The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  A few other odds and ends need to be seen to. When finally he feels the Sidewinder is doing okay enough to limp around, he decides to move her. But not away from the surviving Cereb luminal, as one might think. No. He sets the autopilot on a direct course for S4: back to the mother ship.

  As the Sidewinder makes its approach, Rook descends to the lower holds, checks the torpedo pods to make sure they’re still working. Once used to fire explosives, and then used to shoot his backup supplies down onto Queen Anne, it now only has one worthy use left.

  With a heavy heart, Rook returns to Badger’s room. He checks in on the old man, almost wishing that some of the damage would have killed him. He remembers Badger’s words to him. “Why don’t you…just…pull the plug?”

  Why didn’t I? Rook thinks, looking in on him. Then, he realizes it was for this. He didn’t pull the plug on Badger because of the old man’s own maxim. “Keep up daily exercises…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 don’t quit!”

  It is the part about managing resources that holds Rook’s attention now. He approaches the stasis tube, hovers over it. “It’s time, Badge,” he says through his helmet. “You ready?” The old man makes no move…except a twitch at the side of his lips. Is that a smile? It’s hard for even ghosts to tell.

  14

  The Engineers are all standing on the lowermost level of the mother ship when they get the word. A group of seekers has spotted a human body. It is out in the open, floating in a spacesuit with limited oxygen. When they come upon it, they prepare to annihilate it…until the Conductor sends out the command to return the body to him in one piece. He wants to see it for himself. Perhaps dissection will be helpful, as they have done with countless other anomalous life forms.

  The body is retrieved by a squadron of skirmishers, and as soon as they return they are given clear passage through one of the few remaining undamaged docking bays. The body is taken quickly up to the Researchers, and as soon as he is able, the Conductor leaves the repairs in the hands of his Engineers and Architects, and their many repair machines.

  The devastation is catastrophic on most levels. Word has already been sent back to High Command, and to the Elders, of course. They wish to speak with the Conductor. He believes he knows what they wish to discuss. For now, though, he will pretend he doesn’t.

  By the time he has reached the Researchers’ level, the Conductor notices the looks on the faces of his crew. Well, maybe not the looks, but something in their eyes tells him he’s lost them. And once a Conductor loses the respect of his crew, he can be sure that he’s lost his usefulness to his Elders. However, his encoding, both genetic and otherwise, guarantees that he will do his duty until the very end.

  When he comes upon the body of the Phantom, the Conductor is anxious to see. The body has been handled delicately, as per his request, and the suit is severely charred. A leak in the air tanks caused death by asphyxiation. “Probably ejected as his ship started coming apart,” one Researcher suggests. Another Researcher removes the helmet. The Conductor looks over at the body, and is supremely unimpressed. For our part, we are only vexed, though we might have guessed.

  The old man’s eyes are closed. He looks peaceful, as if he’s just gone off to a nice retirement. The Conductor supposes he has. There’s the hint of a smile on the old man’s face, but that probably has something to do with the asphyxiation. At least, the Conductor believes so.

  He stares down at the corpse, even as the datafeed gives him continuous updates about the dead and wounded, about those outside issuing distress signals and being gathered up, and about the state their supermassive fabricator is in—if they can’t get it up and running, they will not be able to conduct the repairs necessary to leave this system. That, more than anything else, worries him. Does he even want to leave now, knowing what he knows about his fate, knowing that he will be usurped by another Conductor?

  None of these thoughts prevent him from doing what he was built to do. The datafeed continues to scroll on. Duty beckons. A couple more survivors are pulled in down below, many of them badly hurt.

  The Conductor leaves the Phantom with the Researchers. Let them unriddle the mystery of what happened here. He has more pressing concerns.

  Distress calls are coming in here and there, a few outside of the ship, while most of them are from within. Numerous Researchers, Engineers, Architects, Repairers and Cleaners are trapped on various levels. Almost all are critically wounded.

