by Chad Huskins
Thor’s Anvil sends out another great boom—thunder or eruption?—and brings him back to the present. The door behind Rook slides open, and in walks one of the aliens Hawking would probably have warned him to stay away from. Rook taps a key on the console and pauses the music player, which has moved on to another Beach Boys classic, “Help Me Rhonda.”
“Are we there yet?” says Bishop. Rook looks at him for a beat, then snorts out a laugh.
“What is humorous?”
“Nothing. It’s just…it’s an old expression. Back on Earth, ya know. ‘Are we there yet?’ Kids would annoy their parents to death on big road trips by asking that over and over. Adults got tired of answering, so…” He trails off. “One o’ those small things, you know…thought I’d never hear anybody say it again, that’s all. Didn’t figure I’d hear anybody say anything ever again, z’matter of fact.”
Bishop just stares at him.
Rook shakes off the reverie, and his eyes range across the sensor screens. “Anyhow, we’re not there yet, but we’re getting close. Wanna help guide me down to the anterior door, give it a knock?”
“Affirmative, friend.”
Rook watches Bishop carefully as the alien slips into the co-pilot’s seat. The alien looks over the controls. Rook is still fascinated by the alien, because while the Ianeth remains stoic most times, he moves with insect-like speed and precision at others.
Bishop begins checking possible approach vectors and feeding them to the main console. Each vector takes them towards the same nook halfway up a mountainside.
“It’s there?” Rook asks.
“It’s there,” Bishop confirms.
A loud boom of thunder carries through the ship as Rook looks over each vector, chooses one, and begins the descent. The two of them work together mostly in silence as they experience minor turbulence, with just a few words here and there to confirm adjustments. “Heavy wind shift,” Rook says at one point. “Affecting delta-v.” That’s a change in velocity.
“Advise parabola,” Bishop replies, his hands moving over controls with those quick, insectile movements.
Rook complies without comment, setting them on a new parabolic approach towards the ground. “Activating torch,” he says, tapping a key that brings up the Sidewinder’s rarely-used searchlight—the basketball-sized dome extends from the ship’s belly and shoots out a wide 100,000-watt light, bringing the closest thing to daylight Kali has seen in a billion of years. It splashes across the large notch in the mountainside, revealing a patch of ground that looks a little like a short runway leading into an immense cavern. Ashy clouds whip in front of the viewport, so Rook checks his sensors to confirm what’s happening outside. Though the sensors are getting a little interference, all seems to be as it appears. “Extending landing gear.” The Sidewinder suddenly jumps, like it hit a speed bump. “Compensating for crosswind,” he says when they’re forty feet off the ground.
“Copy compensation,” says Bishop. “Sonar says ground is stable.”
“Copy that. Activating narrow-beam.” The Sidewinder’s sensor array is composed of sixteen high-powered narrow-beam antennas. Each antenna takes five hundred measurements per second. This helps understand altitude, to allow for precision landing. “Touchdown in three, two, one…” says Rook. Eeeeeasy does it.
When they land, it’s a little rough. The Sidewinder hits the ground and skids a bit, then jerks to one side suddenly, pressing Rook and Bishop against their seat restraints. Rook does a brief review of the sensors and cams. “We’re good. Ground just gave way a little bit under the forward port landing strut.” He looks at Bishop, who is going through his part of the cycle-down process. “I thought you said the ground was stable.”
“No, I said sonar scans said that,” Bishop says, getting out of his seat and heading aft.
Rook sighs and nods, starts cycling down the ship. “You ready for a little reconnaissance?”
“Affirmative, friend.”
“Let’s do a last check of the ship’s systems, then meet up in the cargo bay in ten minutes.”
“Affirmative, friend.” Bishop is at the door.
Rook swivels his chair around. “Was it another test? Was I supposed to double-check your scan?”
The door shunts open. Bishop pauses in the doorway. “If it was a test, I would never tell you. It would be…inappropriate.” He steps out, and the door closes behind him.
