The Immortal Game (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  Rook shrugs, and then looks back at the dead Ianeth splattered on the wall. “Maybe.”

  “Even if so, we do not possess even a fraction of that kind of firepower.”

  No, he thinks. But I know something that does. He marinates on the thought a moment, then files it away, figuring it is a long shot.

  Rook steps over to the body plastered against the wall, and starts running an analysis. The organisteel shell is still in pristine condition, and there are faint signs of electrical activity still—

  All at once, one of the hands reaches out and smacks the barrel of his rifle and grabs hold of his wrist! Rook gasps as he’s lifted off his feet. The hand squeezes with so much power it feels like it’s going to crush his wrist. Panicking, he kicks the corpse’s chest once, twice, thrice. Each time the pulverized shell collapses inwards, and all the while it squeezes Rook’s wrist tighter.

  The body quivers, looks like it’s trying to move, but can’t. It lunges forward and falters, then splits from the wall and falls on top of him. Its shattered spine allows for no other movement, but its hand squeezes tighter and tighter. Then a shadow falls over Rook, and Bishop is standing there, smashing his foot down on the corpse’s arm, weakening it enough so that Rook can pry his wrist loose and scramble free. Bishop looks around circumspectly. Meanwhile, Rook backs up, raises his gun and begins to fire on the prostrate Ianeth, but Bishop stands in his way.

  “Get the hell outta the way!”

  “Calm yourself,” the alien says.

  “That thing tried to kill me!”

  “That ‘thing’ is a comrade of mine, a member of my own Clan.” Bishop fixes him with a gaze, and there is a note of asperity in his voice. “He’s dead and he’s only doing what he was designed to do, what his duty requires him to do.”

  “Yeah? And what’s that?”

  “To kill an unknown face,” Bishop says calmly. “It is a kind of…how would your people call it? A Death Trap?”

  Rook nods. “A dead-man switch.”

  “Yes. The ocular lenses and the forebrain are on different circuits than the rest of the brain, the personality-brain. They’re outfitted with advanced facial-recognition systems that long outlast the death of the person inside, and if they identify anyone unfamiliar nearby, auxiliary power can be utilized to perform basic assault tactics. You’re lucky he didn’t have a weapon in his hand, or that he didn’t snatch yours. You would have been incinerated before you knew what was happening.”

  Panting and wincing inwardly at the pain in his wrist, Rook bites out a curse, then looks the alien over mistrustfully. “Why didn’t you tell me your people have a backup killer switch?” Bishop starts to answer, but Rook waves him off. “Ah, don’t tell me. Another one o’ your tests? Curiosity killed the cat, and I just proved that I’m the cat?”

  “I wouldn’t say—”

  “Forget it!” He fumes for a moment, massaging his wrist, and then sighs. “Did you find anything in the computer that we can use or not?”

  “Almost all matériel is gone, and there are no food stores left,” Bishop says.

  “Great. So, nothing here.”

  “I said almost no matériel. However, there is something that may interest us.”

  The alien leads him to the far end of the room, where a large, dusty chamber sits, half embedded in the rock wall. A beam of blue light suddenly lances out at Bishop like a laser, touching his forehead, and Rook pauses for a moment, going for his Exciter. Bishop continues forward, though, as the door to the chamber breaks up into six pieces that recede into the wall, revealing something there in the dark recesses.

  Rook shines his lights on the thing, and for a moment figures he might need to retreat. The thing is at least twelve feet tall and looks to be made out of the same twisty, blood-red organisteel that Bishop’s exoskeleton is made out of. It is humanoid in shape—two arms and two legs—and each hand has three digits. The belly, though, is split open, and hanging out of it are what look like both wires and viscera. “What the hell is this? It looks like its guts are hanging out.”

  “It is a powered exo-suit,” Bishop explains. “We use it for heavy lifting. At one time there were a dozen or so here, all of them being used to move computers and military equipment in and out. We conducted some emergency repair work here, too, and these suits were required for lifting the massive engine drives.”

