The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song) (4 page)

I must retire
for the moment
, he thinks. 
I must meditate, cleanse my minds
.  “I will be in my quarters,” he tells the teams of his bridge.

“Sir, don’t
you wish to—”

“He’s finished.  Surely he knows it
already.  It is the last attempt of a madman.  Why else come to us, when he could have remained hidden?  Why else hide just beneath us, when he surely knows it means death?”  The Conductor has long suspected other motives in the Phantom, but he keeps them to himself for now.

Confidently, he strides right off the bridge and into the lift that will take him many levels up, up, up into the safety of his
quarters, and the tranquility of his meditation chambers.

What the Conductor couldn’t know when he said those words, and what you and I can be absolutely sure of, is that his enemy
is
at the very limits of his sanity.  Had he known that, he might’ve extrapolated enough from the available data to predict what was going to happen next.

Or perhaps not.  Because madness knows no logic.  It doesn’t recognize defeat,
nor does it recognize victory, nor doom.  Not even when they’re inches or seconds away.

As we slip away from this bridge once more, we teleport at breakneck speeds across that gulf, passing enormous hunks of carbonaceous asteroids, space dust forming a scattered, translucent light-years-long
wheel across this sector of the galaxy.  We don’t have to go very far into the asteroid field, not far at all.  For as easy as it would be to follow the comet that left the immense trail of space dust, it is just as easy to follow the trail of madness.  We can smell it; it smells like old shoes and fading memories.  We can see it; it looks like the no-color of space debris and despair.  We can hear it; it sounds like laughter and The Spencer Davis Group.

“
Well my temperature’s risin’ and my feet left the floor,

Crazy people rockin’ cause they want to go more,

Let me in baby I don’t know what you got,

But ya better take it easy, this place is hot!

And I’m so glad we made it!

So glad we made it!

You gotta…gimme some lovin’!

Gimme gimme some lovin!
”

Rook is screaming the lyrics to the top of his lungs.  He’s also trying to do it while laughing.  Laughing so hard he’s tearing up and his visor is getting fogged.  His temperature is rising, after all, just like the song says.

They are
closing in, no less than sixteen of them.  Their skirmisher squadrons are always comprised of four groups of four, he’s noted.  Five minutes, and they will be within visual range of the Sidewinder.  Others will be fanning out across the asteroid field, probably two or three thousand if he knew their tactics, and by now he should. They would create a sensor net to ensure he can’t exit without them knowing.  Invisible tendrils are already probing the field, lasers and radio waves trying to touch him, get a fix on him.

He smiles.  The sensor shroud is top of the line, and one of the reasons they
haven’t been able to find him for more than a decade now.  This ship is one of stealth, meant for relaying messages and supplies with only nominal exterior weaponry.  The sensor shroud is a package that consists of a short-range sensor jammer, as well as a DERP (Dedicated Energy Receptor/Projector), which not only soaks up energy at long range, but also links up to the sensor analysis grid.  That grid is made up of tiny steel orbs; satellites that orbit some of the larger asteroids, giving him greater radar, infrared, and 3D renderings of his substantial battlefield.  The ship’s sensor shroud package also consists of an OPG (outward plasma generator) that produces an effect of plasma stealth—it emits ionized gases to reduce the RCS (radar cross section) of a spacecraft.  And finally, there is an active jammer in the form of a full-spectrum distortion projector, which not only scrambles incoming signals, but can also “paint” a target and then jam its outgoing transmissions.

The sensor shroud will keep
Rook off their sensors directly, but the Cerebs can easily track his engine’s ionic exhaust now that he’s moving at top speeds.  They will move carefully along that trail like a hunter following the beaten path of a deer’s feeding trail.  It is only a matter of time before they close in.

Rook
will have to take preventative measures.  Tapping a few keys, he activates the chaff emitters.  From the tail of his ship, a cloud blooms, one made of aluminum shards, and on his enemies’ screens they will soon see the crosshairs (or whatever they used for targeting) aiming at anything and everything, trying to lock on to phantoms.  His people hadn’t found out everything there was to know about the Cerebs, but they did know that as far as radar, sonar, infrared scanning, and sensors in general, it all seems to be universal in tracking and targeting.

The chaff itself was created in fabricators on the bottom of his ship, which could gather asteroids roughly the size of
a shoebox, grind them up, and use some of their base materials for making simple objects such as bolts, screws, wrenches, and chaff.  The chaff he just used was his last batch.

They are already firing particle beams.  We can’t hear the explosions, but the clouds of debris exploding outward from the asteroids all around us tell u
s they are close, firing into the aluminum cloud, missing terribly.

Rook
straps in, and prepares the inertial dampeners and artificial gravity—he can’t just turn the gravity off, because at such speeds it helps a pilot get a “feel” for the turns he is making.  Something that couldn’t be avoided when humans first started making fighter crafts meant for the Deep.  However, too much gravity too fast, and he won’t be able to stand the
g
’s being pressed on his body.

He sees trouble on a datascreen—not enough power going to the vertical thrusters, so he reroutes power from all nonessential systems to give them a boost, and then kicks up his speed to around eight hundred miles an hour.  He cackles, and sings:

“
Well I feel so good, everything is kinda high,

You better take it e
asy ’cause the place is on fire!

It’s been a hard day and I have so much to do,

We made it baby, and it had to be you!

And I’m so glad we made it!

So glad we made it!

You gotta…gimme some lovin’!

