by Chad Huskins
The door at the far end of the room hisses open, and the Ianeth comes walking over to him, as though there was no hurry in the universe, no need to worry over Rook’s injuries or near-death experiences. He does, however, offer a hand when Rook staggers over to a wall. “How do you feel?”
“Like hammered shit, thank you for asking.”
“We’ve got all the pieces. Some minor parts might need replacing, but the omni-kit ought to be able to supply those.”
Rook feels like punching the Ianeth square in the face, but feeling relieved at the rescue, he settles for clapping him on the back instead. For a moment, he’s emboldened by their progress. Despite their disparate philosophies, the teamwork has been solid, and their association has started to show some promise.
The two of them head up to the cockpit, Rook wincing the whole way and Bishop giving him the occasional hand. They cut through the far-flung debris field again, then plot a course back to Kali. The drive core is cycled up. The forward laser begins bending spacetime. A few minutes after that, they’re yanked through the slipstream vortex, headed towards Kali.
At the controls, Rook is moving through some standard diagnostics checks when he hears a chime. Looking down at his micropad, he sees that Bishop has volunteered another game of chess. He smiles, shaking his head, and makes the opening move. The Ianeth remains silent for a time, running through plans for assembly their new weapon, then puzzles over his next move in the game. “I gotta ask, why Springsteen?”
Bishop looks up from the holographic chessboard. “Why not? It was in your playlist, wasn’t it?” He makes a move, then taps a few keys on a holo-screen.
“Yeah, but…why that song particularly?”
“It was a sudden choice. I imagine it reminds you of where you come from. Does it?”
Rook nods.
“I thought so. And you told me that it’s important to remember where you come from. I thought it would keep you calm, bring you back to the familiar, inspire you.”
Rook nods again and looks back at his controls. Then, something catches his curiosity. “What inspires you, Bishop?”
The alien looks at him. “Me?”
“Yes. I mean, chess and music are what I’ve got. What about you?”
Bishop is very still.
“Let me guess, it’s not usually appropriate to ask such questions.”
“No, it isn’t. Like deception play, most things that are most precious to us are best left unspoken.” He’s silent for a moment. “But in the interest of cultural exchange, I’ll allow it this once.” The alien taps a few more keys, then turns to face him. “My Progenitor said it was important to diversify. Though I was bred to be an engineer, there are different sub-types of engineering I might’ve gone down—social, economic, structural, and so on. His approach to instructing was to watch a child play, see what its natural interests were, its natural talents. From this, he said, would emerge the exact nature of the child’s gift. My talent was singing, and so…what’s funny?”
“You! Singing? Get out!”
“I don’t see why that should be odd. As we’ve seen, sentient species tend to share almost every major physical and cultural trait, even if it is expressed differently.”
“Sing me somethin’.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?” Then, Rook answers his own question. “Oh. Right. Infrasound.” Though a lot of guttural noises emanate from the Ianeth’s chest when he speaks, much of the sounds his vocal cords emit are lower than 20 Hertz, below the normal limit of human hearing. “So, all of your songs are in infrasound?”
“If I sang, you could hear the rhythm, just those that come from my bass cords, but you could hear only the occasional noise, and there would be no discernable melody.”
Rook nods. A chime goes off. They are five minutes away from exiting the slipstream. He checks the Heisenberg compensators, and is glad to see they’re working fine. There are strong tidal forces being measured at the edges of the flat-space volume, but not so much as to concern them. As he works, Rook’s mind travels ahead to the task at hand, and he tries to envision what the encounter at Kali will be like. It’s called dynamic visualization, and his father taught it to him years ago when he first entered the chess competitions. Thinking one move ahead, then two moves, then three. He considers what he’ll have to do if one part goes wrong, sets up a Plan B, a Plan C, and so forth. So much will have to be decided based on how his opponents move, though.
Movement. That reminds him. There was the glaring problem of the skirmishers. The Cerebs’ space combat units have gotten sharper, more elusive, and have become increasingly difficult to track even by the principle of four…
Singing. “You know, what you just said about singing, how it seems we’re all connected by similar rituals…it reminds me of something I was thinking back inside the building, before I was surrounded by the husks.”
“What’s that?”
“The steps. They look a lot like a human staircase looked like,” he says. “There’s a universality to it all, isn’t there? Music. Culture. A need to devour resources and keep everybody else off our potential future resources. Racism. Xenophobia. Even the way the buildings were built, the cities and the roads we saw back there on the fortress world. The discovery of the quantum slipstream by essentially the same kind of tech…” He trails off.
“And?” says the alien, reaching forward to check their pycno levels.
“Such universality got me thinking about our beliefs, and about the principle of four.” He turns to look at Bishop. “In your reading of human history, have you come across the name Pythagoras?”
A moment while Bishop searches his memory. “Greek philosopher, mathematician, and the founder of a religion bearing his name, as well as the famous Pythagorean theorem.”
“Did you know that the followers of Pythagoras also believed that the number four defined the universe?”
“I uncovered some files on that, yes.”
