The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  Rook escaped with minor damages to the Sidewinder, along with about a dozen others in his squadron. He couldn’t rejoin his companions, however, because Cereb skirmishers were filling the space around Tyson like gnats. He had to go his separate way.

  I guess I outlasted them.

  Rook looks at Badger now. He’s had enough with the lies. Lies eat up a person’s insides, his mother told him, just as surely as loneliness will, and tragedy, and trauma, and bitterness, and PTSD, and old age. No use in making things worse by trying to juggle a thousand deceptions. Perhaps, Rook thinks, I need to finally take a play out of the Cerebrals’ book. Just tell the truth. Enough with deceptions and half-truths. Just the facts. “There is no port-of-call, Badge,” says.

  “Whattaya mean?” the old timer says. “How f-f-far out are we?”

  “It doesn’t matter. There is no port.”

  “How far out?” Badger demands.

  “No, um…you’re not listening.” He looks the old man in the eye. “There is no port-of-call.”

  “Wh-where are we…?”

  “We’re in the Shiva system.”

  “Sh-Shiva?” His eyes twinkle for a moment, probably grasping at the straws of dim memory. “Damn. G-guess it ain’t so bad. Not a lotta bases here, probably n-n-not a lotta chance to resupply, but w-we can make do, I guess.”

  “Badge—”

  “Th-there’s the asteroid field! We can hide there. Remember all the old n-n-nooks that the general was talkin’ about? Jes before it all went south on H-H-Hawking?”

  “Badge, we’re in the asteroid belt.”

  Badger blinks a few times, working that out. “Well, that’s good. That’s good, yeah. We can, eh, we c-c-can sit here, regroup w-with the others.”

  “Badger, listen to me.” Rook swallows, and leans in. He holds the old man’s hand and sniffs, trying to hold back the flood. “We’re all that’s left.”

  “Damn. Shiva got hit, too?” Rook nods. “Damn Cerebs. Well, we jes gotta…hold up here, I reckon. M-m-make sure we’re clear, let the Cerebs fly on by. Th-then we’ll send out an SOS on a QEC channel.” He is referring to quantum-entanglement communication, which allows instantaneous communication across the galaxy, without delay, no matter how great the distance. Another item that helped draw the attention of the Cerebs all those years ago, and accelerated our end, incidentally. “Yeah…yeah, s-send out an SOS once it’s safe.”

  He’s still not getting it. “Badge…no one’s coming. When I say we’re all that’s left, I don’t just mean here in this system, or in this sector of space. Look…look into my eyes old man.” He leans forward a little more. “It’s over. It’s gone.”

  Badger searches his face. “What…wh-what do you mean?”

  How does one explain the totality of it all? Rook took a deep, steadying breath, and let it out slowly. “Um…cartoons,” he began. “Lazy Sunday afternoons. Walks on the beach. Beaches. Um…cows. Milk. Prayer. Monday morning commutes. Traffic. Forests and picnics. Stand-up comedy. Rembrandt paintings. Um…um…” He searches for more. “Toy soldiers. Books. Movies. Movies based on books. Shakespeare’s writings. Dogs. Cats. Monkeys. Elephants.” As he talks, the old man’s face becomes unmovable stone, yet the eyes show what’s sinking in. “The World Series. Um…oceans and fishing and swimming. Lovemaking. Debates about evolution and religion. Politics. Elections. Tennis shoes and basketball games and beer. Get it? Understand? Roman architecture. Comic books. Superheroes. Socrates’ thoughts on self. Horses. Airplane museums. The English and Chinese languages, the Russian and French languages. The Ethernet. Neil Armstrong’s footprints on the Moon. Plastic bags. Apples. Grocery stores. Inside jokes. Children.” Rook shakes his head, then makes a single wiping gesture in the air with both of his hands.

  And with that, the old man slowly looks away, a tear finally escaping his left eye.

  They both sit for a time, their vision turned inward and to the past. The ship is alive around them. Air circulating through its corridors and alcoves. Vibrating faintly when its maneuvering thrusters correct its heading. But their equilibrium is off, they don’t know which way is up or down, left or right. Their senses have been rocked, and they have no idea where to go next.

  “I’m sorry,” Rook finally says.

