The Immortal Game (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  Rook’s lips turns up in a subtle smile. “A long time ago on my world, there was a group of warriors, called the Spartans. They conducted a famous battle at a place called Thermopylae, and for three days, three hundred of them held off an army of a million Persian invaders. Now, they were all killed, sure, but they made the Persians suffer so badly that their morale was shattered, and it helped other Greeks defeat the Persians soon after.” He nods. “I have to believe there is a story like this one on your world, too.”

  Bishop doesn’t have to think long to come up with it. “Far back in the Age of Steel, there was such an event. The Clan of the Frozen Hands, they were called. Twenty-seven of their warriors held a fortress during the largest siege of the Age, and for thirty-two days repelled the armies of the Clan of the Daggers. In the end, twenty-five of them died, and the last two men standing held a corridor for two more days, all by themselves, stacking up the corpses of their enemies and friends and making it impossible for more than three or four of their enemies to enter at a time. With their, eh…I guess you would call them swords, they killed almost a hundred warriors by themselves before the Daggers filled the hallway with oil and they were burned alive.”

  Rook smiles. “Ya see? Two warriors. We’ve been pushed to the limits of our galaxy. They’ve pushed us so far there’s almost no place left to go. It’s just this place and us two. Two warriors. Two starts a pattern, my friend.”

  “Two starts a pattern,” says Bishop. “So then, let us be Spartans.”

  Rook nods. “Let us be the Clan of the Frozen Hands,” he says, offering another smile.

  The agreement has been made. While Bishop is more than a little curious about Rook’s ultimate plan, this emboldens the Ianeth more than he can say. Perhaps a millennia of being frozen, and some of that time being spent watching his people be dissected alive, has made him as desperate as Rook. But he also feels one more thing needs to be said. “Those warriors, the Spartans and the Clansmen, they were all fighting for something. For someone. I think it’s important you keep that in mind, and not lose hope that there are others, or else your focus and passion may wane again.”

  Rook’s smile wavers. “Why do you bring that up?”

  “Because, while I’m enticed by your vigor, it has to be well placed. At least, that is the way it is with my people, and I believe it’s the same with yours. It’s what sets us apart from the Cerebs. Hope. Hope takes imagination, and it’s what they don’t have.”

  “Yeah, well, some things we just have to get past, don’t we, Bishop?” the human says, turning away and running his hands along the derelict ship’s hull. “This relic here is reminder enough of what we fight for.”

  “You fight for the dead, as do I. But we must also remember to fight for the living.”

  “What living?” he snaps back, almost furious. “Bishop, look at us, and tell me what you see. We’re the lone survivors. The sooner you accept that—”

  “Exactly, the survivors. Has it ever occurred to you that evolution and survival of the fittest didn’t end when our two species left the jungles? What if this is a natural part of life, that sentient beings should test each other? If Nature really does impose a kind of will that demands only the strongest survive, then just look at us. What are you and I, if not the strongest of our kind?”

  “You’re telling me I should just look at all those billions of dead people as, what, desirable losses? Like they were the weakest links, and now the gene pool is, what, purified now that I’m the sole survivor?”

  “I’m saying that you need a shift in perspective. Do not look at yourself as the last of the old. Rather, look at yourself as the first of the new.”

  Rook sighs and shakes his head. “Bishop, there won’t be any new people. I can’t multiply on my own, and unless you can single-handedly clone both our species by the millions, neither can you!”

  “There are others out there.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “I have what you might call faith? Though mine is a bit more scientifically grounded.”

  “How so?”

  Bishop looks at him. “I’ve survived. You’ve survived. Perhaps we made it by different channels, but we’re both here. The two of us.”

  “And so?”

  The ground trembles as Bishop tilts his massive head to one side. “You truly don’t see it? You said the words yourself.”

  “What words?”

  “Two is just half of four, Rook,” the Ianeth replies, turning back to analyze the ship. “Two begins a pattern.”

