The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  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 representation 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 has 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 before 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.

  Asteroids don’t have motives, you say. Well, that’s exactly what the Cerebrals think, and therefore, that’s what the seekers think.

  You see, technologies are always limited by the imagination of those that wrought them. In this case, the Cerebrals. Thus, no matter how much the seekers understand about the asteroids’ shape, weight, mass, and trajectories, they know nothing at all about their scheme.

  Just two years before humanity met its end, it developed a few theories about its enemy. The Cerebrals were clearly possessed of great mental and computational power, their stratagems impeccable, their technology so advanced that at times it seemed magical in origin. But there was a bluntness to their operations, a forthrightness in their approach. Some called it brutal. Others called it merely calculated and cold.

  Of the handful of Cerebs that were captured, none of them were ever interrogated—the soldiers were trained/programmed well to self-terminate when taken alive—but they were dissected by mankind’s greatest researchers. The Cerebs were discovered to be bio-machine hybrids, their thought p
rocesses far too sophisticated for standard IQ testing. Their bodies and minds enhanced by complicated isotopes, nanomachine-augmented blood cells, and bone-fortifying polymers. Most of it seemed designed to create a balanced equilibrium of the senses (since it was found they naturally were so sensitive to environmental changes), making it exceedingly difficult to sneak up on them.

  The Cerebrals are near-perfect creatures. The Phantom in the Deep understands this now. But he also heeds the lessons of his brothers and sisters in ASCA, and the rest of humanity’s assembled military researchers. The Cerebs know something about deception, but they have little use for it. Their machines, therefore, scan for the properties of things, but never the motives of things.

  The thirty-seven asteroids now closing in on the seekers are not asteroids at all. Rather, they are drones coated in mimetic clay—a shape-shifting polymer that human beings were using since the late twentieth century. Just below these bundles of clay, there are sensors, which detect certain objects around them, analyze their dimensions, and stimulate the clay with electrical currents that can alter the shape, density, and even the color of the clay. At the very center of these false asteroids, there is a complex explosive: cyclotrimethylene-trinitramine. A military explosive as old as World War II.

  The seekers note that these asteroids are on a trajectory that somewhat intersects with theirs, they just don’t understand that there can be a motive. Asteroids are dead, dumb things. How can they have a motive?

  The seekers use ground-penetrating radar to map the various tunnels inside Holey Roller, and soon they will detect the Sidewinder inside one of them. They hug the surface tighter, communicating with one another, fanning out around the asteroid’s surface, converging on the only exit the tunnel has. They are mere seconds from forming their net. Once the Phantom exits, they will have their—

  They don’t even get the chance to begin a targeting scheme. The thirty-seven false asteroids that Rook has littered throughout this sector detonate all at once. In space, there is no loud bang, no noise at all.

  Two of the seekers manage to get away, though somewhat damaged, and when the Sidewinder emerges, they take potshots with their particle cannons. These are relatively low-powered beams when compared to the beams from the skirmishers, so Rook dares to allow them to hit him. The EA system absorbs some of the energy, channels it, and uses it to fill a few of its smaller batteries.

  He can’t take too much, though. If the seekers keep pumping the beams into the Sidewinder, it’ll eventually overheat and explode. Here, we rejoin Rook inside the cockpit as he once again swivels his chair to man the firing station. After tapping a few keys, the targeting computer locks on to the first seeker, and the beam does the rest. It disintegrates to its tiniest pieces—Cerebs program their machines to destroy themselves at the last second by way of a massive explosion, so as to leave no tech behind to be reverse-engineered. Five seconds later, the same happens to the last seeker, and Rook is back piloting the ship.

  A quick scan of the field shows that the explosions have attracted more skirmishers to his location.

  He has enough space, and thus enough time, to turn his thrusters back to full. Cutting around Gladys and the Cat’s Eye, then diving between Ivan and his brother Mikhael, the Sidewinder weaves a curving trail of ionized exhaust. Now, Rook cuts all aft thrusters, then puts full power to the starboard side forward thrusters, and the portside reverse thrusters, which creates sharp yaw rate, inducing a tactical flat spin. While still moving on the same trajectory, the Sidewinder faces backwards, towards Holey Roller. He activates the DERP, then uses the Sidewinder’s active jammer to paint a transmission-scrambling wall.

  An alarm goes off. The ventilation shaft has now suffered a great deal more damage. His unwanted guest has cut through another compristeel door.

  Rook activates reverse thrusters, keeping the Sidewinder moving backwards, then activates the sensor shroud. In six seconds, various panels open and extend the multi-walled carbon nanotubes and metamaterials, which join and snap into place. An electrical current passes through them, and all at once the Sidewinder becomes invisible.

  That’ll ditch the skirmishers for a while, he thinks.

