The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song) (7 page)

He doesn’t move.  Neither does his team. 
Maybe that’s what he wants us to do
. 
Sit here and over think it
.  Difficult to say with a creature from Earth.

Using his interface, the Leader commands his men to use a single-line corridor approach.  This technique is the most logical and efficient when passing through such a narrow corridor that is aggressively held.  The operatives walk in a single-file line, the one in the front in a low crouch, aiming his weapon forward, while the operative directly behind him stands straight up with his weapon also aimed forward, and the operative bringing up the rear
checks their tail.  Should they encounter heavy resistance, the operative in the lead drops flat on his belly, the operative behind him takes a kneeling position, and the third operative stands straight up—this way, all three operatives could use maximum firepower, and could fire directly over each other’s head without risking hitting each other.  A tactic also once used by Earth SWAT teams for such narrow passages, incidentally.  (Humans had logic skills, too.)

They progress slowly down the hall, their retinal enhancers alternating between standard, infrared, and EMF vision.
  As the Leader slowly scans his gun by the closed doors on all sides, the sensor at the end of his barrel detects, via X-rays, what is inside each room, and a three-dimensional display is projected against the back of his cornea.  Mostly storage.  Lots of compristeel cases stacked in corners, lots of discarded weapons and food packages.  It’s obvious the Phantom has been subsisting off the barest essentials, but he’s at his limits.

The Leader continues guiding his team forward.  He is familiar with
the Sidewinder ship series.  He therefore knows that the cockpit is directly ahead.

There is an atmospheric generator behind one door, where the
life support systems are housed, along with a shoddy air filter/exchanger.  Behind another door is the engineering bay, and X-rays reveal a badly damaged warbot, one of mankind’s attempts to produce more soldiers, since they were greatly lacking when the Cerebs came.  A fearsome war machine, one that, had the humans been able to produce a billion or so more, could have changed the War completely for them.  But the Conductors conferred with the Calculators early on, and saw this problem well before it got out of hand.  They attacked warbot factories on Shiva, an operation the Leader had helped—

The Leader suddenly
feels something.  A slight change to his environment, but very noticeable.  The porous quality of his armor allows some of the airflow in, so that his skin may judge, yet it mitigates the airflow enough so that it doesn’t overwhelm.  It is a surge of oxygen.  Then, a surge of hydrocarbon gas.

And all
at once, he knows why the Phantom sealed the corridor behind them, and why he reactivated the atmosphere.

You can’t have fire without
an oxidizer
.  The horror of the realization almost stuns him to inaction. 
He wouldn’t
. 
He has so much to lose
. 
He can’t
…

A few seconds before it happens, the Leader listens to his training and turns his particle hand cannon
on the door closest to him.  He fires at the keypad, then at the door’s latch, and summons his fellows to help him pry it open.  Via the interface, they all know what he knows—they’re in trouble.

Pulling and yanking and pushing, they finally manage to open the door just wide enough for one of them to pass through.  The Leader
is just about to squeeze through when combustion happens.  The Phantom set fire to the air.  The ball of exploding gas comes churning angrily right at them.  He flings himself through the door, and, knowing that he cannot save himself and his fellows, opts to save himself.  He shuts the door back quickly, just at the fire bathes them in baptizing heat.  With the door shut, he can just hear their screams.  Within five seconds, they aren’t screaming anymore.

The Leader looks a
round.  He now stands in the circuitry bay, which, if his memory of Sidewinder schematics is still accurate, has a ventilation access shaft right about…
there!
  Wasting no time, he uses the plasma torch from his tactical belt to remove the ten bolts holding the flimsy cover plate on, and then crawls inside.

We’
ve spent enough time with the Leader and his doomed men.  We need to leave him now, because another drama is transpiring not far from him.  In fact, only about thirty feet directly ahead of him, just inside the cockpit, the man with the call sign “Rook” remains safely behind the solid compristeel door.  On the other side of it, in the corridor, a blazing inferno is still churning wildly, fed by the Sidewinder’s air-exchangers.  Only moments before, he tore a few pages out of the hefty user’s manual for the navigation computer, lit the pages on fire, tossed them into the hall, sealed the cockpit off and increased the oxygen and hydrocarbon outflow.

Laughing so hard he’s
wheezing, Rook decides to let them cook for another minute.  This is a good laugh, probably the funniest thing he’s experienced in five years.  His mind is far afield now, and he knows it.  Accepts it.

Then, finally, he switches of
f all life support systems and opens the emergency door he used to seal in his unwanted guests.  In the span of ten seconds, the entire blazing inferno is jetted out into space, where it is immediately doused.  He turns life support back on, but only in the cockpit and in one other room.