  The human stares at him.

  Nothing else is said for a time. Eventually, they complete all scans of the ship, and determine that while it won’t have much delta-v capability, and probably can’t even take off on its own—at least, not without a lot of work—the Sidewinder would have control of pitch, roll, and yaw, and its forward thrusters could give it a decent push, so it should be able to change its direction once in space. Getting it into space is another matter.

  Finally, Bishop assists Rook in gathering up all the corpses. There are twenty-one in all—a squad of Marines, likely meant to be dropped into a danger zone somewhere, is still in their seats, strapped in and seared to the upholstery, and it takes a plasma torch and Bishop’s great strength to remove some of them. Slipping back into Rook’s mind, we see that he’s wondering what sort of op these soldiers were on. Sidewinders were designed to be stealthy ships, capable of quick sabotage or even serving as drop ships for clandestine operations, so where were these Marines going? What distant battleground were they bound for?

  The ground quakes. In the back, there are canisters shaking. Going to check, Rook hears rattling from beneath the floors. Secret storage panels that only a Sidewinder pilot would know about. Checking them, Rook finds two large canisters marked T(3H) – ASCA – 4421-A. It’s reserve tritium, he thinks, astonished. Despite the tragic surroundings, this is encouraging. They must have picked this up along the way at a space station outpost.

  Being low on fuel, this is a key find. Fusion occurs when the nuclei of two or more atoms combine, and while pycno is the usual fuel used to start the fusion process, which ignites the exomatter core and engages the power necessary to move into the quantum slipstream, tritium was always more preferred, because it has two neutrons, whereas deuterium has only one. However, tritium is extremely rare on Earth-like planets. Having both pycno and tritium will nearly triple their fuel’s energy output, because the special plasma created by combining the two heavy isotopes of hydrogen has tremendous power. I guess there’s a silver lining, he thinks, looking around at the ship. Though it certainly doesn’t feel like it.

  The ground quakes again.

  Rook decides to see what might be gleaned from scanning the ship’s database. Not surprisingly, the hard drives are mostly destroyed. Still, it is a marvel of (once) modern technology, and most of the compristeel frame in which the motherboard was stored is still intact.

  It’s strange sitting in the pilot’s seat. Looking around at the charred cockpit, Rook sees everything in its familiar position, and it’s easy to feel like he’s a ghost haunting his own ship. This is what it’ll look like someday, when they finally catch up to me and burn me out.

  Scans take a little time, and he finally starts pulling up some files, many of them are corrupted. Sidewinders were designed for optical computing, which allows a higher bandwidth than the electrons of older computers. It does this using three-dimensional photonic crystals, which are an electromagnetic bandgap metamaterial, parts of which could be re-forged in the ship’s fabricator. It also means that reconstructing corrupted files is much easier, as long as one has another such computer, which Rook does.

  “Anything?” Bishop asks, stepping through the blackened doorway.

  Rook looks up. “Most of the files are encrypted, but that’s no big deal since our Sidewinder has all the decryption software necessary. The problem is the corrupted files, those might take a little time to reconstruct, and many
of them won’t be recoverable at all. I’m sending them back to our ship so the computer can start the recovery. If we’re lucky, we might find some old ports-of-call this Sidewinder visited, maybe retrace its steps someday and find some valuable resources.”

  “Are we ready to go, then?”

  Rook takes one last look around the cockpit, then stands up. “I guess so.” As they’re walking out, they pass the engraving on the wall, and Rook’s light shines brightly on it:

  Interplanetary Space Force

  Eternity

  Legacy

  Humanity

  Rook is glad to see that it hasn’t decayed. In fact, it’s the one part on the ship that looks almost as new as it did when it rolled off the factory floor. Stepping outside, he finds more evidence of Bishop’s industry. There are twenty-one holes, each one just deep enough for a body, holes blasted and cut by the Quickener, and each of the bodies have been covered with red, green, and white blankets.

