The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  Rook thinks, They won’t even try to deceive, only corral and destroy. So he makes a few more motions, and actually performs what one might call a triangulation in chess, and a kind of zugzwang: a situation where one player is placed at critical disadvantage, because the player must make a move when he would rather the other player move. In other words, there are no moves left that do not worsen the Cereb’s position. Unless Rook offers up a sacrifice, which hopefully they won’t be able to refuse if it means getting themselves out of a zugzwang. And, if the Leader was telling the whole truth, then the Cerebrals cannot fathom the significance of sacrifice. They don’t respect it.

  Can it work? he wonders.

  Rook reminds himself that the Cerebs cannot deceive, not on such a scale. They might have survived with minor deceptions, such as luring animals into traps, or leaving bait for fish, but whatever small part of them found use in deception had been removed. Excised. Rook wonders if it’s like the human tailbone, just a remnant of the tail their ape ancestors once had hundreds of thousands of years ago. If humanity had survived long enough, and had come closer together in harmony, would they also have lost the need for deception?

  Are lies necessary to keep one’s humanity? he wonders, moving another piece on his sectorboard. Certainly Rook has lied to himself many times over the years, telling himself that what he does here matters. Does that make him more human, or just an idiot? Or does it make him a basket case? Or all three?

  Rook looks back at the holo-display, looks over his system for outlining the battlefield, and decides it can work. In fact, he sees another point where he can create a zugzwang…

  Then, out of nowhere, it hits him like a brick to the head. No. You’re wrong, Rook. This will never work. Doubt is creeping in. This time it’s born out of a brief bout of sanity. Rook almost starts laughing uncontrollably, almost starts crying, but then lets madness overcome his despair. “It will work. It has to work.” Saying it aloud affirms it, at least for now. With such a long shot, he will have to do this a lot.

  While the computer compiles the data of his new simulation, Rook moves his last remaining pawn on the chessboard. In the very next move, the computer moves White bishop to E1. All at once, he is checkmated. The computer chimes to let him know this. “Damn bishop again,” he sighs. “I always miss it. Always comes outta nowhere.”

  The computer screen asks: NEW GAME?

  He snorts. “Why? So you can make me look stupid again?” Rook stands up from his seat. The chess game has been distracting him from going and doing the thing he wants least to do. But it has to be done.

  Tugging on his spacesuit, he heads down to the cargo hold, floats over to the habitat’s airlock, seals himself in. He retrieves the Leader’s unconscious body, and then hovers back over to the Sidewinder, and secures the compristeel chains to the floor. He seals the ship, and switches on artificial gravity.

  Rook stares down at the Cereb for a few minutes, still thinking on it. Finally, he decides to get to it. First, though, he leans in towards the hostage, and whispers. “I guess you can hear me. That is, if you weren’t lying about being able to hear and see things while being sedated. I need you to know something. You may not believe it, but I am sorry I have to do this. But you and your people…you’ve left me no other choice.” He leans in closer. “You were right. I am losing my mind. And this is what you drive a madman to do when you’ve backed him into a corner.”

  Rook stands up. He holds out his hand. He’s wearing the omni-kit. He flash-forges a stretch of cloth, one of the presets he’s learned to dial up on the display. He wraps it tightly around each hand, steps behind the Leader, and wraps it around his neck. He squeezes tightly.

  As ghosts, we may slip wherever we want. Deep inside the Cereb’s minds, we see that he is concerned. Not terrified, not horrified, only concerned. It isn’t in his DNA to sense fear the way you or I once did. His people have been like computers long before they knew what computers were, and like computers, they don’t have much fear. They do, however, have auxiliary power, and they are able to reroute power from other parts in order to supply it to the necessary areas.

  All at once, the Cereb comes alive. The Leader is thrashing, fighting against his bonds, throwing himself fully backward into Rook. Rook, thankfully, is wearing his Stacksuit, otherwise he would not be strong enough to contend with a Cereb so hopped up on adrenaline.

