by Chad Huskins
Was this his plan? To charge directly at us and let himself be killed, leaving us to fight these constructs? Humans were so illogical, it was just as likely that that was the case as not. Even if so, how could he have done it? It is not possible that a human can learn the depths of Ianeth technologies given a few months alone out here, not even if he traveled to the fortress world and somehow survived.
The Phantom File prods him, urges him to caution. It nags and nags, demanding that he recall the Phantom’s last ploy.
He faked his death last time.
How could he have done that this time? Why would he sacrifice the Sidewinder, his only ship? Would he really strand himself somewhere down below on this rogue planet, just to watch a few Cerebs die? Even if he did, that still doesn’t solve the problem of him using Ianeth tech so proficiently.
A trillion questions enter into his mind, and they are such difficult questions to answer that he can scarcely find the right place for them in his seven-tiered brain.
Meanwhile, the Turks continue putting pressure on his position, forcing him into a smaller and smaller space.
Machines. Machines are hampering us. Dead things without thought or logic.
The Phantom File screams at him that there is more to it. The Supreme Conductor refused to hear.
12
The damage isn’t just extensive, it’s total. The luminal ship will never fly again and that’s for certain. Much of the ship has collapsed and been buried underground. Some of it has rolled over, twisting as it went, with all its main entrance/exit ports facing the ground, trapping the crew inside as jets of atmo and superheated steam come bursting out.
The Sidewinder swoops around the busted midsection, hovers on autopilot, and opens its cargo bay. Bishop steps to the end of the cargo ramp, dials up his Quickener to max, and takes aim at the spot the Sidewinder’s sonar has indicated is a structurally weakened spot. Rook stands beside him and aims his Exciter, also dialed to max. They fire simultaneously, concentrating almost fifty gigajoules of power into a space the size of dime. The hull heats rapidly, and expands outward with explosive force. When it’s over, they take a moment to let their weapons cool down, then dial them back to something not quite so volatile.
“We gotta move, while they still think I’m dead,” Rook says. “Right now they’re not searching for the Sidewinder, so any distortions we create will be filed away as other energy outputs from this thing.” He points down, at the clouds of smoke and the plumes of blue and red flames gushing out of the luminal.
“Affirmative, friend.”
Dyneema ropes are flung from the back, and the two saboteurs drop over the side and rappel down. Jagged pieces of heated metal jut up at them, some bent and looking like ramps, others twisted, broken, and sharp.
Rook lands first, his feet dropping down just beside the hole they’ve made—there are massive holes farther up the length of the miles-long ship, but all of them are either pouring out flames or venting superheated clouds of smoke. The Sidewinder’s AI recommended this as the best entry point.
Rook whips his slack over the hole’s edge, then lowers himself inside and lands on a slanted wall. Twisted as it is and resting on collapsing ground, the luminal’s hallways are bound to keep shifting. Both heated and cooled gases shoot from cracks in the walls, and a strange black, jellied liquid is pouring from the ceiling at the far end, thankfully not the direction they mean to go.
A chime sounds. Rook looks at the micropad strapped to his right arm—the extra-orbital probes have checked in, Turk 8 has been hit again and is now disabled, but for the time being its remains have blocked off the flagship’s retreat. However, one luminal did manage to squeeze through, and is heading down for the planet. If they still think I’m dead, it’s here to assist with rescue operations. If not, it’s here to kill us.
“Bishop! Looks like we held ’em off pretty good so far, but one slipped through!”
“I see that.”
“Time to start developing the rest of our pieces. Go ahead and activate the rest of the Turks. Have them converge to shore up the others.”
“What about the luminal coming down at us?”
“If all goes well, it might actually work to our advantage that it made it through.”
“Copy that,” says the alien. When Bishop lands next to him, the whole corridor shakes, and it’s impossible to tell if that’s the work of a series of explosions happening somewhere deeper in the ship or if that’s Kali saying welcome back.
Kali won’t be happy we returned, he thinks. Not if this all goes off like I’m planning.
