The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  This complicated system for compartmentalizing and managing thought wasn’t all gifted by evolution. As far as anyone could tell, the Conductor’s people were once the same as all other pre-industrialized civilizations. Nomads. Savages. Unhygienic. Simple tribesmen. A fascination with stars was common throughout all their tribes, as evidenced by the countless cave paintings, sculptures, and even their emerging vocabulary. To call someone brilliant they would say he is a “sun student,” to say someone merely regurgitated what they were told with no original insight, they would say he is a “moon student.” Even so far back then, they had known the moon reflected the sun’s light. Like the Mayans of Earth, so far ahead of their time.

  Everything in their culture is saturated with understanding the stars. The first science of their home world was astronomy.

  Then, at some point no one will ever know, there came the spark of true intelligence. They developed multiple brains. Two at first. Double the thinking power meant they progressed in half the time of other civilizations.

  There is evidence to suggest that whatever caused this mutation also created many creatures that could not deal with a duplicitous mind—indeed, according to old texts, it was once a great struggle for his people to deal with two minds at war within one body. Countless religions came and went, all attempting to explain this divide, all while pushing meditation and prayer so as to keep the thoughts separate. The ones who could control themselves and keep their sanity were revered above all, and became the natural leaders as the weaker ones died out.

  The Cerebrals looked up for answers. They searched the stars for meaning to their plight, wondering if there was something beyond that veil of black. Unlike most other sentient species they have encountered, the Conductor’s people did not recoil from the night, they embraced it. It brought them closer to something, an answer they all sought, hidden somewhere in the night sky, a riddle waiting to be unriddled.

  Even that far back, they aimed high. They were meant for the stars, and every single one of them knew it.

  If only they had known what we would find, he thinks now, even as he sifts through perfect memories of the last twelve hours. He manages them, weighs them, labels them, and files them away in the appropriate brain. If only they had known.

  Stars. Endless seas of them. And nebulae. And more stars. And comets and asteroids and gas giants and more stars. They searched for meaning, found none. Other sentient species emerged in star systems around them, others that were no more intelligent than their lowest worker, and yet they discovered space travel in their own time. The audacity of it was…

  The Conductor’s people saw what happened when other beings went through their own industrial revolutions, pushing past the borders of their solar systems. Idiots in charge of technology they have no true mastery of, all of them using concepts they have no command over. All apparent by these species’ rapid expansion. Without the wisdom of Calculators to manage their size and establish a critical limit, or the leadership of Conductors or Directors to carry out actions with the exactness of a proper civilization, all other species faltered and fell.

  We must be as careful here as we were around Rook. The Conductor is quite in control of his faculties, at least for the most part, but what he is carrying is the weight of an entire race’s ego, one built and emboldened by its inability to fail, and one that finds umbrage anywhere, especially in the act of an inferior race to achieve a destiny they haven’t yet achieved themselves. This is every bit as contagious as the despair the Sidewinder is saturated with.

  Breathing, breathing, breathing…analyzing one thought here…measuring another thought over there…judging it…labeling it…filing it.

  Down through the centuries, hormonal shifts and rapid changes in his people’s diet—and even breeding experimentation—brought about three- and four-tiered anomalies. Then came more hearts, because a body with more brains needed more blood and oxygen pumping to them.

  In time, the four-tier brain people became the great sages of their society, the Calculators and the Architects, the Engineers and the Directors, the Gatherers and the Builders. The Calculators came up with the exact number of people, food, water, and resources they would need to be sustainable and maintain optimum efficiency, constantly recalculating as the Architects and Engineers used their findings to utmost efficiency, and the Gatherers augmented their resource supply. The Directors heeded the words of the Calculators, planned out their exponential growth, and devised the necessary system to keep it all working. Everyone knew their place in the grand scheme of things. To this day, historians speak of how it seemed their entire race knew it was destined for the stars, and hadn’t stopped after that first spark of intelligence granted them the vision.

  A caste system formed, and those cursed with the ancient single-brain were set to manual labor, yet even they were too stupid to see that they would eventually work themselves out of their own jobs by helping to build the machines that replaced them. Genetic experimentation gave rise to the Strategists, those of the five- and six-tiered brains. Then came the Advent Children, the Conductors, they of the seven-tiered brain, augmented by advanced implant technologies, and currently the greatest organic thinking machines in the known universe.