  Rook is still laughing, still crying, still angry and on edge. He taps a few keys to run a diagnostics check on the ship’s collision-avoidance system—it acted up on him a few weeks back, and the autopilot nearly allowed the Sidewinder to smash into a random streaker; an asteroid almost as big as the Sidewinder itself, just hurtling through space, probably a portion of debris from some other mid-space collision. Just one of a million dangers he takes into consideration on a daily basis, living out here in the Deep.

  Standing up, Rook quickly peels off his flame-retardant Nomex flight suit (virtually unchanged since the early days of spaceflight), and steps over to the locker containing his Tango armor and Stacksuit.

  The Strength and Tactical Assist Combat Suit, or STACS, or Stacksuit, is the Mk. III version of ISF’s powered exoskeleton/underlay suits, designed for military personnel. It is very lightweight, and enabled Rook to carry heavy objects, up to 155 kg. (341 lbs.) while running or climbing stairs at normal speeds, depending on how high the power was dialed up. Not only can he carry more weight, but he can wield heavier armor and weapons on top of the Stacksuit.

  The thing looks like a diver’s body-glove suit, only about half an inch thicker. It is a formfitting body-glove, easily pulled on by stepping in and allowing it to seal itself in the back with an advanced adhesive.

  This Stacksuit has seen some repairs, though Rook is no expert. The way he understands the technology, whenever he moves his body, nerve signals are sent from the brain to the muscles through the motoneuron, moving the musculoskeletal system. Small biosignals are detected on the surface of the skin. The suit catches these signals via the sensors attached to the skin. With this communication complete, the power unit moves the limb simultaneously with the user’s muscle movement. The suit helps provide free movement based on a robotic system which works in partnership with the ACS (autonomous control system).

  Because the Stacksuit’s legs can lift as easily as the arms, a user can leap more than twice the distance they normally would, and can run at the speed of an elite athlete. This makes it a potential aid down the road, if he survives long enough and becomes too old to do this job anymore.

  Cerebs have incredibly dense bones, hardy flesh, and genetically-engineered subcutaneous tissues that make it very difficult to cause damage to the skin. If a physical confrontation were to occur, the Stacksuit would help level the playing field.

  Rook now pulls out the Tango suit. He recalls the first time he was introduced to it, about four months before the War ended. “We’re callin’ it Tango armor,” said Sergeant Carlton, his close-quarters combat (CQB) instructor. “It’s a prototype, like the STACS was, and DARPA has worked on it extensively over the last two years. The U.S. government is now using this kind of technology, but so far it’s completely utilized on heavy-weapon-bearing vehicles.”

  “I guess that means it’s fairly expensive,” said Cowboy, with a grin smeared across his face. “They really trust it with us?”

  Carlton nodded curtly. “Nearly fifteen million dollars just for one suit of this tech. That’s why so far the government is only buying a few of the prototypes, so that they can attempt to engineer it themselves, only for cheaper. We have an understanding with DARPA and a few British scientists who are helping us develop Tango, and that agreement is more or less that we all share whatever breakthroughs we come across in our research of this tech, as long as we keep it all top secret.” He looked at them meaningfully. “That means, don’t be taken hostage with this.” Die first, was the unspoken addendum.

  Presently, Rook pulls the armor over his Stacksuit.

  The 77/p Tango armor has an interesting property. It can disintegrate high-velocity projectiles once they interact with a magnetic field generated around it. Once the magnetic field detects the incoming projectile, the su
it’s internal computers alert the suit to prepare to dissolve the projectile. In an instant, the suit is ready to defend itself. Tango functions off of the high-voltage charge from his batteries. When an incoming object penetrates the plates, it closes the circuit to discharge the capacitor (which has been readied by the magnetic field disturbance), dumping a great deal of energy into the penetrator, which vaporizes parts of it and turns the rest into a plasma, significantly diffusing the attack, and practically disintegrating a bullet. A high-frequency magnetic field dispersed energy attacks.

  This particular Tango armor has been through the rigors of many combat situations, yet, for all the damage it has received, it looks practically brand new. That reason is simple: self-healing armor, an invention humans had had since the late twentieth century.

  A combination of smart-materials made from DARPA scientists, in conjunction with materials created by Parnes Industries, makes it all possible. A solvent-borne urethane coating from DARPA works with a three-layered system from Parnes’s R&D department. A specially-formulated plastic forms the inner and outer layers, and can stretch to triple its normal size. When a bullet tears through the coating and the armored exterior walls, this plastic stretches around it, and then snaps shut. It leaves a pinhole-sized leak, not even noticeable, and easily re-coated. But, the thin, middle layer seals it shut, since it’s made of tiny leaking beads that absorb condensation from the inside of the hull and expand, making it airtight after penetration.

  Much of this technology was available by the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Such materials and research made it possible for mankind to venture out further from its solar system, out into the quantum slipstream. The Bleed. The Cerebs call it the Bleed.