Rook checks the 3D map on his HUD, some of it reconstructed from memory from his first (and last) venture into a luminal ship. There is substantial smoke, so the HUD will have to guide him a lot. The temperature gauge on his environment suit shows the external temperature is at three hundred degrees and is still climbing. The ship’s many ruptures are turning the corridors into ovens. “This way,” he says to Bishop.
“Affirmative, friend.”
Singsong voices can be heard screaming—the Cerebral crew in their death throes. It makes Rook nervous, and it fills Bishop with immense joy.
The two of them move down the corridor in a careful two-man approach, clearing the hallways. “I’ve got deep,” Rook calls, as he slowly slices the pie around the corner. “Corridor. About thirty yards. Four openings, two on each side.” Rook scans with the Exciter’s scope, which uses sonar to form images on his HUD. A few seconds later, he gives the go-ahead. “Clear!”
“Moving up,” says Bishop, bringing his Quickener up and aiming down the hallway, which has been twisted from the stress exerted by the impact. The floor buckles a little, but the Ianeth remains steady. Rook follows him inside, and they perform a bounding overwatch down the corridor until they get to the next corner. The Ianeth gets there first, and calls it. “I’ve got deep.” He slices the pie. “Corridor. About fifty yards. Seven openings, three on each side and one in the ceiling. Three bodies on the floor, no life signs. Clear!”
“Moving up,” Rook steps around the corner while Bishop holds his aim down the hallway, then falls in behind Rook. They step around the corpses of the Cerebs, all of them bleeding profusely; the floor is covered in the black, viscous fluids all Cerebs share.
At the end of the corridor there is a doorway that leads into a large room. If Rook’s memory serves, this will lead them into the primary engine room, where the core is. He and Bishop flank the door, press their backs to the wall. Rook peeks inside. Sonar shows a wide-open room that looks at least somewhat familiar to him. He looks at Bishop, and makes a hook with his index finger. Bishop nods, and a second later they step into the engine room with a button-hook entry.
“Contact!” Bishop calls, letting out a salvo of particle-beam fire.
The alien hits his first target, and Rook sees more of them on his HUD—in the smoke, they are impossible to discern, but they appear on his visor as nothing more than glowing red silhouettes. Rook squeezes the trigger, downs all three targets, and moves up to cover, kneeling behind a large steel beam broken free. Bishop takes cover beside him, and taps his head, indicating he wants cover. Rook nods and aims over the top of the beam as Bishop gets up and runs to take cover behind a hunk of a twisted bulkhead. Then, Bishop aims around to cover Rook as he joins him.
Leap-frogging like this, they cover one another all the way across the massive engineering room, encountering some of the same kinds of robots as Rook encountered last time, trying to conduct repairs even as they themselves are falling apart. Rook and Bishop take out a dozen of them before finally arriving at the drive core. It’s just as massive as he remembers, and just as sturdy. “Let’s get to work.”
Over the next five minutes, they move quickly about the engine room, stepping over corpses and shooting one injured and confused Cereb engineer. They use sonar scans to find the weakest points around the base of the core container, which is almost exactly as Rook described it to Bishop before they en
tered.
Almost.
There is an extra layer of some alien alloy surrounding this core that wasn’t there on the luminal in the Magnum Collectio. An add-on. Something they put there because of me? Trying not to flatter himself too much, Rook gives Bishop the signal to start looking for structural weaknesses.
Applications of thermite and plasma charges weaken the extra shell. This saves their particle-beam rifles from having to use too much power, which they will need momentarily.
As soon as the outer shell is removed, the radiation levels in the room spike, and Rook knows they’ve broken through to the core. A deep hum fills the room as the two of them get to setting the explosives. After a seventh plasma charge is planted, Rook says, “Ready to synchronize timers?”
“Affirmative, friend.”
