by Chad Huskins
Down and down, deeper and deeper. There is organisteel on the floors now, and it leads them to a large hole in the wall, a crudely made tunnel that suffered collapse, and which scans show once led to the outside. Bishop says that there was never a corridor there, and notes there are clear signs of oxidation. “Intense heat made this opening,” he says.
“Maybe there was a tunnel collapse, and someone had to blast their way out,” Rook comments. Bishop says nothing, just analyzes the collapsed tunnel for a few beats and moves on.
The ground trembles once again, but fiercely this time, and as Rook staggers he thinks about the theory Bishop’s people came up with. Wouldn’t want to be here the day this thing hatches.
The inevitable happens when they come to a spot in the cave that has suffered such collapse that it is impossible to pass without a little work. It looks like the original corridor was massive, big enough to fly a couple 747s through before falling victim to earthquake. After so many years neglect and tectonic (Colossus) activity, what did you expect?
The two of them tap their rifles’ attenuators and dial back some of the energy so that they can safely cut through the stone. But some of the boulders are large enough that Rook and Bishop can’t just cut through, so they have to dial Bishop’s Quickener up to full power and stand way back as he blasts through them. After twenty minutes, there’s a passage big enough for them to step through single-file.
Suddenly, Rook gets another chime. This time it’s an energy signature, and it’s straight ahead. “I’m getting something,” he says to Bishop.
“Affirmative.” There is something in the alien’s tone…He knows something. What other secrets can he possibly be keeping?
The explosions caused by the Quickener have left a great deal of dust in the air, so when they come out the other side Rook’s helmet light and gun-mounted light cannot penetrate deeply.
Then, another chime. Rook looks at his HUD, and for a moment he doesn’t believe it, just discounts it immediately. Then, realization begins to dawn. It’s slow at first. He’s still in denial. “I’m getting something. A signal. It’s…it’s an old IFF…”
All at once, Bishop rounds on Rook, grabs him by the arm, and looks down at him. “Friend, you asked before what the worst part was of being captive. The part that threatened my sanity. I will confide in you now. The worst part was that I was frozen, suspended in a tube while the universe and the war went on without me. It was seeing others brought in, put in suspended animation as I was, and then seeing them dissected, their bodies dismembered and analyzed. I saw it all happen on tables in front of my very eyes. All that time I knew the war was being lost without me. I was forced to endure it all. That was my great test. This, I suspect, will be yours.”
“What’re you talking…?” Rook trails off as he looks past the alien’s shoulder, sees what’s lying just behind him, just beyond the clearing dust.
The scene is familiar to us, for we have been here before. At least, some of us have been. The once sleek ship is damaged and dusty. Its landing gear having never fully extended, it crashed horribly as its crew met their inglorious end. A last-ditch effort to hide. A retreat that didn’t pan out. And now we may know what the story of the two collapsed tunnels have been, and, more to the point, the hole that once led outside. Rook’s estimation that someone had tried blasting their way out was wrong. No one needed out, someone needed in. The oxidation marks around the ship’s hull tell the story: a fire that grew out of control, filled this cave with flames and choking smoke, and gave them nowhere to go.
Rook’s eyes travel away from the ship, down and down, deeper and deeper…his two lights touch on the outstretched appendage, a glove melted to the hand that wore it. He followed the arm down to what was left of the charred remains, now half buried beneath rock. It clearly isn’t an Ianeth hand, nor is it a Cereb’s.
Rook steps around Bishop, and walks towards the body. His flashlights touch on other, more familiar forms. He feels his knees buckle. The ground trembles. He almost collapses. He staggers over to another outstretched hand, a corpse begging for help, and as the tears start to flow, so too does the rage, and the mad laughter. He fights to control it, and trips and falls against a boulder. When he does, the light on the end of his Exciter touches on a hull fragment. The first three letters are gone, melted away by high-yield particle beams, but the rest is surprisingly legible and clean: ewinder x42.
“Rook?” Bishop is speaking from light-years away. “Rook, are you all right?”