  “I found the blankets in the forward cargo hold, along with some other small supplies, an inflatable habitat, a jet pack for use in spacewalks, some rappelling gear for tactical drops, some MREs,” Bishop explains. “I guess they were meant to resupply some colony or other. I apologize if it’s a little crude, but this was the best I could approximate a proper human burial from what I’ve gathered—”

  “It’s fine,” Rook says, and gives the alien a companionable pat on the arm. “It’s just fine, Bishop. Thank you.”

  “You are most welcome, friend. These men were undoubtedly blooded together. It is just that they receive proper rites.”

  Rook nods. He stands in front of the graves, four rows of five, evenly spaced in what Rook only imagines an Ianeth or a Cereb could do. After a fashion, he looks over his shoulder and says, “Could I have a moment alone, please?”

  “Of course.” The alien turns at once and disappears farther down the cave, beginning an analysis and continuing his search.

  Rook looks over the bodies arrayed in front of him. Then he looks at the dog tags he’s gathered in his hands, reads the names, blood types, religious affiliations. He looks over each name slowly, says them aloud. “Bernard Brewer, Catholic. Jamal Eastman, Protestant. Cynthia Keyes, Protestant. Peter Fong, Baptist. Shannon Fomin, Catholic…”

  The names never seem to end. When they finally do, he’s left with only the sound of his breathing. He swallows a lump that has developed in his throat. “I, uh…I don’t know exactly what I should say.” All at once, he decides to say nothing, starts to turn away, then changes his mind and stays. He clears his throat. “You men and women trained hard, and in the end you got the rawest of raw deals. You lived to see the end of our days, and then you were exterminated yourselves, probably without a glimmer of hope that we could survive this. But you obviously did your jobs right up until the end. You did your jobs in the face of such hopelessness…” Chokes up. Composes himself. “I can’t…I can’t do anything to honor that…except maybe to return the favor. I’ll do what I can. I can’t promise it’ll be much, but I’ll do what I can. And let me just say…thank you.”

  Silence.

  The ground trembles beneath him.

  Then, Rook stands at attention, and gives a solemn salute.

  Minutes later, he’s rejoined with Bishop, and the two of them plunge ahead, down and down, deeper and deeper. They come to a set of organisteel doors, which were blasted open centuries before, and now the tunnel has once again partially collapsed. A few shots from their particle beams clear a path. Now, the incline gets sharper. A set of stairs.

  As he walks down the stairs, Rook considers how very familiar they seem—not an “alien” kind of stairs at all, but quite like something a human would design. That should come as no surprise, seeing as how almost every culture on Earth came up with the same “six simple machines” (lever, wheel and axle, pulley, inclined plane, screw, and wedge) at about the same time. Some things are just prudent, and for an intelligent race, stairs are probably just a natural progression of the inclined plane.

  So different, yet so much in common, Rook thinks.

  Down and down, deeper and deeper. The narrow passages are now adorned with strange symbols, and not just letters of an alien alphabet, although there are those. There are wall sconces, inside of which reside clear canisters of fluids, and each canister holds a different color, as well as what appear to be random Ianeth skeletal fragments: an open hand here, a skull there. It all gives the passages religious connotations.

  “What’s this about?” Rook asks, pointing.

  Bishop glances over his shoulder. “Recognition of our caste system. Memorials to each affiliation. The hands represent our leaders, the skulls our engineers, the legs our laborers.”

  “Was it ever possible for an engineer to become a political leader, or a laborer to become an engineer?”

  “It wasn’t unheard of, but we were grown from certain pedigrees and developed for very specific stations. Such a change in station would be about as rare as, say, an entertainer of your world becoming a politician?” says Bishop, coming to the bottom of the steps and searching around.

  “Gotcha.” Rook moves around Bishop, pans his lights around, and discovers that they’ve stepped into another immense cavern, one filled with strangely-shaped chairs, most of them destroyed or overturned, as well as what appear to be computer kiosks, outfitted almost like the office cubicles that Rook worked in one summer while in college.