  The engines’ main power cells are all damaged. As far as fuel goes, a great deal of their pycnodeuterium has leaked out into the Deep. If they cannot get a lot of repair work done, and soon, they will not be able to re-gather this precious resource from the vacuum all around them.

  Hours later, another distress signal comes from somewhere deep in the asteroid field, one of their brethren floating some seven miles away from the mother ship. A pilot who survived by some miracle. The Conductor dispatches a rescue team in skirmishers, hardly giving it any thought. The Phantom in the Deep is dead. It is finally time to put their mission behind them, and conduct search and rescue.

  We go now to another part of the asteroid field. Here, we find the skirmishers gathering up their compatriot. The signal he is giving from his emergency transmitter is coming from beneath another chaotic conglomerate of debris, consisting of chunks of asteroid, and bits of a destroyed skirmisher. Just the tail end, nothing else. How he has survived is not for them to contemplate, they merely gather him.

  The body floats there, like an insect suspended in syrup, moving so slowly that he doesn’t appear to be moving at all. And the suit he is wearing looks…wrong, somehow. It looks a little too small for him. Scans show that it is indeed a Cereb, one of their fellows, but some of the scans seem conflicting. The heart signs don’t seem right, and neither do the pulmonary functions. One of the skirmishers opens its lower bay, and a Cereb pilot floats out to recover his fellow. They ask the pilot a few questions, but he doesn’t respond. Once inside, they lay him on the floor. Removing his helmet, they discover why their fellow isn’t responding to their questions. He is badly disfigured. The bones beneath the face have obviously been pulverized, the eyes look to be sagging in their sockets, and the nose is almost completely missing. He’s barely breathing.

  Something has led us here. As ghosts, we smell something strange. A madness all too familiar.

  The squadron heads back to the mother ship, and after dropping their compatriot off with the Healers, they are once again off to look for more survivors. The Healers run scans of the body, and then move him to an emergency medical pod. Orders are issued up to the Conductor, who is busy filing all of this activity and passing out commands.

  The Healers check for vital signs, and get the same strange readings that the skirmisher pilots got. They agree that this patient has suffered some sort of terrible hit from the explosion, perhaps was too close at detonation, tried to outrun it, and had his skirmisher collapse on him like a can. He even looks like he might have been tortured. One Healer hypothesizes that this might, in fact, be the Leader of the team of operatives that was lost to the Phantom. “Perhaps he’s been tortured, and barely escaped when the Sidewinder was destroyed?” this one asks.

  A quick scan of the face shows that there is a high probability that this is the case. They all agree this is a priority patient, and that they ought to move him immediately.

  They get halfway down a corridor on their way to an emergency medical bay, when suddenly, a blade is flash-forged in the injured Cereb’s hands. The blade slashes out and tears open the throats of all four of the Healers before they can even orient themselves to the anomaly.

  The would-be injured Cereb rolls out of the medical pod, stands shakily to his feet. He reaches up to his jaw, and, with three quick, messy jerks, rips his entire face off. Underneath, Rook is covered in the connective tissues and so
me of the malformed bone structures rendered from the omni-kit. Scanning the Leader’s face and body, then slicing his body into tiny pieces with the plasma torch in order to feed them to the mini-fabricator, worked well enough to form the basic tissues and structures necessary for a workable layer of flesh, eyes, muscle and sinew.

  It is not sacrifice what we as Cereb soldiers do, the Leader told him upon their first meeting. Efficiency is key to us, and we make sure that nothing stands in the way of it. For instance, my people will not stop and search for me or my team, not until they find you. To waste even a scrap of our soldiers or pilots on search and rescue before we have acquired our target would be wasteful.

  An exploitable piece of intelligence, ten years too late for humanity, but not for Rook.

  It worked. It actually worked. Back inside King Henry VIII, Rook worked with the omni-kit to create the facial structure of the Leader. Then, he emptied out the cooler holding all of his and Badger’s blood and spare organs. He froze the flesh to preserve it, and then, just as the mother ship was approaching, he donned it. The plan was in flux at that point; had the Sidewinder been captured and boarded, he would have attempted a different ruse, so he left the disguise on while playing his game on the sectorboard.