The Sidewinder creaks a little, settling and sighing. The engines groan to a quiet. Rook drums his fingers on the armrest, then shakes his head and removes his straps, and finishes cycling her down. As he does, a thought occurs to him. If I’m supposed to double-check his scan, then I’ll have the Sidewinder run a deeper sonar scan. It takes a few minutes, but when he’s done he’s rerouted some power from nonessential systems into the scan and dedicated a few subroutines for analyzing and filing the data.
When he’s finished, Rook glances out the forward view, and takes in the runway that was carved into the mountainside long ago, and then beyond at the immense darkness of the cave, the dimensions of which the torchlight could only partially illuminate for all the interference of stray, ever-moving dust clouds. The imagery…it suddenly reminds him of his and his dad’s first trip towards Kansas City, getting turned back because of the thick ash clouds that got thicker on the ground and piled higher in the sky every day.
The stories came in sketches, never with any complete narrative. Communications with Grennel 112c went out soon, some scant survivors from Grennel’s moon showed up hundreds of light-years away on Dorvin and told the story of chevron-shaped ships in the sky, then fire spreading across the world. Vutes 295e had a similar fate. Sagan 331a was just gone, nobody had heard anything from anybody there in weeks.
Panic spread across the remaining worlds. The destruction was getting closer to the Sol System: home. What was it? The religious-minded believed it was an act of an angry god or gods. The rational-minded saw the pattern and knew it could not be just freak occurrences of Nature—someone was systematically wiping them out, starting with the outer systems and moving inward, giving them no place to run.
The first images of the alien horde came from images captured on older satellites, forgotten and left adrift in Proxima Centauri, just 4.24 light-years away from Earth. It came across all QEC channels. The government tried to control the spread of the images, in order to control panic, but it just wasn’t possible. Quantum-entanglement communication had just started becoming commonplace, it was in almost every home in every system. Instantaneous communication had backfired on the government. Panic in the streets. Religions tossed into a frenzy. WE ARE NOT ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE! WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?
“There’s going to be a draft,” his father told him when the first images of the immense starships hit the net. “We’re in a war now. Nobody’s saying it yet, but what else do you call it?” His father looked at him, then gathered him up on his arms and held him tighter than he had even as a boy. “Oh, God! Not now. We’ve come so far.” Though their family had struggled with the farm and was just starting to make headway in the world, he had a feeling the old man meant all of us, all of mankind had come so far, not just their family.
He saw it all coming to an end. A real end. Not just a setback for humanity, but a conclusion.
His father was a farmer, and was one of those souls who felt a kinship with the earth. A man who had taken stock of what the planet held and what the planet actually meant in the grand scheme of things. A harbor. A place where life might always exist, at least for billions of years, whether it was human or not.
In those next few weeks, he saw the world and all of humanity change drastically. His father presaged the draft, which happened when an emergency session of the United Nations put forth a proposal to the Collegium Planetarum—the unifying council of planetary and extrasolar governments—to begin conscripting men and women over the age of eighteen into active duty. It was a proposal accepted posthaste.
The Aeronautics a
nd Space Combat Academy, an American-British agency once used when nations still battled one another frequently and took some of their axes to grind them in the stars, had in recent years become little used, and therefore little funded. Countless military projects were mothballed. ASCA made greater strides in R&D projects than they did space combat innovations. However, when the time came, ASCA was the most prepared of all agencies for the kind of combat required, and, as it happened, many of the fruits of their projects saw use in the brief war. The Interplanetary Space Force was solidified soon after, but ISF’s legacy was a short one, and its last remnant was Rook.
However, before the war got in full gear, something odd happened. After so much planetary destruction, three months passed without incident. Without so much as a peep. There were no more attacks, and no more sightings of the alien horde or their ships. This increased the fear of the average person tenfold. Billions of their loved ones were dead, and it was clear the aliens had the tech to keep coming. So why weren’t they?
“It’s not over,” his father said while sitting out on the porch late one night, sipping his beer and staring up at the sky.
“What do you think’s gonna happen?” he asked.