“Setting timers in three, two, one…” He activates the thermite charges he’s planted, and Bishop sets his plasma charges to go off thirty seconds later, giving the thermite time to corrode the surface metals and expose the naked core. If all went as they did in Magnum Collectio, the plasma charges will rupture all key components and release the annihilated exomatter core’s energy.
“Timers set,” Bishop calls.
“Check. Let’s go home.”
The two of them dial their assault rifles up again, and aim at the mangled ceiling. Their concentrated fire explodes the hull even faster than before, and they take cover from the falling superheated debris. Rook taps a few keys on his wrist, summons the Sidewinder to home in on their signal and hover directly over the hole they’ve made in the ceiling. Within the darkness and swirling smoke, it’s impossible to tell when the Sidewinder arrives, so Rook must trust the coordinates being fed to his wrist computer.
They move slowly across the engineering room, climbing carefully over razor-sharp detritus, using sonar to try and locate the Dyneema ropes, which are hopefully still hanging from the Sidewinder’s cargo bay…There! Rook snags his line, and a few seconds later Bishop calls that he’s found his. They attach the ropes to their harnesses and Rook commands the Sidewinder to reel them up. They climb back into the cargo bay, close the ramp, and rush down the corridors and into the cockpit.
“Sensors showing at least a hundred skirmishers descending on us,” Bishop calls, sliding into his seat. “And the skies are filling up with seekers.”
“The skirmishers will probably begin slow sweeps, search for life signs, see if the structure is safe to enter.”
“We didn’t.”
“We were desperate, and we’re also on a timetable. They’re not. At least, they don’t think they are at the moment.”
“What about that luminal coming down on top of us?”
Rook checks his screens. “He’s still three hundred miles up, we’ve got time,” he says, checking to see how the other Turks are faring. Much of the space up there is covered by enormous space stations and titanic debris. Turks 10 and 12 have started to box the remaining two warships in, but Turks 9 and 11 have taken heavy hits, and none of 9’s mass drivers are working anymore, it’s just coasting at close to a thousand miles an hour towards the luminals. “How much time before the graviton gun is—”
“Four minutes, thirty-five seconds,” Bishop says.
“Damn it!” We won’t be able to use it against the other luminal in time. We have to get clear, and fast. He looks at his sensors. The skies are indeed filling up with skirmishers. In one way it’s a good thing, because more are landing and beginning rescue operations by the minute. That leaves more of a chunk to take out when it goes off. If this works out, that is.
“Hooking left,” he says, indicating an in-place 180-degree turn to the left. Now they start gaining altitude. However, they aren’t a hundred yards away from the crashed luminal’s hull when a random massive explosion from farther up the ship starts a chain reaction. White-orange light comes through the viewport in an instant, blinding them, and the explosion puts Thor’s Anvil to shame: it sounds like the end of the world. The shockwave hits the Sidewinder knocks them off-kilter, slams them against their seat restraints.
One of the holo-displays goes dead.
Some of the lights go off the control panel.
Energy shields go down.
Arti-grav is offline.
Engines shut off.
For a dreadful two seconds, they are in freefall.
“Tumbleweed!” Rook calls, indicating zero situational awareness and systems failure. “Status!”
“Working with backup AI on the problem…”
The world starts to slowly spin.
Then, all at once, the Sidewinder comes back to life and the AI begins to address the problems. Vertical thrusters are activated and inertial dampers are switched on. Then, dampers switch back off. The entire ship shudders and whines as the light from the explosion dies away and the world is filled with the blackest smoke. Sensors are confused. All the Sidewinder knows is that it can’t let itself fall, it fights to keep its altitude, then keeps climbing. The inertial dampers switch back on, then cut back off again.
Another alarm goes off. He looks at his screen. “Oh no,” he whispers.
“What is it?” Bishop calls, hands racing to reactivate systems.
“The DERP’s been damaged, so has our OPG.”
“Without a DERP or an outward plasma generator, the sensor shroud is virtually—”
“Not a sensor shroud, yeah. Tell me somethin’ I don’t know.” Rook quickly looks over their energy output. For a moment, all of their energy might just be misconstrued as coming from whatever caused that explosion…
Oh no.
