foot thick and contains twelve layers of open cell foam.  There is as layer of woven Kevlar to keep the habitat’s shape.  The inner layer is made of fireproof Nomex.  The air is recycled by the small air-exchanger at its base.  The balloon is covered by a blanket of insulation, a redundant bladder, and a protective sheet.  There is a small hydroponic greenhouse, which is barely bigger than a storage locker and has been failing for years now.  The habitat is enough for one person, unless that person became industrious and gathered more parts on the go, which Rook has done for a decade now.

The
habitat came with a digital manual.  The resources Rook has gathered from the asteroid field and fed to the fabricator has given him enough tools and materials to add on to it.  Initially, it was all very cluttered and cramped.  However, two extra air-exchangers, taken from a pair of destroyed Arrester-class fighters he found on the moon of Moira while on the run, allowed him to expand the size of the dome.  The fabricator has produced enough interlocking plates for him to encase the balloon, protecting it from random tiny asteroids that might ricochet down through the King’s corridors and tear it.

The habitat now stands about twelve feet high, and about twenty feet across.  A series of short rails
lead up into the airlock, which he now seals behind him and activates.  Atmosphere is forced into the room, though Rook and his prisoner are still weightless, and he floats on in and binds his unconscious enemy to the guardrails just inside the airlock.

Through the airlock is the main living space.  Here,
the module is at its widest.  Water recyclers funnel into a contained faucet, with tubes running from each nozzle and plastic jugs connected to the ends of those tubes (can’t just turn a faucet on in zero-grav).

Some of the power Rook gleaned from his latest raid on the Cerebs
will be pulled from the Sidewinder’s batteries—what the EA system took from the particle beams and other energy attacks are also needed for running home base, since his generators are only stored with power meant to last fifteen years.  Rook is nearing the end here.  Just a couple more years, and humanity will truly, finally, be dead.