The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song) (28 page)

Finding
such a weakness within a Cerebral ship is, not surprisingly, hard to do.  They obviously have their quadruple redundancies, and have spent thousands of years calculating, examining, experimenting, and coming up with the ideal warship.  However, the King’s destruction has caused some obvious problems, which he might exploit: cracks in the walls, ruptures around major bulkheads, and busted pipes running horizontally on the ceilings and walls. 

Rook
scans the floor, walls, and ceiling with his micropad.  These corridors are made of complex alloys that Man never made.  He can measure their density, porousness, and mass, all of which tells him that, while incredibly strong and pliable, they are still susceptible to the kinds of charges he’s brought.

He
has a total of ten specialized plasma charges that will detonate with the power of about fifty sticks of TNT.  The thermite charges, of which he has six, will cause relatively minor explosions, say about two sticks’ worth of TNT, but will spread superheated chemicals along surfaces, hopefully melting the complex alloys the ship is made of and causing significant structural damage.  Since these alloys appear to be so strong, though, Rook decides to place most of his explosives along one wall, focusing their might and power in one location.

Using his micropad
, a 3D model, and a positioning system that allows him to know his relative location inside the ship, Rook moves through the smoky corridors until he comes to a hallway that looks to have suffered immense structural damage.  Portions of the ceiling have caved in.  It also just so happens that not just a few feet below him is where the Doc, Grumpy, and the warbot dished out so much damage.

Sometimes, the universe throws you a
line
, Rook muses. 
Or maybe it just likes an underdog
.

It takes him two minutes to set up his charges along the cracked se
ams of a bulkhead, synchronize their timers, and cover them up with random debris lying in the hall.  Rook tries to give it the helter-skelter look it needs, then moves along down another corridor, still following the massive energy readings.

At last, he comes to an open doorway.  It appears that four security doors were meant to be shut here, but something must have happened in King Henry VIII’s explosion that caused the first three to get lodged midway down, and the last door to descend only a quarter of the way.  Rook ducks underneath, steps down another short, tubular corridor, until it dead-ends at an open doorway into what appears to be some sort of engineering room.  He sidles the wall to the right of the door, listening to the harmonics of Cereb speech being called out inside.

I guess not all communication between them is done by computer
, Rook thinks.  Back at ASCA, a few IGS intelligence officers had presented brief lectures on how an emerging theory held that the Cerebrals no longer communicated verbally between one another.  Having worked out some of their psychology, and hearing the strange, singsong words being hollered out inside the room, Rook now knows more about his enemy than all of humanity ever did.

Rook takes a deep breath. 
This is it
.  He runs through a mental checklist.  He smiles suddenly at a random memory.  “I got this, Ma.”

He taps in a ten-digit code into his micropad, which should be relaying the message to a trio of mid-space transmitters he deposited a few minutes before ejecting from the Sidewinder, the same kind of transmission relay stations that he put along the King’s surface so that he could send the signal to the detonators he placed at the King’s core.  These mid-space transmitters send the signal to the Sidewinder.  It is on its way.

“Show time,” he says, thinking of Cowboy, Grass, Badger, and all the others.  That was something they used to say right out of the gates, when going off to meet the enemy.

Rook counts to three, then, he steps through the doorway and into the large room
, rifle up and aiming around.  He is met by more alien structures.  Tall tubes of bizarre color and with more of the alien alphabet strewn across them.  There are also robots, working feverishly to repair some kind of tank that has ruptured.  He slides right by them, and nearly bumps into a pair of Engineers rushing around the corner up ahead.  He fires two short bursts at them, the particle beam hewing them in half before they can utter a yelp.

But Cerebs don’t need to yelp.  Their natural-user interface is never disconnected from the stream of information pouring upwards, upwards,
upwards into the Conductor’s brains.  We can follow this datafeed all the way to the Conductor himself, who now stands on the bridge, and is jolted to his core by what he sees. 
Something else unaccounted for
, he thinks, as impossible as that seems.  But then, this has been a day for impossibilities.

The Conductor examines the datafeed closely, and moves his consciousness down to the lower levels.  Still not believing his eyes, or the eyes of the Engineers he’s now peering through, he watches as the last human in the universe leaps in front of three more Engineers and one Repairer, ending them quickly with a few spats of his particle beam rifle.
  The Phantom has made it into one of the main wings of the engine rooms.

But
…
we had him
. 
The last human’s corpse is freshly dead in the Researchers’ area
. 
They have him even now, examining his body
…

Instantly, the Conductor knows what he missed. 
Two of them
. 
There were two Phantoms out here in the Deep
. 
The other was a decoy
.    Somehow, he knew this.  Somewhere in his seventh brain, he suspected all along.  It is another deplorable ruse by a human, and probably the last, also.  For a lone human cannot expect to survive very long.  The Conductor’s fury creates enough heat that we must stand back.  We pass through his datafeed, several floors beneath him, and are handed off to the consciousness of the next victim to fall to the Phantom.

Rook has progressed farther into the room.
  He’s come to two enormous cylinders that stretch up through the ceiling and pass into the floor.  Incredibly high radiation levels are emanating from it, and the last few Cerebs he killed were all wearing protective gear.  Doubtless, they were suffering unusual contamination in here.

Rook doesn’t understand the level of tech he’s looking at here—it’s probably thousands of years ahead of what mankind wrought before its end—but then, a pitbull doesn’t need to know the mechanics of
its prey’s throat to know that if you bite down on it, and shake it, the prey dies.

