The Immortal Game (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  “Thousands of targets bearing Sectors Twelve through Twenty-three,” Bishop calls, just as the Sidewinder jumps a little when the energy shield deflects a hunk of debris almost too big for it to handle. “We are completely covered up on the rear. We’ve got azimuth,” he says, indicating more than one major group separated in bearing. “Skirmishers bearing straight towards us, seekers swarming to the outside, cutting off flanks.”

  “Say speed.”

  “Twenty-seven miles per second and gaining. Alpha check?”

  Rook looks ahead at the churning clouds and the now three dozen tentacles reaching out into the void, then looks at the holo-display to his left. “About six thousand miles away from the heart of that thing,” he replies. “But only about twenty miles before we’re in range of the closest limb.”

  A loud whine!

  “We’re being targeted,” Bishop says, as calmly as he might be ordering a sundae.

  “We got one batch o’ chaff left. Releasing in three, two, one…chaff away!”

  The cloud blooms behind them, and immediately the skirmishers begin firing through the cloud, missing or hitting debris, although one beam does slice across their top, causing the whole ship to quake like the surface of Kali.

  Deeper into the debris ejected from the breakup of the planet, mostly gases and billions of scattered lava rocks, what was just on the very surface of the planet. The viewport starts to go dark, but the swirling, brilliant masses of limbs are still visible, shining and reaching. Rook spots one batting away the empty husk of a Turk, and is haunted by how similar it appears to a documentary he once saw where an octopus was playing with a mayonnaise jar someone had dropped into the ocean. And for a moment, he’s back home, sitting and watch the documentary with his dad…

  More particle beam fire, two shots glancing off their starboard, breaching the hull in the sealed corridor behind them. A few seconds later they absorb a second barrage across their stern. “They don’t seem to be trying to take us alive anymore,” Rook says.

  “They’ve sustained enough losses,” Bishop replies. “I can only imagine what it’s done to their ego.”

  “My dad always said that if you beat a guy ranked higher than you in chess, he’ll spend the rest of his days dreaming of a rematch so he can redeem himself. He can’t live without the redemption.” As they get deeper into the cloud, Rook checks his sensors, sees denser materials coming their way. “How much longer before we get that graviton gun recharged?”

  “Thirteen minutes, ten seconds.”

  “A watched pot never boils,” he mutters, watching another particle beam slice the space above them, annihilating a huge block of black rock.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just…” He trails off. Something strange has materialized on a holo-display. “Bishop, where’s the closest skirmisher?”

  “Six-point-one-three miles off. Why?”

  “You’re sure there’s none right above us?”

  “There isn’t. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I’m getting that same heat signature bouncin’ off our wake, and it’s staying steady. If it was just a superheated piece o’ rock, it wouldn’t be following us, it’d be going away from the erupting planet.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that something’s following—”

  An alarm!

  “Skirmishers are breaking off,” Bishop reports. “They’re opening a path for the flagship, and we’re being locked on. Energy buildup detected in flagship. It is preparing to fire its primary weapon.”

  Rook looks around the debris field. No more pieces to move. No more chaff. No more weapons. No more plays to make. There’s nothing to hide behind. Nothing so large that a blast from those world-ending particle beams can’t just burn through it and destroy the Sidewinder once and for all.

  A hand on his shoulder. He looks back at Bishop, and the alien just looks at him. “It was the greatest final show our peoples could’ve hope for.” He is right. How could we have asked for anything more? “The Clan of the Frozen Hands would be proud.”

  Rook sighs, and nods. The alien offers a wide grin, and the human returns one of his own. It almost feels good. It’s…kind of a release, isn’t it? No more fighting. No more knowing that he’s the last. No more wracking his brain for the right answers, the right plan. No more running. No more living on the edge, wondering when death will finally come, because it’s here. This is it.

  Rook looks out the forward view at the swirling mass of incandescent clouds. Can’t imagine a more beautiful last sight. He can almost imagine it’s heaven. He sees us there, waiting on him, and we can see him. We’re ready if he is. Ready to accept him into our worthy fold.

  A tap of a few keys and an adjustment to the throttle. The Sidewinder is now at full speed, moving with total abandon, not carrying the slightest about the massive hunks too large to be deflected. It just means the flagship will have to chase them a little deeper, maybe put them in the way of…

  There it is, he thinks, seeing the large, churning swell coming right at them. The tentacle is uncoiling, and indeed dozens of miles of gases and debris seem to part just for it as it unwinds at what looks like a slow speed from this far, but is actually several miles per second. It’s been sliced some, split down its center, and is hemorrhaging a dark-red liquid—doubtless, a wound given by the flagship in its escape. I hope you get your vengeance, too, friend. For the sake of whatever race made you, I hope you get vengeance.

