The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song) (6 page)

The
Leader connects to the natural-user interface that links his team.  Data scrolls across his retina, the same data being sent to his team.  With a series of thoughts and motions of his eye, he issues the command.  They enter on the count of four (a number of almost religious significance in their culture, a positive omen in calculations), swinging through the opening under zero-gravity conditions, counting on the thrusters on their feet, elbows, and back to propel them into the hold.

The cargo bay is not entirely empty—the pilot had the sense to tie and bolt most things
down, in case of just such a breach.  Several lockers remain against the wall, some of them with transparent covers, revealing weapons within.  Weapons such as particle hand cannons, the very same sort as the Cerebs now unholster from their sides. 
He’s killed us before
, the Leader thinks, his respect increasing for his target. 
He’s harvested us
.

Of course, it shouldn’t be too unexpected for the pilot of a Sidewinder.  Those pilots were typically trained in stealth, infiltration, and sabotage.  Sometimes their missions required them to
stay away from any military base for months at a time, gathering resources as they went from one mission to the next.

The Leader understands harvesting like this. 
Harvesting is as essential to the Cerebrals as breathing.  Without continuous harvesting of the resources of both Nature and one’s enemies, a people cannot hope to survive—so sayeth the Calculators—and certainly can never expand.  Most civilized species learned this, and the humans were no different.  They just didn’t manage to figure out how most of it worked before the end.

The Leader’s natural-user interface highlights this weaponry, and the data is instantly transmitted to the rest of his team, who no doubt have already noted it and assimilated the data themselves.  Their target is technically proficient, and has guile. 
He couldn’t have survived this long without it
, he thinks.  It was, after all, the greatest flaw in
homo sapiens
. 

The Leader considers that. 
If they had spent as much time on logical resource-gathering and maintaining strategic location, rather than attempting their “cloak and dagger” nonsense, they might have stood a chance
. 

We could argue that the Leader is right.  But, then, we wouldn’t have been human.

For all their intelligence, this can be extremely difficult for a Cerebral understand.  For you see, Cerebrals possess great powers of reason, calculation, and linear thinking.  They are imaginative, but only insofar as engineering and uplifting their own species.  One thing that gave them the most concern when dealing with humans was that, while humans have passable skills of linear thinking, it was their
lateral
thinking that made them so unpredictable.

Linear thinking has to do with cold, step-by-step logic.  It deals with certainties, not abstracts.  Two plus two is always four; you can’t have a safer bet than that.  No matter which species you communicate with, no matter what language they use, putting two objects side-by-side with two other objects always brings about
four objects
.  The answer to the question “Does two plus two equal four?” can never be “Probably.”  The answer to such questions is either a definitive “Yes” or a resounding “No.”  It was the power to focus on these facts, and ignore romanticism, that elevated the Cerebrals.

Contrary to that, the humans often employed lateral thinking, which has to do with solving problems through approaches that are indirect, and quite often non-logical.  Gifted lateral thinkers use reasoning that is not immediately obtainable to those that use the step-by-step logic that has so far guaranteed the Cerebrals’ place in the universe at the top.

According to the files the Leader has on pilots/saboteurs assigned to Sidewinder ships, lateral thinking was promoted even more in their type.

All sentient species must have
some
degree of lateral thinking, or else they can’t get very far in the creative process, but whereas human beings have ample amounts of it (to the point that their hodgepodge imaginations could be deemed almost insane by Cereb standards), the Cerebs have a great dearth of it, which they have always been proud of.

Perhaps that is
the reason that, while the Leader clearly spots the obvious tripwire, and the not-so-obvious faux junction box, he misses the true trap.

There are two obvious signs of trappings—a tripwire at the foot of the door and a compact plastic explosive arranged in the usual human style in a steel box mounted on the wall beside the door.  The box itself is made to look innocent, like a cable junction box, only EMF scanning (electromagnetic frequency) shows that there is no electrical current moving through any of the cables running into it. 
A dummy box
.

Half floating, half pushing slowly through the vacuum of the cargo bay by gentle thrusters, the Leader and his team close in around the far door.  It’s here that they lose their first operative.

Waving to one of his fellows, the Leader floats to one side.  He moves to the rear of the cargo hold, gripping his magnetic boots against the wall and aiming his weapon down at the gaping hole they blasted open, covering the entry.  The other two commandos join him.  While the thermite charge is placed around the door’s hinges, they maintain radio silence—few words need be spoken when so much can be communicated via the linked natural-user interfaces.  His scanners automatically analyze every element in the room, from the walls to the lockers, and even to the sheets of paper floating in the vacuum.  It analyzes the paper down to its most miniscule elements: 76.57% cellulose, 14.3% cotton, 5.21% resin, 3.92% miscellaneous. 
Cotton
, he thinks.  An element only available on his home world by synthesis, yet still nothing like Earth cotton.  He recalls the last time he touched real cotton…

He senses
it the instant before it happens.  They all do.  Though their armor is filled with shear-thickening liquid, which allows them to absorb major impacts with less damage and controls the sensational overload they would feel from high-impact ballistics, the exterior of their armor has a special porous attribute, which allows some sensations to come through—like bats with super-hearing, the Cerebs find great value in their hyper sense of touch.

They feel the quick burst of air coming out from the far wall
, even manage to analyze it.  A nanosecond later, the blast kills the operative by the door.  The explosion comes not from the plastic explosive, nor from any tripping of the wire on the floor, but from the lockers to the side.  Something—perhaps a motion sensor, a heat sensor, a pressure panel, or all three?—must have detected some change in the environment, igniting an explosive waiting inside the lockers.  Those lockers, where all the precious weapon stores were.

