The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song) (22 page)

Rook would not permit the Leader’s assessment of his people influence him now.  Rook has dealt with enough despair and guilt, and he wouldn’t take on any more. 
We had as much of a right to be here as they do
. 
We had our flaws, sure, but so does every living creature
. 
The Cerebrals’ greatest flaw is that they see none in themselves that can’t be quantified in terms of “efficiency loss” or something of the like
.

Presently, Rook drifts back over to the first drive core.  He alights like a leaf on a forest floor, and reaches into one of his suit’s pockets.
  He produces a scanner, checks the exo-matter mixture ratio of the drive core, which was once monitored by the computer still dying within it.  Trace amounts are left, but even small amounts of that sort of mixture is highly explosive.  Next, he checks the reaction sequences, which are still corresponding to specified norms—if they weren’t, detonation would be mere seconds away.

From the satchel clipped to his side, Rook produces a dinner plate-sized
octagonal device.  It’s black, and coated in a shape-shifting polymer.  A keypad on the top demands a ten-digit activation code before he can set the remote frequency.  After delicately placing the first, he floats to the next spot he’s selected, and the next, and the next, setting them up all over the cavern, listening to the last bits of “I Dreamed a Dream” from
Les Misérables
.  When all the N3 explosives are set, he backs out, as careful as Jack not to wake the sleeping Giant, and just as anxious to climb back down the beanstalk.  On his way back to the Sidewinder, Rook places a few radio frequency relay stations on the cave’s walls, their dishes opening like blooming flowers as he activates them.  He makes certain they are indeed receiving a quality signal, and can bounce the signal onto the N3 explosives.

Back inside the Sidewinder, he reactivates life support and artificial gravity throughout the ship, and removes his helmet.  By the time he gets to his seat in the cockpit, the computer has already rendered four more possible approach vectors, should he make the changes to Dopey’s position if the Cerebral ship approaches from Sector 23 (
coordinates:
S23 – SQ615 – SB33 – D5 – P2 – H109
, to be exact).  The computer is also ready and waiting with an offer for another chess game.

Rook cycles up the engines,
releases the inertial clamps, and trusts the autopilot to give him liftoff.  His eyes glance over to the two freezers at the far corner of the cockpit.  They are the same freezers that once held Badger’s blood, as well as the spare heart meant for the old timer.  Rook had to dump it, so that he could preserve something else. 
It won’t work
, he tells himself.

Immediately on the heels of that thought, he grins and thinks,
It’ll work
.  Encouraging his own madness is all he’s got left.  “Madness and genius are a hair’s breadth apart.”  His father’s words again, but this time he was quoting some physicist from the twenty-third century.

Now the Sidewinder climbs out of the catacombs.  It must move slowly.  The twisting tunnels aren’t the only danger.  The collapsed passages and free-floating boulders we passed on our way down are a major concern.  Magnetic shielding will deflect them from smacking
against the Sidewinder’s hull, but there is only so much room inside these tunnels and pushing them too hard against the walls could cause further collapse.

He checks the radiation levels, which are slowly declining.  The Sidewinder’s electronics are made of radiation-hardened materials, but the radiation all around him was at unholy levels.

The computer chimes.  It anxiously awaits his next move.  Rook eases the Sidewinder around a tight corner, and once he deems that it’s safe passage from here, he sets the course and puts the ship on autopilot.  He tears open an MRE package, sucks down the same bland nutrient sludge he’s been devouring for years, then looks at the chessboard.  He started up new game after leaving base.  Now, he moves his king to H8.  The computer moves its queen to G6, taking his last rook.

Now, there are only three pieces left on the board.  His king sits at H8, while the computer’s queen sits at G6 and its king is not too far away at F7.  It is Rook’s turn and he has no remaining legal moves he can make.

“Stalemate,” he mutters.

That’s the first time that’s happened in a very long time.  Usually, the computer is clever enough to win
, it is a computer, after all, and on the rare occasions that Rook is able to defy its expectations of him, he comes out the victor.  But here, after perhaps two years of solid endgames, he and the computer are finally at an impasse.  A no-win situation.

Rook now turns
to the holo-display showing the three-dimensional sectorboard he’s constructed around
Magnum Collectio
.  He reviews all the sectors of his battleground, and considers more movements that the Cereb mother ship can possibly make if all his other plays fail and it reaches Sector 1 without delay.

He taps a few more keys on the display, integrating the likely trajectories of asteroids all around the Cereb ship once it begins pushing them out of the way:

Select:  Check Likely Approach Vectors

Account for:  Perimeter Asteroid Changes

Account for:  Enemy Primary Weapon

Account for:  Asteroid Destruction by Enemy Vessel

Account for:  Anomalous Asteroid Movements

Extrapolating…

>>>
PRINCIPLE OF FOUR: APPLY

All at once, the Sidewinder’s computer applies Rook’s mathematical concepts to the mock mother ship, and extrapolates numerous possible approaches and evasion vectors it might make once it reaches
Magnum Collectio
.

By the time he returns to the campsite, Rook has gone over several possibilities.
  He cycles the ship down and switches off artificial gravity to save on power.  He floats to the circuitry bay and begins doing some repairs to the repair bot—the omni-kit now allows him to make higher-quality, more specific parts, and if he can get this bot up and running, it’ll cut his repair time in half.

While he works on fabricating the
parts needed to fix the bot’s RDM (repair diagnosis module), Rook taps a few keys on his micropad, sending a command up to the Sidewinder’s main computer.

