The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song) (16 page)

Rook removes his helmet,
tastes the slightly purer air of the habitat, and places the helmet in a storage chest bolted to the iron floor.  He floats over to the workstation, pulls himself down into the chair and straps himself in.  Using a touch-screen and a holo-display, he pulls up the habitat’s data and runs a systems check.  There are a few problems he’s not surprised to see—a filter in one of the air-exchangers needs replacing, and he’s not been able to find enough raw materials to form an adequate replacement in the fabricator.  A small fire destroyed a good portion of the one still in it, and many of those pieces were lost when the emergency systems jetted the fire, and some of the debris, into the vacuum outside.

The single picture he has left from home, digitally printed out from the Sidewinder’s onboard computer
printer, adorns the wall in front of him.  A picture of the far, long golden fields stretching out into a swift horizon, with a few verdant green fields rolling end over end, into forever.  Rook takes a moment to look at it, then looks away quickly.  Staring at it used to bring him comfort, but now, for some reason, it only brings him anxiety. 

That
picture is tilted since the habitat’s walls have started to sag.  A prosaic but no less illustrative reminder daily struggle to survive.  There’s also a pair of frayed cables on the outside of the habitat.  According to the computer, they absorbed impact from something months ago, a ricocheting rock of some kind.  From time to time, Rook can hear them pang off the habitat’s protective iron shell.  The systems log says this impact happened a few months ago, long before he left on his last excursion.

How
did I miss that before I left?

There are almost
two hundred tiny problems such as this, and a couple of big ones.  There is only so much one man can do around such a habitat, while also having to leave it for long periods at a time to conduct raids and scavenge for supplies.  Things break down.  Things decay.  There is no safer bet in the universe.

Like the mind
.  The thought comes to him unbidden.  Yet, he cannot deny it.  His outburst of maniacal laughter outside was proof of it. 
The mind decays
. 
Just like everything else
. 
And the longer one goes without others performing maintenance on it, the faster it decays
.  No one was around to tell him he was wrong.  No one was around to double check his tactics, his assessments, his repairs, his methods, or his thought processes.  It explains why he missed the frayed cables.  It is just him out here.  Just Rook, doing the jobs of a dozen different men, trying to keep focused on all he needs to survive. Trying not to get killed by a stupid mistake.  For
any
mistake is exploited by both the Cerebs, and by the harshness of space. He tries not to become lost in the Deep, hanging on to some shred of hope that he’s not the last survivor of mankind, trying not to hear the whispers of us, the ghosts, all while trying to maintain a grip on his own sanity.

In fact, just looking at the systems data and the report about the frayed cable
s causes him to snort out a laugh, and the snort almost becomes more than just that.  Tears leak from his face, and he quickly wipes them away before they can float away from his face and alight on some computer component; moisture is the ultimate enemy to electronics, after all.  Just one of a million things Rook must consider on a daily basis, and just one more thing to corrode his sanity.

Rook tries to assuage his coming madness by telling
himself that the omni-kit he obtained from the Leader is a boon.  It fabricates objects in far superior design and specifications than does the Sidewinder’s fabricator.  It should come in handy, might even prolong his life a year or two, if he can fully grasp all its capabilities.

Behind him, his prisoner mumbles.  Rook glances over his shoulder, sees the Leader stirring a little.

Rook looks back at his computer.  It takes a couple of hours just to run through all of the primary, secondary, and tertiary systems, completing their diagnostic checks.  He’s been gone for some time, so there will be problems to address along with the usual maintenance.

One other
important thing he must check: its nuclear center.  One of the more astonishing discoveries Rook made when first exploring King Henry VIII was that, apparently, it was once used by Man to dump its starships’ nuclear drive cores.  He estimates this took place about four hundred years ago, when traveling through the quantum slipstream was done by far more volatile reactors, before the newer, cleaner pycnodeuterium drives were developed by the military.  While still generating titanic radiation levels, the pycno drives were less unpredictable, and therefore less dangerous.  The old nuclear drive cores had to be dumped after just a few uses, and changed out with spare cores kept on each vessel.  Since there were laws about just leaving the old ones in the space as dangerous debris, deep-space vessels had to put them
somewhere
.