Rook
takes his seat again, and it automatically swivels around to face the console.  He straps himself in, runs a quick systems check, makes sure that
most
of the lights show green on the trouble-board, then gets underway.

A sensor chimes.  He has
ten more Cerebral skirmishers closing in.  Doubtless, they detected the sudden jet of flame amid the asteroid field.  He curses himself, yet knows that he had no other choice.

The incoming fighters are currently
making their way around the considerable girth of Fatty, an asteroid that to Rook has always looked like the large, round swell of an alcoholic’s beer gut.  It is 62.337 miles at maximum length, but moving at their speeds, they’ll be around it in minutes. 
Time to move
.

Rook
takes the Sidewinder off of autopilot, and reclaims the controls for himself.  A chime goes off, and he turns his attention to the pycno mixtures in his engines.  One screen measures the Joule-Thomson effect on the exhaust gases, gauging the temperature change of the gases as they’re forced through the primary insulated valves.  He glances at another screen, checks the enthalpy, or the total energy of his thermodynamic systems.  There are endothermic/exothermic fluctuations there, indicating a valve that needs repair.

Another chime goes off.  He looks at
yet another one of his 3D monitors.  It appears he has a lone survivor.  One of the Cereb infiltrators is moving slowly through the tight confines of the vents.  Rook thinks,
I ain’t got time for you just yet
.  So he taps a few keys, which lowers a few emergency shutoff seals within the ventilation shafts, encasing his enemy for the nonce. 
He’ll have a plasma cutter on him
. 
That’s probably how he got in
. 
It’ll take him a while to cut through those compristeel doors, though, so I’ve got time
.

Rook engages forward thrusters, rolls to port, moving around the Clam (it looked to him rather like a clam with its front pried open), then around the Five Fists, and
now into the Field of Showers.  He’s catalogued all the names, and the computer keeps up with them.  Though the AI no longer speaks to him, it still works well enough to keep tabs on the asteroids’ movements and predicts their trajectories.

Another chime sounds.  They’ve cleared Fatty.

Rook starts to cry.  Then, he laughs, and keeps crying all at once.  He’s been on edge for more than a decade.  Sometimes, the anticipation morphs into the jitters, and the jitters sometimes manifest themselves in strange, contradictory emotions.

Rook r
eaches forward, taps a few keys:

SEARCH: CLASSIC BANDS: ERA/YEAR: 1968

ARTIST NAME: STEPPENWOLF

ALBUM NAME: THE SECOND

The music cues up.  He is ready to die.

4

The Conductor says, “Let me hear it.”

“Sir, I must advise against—”

“Let me hear it,” he repeats, in a tone that brooks no argument.

An instant later, the entire bridge is filled with a horrible, wonderful whine.  A classic earth instrument.  The guitar.  It is screaming, even while another one cues up slowly, ominously in the background.  There is a threat in that music.  Something awful is being portended.  Then, there is an explosion of voice and bass and drums, and the tension is released.

“
I like to dream, yes!

Yeesssss, right between my sound
machine!

On a cloud of sound I drift in the night,

Any place it goes is right!

Goes far, flies near,

To the stars away from here!

Well, you don’t know what
,

W
e can find!

Why don’t you come with me little girl,

On a magic carpet ride?
”

The Conductor thinks,
Steppenwolf, if I’m not mistaken
.  And he never is. 
A group of musicians that hailed from Canada and America in their year of 1968
.  The sounds are dampened some by his cochlear implants, so that he doesn’t overindulge—indeed, it is his people’s hypersensitivity that taught them the dangers of excess.  If they hadn’t overcome that aspect of their being, they never would have made it to the stars.  Those first four-brained ancestors had calculated this and wisely listened to those calculations.

“Guard yourself
,” he says aloud, though it’s as much for himself as the others.  Then, as any good Conductor ought to do from time to time, he advises them.  “It’s important that we know our enemies, but become a student of a thing for too long, and soon you become that thing.”  He turns to the Manager directly behind him.  “Cancel that noise.”

“Yes sir,” the Manager responds with more than a smidgen of relief. 
The music stops abruptly, and everyone on the bridge visibly relaxes.

“How long before our skirmishers close in?”
he asks, turning back to the three-dimensional representation of the Deep all around them.

“They’re coming into visual range now, sir.  One of their scanners has detected the remains of one of our
commandos.  Do you want me to dispatch a team to gather his remains?”

“
Leave him.  Continue the search for our Phantom.”  There was no room for sentiment.  As a rule, the Conductor and his kind did not like to leave any trace of their biology or technology behind, lest weaknesses be found and exploited, but it is only the Phantom left.  What weakness could he possibly find and exploit on his own?