  As it turns out, he is now able to utilize his resources to a different outcome. Not all ploys are like chess. Some are like jazz; you improvise, you listen to your instincts, and make the rules up as you go.

  Badger’s body was fired from a torpedo tube towards the mother ship, and it was bait they couldn’t refuse. The last human in the universe. Still ensconced in the Sidewinder’s sensor shroud, Rook watched from afar as they took his last friend and confidant away. Then, he waited a few hours, and slipped away from the Sidewinder, leaving it on autopilot and connecting it by remote to his wrist-mounted micropad. The OBET he took off the Leader summoned his rescuers.

  The uniform Rook is wearing is that of the Leader’s, fixed (thanks to the omni-kit) and tweaked so as to feed him the atmosphere desired by a human. Since Cerebs are a deal larger than humans, he tried to fill it out by wearing his Tango armor and Stacksuit underneath it all. Now, he peels the Leader’s suit away. Then he peels the rest of the fabricated flesh and sinew away from his head, neck, and arms. The disguise got him this far, but it is unlikely it will get him very far through the rest of the ship. But for now, he stands as the first human being on a Cereb vessel.

  The layout isn’t at all what he expected. Lots of tubular rooms and corridors, with lights oscillating on the ceiling in a way that is unappealing to the human eye. It’s dark in here, but that’s probably because of all the damage sustained, he figures. That, or it has to do with Cereb sensitivity to light.

  There are markings on the wall, presumably the Cerebral alphabet. No humans were ever able to find their true writing system, only digital codes and commands listed in their captured computers. Indeed, some of the folks at IGS believed the Cerebs no longer had an alphabet, but it appears that they were wrong: no matter how advanced a civilization gets, the fundamentals are not negotiable.

  Rook bends to rifle through the Leader’s discarded spacesuit, and finds his spare gear stored away in pieces. His sidearm is easy to reassemble. So is an old particle beam rifle gathered from the debris of a destroyed skirmisher many years ago. A small pouch of thermite and plasma charges clip nicely to his tactical belt. The helmet, which he shoved into the crotch of the suit where there is ample room, snaps into place without a hiccup. He flips on the suits internal atmosphere. This ship is damaged, and there’s no telling when and where it will spring another atmospheric leak.

  Next, Rook searches the bodies of the Healers he killed, never finding one weapon among them. Why would they be armed? he thinks. No mistrust between them, and no reason to suspect any unauthorized persons ever being on their ship. Rook muses that the Cerebs are like a city council that wouldn’t put a stop sign at an intersection until some kid got hit by a car on the way to school. It’s never happened before, so why plan for it?

  Rook moves to the end of the hall. He hears a few strange noises coming from each corridor, like delicate little wind chimes. It takes him a moment to realize they might just be the Cereb form of alarms. They’re very sensitive to textures, sounds, and certain images. Soft chimes may be all they need to let them know something’s wrong, not blaring alarms.

  Rook clips his sidearm to his thigh, and brings up the particle beam rifle, which he’s attached a shoulder strap to for convenience. He moves down the corridors with the rifle at low-ready, eyes scanning the dark corridors for any movements. He uses his micropad to follow large energy readings, assuming they will lead him to some important piece of tech, such as energy storage compartments or the warship’s considerable engines. Besides the enormous readings of residue all around, indicating the oxidization of many fires recently put out, Rook detects a large ionic surge, and sets the micropad to follow that.

  He passes a few smoky passages, and a number of broken corpses, obviously flung against walls, having their bones pulverized when King Henry VIII went off. He steps around one moaning individual, and stomps on his long neck, breaking it. Down another passage, he passes a few rooms, all of which have doors shut and sealed.