The King’s porous surface and network of tunnels probably made it ideal for burying nuclear drives.  Unfortunately, it seems a great deal of commercial vessels
passing through
Magnum Collectio
all had the same idea, and no less than two hundred cores were taken deep, deep into the center of the King, and dropped off.

The radiation levels
are off the charts, enough to give a human being 30 Gy (absorbed dose of radiation) if exposed to those tunnels outside without adequate environmental suits.  But there was another concern: those old drive cores could also be extremely reactive.  Centuries of decay made them even more dangerous.  Almost like a plastic explosive, a sudden high impact could set them off, start a chain reaction from one to the next, and the detonation would be (according to his computer’s calculations) about four thousand times what was dropped on Hiroshima.  Apparently, no one had considered the long-term effects of drive core corrosion.  Another of mankind’s mistakes—putting all of its (rotten) eggs in one basket.

It seems that, just as it was back on Earth, some of the nicest places to live were also the worst places to live.  The same attributes about King Henry VIII that had attracted Rook—its
porous surface, its placement in a heavily congested and complex portion of the asteroid field—also made it a prime visitor’s spot for other “space tourists” in its time.

From the moment he first discovered this, Rook set his computer to monitoring the situation at the King’s core.
  It is extremely important that he remembers to monitor both the radiation levels (which could do damage to some of his equipment outside, which he hasn’t yet developed sufficient radiation shielding for) and the thermal levels collecting in pockets around the discarded drive cores.  The higher the thermal levels, the more volatile they would become to even minor impacts.

Such nagging paranoia. 
And though Rook has always enjoyed a challenge (they didn’t let just anybody fly a Sidewinder), it is another heavy burden to his psyche.  Part of him despairs, but, God help him, another part of him loves the work.  Work on the farm had prepared him for this.  Never a dull moment on a farm.

More mumbling from behind.  And movement.  Rook turns to see his guest has tried to roll over.  Rook goes back to his work.  After another thirty minutes, the alien is no longer mumbling, just breathing steadily.  When Rook turns back to face him again, the Leader’s eyes are wide open.  He seems perfectly lucid, his black eyes starting to pulsate again with that blue light so deeply embedded within. 
It almost looks like a galaxy wants to form in there
, Rook thinks. 
Or like a star is dying
. 
One of the two
.

“This is your home?” the Leader asks.  His voice isn’t groggy.  He’s perfectly cogent, even looks well rested and eager to start a new day.
 
Like me waking up on the farm, excited about the day’s work
.  Perhaps in this way, he and the Leader are cut from the same cloth.  They both enjoy working.  We, as ghosts, are capable of seeing into both their souls, and we can be sure that this is the case.  It seems that while philosophies differ, soldiers never change.

“Yeah,” Rook says.  “This is my home.”  He almost adds the words “
for now
” but quickly bites his tongue.  Something is still forming deep inside of him, an idea that Rook isn’t yet conscious of, but it still restrains him from saying more.  “What do you think of it?”

“It is about what
we estimated,” says the Leader.

“How so?”

The alien wriggles in his bonds, pushes himself up off the iron floor, and leans back against the latex wall.  “A quick-camp, one of your DSHMs, buried deep inside one of the larger asteroids.  You’ve also been here long enough to forge much of the supporting structure from your Sidewinder’s fabricators, little by little expanding its size.”

Rook raises an eyebrow.  “How do you know where we are if you were incapacitated the whole ride?”

“Because I wasn’t.  Not completely.  Your sedative works well enough, but it puts my people in more of a hibernation state, one in which we are still aware, still able to gather information from our environment.  It’s our hypersensitivity, and our four-tiered brains.  We’re never really asleep.  We require a cycle-down period for rest, what you might call
meditation
.”

Rook nods.  “So, you saw through the windows in the cargo hold.”