  The bonds rattle. One of them breaks loose. In the end, Rook wrestles him flat to the ground, pins the Leader with a knee in his spine, and jerks back swiftly. The whole massive body is going into convulsions. The Leader’s mouth opens, closes, opens, closes. The alien’s thin black tongue stretches out, and the bulbous eyes go even wider, if that’s possible. It takes five full minutes for him to stop fighting. When it’s finally over, Rook holds on for another five minutes, just to be sure.

  Then, he rolls the corpse over, and looks down into the eyes. They are no longer pulsing blue. “You said I should use my resources wisely, Badge.” He aims the omni-kit at the corpse, and scans what he needs. “Just followin’ orders.”

  Next, Rook takes out the plasma torch, the same one the Leader used to infiltrate the Sidewinder. Somehow, we get the feeling we need to leave. This perhaps isn’t one of the better moments in our race’s history, and seeing as how it’s being done by the last of us, it’s especially revolting. Besides, we’re ghosts. We’ve seen enough of this sort of thing.

  It will take some time to immolate the Leader’s entire corpse. Meanwhile, other things are brewing elsewhere.

  10

  Silent as the grave, the Cerebral ship pushes through the asteroids. It trudges on, the tentacles and grapplers extending from its belly, snatching up the choicest asteroids, scanning them, tasting them, like a connoisseur wondering about the delectability of a rare grape. Some are reeled in, most are rejected, and the rest are quietly pushed aside by invisible beams of energy.

  The Conductor has returned to the bridge, and now absorbs the latest data on the field. This particular cluster grouping is of interest, because not only does it have the largest congregation of sizable asteroids, it also has various radiation signatures that may prove anomalous. Once the “noise” of space is filtered out (the space dust, the rogue ice, the cosmic microwave background), a pattern emerges, one indicative of human residence. Possibly ancient human residence. They have already scanned three asteroids with signs of landings; the imprints of landing gear belonging to human ships that haven’t been in use for a hundred years.

  Still, there might be a loose infrastructure left in place here, one invisible to the naked eye, and perhaps even scanners. If he’s using one of the sensor shrouds, the Conductor thinks. Human occupants, long forgotten even before the War, may have happened through here, and they may have left enough for the Phantom to subsist on, enough to provide him shelter.

  No sooner has he used the available data to extrapolate on this theory than one of the Managers speak up, “Sir, we have confirmation from a group of seekers of an abandoned station. On the surface of one of the asteroids, mostly broken down, though the husk of a building remains. Spectral analysis on ice fragments left from exhaust stacks confirms, and Researchers acknowledge. It fits the form of a typical human deep-space operation.”

  “A miner’s outpost,” the Conductor says.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Obliterate it. And all the asteroids immediately surrounding it, as well.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The massive particle accelerator in the belly of the ship cues up. A dozen exotic matter beams accelerate and amplify the single beam, and the gigantic focusing magnetic lenses and coils push the energy forward, down several particle channelers. The massive energy fires through a router which takes the combined power up through the spine of the ship, and feeds it into the enormous particle annihilator.

  When the particle beam fires, there is no sound, and no great bursts of flame. The asteroid simply explodes in a silent starburst. Superheated chunks
of rock glow for a few seconds, but cool down as they disappear further into the Deep. Six more shots completely annihilate the larger rocks around it. One less place for him to hide, the Conductor muses.

  Being the specters that we are, we can slip outside and watch this marvelous destruction, the likes of which hasn’t been seen in this region of the Deep for almost a century. The asteroids don’t care about this sudden disharmony. They’ve been knocked onto different courses, but they’ll just find another path. They always do.

  However, if we follow one particular hunk of rock, we see that it travels far and wide, at nearly five hundred miles an hour. It is about the size of a common dinner table, and just seconds before it was a portion of an asteroid’s core, where it’s been for a hundred million years. Now it is a superheated chunk, its glow diminishing in the vacuum’s cold. It plunges deeper and deeper into the field. Other chunks of debris that were ejected from the same asteroid impact on larger asteroids, either joining with them or sending up more debris.