Now we once more float away from the bridge, away from the
mother ship, across the fields of shifting rock, and past the squadron of skirmishers rocketing towards the Phantom.  We alight soundlessly on the hull of the Sidewinder just as it is cresting the horizon of a two-mile-long asteroid, nicknamed Zipper.  We pass through the compristeel hull and casually slip into the ventilation shaft, past the Leader who is hard at work with his plasma cutter, and then beyond to the cockpit.

A loud noise amid the silence of space.

“
You don’t know what,

We can see!

Why don’t you tell your dreams to me?

Fantasy will set you free!
”

The pilot sings.  Chimes are going off.  For a moment one alarm sounds, but he quickly switches it off.

“
Close your eyes, girl!

Look inside, girl!

Let the sound take you awayyyyy!
”

They’re just behind him.  A few shots are fired, but they’re only glancing blows.  Rook taps a few keys, setting the computer to randomly rotate the frequency of his energy shields.  Hopefully, that will prevent his enemies from setting their own weapons to the same frequency and getting through his shields.

Of course, some of the energy still came through in powerful bursts. 
Secondary and tertiary shielding consists of ROK (rapidly-oscillating kinetic) shielding, as well as a modified EA (endoergic armor).  EA allows the ship to absorb and transfer
some
of the energy displaced.  Working in tandem with photovoltaic solar cells, the EA converts the energy of particle weapon impacts, electromagnetic attacks, and energy from any nearby ambient starlight to fuel other systems—in other words, the Sidewinder borrows a bit of the energy used in attacking it to fuel parts of its own system.

It is this endoergic armor that requires he step out of the shadows from time to time and pick fights.  The Sidewinder is dying—has been dying for many years now—and the only power he gets any more comes from what he can absorb endoergically.  The ambient starlight, and even the nearby sun
isn’t enough to fill the tremendous needs of his engines.  The energy has to come from
somewhere
.  Picking fights with Cerebs brought energy from the glancing blows of their particle beams, just as long as he didn’t stay out in them too much, overheat, and explode.

These systems require constant maintenance by a specialist.  Rook’s entire crew died years ago, leaving him to do the work himself.  Well, he and one other, but we’ll get
to that.

Right now,
the Sidewinder is handling some heavy gravitational disturbances.  His ship is a much smaller object than all the rocks around him, which means they all cast effects on his ship, and he is now in the very thick of it.  Even the sun, far away as it is, plays into his maneuvering.  The Sidewinder is always barely holding it together.  It is a complicated system of artificial alloys, polymers, plastics, glasses, fibers, and quantum-level-manipulating machinery.  “A tin can designed to hurl an ant through an angry ocean,” was how one of his ASCA instructors once described the Sidewinder series.

Another alarm.  He is being targeted again. 
Rook takes a chance.  There’s cover just up ahead.  He remains where he is, and accepts a pair of blows from his enemies before he takes a quick dip around Holey Roller and the Three Sisters to break line-of-sight, and suddenly he is free of their targeting.  The EA systems transfer the energy to power reserves, but it’s still not enough.  He needs more. 
They’ll send out seekers soon
.

No sooner does he think it than it happens.
  The holographic display to his immediate right shows twenty separate objects, roughly the size of basketballs, being emitted from the underbellies of the skirmishers, setting a vector of 231, Mark Twelve.  Far faster, and less powerful in terms of explosive force, seekers have a limited fuel, but can burst forth and, for about three to five minutes, rocket around obstacles, seeking their targets.

Rook is out of chaff, so he can’t pollute the field with anything physical to confuse the seekers’ sensors.  However,
Holey Roller presents a few possible answers.  About three miles in diameter, this Class-S asteroid is made of stony iron, and rolls unusually fast for its size.  Besides that, it is very porous.  Some of the pores are large enough for a ship to slip through.  Many a time the Sidewinder has held inside one of these tunnels, waiting for weeks and sometimes months to ambush a Cereb skirmisher.

Now, he pulls around Helga, the largest of the Three Sisters, and then dives down, down, down into one of the few tunnels of Holey Roller that go all the way through to the other side of the asteroid.  Once inside, all is darkness.  No sunlight reaches in here.  He must decrease his speed by two-thirds if he wishes to navigate.  Using the 3D r
epresentation of the tunnel he mapped out years before, Rook glides through perfect dark.  This is made even more difficult because of the fact that Holey Roller is, well, always rolling very fast.  Imagine trying to navigate a dark cave with only a map and a flashlight, and the cave kept rotating around you, and you’ll have some idea of Rook’s troubles.