Mouth agape, eyes unblinking, he pushes himself away from the boulder and staggers around to the other side of the ship, where his foot catches on something and he trips, this time falling all the way to the ground. The ground trembles. He rises to his knees, and sees the blow that probably killed them all. The Sidewinder took a devastating hit right through its centerline, rupturing every important bulk head.
“Rook?”
He forces himself back to his feet, and finishes circling the Sidewinder, then comes around to the alien. The momentary madness has passed, but the hopelessness…will that ever truly be gone?
The ground and walls rumble, then stop. Things go absurdly quiet for a time, or perhaps that’s just us. The alien puts an arm on his shoulder—genuine concern, or just something learned from studying the ship’s files on human culture? Either way, doesn’t it mean that he cares? Rook thinks. Then, on the heels of that, Or does it mean he wants me to think he cares?
It forces him to ask what is real and what isn’t. It forces him to consider that, if Bishop is just simulating human customs, then isn’t he, Rook, a mere simulation, too? A mere echo of what once was? After all, what good are customs if there’s no one left to share them with?
Rook steps away from Bishop, and kneels beside the corpse. He looks at the outstretched hand, a desperate plea for help frozen in time. He reaches out to it and grips his comrade’s hand, at least a decade too late to save him.
5
The two soldiers sit in silence for a time. A human and an Ianeth, two peoples who, it could be argued, were never meant to meet, and should never have met. Their species were too different, their cultures and their goals too incompatible. Case in point, the human seated against the far wall, staring at what is now a tomb for the final group of humans, and the alien…he’s walking around, assessing the damage to the ship, even making comments here and there.
“This ship could actually fly again, though not through the slipstream,” Bishop says. “The destruction wasn’t to her thrusters, but to her warp drives, life-support systems, and the hull. Atmo leaked out, they had to make an emergency landing.” We can see the Ianeth’s mind at work, visualizing in a way that neither human nor Cereb can do. It’s almost cinematic the way he projects the crash simulation against the back of his retina. Calculation merges with imagination, and we can see what he perceives as the most likely scenario.
We see it all. The dead-on hit from some unknown Cereb space force, a final leap into the quantum slipstream to escape. They might’ve made it several hundred light-years before they had to reenter “real” space. They needed someplace to touch down. Pushed to the farthest edges of the galaxy, they were desperate. They might’ve made it, too, Bishop thinks, moving around to her gutted belly. But something followed them. A scan of the belly show the split compristeel, the scorch marks. A sticky hull-bomb attached itself to them before they could make the jump. They probably counted their blessings when they escaped, and the Cerebs let them think that. When they were making their descent, it detonated. They probably never knew what happened, only that they were crashing.
The alien exposes something to us. A moment of wonder, and a pang of…empathy? It’s the first he’s really revealed, but there it is. Bishop is now projecting himself into the crew’s place, just as cinematically as before. There he is, standing on board the Sidewinder as it spiraled out of control, him and his crew not knowing what hit them, thinking how they failed their people, all of them fearing that the
y had let down their entire race…
The sense of failure returns, and it’s difficult for Bishop to contend with, especially when his perfect memory doesn’t allow him to forget his friends and fellow soldiers, all of them screaming for him, some of them reaching for him as the Cerebrals clamped them to the table, and him frozen in place. Did they want me to watch? Did they want me to see? Why? To measure the emotional reaction, no doubt.
Behind him, Rook stirs. Bishop watches as the human stands and walks around, running through another scan of the cave, obviously looking for more answers. Bishop follows him, right up until they come to the largest hole in the ship’s hull, right on her belly where the bomb clung to and then went off. There is a large amount of green foam that has leaked out. Bishop checks the files he downloaded from Rook’s ship, and immediately knows what this foam is. Sidewinders were designed with an inner and outer hull made of compristeel, and a mid-hull made of depleted uranium armor. In the spaces between each hull, there was a layer of aerogel, the lowest-density solid mankind ever created, made of 96% air. It is almost impossible to feel or see, supports about 4,000 times its own weight, and can withstand a direct blast from several pounds of dynamite. It also happens to be the best insulator human beings ever knew. The humans were getting more sophisticated by the day, Bishop reflects. Blazing a trail much like our own. One discovery led to another, gave way to other inventions, prepared them for the stars.