  Then, out of his right viewport, there comes another parting in the cloud, this one a tentacle twice as large as the one coming right at them. This one is curling and uncurling even as it elongates. It collides with the first tentacle, they twist around one another in an arresting scene of coordination, forming a barrier.

  Protecting its center? Rook wonders, considering the fact that they are diving for the creature’s heart.

  Right before his eyes, the two tentacles split, and, like a snake giving birth to live young, smaller tentacles come slithering out, each one moving faster than their parent limb. The Sidewinder moves towards them, and Rook and Bishop both stare like moths drawn to flame. Then, on instincts, Rook decides to try and evade. The burst of hope comes quite out of nowhere, and he rolls hard to starboard, takes a glancing blow on their underside by this sub-limb, which is a mile wide and looks to be made of black leather.

  Another limb goes for them, and he zigs the other way, then zags away from another. They’re now hit on their rear, taking out their main thruster. The Sidewinder screams like a woman being murdered, then shudders before all engines shut down.

  Rook looks at the holo-display to his right, and smiles at the image of the oncoming flagship. Bet you can’t maneuver like that, can you, big fella?

  It can’t, and it doesn’t. The sub-limbs smash into it, wrapping themselves around it at crippling speeds. The primary weapon is fired, blasting through a dozen or so of the sub-limbs, but like the fabled hydra, as each is severed, more only seem to come.

  Rook closes his eyes, waiting for the end to come. The Sidewinder has only a few side thrusters left, and is tearing through space without a prayer. Spinning. Arti-grav is off, then back on, then back off again. He opens his eyes, sees nothing in the viewport but the tentacle barricade they’re about to smash into, and a swirling cloud of both light and miasmic terror, and he smiles.

  When the music starts, he almost misses it:

  “I feel my wings have broken in your hands,

  I feel the words unspoken inside,

  And they pull you under,

  And I would give you anything you want, oh…”

  The music is coming from the comm, one of the few things still working on the Sidewinder. Rook smiles wider. “Good choice, friend,” he says, closing his eyes and absorbing the sweet sounds of home. “Damn good choice.”

  Bishop turns to him. “I didn’t choose it.”

  Slowly, Rook opens his eyes again. When he does, he’s very confused, be
cause now instead of the barricade of intertwined tentacles, he sees…Angels? Rook leans forward, mouth agape, looking at the large objects hovering in front of the Sidewinder’s viewport, swimming in space amid the debris and clouds. They look roughly humanoid in shape, but they’re twelve feet tall at the least, dark blue, with arms and legs that splinter off into numerous tentacles, each one with a four-fingered hand. They…they have two heads. One at the top of the body, where you would expect, but another one situated inside the chest. They are moving by no propulsion system Rook has ever heard off.

  “You are all I wanted;

  All my dreams are fallen down…

  Crawlin’ around and around and around…”

  “I don’t…I-I-I don’t…I don’t understand,” Rook sputters.

  “I told you,” Bishop says, turning to him. “Didn’t I tell you, friend? Two is a pattern. Did you honestly think we were alone?”

  As they move closer, the creatures attach themselves to the hull, and Rook and Bishop feel the Sidewinder shake and shudder as it’s slowly brought under control. They’re spun around, and suddenly they see the debris field racing away, all the gases and writhing tentacles become smaller, and smaller. He can see a giant burst of light thousands of miles off; the death throes of the flagship.

  It seeps into Rook’s mind slowly, the reality. The smile gets wider, the realization dawning. Tears fall. He weeps. Then he throws his head back, thumps his fists against his chest, and can’t stop laughing.

  “Somebody saaaaaaaave me!

  And two warm hands break right through me;

  Somebody saaaaaaaave me!

  I don’t care how you do it!

  Just stay! Stay!

  I’ve been waiting for you!”

  Thousands of miles away, the last signal of the Supreme Conductor is dying out. In the end, he learned almost nothing from his mad dash for vengeance, but he did have enough sense to make one final recommendation: he admitted to his obsolescence, and recommended the data he sent be used to form a more perfect Supreme Conductor, one who will not buckle under such maddening contradictions that the Phantom represents, and one who will offer a true counter to the Phantom’s tactics.

  The Colossus continues spreading, and consuming space. Its expansion finally slows after a few hours, and its split core will cool over days. The bulk of the organism will remain hidden inside that dark cloud for thousands of years to come, its limbs eternally probing the vacuum, selecting this morsel and that one, testing it as a food source. Let us retreat now, lest it selects us.

  15

  Drifting. Floating in a dream.

  Exhausted, Rook sits in his pilot’s seat, eyes looking over the holo-display around him, saying nothing. Behind him, Bishop moves about, busily pulling up what few systems are still operational, making the most out of this miraculous moment. They’ve spoken little. Rook doesn’t feel quite up to having a lucid conversation just yet. He can hardly stop staring out the viewport, looking at the tall alien beings that have anchored to their ship and have pulled him thousands of miles away. He checks his systems—their heat signature matches the one that’s been in the Sidewinder’s wake for weeks now.