  There is a tremor just below him. As humans, and especially as apparitions, we do not sense it directly, but the Conductor surely does, and we sense it only vicariously. Not only is he vastly more intelligent than most members of his species, he is also a dozen times more sensitive to changes in the atmosphere, and to his general surroundings.

  Slowly, he opens his eyes. The floor trembles again. When he stands, he removes the sound nullifiers from his ears and listens. The natural-user interface of his left eye gives him a display. The ship is altering its course. “Why?” He says the word aloud. That isn’t a good sign. Conductors don’t do that. Certainly they seek counsel with themselves, but they don’t talk to themselves. “And why not?” When no one answers, he says, “It’s a fair question.” When still no one answers, he steps away from his bland-feeling cushion, steps onto the cold floor, and lets the sensual vibrations move up through him.

  Silk.

  It isn’t silk. Nothing will ever be silk again. But it is a sensation; a glorious, rapturous sensation like no other. His skin cells and his nerve endings quiver. There is a delightful agony just behind his eyes. It feels as though tiny needles are being pressed into each of his pores. Normally, his flight suit would dampen such sensations, but he stands naked and defiant, accepting wave after wave of forbidden sensations.

  The exultation lasts only a few heartbeats before someone chimes in. A voice imposed along the datafeed: “Sir, your presence is requested on the bridge.”

  He replies without a moment’s hesitation. “Is it over?”

  “No, sir. He’s downed two of our skirmishers. We believe we have operatives attempting a dynamic entry at the moment.”

  “You believe?”

  “Sir, his sensor shroud is still—”

  “Active. Yes. What is their status?”

  “We do not think they have made it in yet—”

  “Is the music still playing?” If the music still plays, he isn’t yet dead.

  Ample hesitation from the Manager. Finally, “It is our Consensus that it is best if you come see for yourself. Sir,” he adds sharply.

  The Conductor isn’t anxious to cut his meditation short, and neither is he happy to put his flight suit on—the same suit that insulates him from such wonderful sensations. But like Rook, he is a creature of habit, and duty beckons. He can’t know it, but even as he steps into the suit chamber, and even as the plastic-metal-alloy suit is formed around him and the foam is injected into the seam to seal it and pad it against vibrations, the last human in the universe is also heeding the call of duty.

  Outside of the Cerebral mother ship, there is an ever-expanding orb of nothingness within the asteroid field—the magnetic cannons are still pushing away thousands upon thousands of rocks, still
carving a path for itself as it searches endlessly. Some of the cargo bays have opened, and we see the tentacles spilling forth. Numerous vacuum-jacketed hoses, made of complex composite alloys, extend from the bottom with the slow, thoughtful grace of a jellyfish. The tentacles select random morsels here and there, tasting them, fondling them so delicately, as though they might break. Slowly, they are reeled into the bays.

  Beyond this harvesting, we pass through a tremendous sea of rocks, great and small. Some zip fast, as if late for something, but most are lumbering and disinterested in the goings on of the cosmos. Farther and farther into the Deep we go, squeezing through tight clusters of the behemoths, passing through showers of the smaller ones. Here, we see a few collisions take place. This is a common occurrence, though not nearly as common as when the field was first formed—in the beginning, these rocks had been much larger, but they had rapidly pulverized one another, whittling each other down to the bits and pieces we see orbiting and arguing with each other. The arguments grow louder the deeper we go, the party more crowded, the gravitational forces more opinionated.

  At last, we see an object that cannot be one of these rocks, for it has nature-defying shape and purpose. We have found the Sidewinder again, and now she coasts silently within a terrific shower of hundreds of rocks, roughly her size or a bit smaller. The autopilot has been engaged, and she now avoids the asteroids big enough to destroy her. The smaller stones try to smack against her hull, but glance off the invisible force-field inches off her surface, just as if a child had skipped a stone off of water.

  On her underbelly, the four Cereb commandos have finally melted their way into a cargo bay. As soon as they do this, a jet of air silently blasts out at them, carrying with it over a dozen compristeel cases. The Leader of the team checks inside. The Sidewinder’s emergency protocols have been enacted, and the AI has sealed the door into the cargo bay and shut off all vents into that room to save on life support.

  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 nanos
econd 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 fluids 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.