  But this particular hunk of rock is both lucky and tenacious. It travels through a hundred miles of golden-brown space dust, bounces off of many other asteroids, shedding some of its mass, which crumbles away, and yet it keeps going. It smacks into smaller rocks, knocking them to one side like some kind of bully. Here and there it clips another asteroid, but for the most part, it remains perfectly intact. After an hour, we realize it has happened upon Queen Anne. It floats within a mile of Grumpy, passes through the networks of Wild Cards, and continues on its way, mostly unabated.

  We’ll leave this rogue boulder for now, leave it to its eternal search for purpose, because we’ve finally returned to King Henry VIII. And here, something frightening may be unfolding.

  Slipping through the same twisting tunnels as before, we slip past the motion sensors and the proximity mines. They cannot detect us. They can do us no harm. Dust and a few loose pebbles drift through these tunnels. They pass through us as easily as we pass through them.

  Now we are in true darkness. The light of far-off Prime cannot penetrate these caverns. We are dead, yet darkness is still unsettling. In life, we were always afraid of what cannot be seen. We were afraid of apparitions. Now, apparitions ourselves, we still find ourselves uncertain about our environment. Something tells us we may still be affected, perhaps by nothing more than a mental ailment, much like the one that threatens Rook on a daily basis.

  We do not find our sole survivor where he ought to be. He is not at the campsite. Neither is his prisoner, nor the Sidewinder for that matter. The habitat is quiet, both inside and out. It looks to have been sealed off properly, so he didn’t leave in a big hurry.

  So, where is he? Where is the sole survivor of humanity?

  For the answers, we must go deeper. We follow a soft trail of ionic distortion, and we turn down another series of twisting tunnels, some congested by rocks from collapsing tunnels, the boulders just floating around one another, gently nudging, politely suggesting alternate paths for one another. After about a mile plunge, we are becoming aware of an increase in radiation. In life, these levels would surely kill us. As we are now, the radiation cannot hurt us. One of the benefits of being dead.

  We follow the trail of ionic disturbance, the exhaust left by the Sidewinder, and finally we come across it. The vessel is parked on a slightly slanted wall, just to our right in the cavern. Not too far beyond it, there is another ship, one half as big as the Sidewinder and with no pilot seat, maintenance area, or crew quarters. A drone. One sent down here ages ago, and left to rot, possibly suffering a breakdown after dropping off its payload in these catacombs.

  We pass through the walls of the Sidewinder, searching for Rook, and find no one. No one, that is, besides the old man in stasis. Badger sleeps comfortably, his vital signs stable. Passing through the cargo hold, we find nothing of interest. Where the Leader ought to be, there are now only charred markings on the floor, and an unsightly stain.

  Let’s…let’s be away from here.

  Outside, there are two signs that were once likely embedded in the rock walls, but have now come loose and float about freely. They read, in various human languages, WARNING! INTENSE RADIATION! DO NOT APPROACH WITHOUT PROPER RADIATION SHIELDING! WARNING!

  Again, we may ignore this. We pass further on, into the dark tunnel ahead. There seems to be no sign of Rook at all, not until we detect a faint, bluish glow up ahead. We plunge ahead, and find that humanity’s sole survivor is swimming soundlessly through the frigid, miasmic tunnels. The small thrusters on his back propel him softly forward. His flashlight rakes the walls, here and there catching glimpses of another drone’s skeletal remains.

  Then, he gasps. His flashlight’s beam suddenly comes across a body, and his blood runs cold. What is a human corpse doing down here? he wonders. Then, he realizes what it is. A repair bot, much like the one broken down in the Sidewinder’s circuitry bay, only a bit taller and with more humanoid limbs. This one has long, spindly arms, sort of like a human’s, with clawed feet meant for clinging to rocky surfaces and conducting complex maintenance on structures built in a vacuum. It was likely sent down with one of the drones, assisting with the delicate burial of one of the drive cores, while at the same time setting up the needless radiation warning signs, and got abandoned. Such repair bots were made of radiation-hardening components, but eventually even their electronics would fall victim to such high levels as these.