“People will turn on each other,” he said matter-of-factly.
The young man snorted. “What? Why would they do that?”
“Give it time,” the old man said simply. “Paranoia. People will start convincing themselves it was a hoax. The attacks will be blamed on terrorists. The government will need scapegoats, and the die-hard ‘patriots’ will be all too eager to oblige. Give it time,” he said, taking another sip of beer. “Eventually, we’ll have us another attack. People will suspect terrorists, and so will many in the government. No one will know what to think.”
“Then what?”
His father didn’t hesitate. “The highest possible alert, DEFCON 1, will be put into place. For a long time, the Pentagon has had a Joint Evacuations Program for just such a contingency. The helicopters and jets will scramble for classified radiation-proof COG locations, hollowed out mountains and so forth, most o’ them off-world. Martial law may be considered. Here in the U.S. they’ll enact Operation SCATANA, which shuts down America’s airspace, like they did on 9/11. They’ll seal off the country, all ports and harbors shut down, the borders closed. Border patrols and Customs will be checking for terrorists and how they got into the country. Public transportation will shut down. The United Nations will start to divide. United we stand, divided…well, you know.”
At the time, he stared at his father and wondered. It was easy to think him a little too paranoid. And he did. After all, his entire life had passed without much incident, no major wars or famines, no worldwide pandemics, only advancements in technology that made life easier and easier, making his work on the farm easier and giving him more time to study, read his comic books, and play in chess tournaments. “I think we’re gonna be all right, Dad,” he told the old man.
Rook now recalls his father turning to him, smiling faintly, and saying, “You’re probably right.” He now realizes there wasn’t much hope inside the old man. The smile was for his son, to encourage him to keep clinging on to his own faint hope. He didn’t believe I was right for a second. He knew. In his bones he knew it. If only he could speak to his father now, ask him for guidance, ask him what he thought his and Bishop’s next move ought to be. If only he was a man of faith who believed in spirits, he might try and talk to him…
A soft chime. He looks down and checks the diagnostics screen. The repair bot has just sent a message directly to his micropad: the main drive’s energy attenuator is on the fritz. The show never stops for glitches, he thinks, rising to his feet. Those were his father’s words, used whenever a piece of farm equipment broke down. On his way to the door, Rook wonders if the energy attenuator is a real problem, or if it’s something Bishop conjured. He hates that he has to think this way now, but he needs all the friends he could get.
Always know your teammates thoroughly before trusting them. Now here came some of Badger’s advice, creeping up from the past. Sure, easy for the old man to say, but he never encountered the Cerebrals. If he had, and if he had found himself left with no other help besides an Ianeth, Rook is willing to bet ol’ Badge would’ve reevaluated his philosophy.
When Rook opens the door to the cargo bay, he finds the Ianeth already there and checking his load-out. Otherwise, he’s ready to go. Bishop’s techno-organic body does not require him to put on a suit before exiting the ship—according to him, Ianeth “hatched” ready to survive in space and on any world that did not exceed 537° F and 6.4 g’s of gravity.
Rook removes his Nomex flightsuit, tosses it into a storage locker. It takes him a moment to pull on his slim-fitting Stacksuit, and then pull the Tango armor on, and the atmo suit over that. He checks his left gauntlet—this last month, and with Bishop’s help, Rook worked out a way to link the Cereb omni-kit to the OCC (operational control center) on his glove. He taps a few keys on his wrist, activates both the STACS and the armor.
“Everything good systems-wise?” he asks Bishop.
“There were some endothermic/exothermic fluctuations.”
He nods. “Another valve that needs replacing, huh?”
“Affirmative, friend.”
From the storage locker, Rook now removes a particle-beam weapon that Bishop built using scraps taken from Shiva-154e, right after the fight at Magnum Collectio. It is a compact, snub-nosed thing about the size of a human assault rifle, black, lightweight, with a curved energy-pack receiver, and a grip and trigger suitable for human hands. The alien said it was as close to a classic Ianeth design as he could get, capable of dialing down to two gigajoules and as dialing up as high as twelve gigajoules—about twice that of a barrel of oil when combusted. Bishop dubbed it simply the Exciter.