  Rook nods appreciatively. “Not exactly what I’d call ‘matériel’ but…”

  “Remember, I’m an engineer. One of my focuses is rebuilding, and for that we need resources. And didn’t you say of chess it’s all about gathering resources?”

  “Oh, I’m all about resource-gathering. It’s just that this thing is large, and will take up most of the free space left in our cargo hold.” Rook shrugs. “’Course, it’s not like we’ve got a lotta demand for that space, and if we come across more supplies later that require the space then we could dump this thing…” He trails off, lost in thought. “Getting it out of here could be a chore, though.”

  “No, it won’t. I can step inside and connect with the exo-suit, and it can do most if not all of the work itself.”

  “It’s that badass, huh?”

  “Affirmative, friend.”

  “Can you teach me to use it?”

  “Negative. It requires special link-nodes connected directly to the control-brain, which only Ianeth have.”

  Rook sighs. “Well, if that’s all then, I reckon we can move her outta there after we’ve finished with the burials.”

  “Burials?”

  “Yeah. Don’t you wanna bury your friends here?”

  “We do not bury our dead. We have a different sort of ceremony, one I will attend to later by myself. You’ll only, eh…” He searches for the right word. “Aggravate them.”

  Rook looks back across the cavern. “Right. About that. Listen, I’m sorry I called your clansman there a thing. That…that was inconsiderate of me, especially after you helped me up there with my comrades.”

  “No apology necessary, friend. The matter is closed.”

  Rook looks him up and down. “You knew some o’ these guys? As in, personally?”

  “The matter is closed,” Bishop says, and stalks back across the cavern, his feet thumping heavily on the ground. Rook watches him go, and then looks back up at the massive exo-suit. Then, all at once, two more connections are made. The Turk, he thinks. It comes back to him. Actually it never left him, it’s been nagging at him the whole time. The derelict Sidewinder, the bodies of his fallen comrades, the “dead-man switch” of the Ianeth, and the exo-suit itself, being an empty husk unless someone operates it from inside…they all have one thing in common: they’re all dead and empty on the inside.

  The Turk.

  Rook stands there a moment thinking, vacillating between telling and not telling Bishop what plan he’s started working on. For the moment, he decides to keep it to himself.

  The plan forming is like some burden he knows he must soon take up, suddenly thrust upon him without his wanting it. The plan is now picking up components, collecting little nuggets that orbit the Master Plan, the same way a large asteroid hurtling through space will naturally collect smaller rocks that gravitate towards it. And, like an asteroid that’s whipped around a massive planet, the Master Plan is picking up speed.

  Meanwhile, approximately thirty-seven light-years away, something else is picking up speed. The Squadron Leader has detected a slightly larger patch of striated ice, and with it, an ion trail. It is not long before they find the rogue gas giant, or the ancient Ianeth space station hidden within it. The trail is getting warmer.

  6

  The work begins apace. Rook leaves Bishop mostly to himself, the alien culling more information out of the Ianeth base’s databanks. Rook works at moving the few supplies from the derelict ship over to their Sidewinder. As fate would have it, there are some blankets which will be welcome on cool nights when they’re saving on energy by cutting heat, and the SAFER III jet pac
k might come in handy, but the MREs are one of the more precious supplies—the Sidewinder’s fabricators can approximate most alloys, and the Cereb omni-kit can flash-forge a great many things the ship cannot, but food good enough for a human and an Ianeth to eat? That’s a little trickier.

  The rest of the supplies are power packs, most of which are empty but can still be used for reloading particle beams in a pinch. It saves Bishop the time of forging more of them, Rook thinks. By this time, his partner has already been working himself all hours of the day (and Ianeth days are longer than humans), so it will be nice to have him freed up to focus on other matters.

  Speaking of Bishop, the alien spends a whole day repairing some of the exo-suit’s actuators. Each joint of the suit has its own computer processor, and two of them are working at half capacity. Its cells are filled with an expansive supercritical liquid, which serves as both a fuel and a lubricant, and it needs to be run through the Sidewinder’s fabricators for purification. Finally, Bishop maneuvers the exo-suit carefully out of the tunnels, making larger pathways for them as he goes.