  Bishop lowers his Quickener and approaches the display, running a hand over it. He taps no keys, though a dozen lights flash at once and a massive holographic orb is projected towards the center of the room, illuminating the entire cavern. The orb is almost twice the size of the Sidewinder, and contains only a few recognizable images to Rook’s eyes, a few Ianeth faces and a dozen or so cosmic bodies—moons, stars, planets, asteroids, comets, constellations, et cetera.

  “Much of this won’t make any sense to you,” says Bishop, running his hands along another control panel. “Your eyes have a—”

  “Limited view of the electromagnetic spectrum, right.” Rook moves around the kiosks, and comes to a sudden halt, bringing his rifle up to bear when he sees the shape…the alien appears to be standing, but actually died by being flung against a wall, where half his body became a paste and glued much of his body there. The body is now frozen, fossilized. “What happened here?”

  “I imagine Cereb forces invaded to complete the subtraction of Ianeth on Kali.” He moves his hands over the controls, bringing up strange interactive menus. “They’re very good at igniting atmospheres, but we dug in so deeply, I’m sure they wanted to come down and make sure it was finished.”

  “Looks like everything’s been left in standing order. Mighty considerate of ’em.”

  “The Cerebs had no need to destroy this place. We were close to extinct by the time they came here, and those of us who fled here couldn’t ever return to this patch of space. At least, the patch of space Kali occupied thousands of years ago.”

  Rooks nods and pans his light down, scans the ground, and finds others strewn across the ground, most of them in pieces, though one or two look largely intact. In fact, except for being covered in centuries of dust and debris, they almost look ready to stand up and move around.

  “Find anything?” Rook calls.

  “Lots of things. But none that interest us very much, I’m afraid.” Bishop’s hands glide across a holographic tapestry of colors, some of them forming screens coherent to human eyes, some of them looking more like finger paintings in the air. “Fascinating.”

  “What is?” says Rook, looking around the rest of the cavern, then panning his light over to the frozen corpse.

  “It seems the last ones to leave were doing some deep surveys of the planet’s crust. Researchers doing what researchers will do. There’s a fault line beneath us that runs to the far side of the planet, and it appears the Colossus was busy after I left. There are immense empty caverns, and below that a fault line running the
length of that mantle in that entire hemisphere.” A few more motions with his hands, a number of new orbs materialize. “This is surprising. The caverns are filled with magnetic minerals heavy in crystals, which are generating incredible piezomagnetic effects, magnetizing crystal rock.”

  “Meaning?”

  A few more motions. “When the fault line shifts, we may expect something on the scale a few trillion tons of Richter seismic energy.” He looks at Rook. “That would be a twelve- or thirteen-point quake.”

  Eyes wide, he looks at the alien. “Uh, if I’m not mistaken, a twelve-pointer is the point at which the Earth itself would crack in half. Not float apart, the gravity would keep the two pieces together, but a twelve-pointer on this planet…Christ, is it safe to be here now?”

  Bishop goes silent, runs a few figures. “I don’t believe we have anything to fear, at least for the next three hundred and fifty years. That’s according to the researchers’ last estimate. It seems the very last of my people here were looking for a way deeper into the planet, a chance to hide from the coming assault, but they decided to flee instead. They placed some seismic survey charges near the fault line, but decided not to activate them, fearing a chain reaction. The charges were left behind, but I suspect all of them have since fallen into the canyons they were placed inside of—the constant temblors have rattled them free, so there’s no chance of us salvaging them.

  For a moment, Rook says nothing. Something has just occurred to him. “Hey, how much power would it take to cause that fault line to give?”

  The alien doesn’t hesitate, his hands race across the air, from one holo-display to another. “According to last calculation, a direct hit with three to four hundred petajoules would split the crack, cause the chain reaction.” He looks at Rook. “Why? Does that have some value to you?”