  Now, as he moves, Rook feels a surge of adrenaline like never before. He isn’t smiling, but the glee is there, deep inside, threatening to bubble over. It is a moment of vindication. Vengeance. He has done the impossible. His enemies lay broken at his feet, and now they know. They know that they are not indestructible. They know they are not perfect. They know they misjudged humanity.

  They know.

  Rook reminds himself to stay focus. It isn’t over yet. He begins identifying what look like key structural components, and searches for prime areas to place his thermite and plasma charges. At the Academy, Sidewinder pilots specialized in sabotage, which covers the studies of computer systems, analysis of structural weaknesses, security gaps, and of course demolitions. Typically the focus is to damage and demoralize enemy forces by wasting their materials, manpower, and time. Sometimes, a sudden opportunity arises, and a game of sabotage must be improvised. Advanced SODD training (Subversion, Obstruction, Disruption, and Destruction) focused on having a keen eye towards structural weakness.

  Finding such a weakness within a Cerebral ship is, not surprisingly, hard to do. They obviously have their quadruple redundancies, and have spent thousands of years calculating, examining, experimenting, and coming up with the ideal warship. However, the King’s destruction has caused some obvious problems, which he might exploit: cracks in the walls, ruptures around major bulkheads, and busted pipes running horizontally on the ceilings and walls.

  Rook scans the floor, walls, and ceiling with his micropad. These corridors are made of complex alloys that Man never made. He can measure their density, porousness, and mass, all of which tells him that, while incredibly strong and pliable, they are still susceptible to the kinds of charges he’s brought.

  He has a total of ten specialized plasma charges that will detonate with the power of about fifty sticks of TNT. The thermite charges, of which he has six, will cause relatively minor explosions, say about two sticks’ worth of TNT, but will spread superheated chemicals along surfaces, hopefully melting the complex alloys the ship is made of and causing significant structural damage. Since these alloys appear to be so strong, though, Rook decides to place most of his explosives along one wall, focusing their might and power in one location.

  Using his micropad, a 3D model, and a positioning system that allows him to know his relative location inside the ship, Rook moves through the smoky corridors until he comes to a hallway that looks to have suffered immense structural damage. Portions of the ceiling have caved in. It also just so happens that not just a few feet below him is where the Doc, Grumpy, and the warbot dished out so much damage.

  Sometimes, the universe throws you a line, Rook muses. Or maybe it just likes an underdog.

  It takes him two minutes to s
et up his charges along the cracked seams of a bulkhead, synchronize their timers, and cover them up with random debris lying in the hall. Rook tries to give it the helter-skelter look it needs, then moves along down another corridor, still following the massive energy readings.

  At last, he comes to an open doorway. It appears that four security doors were meant to be shut here, but something must have happened in King Henry VIII’s explosion that caused the first three to get lodged midway down, and the last door to descend only a quarter of the way. Rook ducks underneath, steps down another short, tubular corridor, until it dead-ends at an open doorway into what appears to be some sort of engineering room. He sidles the wall to the right of the door, listening to the harmonics of Cereb speech being called out inside.

  I guess not all communication between them is done by computer, Rook thinks. Back at ASCA, a few IGS intelligence officers had presented brief lectures on how an emerging theory held that the Cerebrals no longer communicated verbally between one another. Having worked out some of their psychology, and hearing the strange, singsong words being hollered out inside the room, Rook now knows more about his enemy than all of humanity ever did.

  Rook takes a deep breath. This is it. He runs through a mental checklist. He smiles suddenly at a random memory. “I got this, Ma.”

  He taps in a ten-digit code into his micropad, which should be relaying the message to a trio of mid-space transmitters he deposited a few minutes before ejecting from the Sidewinder, the same kind of transmission relay stations that he put along the King’s surface so that he could send the signal to the detonators he placed at the King’s core. These mid-space transmitters send the signal to the Sidewinder. It is on its way.

  “Show time,” he says, thinking of Cowboy, Grass, Badger, and all the others. That was something they used to say right out of the gates, when going off to meet the enemy.