Sensors show that the
Cereb seekers are currently fanning out around the surface of Holey Roller.  At ASCA, he was trained on the capabilities of seekers (only briefly, though, because the War didn’t last very long).  Each seeker has its own AI, yet they communicate and work as a team, and they have detailed files on human psychology and tactics.  They can also scan deeply into surfaces, and likely have already mapped the various tunnels inside Holey Roller large enough to house a Sidewinder craft.  They’ll be waiting on him on the other side.

The smile on
Rook’s face tells us he hopes they are.  Then, his smile dies, and he darts a glance over in our direction.  This is the second time he’s done this. 
Can he really see us?
  Doubtful.  Then, he shouts, “Who’s there?”  We say nothing.  Even if we spoke, he couldn’t hear us.

Slowly,
Rook takes his eyes back to his console, and addresses the twisting tunnel.  The pilot has been alone for far too long.  Alone with his thoughts and the ghosts of humanity dancing in his head.  Surely sometimes he must wonder if it has all been just a dream—apple pie and Niagara Falls, hockey and the United States, automobiles and TV, women and children, all of it just a dream.   Certainly none of those things will ever matter again, not even as trivia on some game show (all the game shows are gone).  It keeps him up at night, the question,
If something is totally and completely wiped out, just utterly erased, did it ever exist at all?  Did it ever happen?

His mind goes on autopilot, and his thoughts wander, even as outside his enemies gather around him. 
If humanity is completely gone, did it ever really happen?

Surely the failing of a star h
as an effect on the other cosmic bodies around it, but what about a species?  The entire existence of mankind now only means that there are multiple worlds on which the surfaces and atmospheres have been irreparably scorched. 
Is that all we were?
he frequently wonders. 
The catalyst of destruction for other worlds?  A lure for creatures like the Cerebrals to come and bring about the premature deaths of perfectly good planets?

For some people, this would bring about such a great well of depression that they would end their lives rather than carry on.  Such supreme defeat would bog the average person down, make them unable to go on.  But some people are made of stranger stuff—not necessarily
braver
stuff, just stranger.  Like professional athletes who don’t dwell on defeat too long, just long enough to derive a lesson out of it.  Like a rejected lover who insanely thinks he or she can win back someone ten years removed from their life.  It’s not bravery that keeps them going.  It’s a kind of sickness, a malady of the mind.  One must have such a malady if one intends to stand against crushing odds.

Perhaps it is this same malady that takes his mind away from the controls for a second—just a second—so that he can finally make his move on the holographic chessboard to his left.  He’s finally made his decision.  With the wave of his hand, he moves his queen to E7, to
bolster the rook at A7.

It’ll be a few minutes bef
ore Rook comes out the other side of Holey Roller.  His mind is focused on the hundreds of commands and controls he must consider if he’s to exit the other side of the asteroid, so let us leave him alone for now.  We travel now into the ventilation cover above his head, where air blows in gently from the exchangers.  Down one narrow crawlspace, we take a sharp left, then a sharp right, and we see that the Leader has finally melted the rest of the way through the first of the compristeel doors.

The Leader switches his plasma cutter off and clips it to his side, then produces a foam coolant dispenser, and sprays down the superheated metal he’s just finished cutting into.  After a moment
, he squeezes through the tiny opening, and pulls himself along by his elbows, pushing his toes.  The confines are almost too small for both him and his tactical suit.  Inch by inch, little by little, he makes progress towards the cockpit.  He feels the shifting of the ship, which tells him the Sidewinder is still evading, still not home free.

Now we pass through the ventilation shaft, up through the mangled wires and crisscrossing pipes, beyond the hull and out through the Class-S asteroid, through passages so dark and silent they awaken nightmares in each of us.  These sorts of fears gather around us like old friends, never letting us forget that they are there for us at all times, all we have to do is look around.

Now, thankfully, we slip free of Holey Roller and out into the perfect vacuum.  A cluster of asteroids, numbering in the billions and most of them no bigger than golf balls, spread out slowly before us.  Likely, they are the result of a major impact on some other asteroid, now forming a random shower of debris to further clutter the field.

The Cerebral seekers now zip along the surface, scanning, scanning, scanning.
  As well, they monitor the movements of the asteroids around them, including those billions of rock fragments expanding slowly throughout the field, to ensure that they did not collide with any of them.  Some of those asteroids move in anomalous ways.  Thirty-seven of them in total, moving in anomalous ways.  The seekers don’t know it, but they’ve neglected a key component to the motions behind those asteroids—that is, their motives.