  Slowly, the old man raises his left hand. Removes the glove. Looks at his wrinkled hand. “How long?” says Badger.

  “How long what?”

  “How long have I b-b-been out?”

  Rook swallows. “A couple years, at least.”

  Badger gasps, and sniffs. “And h-how long b-before that?”

  Rook shrugs. “Hard to say. You’re in and out of it pretty frequently. You stay out longer than you stay awake.”

  The old man looks back at him. “And you…y-y-you’re all alone?” Rook nods. “S-so when I’m out…you’ve got nobody?” Rook nods. “Y-you’re absolutely certain. It c-c-could be a deception or—”

  “The Cerebrals don’t lie, you know that.”

  “—or m-maybe there are others out there, h-hiding like us—”

  “Their Calculators and Conductors don’t miss anything. You know that, too.”

  “Well it can’t just be bloody over!” Badger screams. Rook jolts. Not having heard a raised voice in many years, it jars him to his core. He looks down at the old man, his face now a twisted mask of rage, tears rolling over cheeks in a never-ending stream. “It can’t be,” he rasps. His eyes become rheumy. The painkillers are taking over, and the auto-injectors are slowly putting him back to his rest. “It…can’t be…”

  Rook looks down at his hands. They’re still shaking from the fight, and now from his confession. He looks out the door, out into the corridor, and decides he should go and have a talk with his prisoner. He stands up from the stasis tube, and starts to leave when Badger reaches out to grab him. “Have you…have you…told me this before?” His eyes are barely open. He’s close now to his slumber.

  Rook shrugs. “I’ve told you portions before, but never that blunt.”

  The old man swallows. “I don’t r-remember that.” He looks afraid. “I’m gonna forget again, ain’t I?”

  Rook nods. “Probably.”

  “Th-then don’t you forget this,” he says, smiling madly. “Don’t you quit. Don’t you ever quit, boy. Do what ya have to, to occupy yer mind. Keep up daily exercises—”

  “I already do, Badge.”

  “—and keep a daily journal, to keep your m-mind straight…manage your resources…and sing! Listen to music. K-keep playin’ chess like you always have. I don’t care what you do, just keep your mind straight and don’t quit! That ain’t how I trained ya, and I know that’s not how your mama and daddy raised ya. Couldn’t have made it into the Academy if they did.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “I know I’m right! And you’ll address me as sir as long as I’m still breathin’.” He hadn’t demanded to be called such in a decade.

  “Yes, sir. You’re right, sir.” The old man’s eyes start to flutter. Rook reaches out to tap a button, and the compristeel door slowly slides down over the top of the tube. Inside, he’ll remain in semi-hibernation, with vascular operations brought to a minimum, so that he requires less oxygen and food.

  “Manage your resources…wisely,” Badger insists.

  “I will,” Rook replies.

  “I’ve…I’ve told you all this before, haven’t I?”

  “Yes, sir. You have.” The old man smiles. “You didn’t earn your call sign because you look like a badger. I got an earful from you when this all…when it all…you know.”

  Badger smiles, and more tears spill out. “You and me…the last of all…of all mankind. Who…would’ve…thought?”

  Rook forces a smile. “Yeah,” he whispers.

  Badger swallows his smile, looks around at the hoses he’s being connected to. “Why don’t you…just…let me die?”

  “You’ve asked me to do that before, too.”

  “Why…don’
t…you…?”

  “Because, Badge.”

  “I’m just…just eating your…food and resources…”

  “Not as much while you’re in hibernation.”

  “…and I’m dyin’ anyway…”

  “Shut up, sir.”

  “You…I don’t…you…” He’s fading fast, back into blissful ignorance. Rook finishes calibrating the stasis tube to receive its only patient again.

  Just before the stasis tube closes, however, we think we can hear the old man whisper one more thing. Rook hears only part of it as he turns to leave. It sounds like hell. Rook believes it is something like “we’re in hell,” or even “go to hell,” the mere ramblings of an old mind, slushy with dementia, turning to even greater slush as painkillers and sleeping agents take over.

  But you and I are the ghosts of humanity, and we miss nothing. We hear exactly what Badger says, and we couldn’t agree more. “Give them hell, son,” he says. “Give them hell.”