Thunder rolls outside.
As he makes his way to the bay door, Rook checks the particle hand cannon—the ISF-issued pistol strapped to his right thigh in a tactical holster—and gives Bishop a thumbs up. The alien learned long ago what that meant. “Sealing cargo bay,” Rook says, tapping a few keys on his wrist. Atmosphere is drained from the room. “Disengaging arti-grav field.” Artificial gravity switches off, and at once they both feel the pull of Kali’s extra .2 g. The Stacksuit compensates with back, neck and leg support, but the pressure on the body as a whole isn’t lessened. Rook is just happy that Kali’s gravity is suitable enough for humans—it could just as easily have been 5 g’s, since the Ianeth had no concern for that.
“Alright, stick close,” says Rook, just as the ramp is descending and the first waves of ash clouds come whipping into the bay. The winds are at twenty-two miles an hour and now come roaring inside, but since there is no atmosphere differential, there is no suction of air one way or the other. They step down the ramp slowly. Rook’s Exciter hangs from his shoulder by its strap.
However, he notices Bishop’s rifle is in hand, in a ready-low position. The Ianeth’s rifle is a bigger, meaner-looking thing than Rook’s snub-nosed rifle. It has a longer, more twisted barrel, which Bishop said allowed for more power. Inside of it were exotic matter beams that accelerated particles, amplified and focused them into a single beam, with numerous focusing magnetic lenses and coils pushing the energy down a dozen particle channelers. He started building various versions of it weeks ago—the creature hardly needed sleep—and this is his most completed model. It can be dialed down to three gigajoules, and dialed up to thirty-six gigajoules. He calls it the Quickener.
“Expecting trouble?” Rook asks warily.
The alien looks at him. “Why do you ask?”
He points to the rifle. “You’re holding it like you mean it.”
“I am the last of my kind. The Cerebral Calculators intend to subtract me. It is not usually in our nature to be caught unprepared.” He adds, “The last time we made that mistake, it cost us everything. Now, I am everything.”
Rook nods, then takes the lead. As soon
as his foot touches Kali, the planet seems to reject him. The world trembles. A temblor, just enough to be noticed. Through the vibrations in his feet and suit he can hear the faint rumble, like a long-dormant leviathan suddenly waking from a long sleep. Behind him, Rook hears one of the Sidewinder’s support struts squeak just a bit.
He looks at Bishop.
“It’s fine,” the alien says. “Earthquakes are incredibly common here, as I said.”
But Rook now has reason to suspect everything his partner says. “How powerful were the quakes on average when you were last here?”
The alien pauses for a moment. We ghosts may know that the alien is searching for the right way to convey power in terms Rook will understand. “The largest ever approached nine points on your Richter scale.”
“Jesus,” he said. “That’s cataclysmic.”
“Affirmative, but we never had need to build on the surface, and we kept the underground installations away from most major fault lines.”
“Most?”
Bishop gives a shrug, a human gesture to convey relaxed admission. “We had to remain near some fault lines so as to make our position more precarious, thus making it not an ideal place to hide, and thus more likely to confound the Cerebs.”
That notion settles in with Rook. He knows that, before their end, the Ianeth were onto the same train of thought that he had developed after so much time inside Magnum Collectio. Deception and obfuscation became the only tactic that worked to prolong their species, they just didn’t develop battle strategies using that philosophy fast enough to hold any sway in the war.
Rook checks his OCC, brings up another atmospheric reading, and then connects to the Sidewinder’s computer and commands it to jet spent gases, and then start filtering in some of the scant oxygen from Kali’s air. The circulators, recyclers, and air-exchangers can only recycle the same oxygen for so many years. Now that he is on the rare world where the ship won’t be pulverized by extreme heat or gravity, and also has some small oxygen content, he might as well take advantage. Every little bit helps us last a little longer, he thinks.