SEARCH: CLASSIC BANDS: ERA/YEAR: 1967

ARTIST NAME: OTIS REDDING

ALBUM NAME: SINGLE

SONG TITLE: (SITTIN’ ON) THE DOCK OF THE BAY

“Whistle while you work, boy.”  Advice from both his father and from Badger.  His father, on a random day at the farm, bailing hay and working until sunset.  Badger, on one of his last lucid days, some eight years ago, when advising Rook on how to keep his sanity.

“
Sittin’ in the mornin’ sun,

I’ll be sittin’ when the evenin’ comes
.

Watchin’ the ships roll in,

Then I’ll watch ’em roll away again
.

Yeah, I’m sittin’ on the dock of the bay,

Watchin’ the tide roll away
.

Ooh, I’m sittin’ on the dock of the bay,

Wastin’ time
.”

Rook did as he was told, and whistled.  And there was no better song to whistle to.  A great part of the song came when the lyrics just stopped, and here came the most nonchalant, devil-may-care whistle one could fathom, while in the background the ocean could be heard soughing.  Images of home.  The ocean.  Sand.  Beaches.  Women wearing bikinis as thin as their smiles.

Whistling works, but only so well, and only for so long.  Despair comes more easily, and lasts much longer.  And yet, like any madman with his back against the wall, he continues with his mad scheme.

A chime goes off.  At first he thinks it’s the computer again, requesting another game, perhaps even making the first move without his approval.  But it’s not chess the computer wants.  It wants his attention to an area a few hundred miles outside of
Magnum Collectio
, outside of his sectorboard.  Most of the spy satellites he’s left scattered throughout the asteroid field have been scooped up or destroyed by skirmishers.  They’ve located a lot of the satellites on the field’s perimeter, and one by one they are removing his ability to see beyond his home region.

However, a few satellites remain, and they have detected the mother ship.  It’s coming.  Slowly but surely.  He has perhaps thirty-six hours.  The Cerebrals are moving at a careful pace now, deliberately destroying larger asteroids along the way.  They’ve opted to sift through the haystack in search of a needle, and, as predictable, burn much of the haystack down.

Rook feels his pulse quicken.  Sweat begins to bead down his brow, and he wipes it away with an already filthy rag.

It takes two hours to get the repair bot’s new pieces forged and in place, and another hour to make sure its programming hasn’t decayed so much that it can no longer recognize its primary functions. 
Finally, he switches it on to test it.

“System scanning,” it says in a curt, self-important tone.  “EEF protocols are present.  Acknowledging systems scan for—wait…wait…wait…collating.”  After a few seconds of
Rook silently praying that the damn thing will work, it finally says, “Confirmed.  Diagnostics check complete.  System specs maintain.  Thirteen-point-seven percent inoperable.  Program decay nominal.  Efficiency at acceptable levels.  Command?”

“I need you to work on the engine exhausts first,” Rook says.  “Make that a priority.  There are insulation problems around the valves, indicating an unacceptable Joule-Thomson effect.  Check for throttling, then do a thorough diagnostics scan and get back with me.”

“Acknowledged.”

Rook lets the waist-high thing crawl around,
work on the valves, then watches it diagnose the Sidewinder’s many ailments and selecting the appropriate procedure to cure it.  For the first half hour, he walks alongside the repair bot, watching it work, making sure it’s doing its job correctly before allowing it to go off on its own.

Rook lets the repair bot work on the hardware,
while he goes to the main computer outlets to work on the software.  Every time the bot reports that it has insufficient tools or supplies to conduct a particular repair, Rook gathers the necessary resources into his glove’s mini-fabricator, flash-forges the required pieces in his palm, and hands them over to the bot.  “That’s teamwork, little guy,” he says at one point, smiling down at it.

“
Teamwork,” it says shortly.  “Acknowledged.”  Then, it turns and is off once more.

Rook watches
the bot go.  A long time ago, somewhere in some factory, an assembly team put that thing together.  Just another repair bot, right off the assembly line like all the others.  It has traveled thousands of light-years, changed hands, changed owners, and finally wound up here.  A derelict piece on a derelict spacecraft.  Just like the warbot.  Just like Rook. 
Aren’t we a motley crew
, he thinks, and is off to check the systems software.  On his way back to the cockpit, he pauses in the main corridor to look at the engraving on the wall.

Interplanetary Space Force

Eternity

Legacy

Humanity

It’s that middle word that gives him pause. 
Legacy
.  Another word for birthright, or inheritance, something left behind for posterity’s sake.  The word knocks around inside his head for the next few hours, and will eventually spawn another idea.

For the next ten hours, Rook consumes what’s left of his caffeine pills and the coffee
, which he’s been saving for a rainy day, and sits in the cockpit staring at his holographic sectorboard, moving pieces and setting up triangulations and checks based on the assumption of four retreating vectors the skirmishers will likely use when—
if—
they retreat.  Rook develops a series of discovered attacks—in chess, those are attacks revealed only when one piece moves out of the way of another.  “It’ll force them to move,” he whispers to himself.  “Like a king left exposed, it’s a forced move.”  What sentient being wouldn’t move its most powerful piece out of harm’s way?

For Rook, it can be downright maddening at times, trying to think how the enemy might think.  Oftentimes, he finds himself forgetting a key component, such as applying the four-times-four principle to the possible retreat lines from each sector.

But it becomes even more mind-sloshing when, after he believes he’s done all he can do on figuring on the mother ship’s main movements, he must now determine the movements of her skirmisher squadrons, her “pawns.”  Rook already knows that the Cereb squadrons are invariably comprised of four groups of four.  What he hasn’t seen is what they do when a primary luminal ship is heavily threatened, because it’s never happened before. 
But I’m willing to bet it’s the same reaction in all sentient species
. 
Protect the main weapon
.