The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song) (29 page)

The massive being also stands alone, but he is intact, and as skilled and volatile as his race ever was.  He emerges from the other side of the engine room, searching for a way out,
instinctively following the airflow escaping out the gap that Rook has created down the hall.

The Cerebs
who remain take cover, look for higher vantage points in the engine room, and fire down upon the Ianeth.  The creature shrugs off their assault, a great deal of the energy washing off of his natural, chitin-like armor like water off a duck’s back.  Some of it, though, penetrates, and wounds.  But the Ianeth are a single-minded people, very much like the Cerebs in that way, and he plunges ahead, diving through the open doorway, and noting the human lying on the ground.  Though the Ianeth has never met Man, he knows an ally when he sees one, and knows he must be formidable if the Cereb operatives are all working together to hem him in.

Without thought, the Ianeth lifts Rook off the floor, throws an arm around his back, and runs with him. 
Because the Ianeth understands another axiom of Earth: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

And
the Ianeth understands something else.  If this enemy to the Cerebs got on board this ship, and he is attempting a retreat, then he must have a plan of escape.

They run, the last representatives of their species, and us ghosts try
ing to keep up.

Particle beams are fired uselessly down the corridor behind them.  The Ianeth follows the escaping air currents through the halls, and Rook tries to help by pointing.  He’s ready to faint, and also ready to believe he’s dreaming all of this.  Then,
they come to it.  The hall where Rook set up his escape.  It is a twisted mess of melted and charred debris, a hallway with a floor, a ceiling, but only one wall.  The one on their left has been completely blown away, and even though the vacuum of space is trying to suck them out, the Ianeth’s feet are able to grip the metal floor.

Several floors above, the Conductor watches all of this is bewilderment.  None of it fits the tally.  Too many variables to consider.  This isn’t the way it was all supposed to go.

Meanwhile, the Ianeth searches for a way out.  It appears there is no way, just a giant gap in the corridor…and then Rook points it out to him.  A blank piece of space, but not quite as blank as it appears.  The Sidewinder, parked about fifty feet away amid the asteroids, turns off its cloak, revealing itself, angling its rear end towards the warship and opening its cargo bay doors.  The Ianeth, now emboldened, takes the human in its powerful arms and flings him out into space.  The alien’s aim is perfect.  Rook zips across the open void and into the Sidewinder’s open pocket.  The Ianeth is being fired upon by numerous operatives as he sails clearly across the void, and clings to a wall inside the cargo bay.

Rook, still believing he is in a dream, taps a few keys on the micropad and seals the cargo bay doors.  Artificial gravity is initiated, dropping both he and the Ianeth to the floor.  Rook
stands awkwardly, and remembers to reactivate the Sidewinder’s cloak.  He gives one look to the large alien that saved his life, as it staggers to its feet and clings to the walls for support.  It is large, say about eight feet tall, with a wide head atop a long, muscular neck, and with beady black eyes and a wide mouth that appears to be in a permanent, and devious, grin.  It is covered in plates, kind of like turtle shells, all over its legs, arms, and chest, each one a very dark orange, and injured terribly in the escape.

Rook has no time to issue thanks.  He hopes it goes without saying.  He
stands, and limps down to the cockpit and takes his seat.  It takes him just six seconds to get the Sidewinder angled for escape.  Then, he’s off.  From behind, he can hear heavy footsteps approaching.  The Ianeth tries to step through the door into the cockpit, fights against the shape of the door, and stands behind Rook as he angles the ship up and out of the asteroid field.

“I don’t know if you can understand me,” he says to the alien.  “But, pal, you wanna strap in.”  He points to the copilot’s seat next to him, and the Ianeth seems to catch on very quickly, even figuring out the safety straps.

Rook looks down at his micropad.  Thirty seconds until the thermite and plasma charges detonate.

Not too far away, the Conductor watches on his own screens as the Sidewinder attempts to make good its escape.  He knows it’s not possible.  It cannot be.  For all the anomalies he’s witnessed today, surely one more cannot be possible.  He sets the ship’s small guns to fire, and is just about to send out the
order for skirmishers to follow when the door to the bridge opens behind him.

The Conductor turns, assuming it is a team of Repairers he’s sent for to help restore the bridge to its former capacity, but is stunned when he stands there looking at clones of himself.  The Usurped are in various stages of dissection, looking like corpses given gruesome and cruel reanimation.  “What is this?” he has time to say before they attack him.  Like mad dogs, they have no real plan or form to their attack.
It’s hideous, brutal, and worst of all, inefficient.

