The Immortal Game (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  Another hit.

  “Deploying chaff!” he calls.

  From the Sidewinder’s tail, a cloud of aluminum shards blooms, and all at once his enemies are trying to lock on to dozens of phantoms.

  Bishop lines up another series of targets, each one igniting under the concentrated power of the Sidewinder’s energy weapons. They receive hits from above and below. The Sidewinder rocks so hard Rook feels certain his restraints might’ve cracked a rib or two. He still manages to peel away from a swarm headed right towards them, still continuing them climb, just as the luminal breaks through the cloud line above.

  “Now you’re messin’ with a…

  A son of a BIIIIIIITCH!

  Now you’re messin’ with a son a’ bitch!”

  Another downed skirmisher, another hit to the Sidewinder. Energy blasts and lightning ignite the sky, illuminating the belly of the beast descending upon them. Rook finds an opening in the cloud of enemies and gives the Sidewinder an extra push, his body fighting against acceleration while Bishop remains unfazed.

  Rook finds an opening in the sky, and forces them past Mach 1. He is pressed against his seat, holding on tight to the yoke. Aerodynamic condensation creates a halo around the Sidewinder, which turns into a cone and bleeds out across their airfoil. They leave a sonic boom in their trail.

  Still not fast enough.

  Another hit. This one bad.

  “We’re losing atmo!” Rook says, giving a glance to a diagnostics screen. “Repair bot’s applying sealant.”

  “I’m working on our inertial dampers and arti-grav now,” Bishop chimes in, even as he selects from an array of other targets and locks them into the computer’s targeting system.

  At least one thing is working. He wasn’t even aware at which point he starting boiling with rage, but being chased and pinned like this, with limited access to escape, it has reawakened his bloodlust from months before in Magnum Collectio.

  Then, all at once, the dampers come back on, and Rook feels his body become free of acceleration g-forces. A second later arti-grav reasserts itself and Rook feels his seat press up into him again.

  “Inertial dampers and arti-grav back online,” Bishop reports calmly, as if he is telling Rook that his pizza is in the kitchen, might wanna eat it before it gets cold. “Plasma charges set to detonate in T-minus two minutes, fifteen seconds.”

  “Activating full burn!”

  “Talkin’ jivey, poison ivy!

  You ain’t gonna cling to me!

  Man taker, bone faker!

  I ain’t so blind I can’t see!”

  The inertial dampers cause a lurching in Rook’s stomach as they suddenly blast past hypersonic speeds, then into high-hypersonic. Within seconds, they are finally beyond the luminal-created ceiling, and they can now shoot straight through the clouds. Skirmishers follow them as they reach escape velocity.

  “Now you’re messin’ with a…

  A son of a BIIIIIIITCH!

  Now you’re messin’ with a son a’ bitch!”

  Then, energy readings in the sky outside suddenly go off the charts. Rook looks at a flickering holo-display. “Jesus, they’re targeting us with their primary weapon!”

  “A little ship like this with a beam that powerful?” Bishop sounds humored. “I’m honored.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re fried unless we can clear the—” Another hit to starboard cuts him off. Rook uses NUI to direct some of ship’s repairs on his HUD. He tells the EA systems to bleed some of that incoming power to keep enforcing the inertial dampening effects, but just now the endoergic layer of armor seems to be failing. Too many ruptures. The repair bot isn’t able to apply sealant fast enough…

  “We need to close off the back half of the ship,” Bishop suggests. “And cut off all life-support systems.”

  “Concur.” Rook has enough oxygen in his environment suit to last another hour. Tapping a few keys, he seals off the cockpit and switches off life-support systems and lets what’s left in the corridors drain out as they begin to exit the atmosphere.

  “Luminal is still angling to fire primary weapon.”

  “Time to detonation?”

  “Forty-six seconds.”