“The Pythagorean cult was a group of mystics, heavily influenced by mathematics, astronomy, and music. They believed the universe could be explained by numbers alone. They were particularly interested in the numbers one, two, three and four. They called these the tetras. They held allegiance to the tetras and believed in the ‘fourness’ in all things. The geometric system of point, line, surface, and solid were the basic examples they gave for fourness. They especially revered the number ten, and called it the most perfect number, as it contains one, two, three and four all added together. Also, when written in dot formation, it forms a perfect triangle, which is an important supportive shape in geometry and engineering.”
Bishop looks at him. “Why bring this up?”
“I’m just wondering about the level of the Cerebs’ connection to four. It might not be held in mysticism for them, but everything else between sentient species seems to be so close—music, architecture, xenophobia, the structure of stairs, quantum-drive design—what if the Pythagoreans weren’t the only ones to view ten as special? Even if the Cerebs don’t know they’ve done it—”
“They might have a subconscious draw to other derivations of ‘fourness.’”
“Exactly.”
Bishop turns back to his panel, his hands moving across the controls as he brings up half a dozen holo-displays. He brings up the data on the four skirmishers they took out at Kali. Rook remains silent for the next five minutes, watching as numbers, angles, and equations scrawl across the screens. Three-dimensional representations of each dogfight are derived from that data, and the video footage is replayed again and again, with Bishop superimposing markers along the vectors each skirmisher might’ve taken, and—
Rook smiles as Bishop puts up the results of each finding, and smiles broader as the ships in the replays match up less than a second later to his derivations.
“What did you do?” Rook asks.
“I told the Sidewinder to give me derivations of ten, as well as sixteen—what you said they hold as their mo
st ‘divine’ number, being four times four—and I had the AI work up a quadrillion vectors. I couldn’t do all of the math on my own,” he says, almost apologetically. “It looks like we’ve got some sort of loose blend of the principle of four and another principle at work—it begins with four and branches off into ten vectors from each one of those vectors, then sixteen, then a hundred and sixty.”
“A hundred and sixty?”
“Ten multiplied by sixteen, yes. The variables are staggering to say the least, but they look much closer to exact targeting.”
Rook looks once more at the 3D footage as the targeting reticles line up with the escape vectors Bishop worked up. He sees how, if each vector is followed and the speed is increased, each vector would’ve taken each skirmisher on a wide arc and brought them behind the Sidewinder. “They weren’t running.”
“No. They were angling to get behind us and take us out from there.”
“But, why? The Sidewinder’s turret can spin and fire just as easily behind itself as it can in front. What’s behind us that they would want to…?” It strikes him. Bishop remains silent, letting the human’s mind work. Whether the alien does this because he already knows the answer or has learned to allow Rook’s imagination to work, we cannot be entirely sure. “The engines are at the back on the ship and they wanna take them out, leave me stranded. The only reason for that would be if they wanted to board the ship.”
“To take the ship, you mean. They revere machines, and may believe some anomaly exists within the Sidewinder that made it so formidable in the asteroid field.” He shrugs. “Or, they may only want you.”
“Me?”
“They took me and my brethren prisoner and kept us for study because we gave them what you would call a hell of a fight.” He looks up at Rook. “I suppose this gives you a rather dubious honor.”
“They want me. They’re intrigued by me.”
“You gave them the first defeat that we know of. You’ve proven a master of both linear and lateral thinking, you’re capable of great mathematical exactness, yet also mind-bogglingly stupid sacrificial tendencies.”
Rook raises an eyebrow. “Thanks?”
“I don’t mean to boost your ego, for such a thing tends to make one sloppy, but it could be that you represent a perfect storm of intelligence and madness.”
“Again, thanks?”
“I’m not telling you this to either flatter or insult. I’m telling you so that you may know all the factors. If taken, you will be kept alive throughout your dissection. I’ve seen this happen. It is a waking lobotomy. You’ll feel your mind slipping away as each piece is ‘hacked’ into and eventually removed. You’ll feel yourself becoming…less.”
Rook sighs. He leans back in his seat, strokes his temples and rubs his eyes. Then, he snorts out a laugh. “Ya know, I had an uncle who was an ornithologist. He lamented the passing of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. They all went extinct back in the 1920s, I think. He said the last of the species went extinct because of researchers trying to gather them as specimens for examination. Same with the passenger pigeon, which used to flock in such numbers they blocked out the sun! Is that me? Is that us? Great civilizations that once spanned the stars, now down to a few dying relics, and not even meeting our end the way a soldier should, but on a damn table by some researchers?”
The alien doesn’t hesitate with an answer. “No. We are soldiers, the last of our kind, and that is now our fate.”
“It’s just us, though. Just us. You and me.”
Bishop leans forward. “Don’t lose focus now. We’ve come so far.”
“Sometimes…sometimes I can’t get them outta my head, ya know?” His mind is going back to where it was during the freefall fight with the husk. “Mom and Dad. I’m sure it’s the same with you, with your parents and your Progenitor.”
“It is,” the alien allows.
“It’s just…” Rook swallows. He’s drifting now, considering himself such a meager final representative of the human race. Who would ever want such a dubious honor? Certainly not us. Certainly not him. “You and me, we’ve been a part o’ this thing so long, we wouldn’t know what we are without it.”