  On the second day of their labor, Bishop is able to use the exo-suit to rip away some of the large chunks of the derelict ship’s hull. The scraps are ripped into smaller pieces, say as big as a shoebox, so as to fit inside the Sidewinder’s fabricator. The compristeel is re-sequenced and re-fitted using plasma welders. However, when Bishop goes to place the new bits in the Sidewinder’s cargo hold as reserves, Rook tells him to hold on to it.

  “What for?” asks the alien.

  “Got somethin’ else in mind,” he replies, waving Bishop back inside. “Put them back on the derelict ship. Get repairs started on the exterior. Make it look as much like new as possible.”

  “That will take some time. Days.”

  “We’ll take as long as we need. We need it to pass inspection.”

  “If you’re thinking of using it as a decoy, its engines will never get it off the ground. It has nearly zero maneuverability, and zero chance of ever hitting warp again.”

  “It’s more than just a decoy, it’s a cog in the machine.”

  “What machine?”

  Rook doesn’t answer directly. “And I don’t need it to warp or maneuver. At least not too much. Just get its OMS working, we need orbital maneuverability. The anterior, posterior, and axial thrusters only. Vertical thrusters only need to work enough to get it off the ground, so she can assist when the Sidewinder tows her into orbit.”

  Bishop gives him a look. “If you want to tow it, I think we’ll need more power than what she’s capable of.”

  “She? Did…do Ianeth refer to their ships as females?”

  “I’m attempting to match what I know of your parlance. In any case, she’ll practically be dead weight, and I don’t think the Sidewinder can lift it out of here if those vertical thrusters fail.”

  “Take extra care with those thrusters, then. Get them working properly.”

  “That will take a few more days.”

  “Get the repair bot to help you. I’ll lend a hand as much as possible.”

  “What else has your attention?”

  “Kali. I need to know this planet back to front. I need to know the exact power of her magnetosphere, what it takes to bounce something off her atmosphere.” He nods up at the sky. “I’ve also got a mind to check out those space stations together when you get a chance.”

  “The defense stations? That’s a good idea. Maybe we could mine them for some alloys.”

  “Don’t mean to mine them. I mean to see if I can get them up and running again.”

  The Ianeth makes his queerest look yet. “I told you, there’s nothing in them, just some functioning drives, far too large to assist the Sidewinder, perhaps energy shields. There are absolutely no weapons on them. None at all.”

  “Even better. Means they have less mass, and will be easier to move.”

  Bishop goes still, and quiet.

  “What is it?”

  The alien shuffles a bit uncertainly. “I have followed you without question across hundreds of light-years, though we aren’t yet blooded and I’m not sure what it is you have planned. I understand your reluctance to trust me, especially considering how your race views deception games such as mine, but I feel it incumbent upon me to push the point now: what exactly are you planning, friend?”

  “Your people play deception games, mine play trust games. Consider this a kind of ‘trust fall,’ all right?”

  “Trust fall?”

  “Yeah, ya know, where you stand with your back to a friend and cross your arms and fall backwards, trusting they’ll catch you?”

  Bishop takes a moment. Then he says, “That sounds absurd. And intriguing.”

  “If you’re really my friend, my ally, or however you see us, then you should note that I’ve dealt with your weird little deception play, so now you’re gonna have to play along with my weird little paranoia. I’m not saying I think you’ll betray me, but there’s no guarantee you won’t get captured by the enemy before we’re done building here. If that happens, I would like it very much if you couldn’t give up my plan.”

  “I’m…on a ‘need to know’ basis,” Bishop clarifies.

  Rook smiles and slaps his arm. “Now you’re getting it. Now hop back inside that suit, you’ve got some scrapping and welding to do.” He walks away. “I’m off, gotta go scan the planet. See you at oh-four-hundred. If you need to talk, use the open QEC channel.”

  “Affirmative, friend.”

  Rook takes the Sidewinder and lifts off, leaving Bishop to his work. The alien spends the hours before rendezvous tearing off great big hunks of the derelict ship, and replaces them with the last batch they welded from the Sidewinder’s fabricator. He uses the exo-suit to hold them in place, then hops out and uses the plasma torch to weld them to the frame.