  On his screens, all of the skirmishers are peeling away. They’re getting clear of the massive, high-yield particle beam that’s about to split the sky, with a radius too large to miss the Sidewinder. Unless we bank hard for the east, and accelerate to top speed. But that will mean they’ll be running parallel with the planet’s surface, with the luminal ship below them, and when—if—the plasma charges go off and that drive core destabilizes enough to fully detonate…We won’t be high enough to escape the explosion. We can turn back for space once it happens, but it’ll be close.

  Rook recalls their narrow escape from Magnum Collectio when the last ship’s core destabilized and exploded. The power unleashed is going to be just as tremendous here.

  “Hang on,” Rook says, and banks east, pushing the thrusters to full. Skirmishers follow.

  “The luminal ship is elevating. They’re pursuing and still targeting.” Bishop targets two skirmishers, destroys them in as many seconds. “Detonation in T-minus forty-five seconds.”

  They’ve broken through the clouds, and can just see the dots of supermassive starships and space stations as they are illuminated by the glow of particle beams and superheated explosions, all happening hundreds of miles away. Just now, Turk 8 is being obliterated, but Turk 12 has partially taken up the position left empty by 8, and enough of 8’s debris remains to hamper any chance of an immediate escape.

  “Detonation in ten seconds.”

  Rook counts to five, then rolls hard to port and pushes for space. He pushes to Mach 32, hoping with every bone, tissue, and blood cell in his body that the inertial dampers and artificial gravity don’t choose that moment to suddenly switch back off.

  “Four, three, two, one…”

  For a moment, nothing happens. A dreaded few seconds where it seems like it was all for nothing.

  Then, the world becomes light. They have made it into full vacuum and so cannot hear the explosion as it happens. The Sidewinder begins to shake. Only we may safely pass outside and look below the ship, at the holocaust expanding outwards, bringing ungodly light and heat to a planet left so long in darkness and cold. No less than 2.93 exajoules of energy are displaced in an instant, creating a surge of first white, then orange-hot superheated debris, gases, and plasma clouds, before turning white again in a series of shockwaves that expand outwards. The black clouds of Kali become illuminated and join with the white dome rushing up at us.

  Yes, a dome! A dome of displaced energy pushing across Kali’s surface, expanding at a rate that makes it seem limitless, as though it might consume the whole planet, the whole galaxy. When the shockwaves hit the other luminal ship hovering above the dead luminal, it survives for merely a few seconds, energy shields trying to bleed it off. But it cannot hold up. And here’s where it seems as if the universe might end.

  The luminal ship explodes, its own drive core erupts a second later, the energy is displaced down towards the energy rushing up from the first explosion. The energetic ripple effect bounces into the ground, then back up, joining the rest of the energy already rising above the planet’s surface, tripling the energy to six exajoules—six times the energy released in the most powerful earthquakes in Earth’s history.

  Energy goes into the earth and into the sky, and the Sidewinder is still racing away. The ship shakes and jerks, the EA systems no longer work, so there’s no bleeding off this energy. The light is so intense the viewport dims itself, else the light might be great enough to sear Rook’s retinas, permanently blinding him. The concussive shockwaves rush out, but displace as each concussive wave reaches the void. However, the shockwaves still propagate via the ejected material coming straight up from the planet below.

  Rook is slammed against his restraints when something huge smacks against the hull, but seconds after that, the Sidewinder
is calm. The comm shorts, and Nazareth’s song about being a son of a bitch switches off. The viewport lightens up. Alarms are going off, and absently Rook switches them off. The Sidewinder is suddenly very quiet.

  Bishop’s face is calm as his fingers zip across holographic interfaces. “We’re clear of the explosion. Graviton gun is recharged and ready to fire. I think I can have shields back online in half an hour.” He turns to Rook. “I just want to say, I can scarcely believe what we’ve actually achieved. It’s a marvel what you’ve worked out here. Truly.”

  Sweating, looking out the forward view, agreeing with the alien that it was difficult to understand what they’d just done, Rook looks at the Turks up ahead being ripped apart. It’s too far away to see details, but scanners show skirmishers swarming the Turks and trying to lend to the damage. Only six Turks remain in near perfect working order—those are 1, 3, 7, 9, 10 and 12.