“No, we wouldn’t. The struggle defines us.”
“The struggle defines us,” Rook echoes, thinking about those words.
“Stop trying to hop into a time machine. That technology hasn’t been invented, not even by the Cerebs.” Was that a joke? It is so hard to tell with this one. “Rook, even if you could go back, you wouldn’t recognize anyone, and they wouldn’t recognize you. Your attitude now, it’s been shaped to fit war and now only fits within that frame. Your family couldn’t empathize, and neither could any soldier. They would treat you as a stranger. It is the same with me. My Progenitor wouldn’t be able to bring himself to speak to me.”
Rook looks at him. “Why not?”
“Because the rest of my unit is dead. I am the last. I should not live after a failed mission where so many died.”
“What, you mean, you’re supposed to commit suicide?”
“Affirmative, friend. The imperative to kill myself in such failure is integrated both at a psychological and a programming level. All my training says do it, and all my hardware agrees.”
“To kill yourself? Just because you lived?”
“Because I failed.” He adds, “Abysmally.”
“But…but why is it mandated you kill yourself?”
A moment while the alien thinks. “There is a saying in your military. ‘All gave some, some gave all.’ There’s a similar expression where I come from, only it adds that you don’t want to be the one that just gives some. The guilt and the shame…we are all taught and programmed that it is too much to bear. It ensures loyalty to your brothers and sisters in arms.”
Rook looks his partner up and down with renewed fascination, and even horror. “Why haven’t you, then? I mean, not that I’m suggesting you do, you’ve been a big help, you’ve saved my life a few times now, but…I mean, why haven’t you killed yourself yet, if it’s so much a part of you?”
A chime goes off. Ten seconds to real space.
“I suspect the reason I haven’t contemplated it is the same reason you have contemplated it. Madness.”
The words echo in Rook’s ears as he turns back to the console. He readies all systems. When they exit, they are traveling at the same speed they were an instant before entering the slipstream, and now Rook powers down relativistic shields as inertial dampers fight to counter the subtle g’s coming off the planet straight ahead.
Kali is exactly how we left it, it is still a black orb of lifelessness with the dark, slightly glimmering 156-mile-around spheres hovering far above it. Rook’s hands move all over the control panel, flipping this switch, tapping that button, interacting with holographic screens all around him. A thorough scan shows everything is peachy.
“Here we go. Back home. Setting a course.” He checks the available approach vectors. Thor’s Anvil has caused a severe storm, which is sure to play hell with sensors upon approach. Rook selects his approach vector, then pauses. A heat spike, bouncing off their wake. “Huh,” he says.
“What is it?”
“There it is again, the same heat wave bouncing off our wake as the first time we entered Kali’s space. Same register as last time, too, when you were working on the Turks.” Rook looks out the viewport, then at all his scanners. “I’m not showing any tachyonic disturbances or spacetime warps. No ionic disturbances or pynco exhaust. There’s been no Cereb forces here lately.” He looks back out at the dark planet.
“Some anomaly connected to the rogue planet, perhaps,” the alien offers.
“I guess so.” But he isn’t convinced. His eyes pan across the dark space mistrustfully, then he cycles up the forward thrusters. “Ready for reentry.”
“Copy that.”
The Sidewinder’s energy shields angle forward to deflect the resistance coming at it straight on. They experience some serious turbulence. Tho
r’s Anvil has been busy since they left, erupting angrily, spewing thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide and flinging micrometer-sized ash particles sharp as needles into the troposphere and mid-stratosphere—essentially clouds of glass has built up around much of the top half of this hemisphere.
Then, a bolt of purple lightning cuts through the darkness. A second later the world-shattering BOOM! carries through the Sidewinder. Neither pilot nor co-pilot move, both have hands as steady as an artist’s. Even when some of the screens show interference, they never panic. Though, Rook’s mind is still back on that strange heat wave signature moments ago, and is worried that he’s missed something, and that Thor’s Anvil’s interference will only make them blinder.
He checks the weather screen. “Got a powerful jet stream blowing that cloud north-westward,” he informs Bishop.
“Do you wish to wait the storm out up here?”
He wrestles back and forth. “Nah. I guess if our friends happen to show up now, I’d rather take advantage of the storm and have our ionic trail frazzled by it. But, we’re gonna be stuck with it a while, looks like, the way that wind’s blowing.”
“We have lots of work to do inside the cave, anyway. It will be six days of hard labor assembling the graviton gun.”
As he checks the power of their protective energy shields, Rook glances over his shoulder. “Graviton gun?”
“What else would you call it?”
He shrugs. “Good a name as any, I suppose. Let’s just hope the Cerebs give us those six days to get the gun up and runnin’.”
The landing is going to be rough because the narrow-beam antennas that allow the Sidewinder to land with exactness are having trouble gathering the necessary data to do their job. They glide up to the cave’s mouth, but don’t go inside. They back the Sidewinder up and aim the cargo bay towards the cave mouth, though, and once they touch down, they are greeted by Kali in the only way the planet knows, with a grumble and a shake. “Home, sweet home,” Rook says, cycling the engines down.