Bishop recalls the Age of Expansion, as his people referred to it. He recalls the first colonies that were ever put on moons and extrasolar planets. Some of those colonies had habitats that he helped design. He recalls the wars, too, and those bloody campaigns set in motion by the Clan of the Spire. His Clan, that of the Hidden Door, saw themselves nearly wiped out, but once that last great war was over his Clan was rewarded for their terrible losses, and were given top positions in the Restoration. As an engineer who fought his way into enemy-laden territories and built structures on the land he took, he was granted many honors.
Everything was settled, he thinks, looking at the cavern he and his comrades bore through the mountain’s side. A time of great enlightenment was upon us. All the Great Wars behind us, we were ready to achieve so much. We could have done great things. Then they came. And just like that, history was diverted.
Still, he can’t say that his people were without fault. He looks at his human companion now, and knows what would’ve happened if their two people had met under different circumstances. It would have been bloody, but I do not think it would have meant total extermination.
“What’s the problem?” says Rook. It’s only now that Bishop realizes he’s been staring. “Waiting for me to crack? Hate to burst your bubble, but you’re stuck with me a mite longer.”
Bishop starts to tell the human that he wasn’t hoping for him to “crack,” but catches himself once he realizes it’s sarcasm. Very difficult to detect, no matter how powerful the sensors. He watches the human a bit longer, gauging him, wondering if the human could handle Ianeth friend-deception rituals. While all Ianeth practiced it, none took it more seriously than the Clan of the Hidden Door.
Bishop’s unmoving face is a perfect mask of composure. When he speaks, he talks of the nuts and bolts of their situation. “She’ll never hold a crew again, and she can’t make the jump to the slipstream, but she could probably handle herself in orbit—”
“She? Did Ianeth speak about ships as females?”
Bishop looks at him. “Negative, friend.”
“‘Negative, friend.’ Is that all you do, mimic the way I talk, the way you learned how human military officers talked?”
Bishop decides to respond to something else. “I’ve noted that recently you’ve spoken of both my and your people in past tense.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Rook snorts, finishing his scan and switching off his OCC. “This is it, isn’t it? A series of tombs and destroyed bases. Us skipping from one derelict base to another, from one empty husk of a station to the next, occasionally stumbling upon the debris left by our annihilators.” He shakes his head ruefully. “Ya know, if you’d’ve told me years ago that I would someday contemplate suicide, I would’ve said you’re full of it. But I’m trapped now. Can’t even commit suicide. If I did, I’d be committing genocide. Ha!” He suddenly hauls off and punches the Sidewinder’s hull, hard, and the sound of metal on metal echoes throughout the cavern.
“I do not think it would be wise to give up now—”
Rook flashes him a look. “Who said anything about giving up?” He takes a few steps back, and looks over the ship. “Nah. Nah, you mistook me. I said I was contemplating suicide. More like…a theory?” He laughs, and no amount of research can tell Bishop if Rook’s laugh is healthy or not, but he postulates it’s a bit of both, and we happen to know he’s right. “We’re the last, Bishop. You’ve seen how much they dogged just little ol’ me in that asteroid field. They’ve weeded us all out, taken no prisoners, made no exceptions, granted no reprieves.”
Bishop tries to intercede, tries to inject hope where sees it dwindling. “There may be others—”
“There isn’t. I can feel it. It’s just us. Just us.” He shakes his head. “But we’re not giving up. That would only prove to them that their ‘calculations’ were correct about us. That we were weak and not suited for ‘their’ galaxy of resources. But see, they think in terms of raw resources. That’s how they think. But I look at this—this destroyed, burnt husk—and I see somethin’ else.”