  Rook glances down at the micropad, which he has strapped to his left arm. Radiation levels are reading high on his screen:137 Cs: 90 SR:limited beta radiation. The levels only climb higher the further he heads:76,123 estimated mRem: 761 estimated mSv.

  So quiet, so deadly. Hope drains from this place, and despair has found a home on its walls, growing like mold, willing to infect any open wound. In an attempt to negate the dread that comes so easily with his environment, Rook plays another song:

  “There was a time when men were kind,

  And their words were soft, and their words inviting.

  There was a time when love was blind,

  And the world was a song, and the song was exciting.”

  A woman’s voice, so warm and welcoming, it does more to shed light on this morbid tunnel than does the flashlight in his hand. In these last years, he has occasionally heard Badger’s voice, but it has been far too long since he’s heard a woman’s. He supposes the last he heard was Grass’s, his copilot. All he had now were recordings.

  “Then it all went wrong.”

  The artist holds that last word, holding onto despair as long as she can, then gratefully releases it in the next verse. The violins cue up. There is a bit of optimism building in the plucked strings of a harp.

  “I dreamed a dream in time gone byyyyyyyyy,

  When hope was high,

  And life worth living.

  I dreamed that love would never die,

  I dreamed that God

  Would be forgiving.”

  Rook needs it. If he shut it off now, he would be alone with his breathing and the rest of the cold, dead stones. Alone with himself, and his doubts. A fever is growing in him, one that would someday consume him. But not today. Not as long as he listens to ol’ Badge and kept the music alive in himself, and kept his mind occupied with plans. As long as he does this…

  Rook’s mind is wiped of all thought when he comes upon the first drive core. His flashlight’s beam hits one of its conduit ports, travels up, up, up the massive compristeel wall that houses it. It stands almost four stories tall. Parts of it are crumbled, revealing the cylinder inside, roughly a storey tall. Dust has gathered on it, naturally. But a brief brush scatters some of it, which floats and expands outwards towards his helmet. Underneath, he sees something. A dim light, pulsating green, flickering on and off indecisively. It is the reactor’s readout screen, stuttering and showing nothing but a garbled mess. Radiation levels have risen incredibly:estimated 783,000 mRem: estimated 7,830 mSv. If Rook were to get a small leak in his spacesuit, the s
uit could still keep atmosphere around him until he gets to safety. However, if there is any leak whatsoever, the suit cannot keep such dangerous doses of radiation from slipping inside.

  “Then I was young, and unafraid,

  When dreams were made and used and wasted.

  There was no ransom to be paiiiiiiiiiid,

  No song un-sung, no wine un-tasted.”

  Using his jets, Rook floats gently away and scans the rest of the cavern. His beam catches sight of another of the drive cores. And another. And another. And soon he is in the midst of the sleeping giants. Machines once used to propel starships across distances previously believed impossible. Engines that enacted forces so titanic that no human at the time understood how exactly they were working, only that the materials and energies being wielded got them from Point A to Point B. Usually.

  “But the tigers come at night,

  With their voices soft as thunder.

  As they tear your hope apart,

  As they turn your dream to shame!”

  A testament to human achievement. And human folly? he wonders, looking upon the drive cores. Rook thinks on it, then rejects it at once. If he believes that, then he has basically fallen for the Cerebs’ assessment of his people.

  His father once told him that the great strategist Sun Tzu advised his students to think like their enemies. “But I wonder if you took my meaning,” his father told him a year or so later, when the topic came up again. Rook was being bullied at school, and started fighting back at the kid, going too far in one instance, hurting him badly. When his father asked him why he did it, Rook said he was doing what he was told, thinking like the bully and giving him a taste of his own medicine. His father shook his head. “I’m glad you listened to me, but there’s also another saying from a guy named Nietzsche, a German philosopher. Nietzsche said, ‘He who fights with monsters might take care, lest he thereby become a monster. For if you gaze too long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’” His father, chess player and history teacher, was always ready with a proverb from some dead person.