The last thing the Conductor thinks before they attack is, dubiously,
I never got to feel silk again
.

What they do to him in the thirty seconds before the engine room explodes is…something we don’t need to see.

Down below, it goes off exactly as Rook planned.  First, the thermite charges detonate, wreaking a deal of havoc on the initial explosion, but it is the melting aspects of the chemicals that really soften the reactors for the plasma charges, which are set up on the adjacent walls.  When they go off, they start a chain reaction, one that takes out several levels of the luminal ship.

It is nowhere near the explosion that the King was.  Indeed, it isn’t even enough to obliterate the entire ship.  But, as Rook sails away, it is evident that the explosion has taken out nearly half of the ship, making it almost certain that it is now a defensele
ss husk, drifting in space, unable to defend itself from the asteroids that will surely pulverize it in the weeks to come as it sits inert.

It may not be much, but it is the first win the human race has ever had against its enemies. 
Hopefully the first of many
, Rook thinks, knowing it is an insane thought.  He smiles. 
But maybe not as insane as it was two days ago
.

Then, he winces.  He leans back in his seat, leaving the Sidewinder on autopilot.  He looks over at the Ianeth, who also sits slumped in its chair, breathing heavily.  “Hey, big guy.  You got a name?”  The creature doesn’t stir, doesn’t even look at him.  Rook smiles.  “I got one
for ya.  A call sign.”  He laughs.  “Bishop.  Know why?  ’Cause you came outta nowhere at the last second, and I never saw it coming.  I don’t think anybody did.”  He laughs even louder, and finally the Ianeth—
Bishop
—turns to look at him.

The laughter carries them well beyond the asteroid field, out towards Shiva
Prime, and further into the Deep.

Epilogue

A week later, the Sidewinder sits on the surface of Shiva 154e.  The planet is mostly a charred mess, the atmosphere still filled with ash, the waters too polluted to drink from without a filter.

Rook limps about in an environmental suit, loading up the last of the resources he’s deemed salvageable.  Some scarce caches of canned foods and MREs, some basic materials he can feed into his omni-kit and the ship’s fabricator, and a few electronics at a destroyed military base, all of it covered in dust, mud, and soot from the planet’s doom.

Bishop picks through some of it with him.  The big alien doesn’t appear to need any sort of suit to survive.  Upon scanning him
with the micropad and omni-kit, which he’s finally getting used to, Rook determines that Bishop’s people somehow worked out a way to merge favorable aspects with their genetic structure, making it so that they are
their own
environmental suits, and the shells on their bodies are
their own
shields.  The chitin-like shells all over his body are as tightly sealed as the hermetic seals of Rook’s spacesuit.  Essentially, the alien is walking around naked, though every effort has been made to make his body naturally strong enough to survive in most all conditions, so that he doesn’t have to “wear” any armor or suits at all.

Bishop is also incredibly strong, and moves with great speed as he lifts large compristeel cases filled with fresh supplies and loads them into the Sidewinder.  He does this without question.  Indeed, he does it without even waiting for Rook’s prompt.  They are both soldiers and survivors, and the language of self-preservation seems as universal as math.

Speaking of languages, it appears that Bishop is also possessed of many bio-electrical-interface qualities.  Meaning many billions of neural connections throughout his brain, and a billion micro-nodes throughout its body, allow him to assimilate data fast.  This permits him to learn at breakneck speeds.  Many times, Rook has caught the alien with his eyes closed, hands hovering over his computer consoles, and somehow activating the diagnostics screens and holo-displays, ostensibly with pure thought.  He’s also caught Bishop walking slowly down the corridors of the ship, analyzing the walls and the repair bot, and sometimes just standing and staring at the circuit boards in the circuitry bay.

Is he working it all out?
Rook wonders.

Yesterday, the alien even surprised Rook by doing some design changes to the translator
box left behind by the Leader.  Perhaps he recognized it from his past dealings with the Cerebrals?  In any case, he used Rook’s omni-kit to flash-forge some items he needed, and, after just a day of fiddling with it, Bishop modified it so that it picked up his own harmonics instead of Cerebral harmonics, and translated those according to the translator’s built-in human vocabulary index.  He spoke his first shaky words to Rook this morning.  “Is devices this you sufficiently working?”