  Meanwhile, Rook hangs in orbit, and there he begins an extensive analysis of the planet’s magnetosphere, and even tracks a few pieces of random space debris that strike one of the poles. He has the computer analyze the approaches of the meteorites, gauging velocity and mass, measuring how quickly they burn up and what sort of speed it would take for something larger to maintain orbit. He factors in the Sidewinder’s estimate of the planet’s mass and radius, naturally includes the gravitational constant (6.67×10−11 N·(m/kg)2), and reviews it.

  Four-point-three miles per second for escape velocity. Now the trajectory. This takes in even more factors. It’s going to have to be exact, he considers, looking over the math. Especially for something without much self-correcting capability. Pushing the derelict ship into orbit will take finesse. He leaves the AI to work it out.

  Meanwhile, he dedicates a few sensors to scanning the defense stations’ density, volume, orbital constant, et cetera. Each station is a perfect silvery orb, exactly 156.03 miles in circumference, almost 31 miles in diameter, and each one with a mass of just under two quintillion pounds.

  That’s low mass for such large objects. Kind of hollow, aren’t they? Guess they’d have to be if they wanted to make room for firepower serious enough to fend off a Cereb fleet and still be nimble enough to defend. Further scans reveal a complex network of compristeel, organisteel, and other alloys Rook isn’t even about to try and give names to. The key thing is the physics. Let’s get to work here.

  Over the next several days, Rook and Bishop work on separate tasks, coordinating for use of the Sidewinder—Bishop requires its fabricator for sprucing up the derelict ship, and Rook gets better analysis of Kali from orbit than if he just sends out drones alone. During one hard day of work, Bishop sends up a call. “The derelict’s keel-frame saw serious damage in the landing. It may be that as soon as the thrusters engage, the whole frame may shake apart.”

  “Find a way to make do,” Rook tells him. “We just need her to be able to handle her own weight enough so that the Sidewinder can do the rest.”

  “I don’t think towing is going to work.”

  “Give it a try.”
>
  “Affirmative, friend. Trying.”

  They work, they eat, they sleep, they wake up, and they do it all over again. Rook keeps coffee in a thermos and pops caffeine pills frequently to get the planetary cartography finished. He searches for hollow spots in the earth, sends drones down to skim the surface, dive into caves, and determine the densest and most hollow points of the planet’s crust and mantle. With this, he maps out fault lines and attempts to locate the large one that Bishop was talking about. It requires some intense and methodical techniques for teasing out the data, including using the ship’s AI to work up a 3D model of the planet’s electromagnetic field, running through linear and nonlinear signatures, as well as planetary wave dynamics, math and sciences he hasn’t had to apply since ASCA advanced meteorological classes. It also requires intense systematizing of all the information that comes strolling through, and then careful cross-referencing.

  There. He’s spotted the main fault form. He taps a few keys, sending more drones—over the next two days, his drones dig a network of tunnels, using their own low-yield particle beams and plasma torches to go deeper so they could scan farther. As the data comes in, he marvels at the next big discovery. It’s connected to a deep, deep glacier, which runs along to the other side of the planet. Sonar also reveals an interesting vein of magma running almost a thousand miles long, all the way from the far hemisphere up to Thor’s Anvil, and that vein is only separated from the glacier by a thin portion of the mantle. Then there is the immense layer of magnetic minerals generating colossal piezomagnetic effects. Jesus, Bishop wasn’t wrong, the pressure waiting to be released is immense! If this is an incubator, it’s set to malfunction soon.

  Eventually, sonar has provided as much as it’s going to, and Rook switches to QEC feed coming from the deepest drones: the image changes from a diagrammatic representation to live video of the soil, dozens of miles down, and the computer runs analysis of the rock. He then uses a photogrammetric sensor in one of the deepest drones to create a highly detailed hologram of the fault line’s layout, subduction zones, and the transform faults. These are estimations and simulations. Throughout the process, neither the computers nor the drones’ live feed reveal any troglofaunal life-forms.