“What do you see?”
“A Turk.”
“What is a Turk?”
Rook doesn’t answer immediately. “Minds made for meddling. You know, that’s what we were told when we were taken into the Academy. We were the best pilots, the prodigies I guess you could say. They took us into the Sidewinder Program and told us that we were chosen because our psych profiles suggested we all had ‘minds made for meddling.’ A kind of loose, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants attitude with a ‘slight inclination towards subversion.’ That’s how they put it,” he laughs. “We were chosen because we were tinkerers, and because we liked to take things apart to see how things worked. We demonstrated the ‘bias for action’ that the military is always looking for in leaders and lone operatives.” He looks at the Ianeth. “You got a mind made for meddlin’, Bishop?”
“What do you propose?” he asks, feeling himself as invigorated as he’s ever been when standing before one of his squad leaders. This aspect of Rook…well, he finds it most agreeable.
“We make a stand. Here. Right here. They’re on our tails, and it won’t be too long before they find us.”
“We don’t have sufficient weapons to suppress a Cereb luminal, much less a fleet if one shows.”
“No,” Rook says, stepping beside the destroyed ship and patting the wounded hull. “But we got resources.”
“I’m listening.”
“Oh no. I’m not giving you the details until I know that I can absolutely trust you.”
If Bishop could give a smile that was anywhere near complicitous, he would. Now here is a quality friend. Proven once before in a great battle, and now proven as a cunning and conniving friend. The Clan of the Hidden Door would find this human a promising initiate. “All right, then. But let me ask you this. Why here? Can you at least tell me that?”
Rook nods. “Where else we gonna go? There’s just two of us, Bishop. We’re soldiers. If we were smithies I’d say we run and hide somewhere, dig ourselves in deep and try to, I dunno, build something for future races to remember us by, to warn them about the Cerebs. If we were sculptors, I’d says we carve some statues to commemorate our races and their legacies. But we’re soldiers, and so I can do something else to help future races. I discovered the principle of four on my own—no need for false modesty here.”
Bishop cants his head to the side. “You’ve mentioned this ‘principle of four’ previously, but never explained. What is it?”
“What? Oh. It was just an observ
ation, a guess really. I actually had a chat with a Cerebral trooper, back in the asteroid field. He told me, ‘four is everywhere, in all things.’ It got me thinking about our opponents and how deeply the number four is rooted in their culture.”
“How was this useful?”
“Well, this wasn’t really my point, but you know how targeting computers work, right? I mean, what makes locking on to a target so difficult?”
“There are many variables. All used chiefly in predicting the future position of the target.”
“Right, exactly. So, on a hunch, I asked the Sidewinder’s computer to begin running simulations of my battles with Cerebral skirmishers. I had it calculate targeting trajectories based on only the four best retreating lines during engagements. And, well, after some tinkering, it plotted perfect firing solutions.”
“This was how you beat them at Magnum Collectio?”
Rook scratches his head, “Well, yes and no. It certainly helped. But that wasn’t my point. My point was that I did beat them. I did it on my own, and I gave them their first defeat, at least that we know of. Together, you and I escaped from their ship, and we’ve evaded them so far.”
Bishop takes a step closer. “Go on.”
“We’ve defeated them once, Bishop. We did. I destroyed their ship and we escaped together. But that’s just once. For them, it might not mean much. But twice?” He smiles. “Twice isn’t nothing. Two defeats matter. Two starts a pattern. And, hey, two is half of four,” he says suggestively. “And didn’t you say we needed to be ‘blooded’ together?”
“I did, indeed,” Bishop says. Then, for a long while, nothing is said. Bishop mulls this over. Despite the fact that Rook’s new verve is heartening, the Ianeth does have a few reservations. To articulate these concerns, he explains, “I was a warrior-engineer among my people, built for combat and digging in before rebuilding, so my intentions are to fight, of course, but also to dig in and build, to restructure, to restore to proper working order. Making a stand like this…what makes you so confident it can work?”