Rook tried to communicate back slowly, but it appears he no longer has to.  Bishop has assimilated the necessary data from both the Cereb translator and the Sidewinder’s vast memory banks, and has extrapolated what is necessary to communicate to the human ear and brain. 
Within an hour, Bishop worked out the kinks, and adjusted his speech patterns.  “I believe I have now adjusted the wavelengths appropriately.  Communication will be key for us.”

When those first words were spoken from an ally—not from an enemy, nor from an old man losing his mind, but from an honest to God
ally
—Rook felt close to tears, and, of course, close to laughter.  The two were so closely intertwined these days.  “I, uh…”  He swallowed, trying to control himself.  “I agree.”

They take some time to scavenge for supplies on the planet’s surface.  There isn’
t much left, but they find enough to nearly fill the cargo bay.  It will be enough to get them started, at least.  Bishop moves to the top of the ramp and says, “I believe we should move soon.  The mother ship still hasn’t moved, but the Soulless Ones—the
Cerebs
,” he corrects, using Rook’s name for their enemy, “will eventually have their communications back online, and we would do well to be away when reinforcements arrive.”

“I agree,” Rook says.  “We’ve pushed it long enough here.  I’m ready if you are, big guy.”

“ ‘Big guy?’  Am I not ‘Bishop’ to you?  Have you selected a new name to—”

“No, no, it’s just a…a, uh, a sign of affection
and respect between partners.  Between friends.”  Bishop stares at him from the top of the cargo ramp.  “You understand
friends
, right?”

Bishop nods slowly, solemnly.  “I understand friends.
  Friends have common enemies.”

Rook thinks on that for a moment, shrugs.  “I guess I never looked at it quite like that, but yeah, I guess so.  Friends also look out for one another.”

“Then I am your friend.”

Somehow, Rook feels that the alien is closely relating
friend
with
brothers-in-arms
.  He supposes that will have to do for now. 
Beggars can’t be choosers
.  A bit of advice from his mother and father, back on the farm.

Finally, they both board the Sidewinder and close the cargo ramp. 
Rook checks the hydroponic greenhouse box, and is happy to see that some of Bishop’s repairs to it have encourage more plant life to grow.  The Ianeth seems to know fathoms more about both organic and technological processes than the people who created the mini-hydroponic lab.  Rook looks down at the growing vegetables, admires the augmentations Bishop has made, and realizes he’ll be spending a lot of time trying to wrap his mind around this alien’s psychology.

Rook taps a button on the primary control board.  “Begin log,” he says.  “Call sign Rook.  As it turns out, the last entry I put into this log wasn’t my final entry.  For anybody who hears this, that means exactly what you think it means.  The principle of four works, and my analysis of my
enemy’s psychology was accurate.  The strategy worked, but I’m not sure that it will again.  Some of the Cerebs probably survived, and they learn very quickly.  But now I know they have blind spots, and where there’s one, there’s probably more.”  He glances over his shoulder, at the alien moving down the corridor behind him.  “I’ve also picked up a new crew member.  He speaks a guttural, syllabic language, not entirely unlike human speech, and he has a translator working now.  He says his people were called
Ianeth
, or something like that.  They were wiped out just like humanity.  He won’t give me his name—I think it’s a personal thing among his people—so I’m going to keep calling him Bishop.  He says he was an engineer amongst his people, and that’s more helpful to me right now than any soldier could be.  He is…a complex organism, capable of learning fast and interfacing with the Sidewinder’s computers to learn more about it, and more about Earth culture and human psychology.  He’s already worked on the Alcubierre drive and, with the use of the omni-kit, he’s fabricated the necessary tools and parts to get the FTL system back online.

“
I saved him, and he saved me.  There’s two of us now, hopefully that’ll mean we can achieve twice the results, using what we now know.”  Rook is struck by something.  “
We
,” he says.  “It…it feels good to say that word again.  I’ll have more to say once we’re out of the Shiva system and to safety.  Bishop says he knows of someplace we can go to hide.  He won’t tell me where, just that it’s far from here, and that it may have supplies and may act as a nice staging area for our next attack.”  He smiles, and adds, “We’re going to try and wipe them all out.  It’s insane, I know.  But it was also madness that had me dream up my little ploy.  Such mad hope…”  He trails off, then reaches for the sign-off button.  “End log.”