  “It seems we’ve reached middlegame,” says Bishop.

  Half dazed, Rook looks around at him. “Huh?”

  “Most of the major pieces have been destroyed, and now it’s time to start looking at endgame strategies.”

  Rook can’t help it. He laughs. He laughs long and hard, and sets a course for a position directly behind the relative safety of Turk 7. “Status on the Turks’ progress?” he says, still sniggering.

  “They managed to cloud the space enough to hem in the flagship and its remaining vassal ship. When they destroyed Eleven, they made enough room to squeeze through and ensure they weren’t crushed, but not before a large chunk of Eleven collided with the underside of the flagship’s partner.”

  “Result?”

  Bishop takes a moment to consult with some of their probes that remain littered around space, the ones disguised inside of mimetic clay. “It looks a little promising. The primary weapon is located on the underside of all known Cereb warships, and there’s been extensive damage. I see radiation spikes—it looks to me like their main power cells have ruptured. If I had to guess, I’d say their primary weapon is down.”

  “Any ideas about fixing the sensor shroud?”

  “The repair bot is working on the OPG—”

  “Any other ideas while it’s working?”

  “No. But, I will add that we may go undetected a bit longer, for the massive waves of energy being displaced in this area of space at the moment will most likely distort their sensors.”

  “Only for a while,” Rook says. “They’re all occupied around the Turks, but they’ll be back on us soon enough.”

  “We could flee,” the alien offers. “We’ve caused monumental damage, they won’t soon forget it. We’ve made our point.”

  Rook looks at their fuel, so low that they may as well forget going anywhere else at all. Then, to the Ianeth, “You’re telling me you don’t want to finish it?”

  Bishop doesn’t hesitate. “Of course, I do. However, we are running out of pieces to play.”

  Looking out the forward view, Rook thinks fast. “I have an idea.” He gives the Sidewinder an extra burst of speed. “One last play that might give us the edge. Prepare targeting axis, I imagine we’ll run into a few skirmishers on the way in. And make sure the graviton gun is ready to fire.”

  “Affirmative, friend. An inquiry, though, before our luck perhaps runs out. How long were you planning all of that?”

  “All of what?”

  “That. Everything that just happened on the surface. It all demonstrates a rather prescient analysis.”

  Rook touches his right ribs, winces where he thinks he fractured one or two against the restraints. “I didn’t plan for that exactly,” he says. “I just wanted to destroy maybe one luminal. If its core didn’t rupture when it crash-landed, then we would infiltrate and rupture it ourselves, just like we did. I wasn’t sure that another luminal would come down to help search for survivors, but I had a feeling—I was actually hoping to keep them all hemmed in by the Turks.”

  Bishop runs his hands over a holo-display, speaks over his shoulder. “But you had a contingency plan.”

  “You told me a twelve-pointer would split the planet in half. Given the huge EMP of the explosion, and the tectonomagnetic and tectonoelectric pulses that were bound to come from a planet-splitting seismic shift, and combined with Kali’s chaotic atmosphere, I was hoping any ship that came down might be low enough that the explosion would frazzle their sensors, give us a chance to make away. But they were much closer to the explosion than I expected.” He looks at Bishop. “Sometimes, some moves just present themselves, and you have to abort others. Throttles,” he adds, indicating a reduction in power to reduce IR signature.

  “Copy throttles,” says the alien.

  The Sidewinder pushes relatively slowly for the final endgame awaiting them, but what neither the AI, nor Rook, nor Bishop knows is what chain reaction they’ve set off far behind them. Once a possible component to his plan, it is now one of those aborted plans, and is therefore so far from Rook’s mind that it’s not even on his radar, figuratively speaking.

  Over six exajoules of energy were released in an instant, and directly on top of the surface of Kali. Miles below, the earth is moving, shifting. Thor’s Anvil has been totally eradicated, and the magma vein beneath where it once stood has ruptured, tearing to pieces along the fault leading all the way to the other side of the planet. Magma hits the massive glacier, turning the ice explosively into steam. In the process, the magma is pulverized, causing a chain reaction that ripples throughout the planet.