Several of the mirrors on the belly and side of the Sidewinder have been damaged, and at least one cooler has also seen damage, so…
“We’re not cooling our ionic trail anymore,” he says. “I’m sending the repair bot back to do some work on the systems, but we’re gonna need to push out of here at high speed. And when we do, they’re gonna spot us, either by sight or by sensors, but probably both.”
“The luminal is now just two hundred miles above us, and the timers are set to go off in less than five minutes. We need to move now.”
“Don’t gotta tell me twice. Activating forward thrusters. Get ready to engage, my friend! You are weapons-free.”
Instead of getting a response, a song comes over the comm. “What the…?”
“A little music for inspiration,” says Bishop, activating the particle-beam turret. “Cuing up targeting axis now.”
“Apply principle-of-four and principle-of-ten targeting parameters.”
“Copy that.”
“Here’s hoping…”
The Sidewinder shoots up and westward. However, with the inertial dampers still not at a hundred percent, they can’t accelerate very fast, especially since almost immediately they have to start banking left, right, left, and right again, to avoid collision. The skies are completely full of obstacles. Almost at once, the skirmishers and the seekers both know something is wrong. Irregular energy spikes tell them something that they cannot believe. As ghosts, we can feel their trepidation, the agonizing uncertainty. We follow it all the way up the chain of command, to the Supreme Conductor, who looks down on this data in utter disbelief.
He’s dead. It can’t be him, the Conductor thinks.
The only logical conclusion is that it isn’t the Phantom. It’s someone else. Another Sidewinder pilot.
But that cannot be, either. He was the last to flee the devastation, the last of his squadron not accounted for. All other Conductors, Observers, and Managers concluded the deaths of the human colonies and military personnel, and all Sidewinder pilots except for the Phantom. There were only a few billion humans in all and their life signs are easy to detect, and they cannot live on dead moons or asteroid fields for too long…
So who is this person?
Are there more humans?
Is it possible that we missed—?
The Phantom File warns him to tread carefully. It fills his program
ming with practically endless uncertainty, and that is too much for a Supreme Conductor. It’s enough to cause massive shifts in the mind, and release the pent-up madness waiting so long to be discharged by the huge responsibility of the datafeed.
Still, there is a way to have an answer. The Sidewinder in question is in the open, undefended, without a working sensor shroud or any shields whatsoever.
Ready to be extinguished, finally and forever. This, at least, gives him some small consolation. We’ll sort out this new Event Anomaly later. All of this thinking and trepidation and decision-making happens in the span of a second, and he sends his orders down to all skirmishers to engage and destroy the enemy. When he does, though, the datafeed informs him that music has been detected. His files on human history tell him the origin. A band called Nazareth. Song title “Hair of the Dog.”
We travel along that datafeed, collide with the song’s intro, hear the drum and the cowbell. The swaggering guitar enters. The skirmishers descend, as do seekers, they being to open fire, and as they do another wonder happens. The Sidewinder fires back, and in rapid succession takes out five skirmishers without a problem.
“Heartbreaker, soul shaker!
I’ve been told about you!
Steamroller, midnight soldier!
What they’ve been sayin’ must be true!”
The skirmishers swarm, descend, take damage, peel off and regroup. As their own particle beams smack against the Sidewinder, the endoergic armor absorbs and borrows some of that power to kick to forward thrusters. Almost every single hit is answered in return, and each attacking skirmisher is blown to pieces seconds after engaging.
“Red-hot mama!
Velvet charmer!
Time’s come to pay your dues!”
The Sidewinder takes a direct hit. EA systems show an overload, and Rook quickly bleeds off a little more power into sub-systems. Without inertial dampers or artificial gravity, they’ve been sent back in time, fighting much the way an old F-16 fighter pilot would, pressed into their seats with each hard maneuver. In the corridors behind them, Rook can hear the repair bot being slung around as it tries to make its way to the circuitry bay.