The
y are almost beyond orbit.  A brief visit to the asteroid field yesterday allowed them to gather some of the mother ship’s spilled pycno, enough to nearly fill the Sidewinder’s fuel tanks.  They leave the burnt landscape of Shiva 154e behind them, rocketing passed its two moons.  The moons are charred, too, left that way by the Cerebs so that humanity would have nowhere to retreat. 
Only asteroids
, he thinks, glancing at his sensors and gauging the massive radiation readings still emanating from where the King met his end.

Once they are out of orbit, Rook hits the main forward thrusters, and in less than ten minutes the entire planet is barely a dot behind them.  He starts running the navigational computer through its paces.  He and Bishop have selected another base of operations, several hundred thousand light-years away.  As Rook begins cycling up the
plasma coils, stabilizing the magnetic plasma transference, and working out the appropriate pycno levels for the initial jump, Bishop enters into the cockpit and says, “I ought to run you through various key elements to the nature of the Cerebs.  You have come to understand much about them, but there is more you should know if we are going to be friends.”

Rook sighs. 
Yep
. 
He definitely thinks friend equates to “fellow soldier
.
”
  “All right,” Rook says, and starts to stand up.  Then, he sits back down.  A thought suddenly occurs to him.  “But first…”  He taps a few buttons on the console, brings up a holographic chessboard.  “You’ve been delving into my ship’s memory archives.  Have you come across the game of chess?”

“I
have.”

“Do you know how it is played?” he asks, reaching over to activate the Sidewinder’s forward laser.  He adjusts it to warp
space-time by one part in ten million, testing the field that will open ahead of the Sidewinder, permitting it into the quantum slipstream.  Tachyon distortion shows optimal levels, so there shouldn’t be any trouble entering the Bleed.  A soft chime sounds, indicating that strong tidal forces are being measured at the edges of the flat-space volume.

“I underst
and the rudiments of the pieces,” the alien says.

“Will you play a game with me?”

“Games are not necessary for friendship,” Bishop argues.  “It is imperative as friends we understand the concepts of our enemies—”

“Games are very important to
human
friendships,” Rook says, now checking the synthetic flesh he made using the omni-kit, using it to patch up his leg.  “And if we’re going to work together, we need to start bridging gaps.  I will do as you say, I will study everything you know about Cerebs and become the kind of friend that you need, if you will first sit down with me and play this game, and become the kind of friend that I need.”

Bishop seems uncertain.  His beady little black eyes view the holographic chessboard with a degree of suspicion.

Rook adds, with a smile, “It is this game that allowed me to destroy the mother ship.”

This appears to pique the alien’s interest.  Bishop steps forward, cocks his head in a way that, were he human, would make him appear
ready to fight.  “How so?”

“Sit down, and I’ll
show you.”

Bishop doesn’t move.  For a moment, Rook isn’t sure
the Ianeth will accept the invitation.  Then, all at once, the large alien plops eagerly into the copilot’s seat, which whines in protest beneath his considerable weight, and leans over to Rook.  “Show me. 
Friend
.”

Rook smiles
wider.  He has the computer set up the pieces.  While it does that, he taps a few buttons, and pulls up a song, circa 1973.  When it begins to play, Bishop sits upright and jerks his head around, alarmed.  “What is that?”

“
Relax,” he says.  “It’s just music.  One of my all-time faves.”  He points to the chessboard.  “Your move.”

Bishop looks at him suspiciously.  Then, slowly, he moves a piece.  Rook takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly.  It is the first time in over a decade he has experienced companionship. He revels in it, as a man in a desert might revel in a pool of cold water he’s stumbled upon.  And, like such a man, he might even become insane with the sudden salvation, and with overindulgence.

To hell with it
. 
Let it happen
.

Outside,
a tunnel through space-time opens and folds around the Sidewinder.  It begins to enter the slipstream in a free-fall geodesic, so that there are no acceleration
g
-forces.  Soon, all the stars become wavy, as if we are viewing them through a glass of sloshing water.  Here, the stars bleed together, like a painting whose colors are scattered by rainfall.  The quantum slipstream opens before us in a brilliant burst of white light.  The ship plunges across the Deep, to parts unknown, carried by Dobie Gray’s greatest hit.

“
Day after day I’m more confused,

Yet
I look for the light through the pouring rain
.

You know that’s a game that I hate to lose
.

And I’m feelin’ the strain,

Ain’t it a shame?

Oohhh, gimme the beat boys, and free my soul
,