  Tectonic plates suddenly jump and shift with breakneck speeds. The mantle ruptures, splits, exposing millions of tons of supercharged magnetized crystal rocks, all now repelling, repelling, repelling. The core cracks, spilling its heated fluids into every new vein ripping open within the planet.

  The egg has hatched. Titanic forces begin to brew.

  On the opposite side of the planet, invisible fields of tectonomagnetism irradiate the surface, and tectonoelectricity pulses harshly outward, digging into the clouds and creating newer and angrier storms as the world splits along many veins. Gravity keeps all the pieces together, but the pieces no less split, and churning seas of magma expand, launching with such force they make it into the thermosphere, blooming, a gorgeous red-orange umbrella that cools at the top and blackens like a quickly dying flower.

  In the hateful darkness below, amid the churning lava and superheated gases, something swims.

  Let us retreat before it finds us…

  13

  The flagship’s primary particle weapon has been firing repeatedly, nearly to the point of overheating. That has never happened. The Supreme Conductor has had to carefully manage the time between cooldown phases and active engagement. That has never happened, either.

  Half of the defense stations are slag, and some of that slag is becoming part of the problem. Despite the fact that the particle-beam cannon is powerful enough to ignite atmospheres, the energy shield surrounding each of these stations was designed to withstand at least a few of those hits. And when the shields finally do fail, the beams seem to only achieve partial penetration, tearing through the openings in the energy shields and ripping through random super-compartments of the defense stations. While it annihilates anything it hits, what it doesn’t hit peels off like layers of an onion and goes careening off into space, much of it towards any sufficiently large object. The solenoid guns are working overtime to deflect debris, but still some of it is getting through.

  What’s worse, the collision between the second luminal ship and one of the stations has caused its particle-beam cannon’s reactor core to destabilize: it cannot fire now without starting a chain reaction that might mean blowing up a good portion of the luminal.

  And then there’s the devastation away on the planet.

  How did this happen? The Conductor asks himself trillions of times, like a computer stuck in a loop caused by too much conflicting data, a column of numbers that just doesn’t add up. As he watches the 3D models throughout the bridge, th
e energy dissipates across the planet and the irradiated atmosphere brings light to the rogue planet.

  The Conductor stares.

  The Phantom File is trying to reassert itself, and yet he is still defiant. It urges him not to be too dismissive of the Phantom, not to discount his effectiveness in battle. The File also says he should not believe everything his eyes see, for the Phantom is most cunning and favors illusions, and yet the Conductor must accept the reality being presented.

  It is no illusion, yet it cannot be happening. We have superior numbers. How did this happen? How?

  The maddening datafeed never stops feeding him the frustrating truth. On and on it comes, telling him the story of excited gravitons, quantum gravity foam manipulations being detected moments before the first ship went down, the ignition of untold and barely contained energy from the drive cores, and the planet being ripped apart. Never has he seen so much havoc wreaked. Never.

  The datafeed continues on and on.

  Damage report: flagship’s hull is strong, secondary ship’s hull threatened.

  Casualty report: exactly 24,213.

  Wounded: exactly 27

  Fleet operational efficiency: down by more than half.

  Hull breaches: flagship 0, secondary ship 21.

  Primary weapon: operable, but overheating.

  Solenoid gun: operable, but being overheating.

  The music, he thinks. It has to be him. There was music coming from the second Sidewinder. But it cannot be him…he cannot possibly be controlling all of these Ianeth stations. The Conductor is almost lost in a catatonic state. The Phantom File tries to remind him of the Phantom’s tendency to—

  By a force of will and self-programming, the Conductor pushes it away. He is fed up with the File. He won’t hear it. He won’t hear anymore building up of the Phantom’s legend. He isn’t something to be given special treatment. Even a special insect is still just an insect!