He has four charges left (
Four!  How ironic!
), two plasma and two thermite. He makes a quick decision.  First, he places the thermite charges on the surface of one of the massive power conduits, sets them to go off seconds before the plasma charges, which he sets up on a wall across from them.  That way, hopefully, the thermite charges will cause initial damage, and the subsequent melting of the alloys will leave the structure weakened enough so that the plasma detonations can penetrate more deeply.

No sooner has Rook set this up than a door opens up somewhere at the far end of the room.  His micropad has the readings: Cereb operatives, sixteen of them, four groups of four.

Rook checks his micropad, and the timer he set on the explosives in the hall. 
Might just have enough time
.  He turns and runs.  Particle beams aren’t immediately fired, which tells him that this area truly is as volatile as he suspects. 
They don’t want to risk a missed shot
.  But these are Cerebs, and if they get a clean shot, they likely will not miss.  He has to remember that.

A pair of Cereb operatives fire at him from his right.  They hit him dead center, but the particle beams wash over his Tango armor’s magnetic shielding.  Two more shots start to overheat the suit’s
batteries, so he ducks behind a large metal support for cover.  He fires shots around the corner, and as he does, a Cereb operative rounds the same steel support and is about to fire point-blank.  Rook slaps his barrel away, sending the particle beam firing wide.  They collide, and go through a furious few seconds of CQB, during which Rook headbutts his enemy with his helmet, sweeps his legs out from underneath him, and delivers a punch that, thanks to the Stacksuit underlay, has enough power to break his jaw and send him to the floor, unconscious.

Two more shots fired on him from the catwalk up above.  The particle beams are poured on him, and once again his Tango armor saves his life.  Rook runs from his cover.  He can’t stay here, and he can’t keep taking this much heat.  His Tango armor can’t last much longer.

He collides with a group of four Cerebs coming out of a doorway to his left.  He fires on two of them, killing them instantly, then enters into close-quarters combat again, all of them using the barrels of their rifles to smack the other barrels away, even as they headbutt, stomp, elbow, and hammerfist one another.  One of them pins Rook’s rifle to his side, while the other operative reaches around his neck, squeezing so tight it feels like his eyes will pop out.  Rook flash-forges another tactical knife in his right palm, stabs backwards, directly into the eyes of the operative holding him, then slashes the throat of the one in front of him

A dozen or so particle beams lance out against him, washing off the Tango armor’s deflectors, bringing the armor closer to overheating.

Leaping over a console, Rook ducks and takes cover behind it as he fires a shot to cover his retreat.  It does only a little good.  One team halts, securing the exit at the far end of the room.  The other three teams fan out, attempting to pin him down.  Rook stands, bolts for the exit.  The first blue-green particle beam is fired in front of him, but Rook’s instincts tells him it was coming.  He leaps for cover behind another computer station a second before the beam is fired, and it smacks on the metal floor beside him, superheating it until it glows.

The teams start closing in even tighter, trying to catch him in a bottleneck.

Rook checks his timer. 
Three, two, one
…

The multiple explosions go off in the hall
he entered from, and it shakes the floor and walls.  All of the Cereb operatives take cover, unsure of this new ploy, but Rook stands and runs for it.  As he does, he is firing over his shoulder, taking shots across his back.  He moves desperately for the doorway…

The Tango armor finally overheats, and fails. 
A particle beam slices right through his left leg, sending him spinning to the ground.  The armor’s self-healing capabilities has it close off the hole in his suit.  The searing hot pain takes over his mind for a moment, consuming his world for a moment. 
I almost made it
, is his last thought before he hits the ground.  He lands in the doorway’s threshold, slides a little ways beyond it, into the temporary safety of the corridor outside.  He won’t be able to stand on his own.  He won’t be able to retreat.  They’ll be on him in seconds.

It is over for him.

Now, as ghosts, we must watch what is certainly the end of our worthy race.  We must watch as Rook crawls, unwilling to give up.  We must watch as he gives a show of our legendary tenacity, our legendary
stubbornness
.  Behind him, the four teams of four are closing in.  Rook can see the airflow moving past him, indicating that his escape plan would have worked—the explosives he arranged farther down the corridor opened up a sizable hole where Doc, Grumpy and the warbot started one. 
It almost worked
, he thinks, laughing madly and still crawling. 
It was all an insane plan, but it almost worked
. 
I guess something like this was bound to happen
. 
Like the Leader said, an anomaly
…
an anomaly to show them they don’t know everything about us
.

Rook tries to stand.  But he can’t.  He just can’t.  No matter how much he wants to, he won’t be able to stand on his own.
  He looks at us.  Directly at
us
.  Rook now sees us, or at least, it seems that he can.  He looks at us beseechingly.  We want to help him, but we can’t.  He sees Badger, either out of madness or because he’s close to the end himself.  “Badge…”

“Get up, pilot!”

“Badge…I’m sorry…I can’t—”

“
Can’t
ain’t in your vocabulary! 
Can’t
ain’t no word I ever taught you! 
Now get up!
”

“Badge…I
can’t stand up…” 

He’s right
.  He cannot stand on his own.

And, as it turns it out, he won’t have to.
  Because it seems the universe does indeed sometimes take an underdog for a pet.

There is one other, a phantom in his own right, a creature that has long been waiting for this moment.  Waiting in hibernation, with the fury of an entire race burning inside of him.
  Awoken by the systemic damage caused by the King’s destruction, he is free to unleash his wrath.

As the Cereb operatives
close in on Rook, a blue-green particle beam lances out from across the room.  It burns through armor and bone alike, neatly slicing through the Cereb commandos with deadly accuracy.  They do not even have time to turn as the last of the Ianeth cuts them down.