  Rook wanders down the hall in silence, passing his prisoner, stepping into his quarters and leaning over the sink. He runs water over his face, and looks up at his reflection in the mirror. He doesn’t recognize himself anymore. His honey-colored hair is no longer in a close-cropped military style, hasn’t been for some time. The three-day stubble is fast becoming a beard. The bags under his eyes are pulling the rest of his face down with them.

  All at once, he thinks of the man he once was. He thinks of home, and his mother and father, and his copilot Grass, and Badger in his prime. He thinks of humanity and poetry and dancing. He suddenly weeps. It’s not just the tears from madness, it is the weeping of a child. It is the weeping of someone in mourning.

  It’s been a long time coming.

  Safe in his stasis tube, Badger mutters in his sleep. “Give…them…hell…”

  6

  The ride back to King Henry VIII is a silent one. Rook plays no music. He keeps an eye on his OPG levels to maintain his sensor shroud’s integrity, and moves between asteroids he knows have passages clogged thick with strands of cosmic dust and random ice left by the comet—the same comet, incidentally, that left behind so much deuterium that originally attracted Rook to this field, allowing him to gather it and re-sequence it into pycnodeuterium. This area, he knows, can cause serious disturbances to even the most advanced scanners.

  The ship is on autopilot, mostly coasting and hugging close to asteroids. Currently, it drifts past Queen Anne, so named by Rook because of the way it had obviously been split nearly in half by a collision with King Henry VIII, a collision that his computer estimated happened about four hundred years ago. Now, with its top portion almost totally cleaved off, it has a decidedly beheaded look about it.

  Arrayed around the King and Queen are their children, with names like Goose Egg, Mickey Mouse, Lucifer, and the Blarney Stone. They all huddle close in a non-threatening clique, keeping their own secrets, and perfectly content to let others keep theirs.

  The Sidewinder makes minor adjustments to avoid collisions outside, while on the inside Rook uses quick sealant and spare compristeel components to seal the hole his uninvited guests had blown in it. Then, he finishes bolting his prisoner to a steel rail inside the cargo hold. Using compristeel chains and elastic straps once used to hold down cargo on resupply missions, Rook ensures that the Cereb isn’t going anywhere.

  To make sure the Cereb was out, Rook gave him a dose from an auto-injector. Four grams of a high-potency short-to-intermediate-acting 3-hydroxy benzodiazepine drug. It has all five intrinsic benzodiazepine effects: anxiolytic, amnesic, sedative/hypnotic, anticonvulsant and muscle relaxant.

  He’ll be out for a while.

  That gives Rook plenty of time to play with the omni-kit, as well as work out his next move in his ongoing game of chess with the ship’s AI. “Keep your mind sharp,” Badger always told him, starting long before the dementia first started taking over. “Keep playin’ your games. Keep your mind sharp, so’s you don’t get like me.”

  A holo-projector just two feet away from him projects the 3D image of his chessboard. “Knight to E7?” he says aloud. “That’ll let me take the pawn at C5. But no…no, there’s a bishop way across the board over there, Rook. Where’s your head? That’s how you lost your other knight, you didn’t think.”

  Rook toys over another strategy, trying to think three moves ahead, the way he did back at flight school, when he defeated every single one of his classmates in simulations and took the highly coveted Ace’s Top spot on the boards. Across from him, at the other end of the cargo bay, the Cereb stirs, lets out a moan, then goes limp again.

  The Cereb operative’s glove fits almost snugly on Rook’s hand, except it’s missing a fifth digit. The material is heavy-duty, too strong to be cut, even by the Cereb’s black-bladed tactical knife, so he must use the plasma cutter to cut out an extra hole on the side to fit his pinky through. Once he does this, he pulls the glove on tentatively, testing the feel. The insulation is very soft, and sort of “muted” all sensation. He supposes Cerebs need this, being so touch-sensitive.

  A few taps of the keys, trying to recall what he learned about the omni-kits back at the Academy. A few starts and stops. A green beam shoots out, scanning the floor. He aims the glove at a small MRE packet nearby. The omni-kit seems to measure the properties of the MRE for a moment, before a small green bar fills up, and a holographic screen is displayed in front of him. He cannot read the alien text, but since nothing happens and the screen shuts off, he supposes that either the mini-fabricator inside the glove is still functioning, or…

  I haven’t fed it enough raw materials.