“Windows are structural weaknesses,” the Leader comments.  “The only reason you have them is because your people still didn’t trust their sensors and other technologies to do the flying for them.  If you had been sufficiently developed in your technology, you would have gotten rid of them long ago.”

A moment of silence.  Rook figures the Cereb is just creating conversation to buy more time.  “So, how much did you see?”

“I saw a pod released to a neighboring asteroid.  A spare cache, I presume?”  Rook doesn’t confirm this, but the Leader nods as if he does.  “That is also what we figured.  You probably have backups throughout the entire field, yes?”

Rook keeps quiet on that.  He ponders something else, then
says, “You said you guys figured I was holed up in some place just like this.  So why haven’t you guys closed in on my exact location yet?  The asteroid field is big, but it’s not so big that a good scan couldn’t weed me out.”

“You’ve
been of minor consequence.  There were groupings of thousands of others here and there that we had to tend to first, ensuring that they didn’t procreate.  It is only now that our ship’s Conductor wishes to officially put an end to humanity.  You might say, the final bit of
paperwork
for formality’s sake.”

Rook stares at the creature in wonderment, and with growing rancor.  “
Paperwork?” he says silently.  “So I’m just a period at the end of the sentence?  Just a final ‘T’ that needs to be crossed?”

“A final debit that needs to be
crossed out
,” the Leader corrects.  “That would be a better way of putting it.  We heed the lessons of our Calculators, after all.  They, of the unending account books.”

“How many Calculators are there?”

“There are many throughout the galaxy.”

“Do they have a leader?”

“There is a Council of Elders.”

“How many of those are there?”

“Four.”

Something catches Rook’s attention about that.  It just suddenly occurs to him.  “
Huh.  You have four-tiered brains,” he says.  “At least, most of you have.  You came here with four men, yourself included.  You say there are four of these Elders.”  He points to the Cereb’s hand.  “You have four fingers, and on your glove’s omni-kit, it takes four confirmations in order to make the mini-fabricator work.  Your OBET sends out a four-beat omnidirectional distress call.  Your skirmishers attack in squadrons made up of four groups of four.  Is all that just coincidence?”

The Cereb’s eyes do not blink, only pulse.  “An interesting deduction.  Yes.  Four is the number of greatest providence, you might say.  A positive omen in calculations.  At least, the way we conduct them.”

“How’s that?”

“It would take a very long time to explain.
”

“I’ve got nothin’ but time.”

The Cereb shakes his head.  “Not nearly enough.  It’s a level of mathematics that not even your greatest physicists ever achieved, so I doubt a simple saboteur could comprehend it.  But, needless to say, the proof of four’s greatness is all around you.  It is in all significant things.  There are four fundamental forces in nature: the forces you call electromagnetism, gravitation, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force.  There are also four dimensions in nature, the fourth discovered by your people when you first stepped into the Bleed.”

Rook shakes his head.  “That doesn’t seem like all that much to base—”

“We have found four’s significance even in the biology and psychology of all other sentient species and their societies,” the Leader goes on.  “Four points to a cross, an important religious symbol, and a symbol of wholeness and universality on all worlds we have found.  Every sentient species we have come across has four limbs.  Your own brains are made up of four chambers, just as it is with every other sentient species we have found.  There are four chambers to your heart—we happen to have two hearts, four multiplied by four is sixteen, which is the Supreme Number in our estimation.  There are four nucleobase types—responsible for pairing and thus life itself—in all DNA and RNA we have ever found.  Where your lines of latitude and longitude intersect, they divide planets into four sections, much like the systems we developed, which indicates on some instinctual level you know of four’s significance, as well.  And when speaking of spreading something over the world, your people called it ‘the four corners of the earth.’  Four’s significance is everywhere.  It is in our bodies and our minds.  It is in our very DNA.  Nature is very specific on this part.  The long and short of it is this: a lone thing cannot advance significantly without a mate, which forms a pair, and
pairs
cannot do well without at least one other pair.  Two parts of two, four parts total.”