The explosion is soundless, except for the vibrations felt inside the Leader’s suit.  As he watches his comrade’s body fly apart, and the flu
ids of his body dribble out in amorphous globules into the vacuum, he wonders with detached logic,
Why would the Phantom do that?

His fellow’s sacrifice
isn’t in vain, however, because the door is blown partially open.  More air jets past them.  The Leader and his two remaining operatives remain magnetically locked to the walls until the Sidewinder’s AI also shuts off airflow to the corridors beyond.  Ten seconds later, it’s done, and the Leader cautiously floats over to the gaping, superheated metal frame where the thermite burned through.  He inspects the false junction box, and the plastic explosive, which still has yet to go off, either because the detonator is faulty or it is a trap never completed.

The Leader
looks at the charred spot along the wall where the lockers were only seconds before. 
Why would he do it?  His weapons were in there
.
He can’t have many more left
.

It
is a question the Cerebrals always asked themselves when dealing with humans.  It is no different with the Phantom.  The Phantom, whoever he is, has left the more obvious traps as decoys, no doubt knowing it would draw their attention, yet placed a far deadlier bomb inside a storage locker, destroying his weapons cache entirely. 
Being so isolated, he must be incredibly limited on resources
. 
So why do it?

After a moment of introspect, the answer is obvious. 
Because he knew we wouldn’t expect it
.  It was counterintuitive.  Worse, it was counterlogical.

Cerebs don’t do battle this way.  They are blunt. 
They contemplate operations from the moment of inception so that they don’t have to over think them in execution.  Calculations are completed well beforehand; the ratio of enemy resources to their own is always measured first, then remeasured, not only by supercomputers but by the Calculators and the Conductors.

With Cerebs, what you see is what you get.  Just as mathematics are a universal truth throughout the cosmos, so too are motives and actions. 
This is their philosophy.  Their motives are to destroy lesser, problematic species, and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise.  Subterfuge isn’t a trait commonly favored amongst their people; guile has only ever bred mistrust amongst members of a species, and thus a species—a
proper
species, they feel—must have a focused goal, untainted by deception.  Without that focus, true uniformity is lost.  That is why races such as human beings develop cloaking technologies—to hide—and superior races such as the Cerebrals do not.

Yet humans revel in this
blasphemous counter-logic, and the Leader’s fellow paid the price for his lack of understanding in it.  Nothing is more frustrating than watching a calculation not pan out.  His two remaining operatives look to him now for guidance.  Few are trained to think like a human, and it appears even the Leader, as advance as his training is, hasn’t been trained enough.

It matters little
. 
We have the superior numbers and resources
. 
We exterminated the rest of them
. 
He has nothing and no one left to help
.  Humans have always fled from them, or dashed madly into suicide missions.  There is nowhere left for this one to flee to, and should he attempt a suicide run, it would benefit him none at all.

The Phantom is alone in the universe.

But a cold tingling sensation travels up the Leader’s spine—this is not one of the good sensations that enraptures his people, either.  It is a shiver of portent.  Being so sensitive to environmental changes is just one of the items that has kept his people one step ahead of their enemies for millennia now.  Though logically he knows the Phantom is alone and outgunned, he also knows a formidable opponent when he sees one.

Carefully,
the three remaining Cereb commandos move into the cylindrical corridor, all of it made by the hardy metal humans called
compristeel
, an alloy of immense strength, yet with the capability to give under the high pressures of space travel and combat.

Well versed in zero-gravity combat, the three of them move inside, using their thrusters to adjust themselves in technical and dynamic entries, guns facing out.  Wordlessly, the Leader commands his two operatives to take separate walls—without gravity, every way is up.  The Leader takes the ceiling, clings to it magnetically, the o
ther two take the floor and one of the walls.  They crouch, and proceed down the corridor, two guns facing forward while one of them remains behind, “covering their six” in human parlance.

Then, all at onc
e, artificial gravity reasserts itself.  And it is several
g
’s too strong.  The Leader feels himself pulled straight down.  His magnetic boots aren’t strong enough to keep him clamped.  If not for his jets catching on quickly, he might’ve smacked hard against the perforated steel floor.  The Leader expected such a ploy.  His people were linear thinkers, not stupid.  Far from it.  And deception isn’t something they are entirely unfamiliar with, but whereas most species learned it early on as a survival mechanism, Cerebs learned about it mostly late in their existence, by hunting and destroying those species who reveled in tricks.

The cultures, customs, and indeed the very DNA of Earth’s creatures were saturated with deception.  The chameleon that changed its colors.  The insect that disguised itself as a leaf or a stick in order to evade predators.  The puffer fish which swelled its body to look more intimidating than it actually was.  Constant deceptions.  The various government agencies were
always spying on each other, which made no sense to Cerebs, who have always been uniform in their goals.  They are single-minded, and thus share information freely.

Behind them, a thick, compristeel door quickly lowers from the ceiling, sealing off the hall behind them. A hissing sound.  The Leader’s interface tells him that atmosphere is being restored.  Then, the door ahead of them opens. 
What is this?  An invitation?  Is it a surrender?  No, if that were the case, he would present himself for surrender
.  Remembering his training on humans, he thinks,
It’s a lure
.  Something the Cerebs had only used to catch their food, but never on other sentient creatures. 
It’s so unnatural
.