  Rook stands up, sifts through the junk strewn across the floor—items pulled down through the corridors earlier when he opened the cargo bay door, and gathered down here as he closed the door back. He finds wrappers and the spilled contents of compristeel cases: a few spare fatigues, syringes and assorted medical supplies, a tool set, more MREs, and clothes meant for a colony on Mars, now a full decade late.

  The forearm of each omni-kit has a small compartment for raw materials. It can take dirt, sand, organic materials from plants (perhaps even animals), metal shavings, or old rusted screws and grind them into dust before heating them, shaping them. Without those raw materials, omni-kits aren’t much good.

  For the next three hours, as he makes his slow, careful approach to the morbidly obese King Henry VIII, Rook experiments more with the omni-kit. He tears a few old MRE wrappers up, gathers dust from the vent filters, and collects the destroyed compristeel bolts that the Cereb operative melted down inside the vents.

  Rook also finds the partial remains of one of the Cereb operatives. Most of them were incinerated and blown out into space, but one of them must have gotten hung up in the steel access ladder leading below. The body was gone, but one of the legs had gotten trapped in a rung, and twisted off. Rook manages to pry the leg free, but the heat of fire and the cold of the vacuum has made it brittle, and it breaks in his hands, , spilling a black, viscous fluid. Cereb blood. He peels away certain sections of it, and feeds portions of the armor, and even the flesh and bone that have melted onto the material, into the glove’s underside. A test of the mini-fabricator shows that it can flash-forge organic materials, apparently using the base proteins in the dead Cereb’s recycled flesh, as well as amino acids, nucleic acids, and perhaps even DNA, since it accidentally produces one disgusting, sizzling hunk of flesh, which he discards outright.

  As disgusting as it sounds, Rook marks this as potential source of food.

  It takes another hour to figure out how the scanner works. He must first scan an object and then figure out exactly which commands on the holographic display are the Cereb version of CONFIRM and DENY. A few missteps. For instance, when he scans a compristeel bolt still holding a vent cover in, the omni-kit mistakenly believes he wants the whole vent cover forged, and attempts to do it, though it only has about a quarter of the materials needed. And so Rook gets a perfectly good compristeel bolt c
ombined with the corner of a compristeel plate cover. He has to cut this into pieces with the plasma torch and re-feed it to the mini-fabricator, then tries again.

  Another few missteps occur, but finally Rook happens upon a strange rhythm. The discovery comes quite out of nowhere, but he eventually notices that every time he tries to confirm a design, he must confirm it three more times. A total of four confirmations are needed in order to get a fabrication. Redundancies? he wonders. For quality assurance? He files the trivia away for later pondering.

  Once he gets a feel for how the scanner works, he begins scanning random items around the cargo bay. The mini-fabricator has enough raw materials this go-round to make a few compristeel bolts, various plastics, ceramics, silicon carbide, and even a knife similar in dimensions and design as the Cereb tactical blade. The objects are flash-forged in his palm. At first, a cloud forms in his palm, like a small dust devil or a tornado’s funnel, the grains of materials cast around by the magnetic field generated by the device, and then quickly assembled. The entire process takes about two seconds. It’s astonishing to see. No human-made quick-fab technologies ever came close to this kind of quality and speed of manufacture.

  Rook tests the omni-kit further, and begins repairs on the Sidewinder’s interior. The vent covers are first. Later, if he has time, he’ll move through the ventilation shafts and see if he can’t repair the damage the Cereb did inside.

  An alarm goes off. Rook bolts to the cockpit to check, but it’s not any Cerebs: the Alcubierre drive is seeing system failures. He moves quickly down the hall to check the direct interface with the engine’s AI. The engine is the last FTL, or faster-than-light, propulsion system, that mankind ever created. It is an Alcubierre drive, based off of the theories put forth by Miguel Alcubierre far back in 1994. It combines his specs for using exomatter (exotic matter) with the combustion of quantum fields by cold fusion. Once this is done, a bubble of normal space is formed around the Sidewinder, protecting it from the considerable hardships of the Bleed. The whole process is fueled by the deuterium Rook has been harvesting in the asteroid field for a decade, and re-sequencing into pycnodeuterium.