Gimme gimme some lovin’!
”

Rolling hard to starboard (right), he routes extra power into the forward thrusters, banks hard around the next asteroid, which he’s dubbed Atlanta, as it’s roughly the size of the city before she burned, and holds to the generous shadow of its underbelly.  The shadows have ever been critical to his survival here in the asteroid field.  The small and massive rocks play interesting tricks with the light from Shiva, which is not so far away, spatially speaking.  Big rocks cast big shadows against the small rocks, and the small rocks cast shadows against the big rocks.  Those shadows are always moving; sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but always moving.  It takes an experienced eye to gauge the rocks, their speed, their roll, and their satellites—yes, their satellites, for the bigger ones always attracted, via gravitational force, smaller asteroids the way planets capture their moons—and to navigate them and their shadows.

Artists once called it
chiaroscuro
, Italian for
light-dark
, the study of the interplay between light and shadow, and it was one of the last tricks Rook learned from mankind’s developing Aeronautics and Space Combat Academy (ASCA), where radical new techniques were tested and developed before the great purge.  Before the War.

Another chime.  They have made it through his cloud of chaff, though some were thrown off
, it seems, on wild goose chases.  He has six of them directly on his tail now, and just about to surmount the horizon of Big Ben.

The asteroids
have become like old friends.  He knows them well, and gave many of them names.  Another tactic taught to him at ASCA, just before the end.  Make monuments and markers out of the natural items in one’s environment.  It is healthy for the memory, and for making sense out of an otherwise senseless universe.  The map is always changing, and he has various computers helping him keep things straight.

Looming like an upset parent,
Big Ben is the biggest one in the field; at 749.3 miles across, he’s about twenty times the size of Rhode Island before the end: a dwarf planet.  Big Ben is covered in regolith, a layer of loose dust, soil, and broken rock.  It also has a weak atmosphere and water frost on one hemisphere.  A possible home for Rook, were it not so obvious to his enemies.

Hovering near Big Ben is his slightly smaller brother, Little Ben
, which is only 635.22 miles across.  Each of them has no less than a hundred smaller asteroids huddling in the hundred miles between each, like children gathering around a parent, and each of them with their own unique quirks and personalities.  Such as Gonzo, which Rook passes beneath now.

Gonzo
is 580.6 miles wide, but with bizarre striations across its surface, and strange jutting pieces that were utterly unlike the rest of its brothers in the field, and a tendency to bounce off the orbits of some asteroids, zip around them, collide with others, and disturb the satellites around the Bens. Scanning revealed that Gonzo has a rotating liquid metallic core, one with anomalous supermagnetic properties, which might explain why it zips around so fitfully—the great core doing battle with Big Ben’s immensity.

Gonzo also has one other very interesting property.  At close ranges, its titani
c struggle with Big Ben, combined with the thick ice and space dust left by the passing comet many years ago, creates a disturbance on most sensors.  Moving closer to it, his sensors begin giving various contradictory reports, which is okay, because his enemies will be experiencing the same right about now, and they didn’t know the field and its movements nearly as well as he did.  They knew it as well as their computers could plot the motions and trajectories of every asteroid in the field.  But even their computers wouldn’t be accounting for the weather.

The shadow of Gonzo, now cast against Big Ben, creates an orb of pure darkness.  His pursuers don’t see it.  They don’t see what’s coming right over the top of Big Ben.  But Rook does, and he’s laughing.  Again, I urge you to keep a few feet from him.  Out here, madness is catching.

He’s still singing:

“
Gimme some a-lovin’!

Gimme gimme some lovin’!

Yeah, gimme some a-lovin’!

Every day!
”

There is noise about the cockpit.  This time, it is no chime, but screeching alarms.  They are on him, locking on.  Rook blinks.  Activates the Sidewinder’s rear cameras.  Switches to thermal imaging.  Sees them.  Smiles.

The alarms continue screeching.  Rook sings louder.  He kicks extra speed to his forward thrusters.  His smile widens as some of the
g
’s start to spread it across his face.  He can no longer move his lips to sing, though he tries.  He flies closer to Big Ben, now just twenty feet above the dwarf planet’s surface, moving over the frozen ice and past the sole mountain peek on its surface, using it for cover.  It blocks his enemy’s line-of-sight for about four seconds, then they’re on him again.  It doesn’t matter.  The horizon is up ahead.

Alarms!

They’ve locked on again…but then the alarms cease.  He smiles.  They’re losing him, unable to lock on as they wish.  Such darkness, and with their sensors on the fritz, they are not in any such conditions that any of them have probably trained for.  But they’ll find him.  Of that, he is certain.

Rook checks the Sidewinder’s fuel
tanks.  He is at a quarter.  It might be enough, but only if his gambit works, and he is able to—

Alarms!

Rook checks his scanners.  “Looks like I got some pals comin’ in, at one-one-eight, Mark Five.”  More alarms sound.  There is nothing and nowhere to go.  Nothing but rock and ice below, and Gonzo up above, casting its nefarious shadow down on all of them.  The alarms continue screeching.  He can’t reach out and switch them off, the
g
’s are too great.

They are about to fire.  He estimates in five, four,
three…

He makes the
dip over the horizon.  He makes it to the sun.  And so does the hemisphere of Big Ben just beneath him.  The colossal rock’s spin has been sped up over the last few days, thanks to Gonzo’s strange properties, and it has “ping-ponged” between Gonzo and Little Ben, changing its usual lumbering spin and movements throughout the field.  And the same solar winds coming off of Prime that are causing the geomagnetic storm on Shiva 154e plays a part, as well.

Rook counts
on that.

It happens
slowly at first, just a few great cones of gas jetting up into the air.  Then, as the sun comes up over Big Ben’s horizon—or, rather, as Big Ben tilts its icy hemisphere to meet the sun—the sublime happens.  All at once, the ice transforms immediately into gas without passing through its liquid stage. 
Sublimation
. Great jets of superheated gas shoot angrily into the air, creating a boiling mist that covers several hundred square miles.