  “They’ve been following us,” he whispers.

  Bishop glances out the forward view, and nods. “Most likely.”

  “They remained hidden. Even from us.”

  “It explains why they haven’t been wiped out by the Cerebs yet.”

  “You think…maybe they’re the builders of that…whatever-it-was? The Colossus?”

  “I would say it’s a, ah, safe bet?”

  The Sidewinder shudders, jostling his cracked ribs. Outside the viewport, just beyond the elongated bodies hovering impossibly in the void, there is a large orb of light. It’s growing in size, and has been for hours now. “What do you think that is?” He points. The light is now taking on contours, resolving itself in the shape of an imperfect sphere, swelling and shrinking, swelling and shrinking.

  Bishop glances out the viewport. “I imagine it’s whatever system they use to achieve long-distance travel.”

  “You think it’s how they travel the slipstream?”

  “Affirmative, friend.”

  Another hour passes. The two of them say little, only working at getting systems back online. Remotely, Rook controls the repair bot, which is banged up in the corridor outside, but is still working well enough to mete out hull sealant, replace aerogel insulation, and reroute power temporarily from other systems to bring life-support systems back online. Rook is finally able to remove his helmet and breathe the Sidewinder’s atmo.

  “The fabricator is badly damaged,” he says, going over a few diagnostics. “We’re gonna need a lot of raw materials to feed into the omni-kit to make the replacement parts. Could take months before the fabricator can mass-produce what we need.” He looks ahead. “That is, if these guys don’t eat us first.”

  Bishop gives him a look. “You don’t believe they require—”

  “It’s a joke.” He snorts. “No. I don’t think they want to kill us, or else they wouldn’t have saved us. The real question is, why save us.”

  “I suspect the same reason I did.”

  Rook looks at him. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend, you mean.”

  “Affirmative, friend.”

  As they reach the glowing sphere, it begins to fill their view, the viewport itself dims, shielding their eyes from the light. Rook holds his breath as they are pulled through the portal. Bishop takes a seat beside him. Rook looks down at his sensors. “Spacetime is being warped all around us at exactly one part per ten million. You’re right, they’re guiding us into the slipstream. But the way they’ve managed it…it’s different…it’s…”

  “Beautiful.” The alien roots through more of their systems, drudging up enough power to reroute to arti-grav.

  Rook smirks. “Affirmative, friend.”

  Six hours of travel. They emerge into real space, a thousand light-years away and still being towed by the large aliens. Looking at them more closely, without the craziness and mad glee of suddenly living to fight another day clouding his mind, Rook realizes he was probably wrong on his first assessment of the beings. They don’t have two heads—the bulk of their bodies look to be some kind of bio-mechanical construct, like Bishop’s exo-suit, only taller and slimmer, and even more organic-looking. The second head, the one situated in the stomach behind a transparent bubble, are the aliens themselves. They’re blue, like their suits. Their heads are tall and lean, their eyes bulbous and a translucent green, with a dim glow coming from inside.

  Rook sees almost no indication of electronics anywhere, either on their physical bodies or on their exo-suits. An even closer look shows that their arms and legs merge almost seamlessly with the arms and legs of their exo-suits. It looks like the suits are growing them at their center.

  “What’s propelling them?” he asks, as much to himself as to Bishop. He studies a holo-display, looking at the energy readings bleeding off of the alien bodies. “I mean, I don’t see any propulsion systems. Nothing mechanical. They also hacked into our systems and accessed my music files, selected a song, and played it.” He looks back at the elongated bodies, shaking his head in wonderment. “How are they doing it?”

  “Perhaps we’ll find out.”

  Two more jumps through more of these little “slipstream gates” and now they are in another wide patch of space, except directly ahead of them, nine million miles or so away, there is a bright purple, red, and white star, with a light-years-long jet of light shooting out of both ends. They start moving towards it at about a hundred miles per second. Traveling at this speed, it takes a little over twenty hours for the whole star to begin to fill the forward view.

  The star is actually a star at its inception: it is being born. What fills the Sidewinder’s viewport is a swirling mass of pink and dark-red gases being forced together, tightly compressed. Readings show that compression is heating up by the minute, and the AI estimate
s it has probably been doing so for three hundred thousand years, give or take. The giant spinning disc is larger than the entire Sol solar system. Gravity is crushing all the gases into a super-dense, super-hot ball of energy. The light-years-long beams of blue light shooting out of the center are jets of gas being released out of the top and bottom of the star, caused by the release of immense pressure. Meanwhile, gravity is still sucking in more dust and gas particles, which smash into each other, generating more heat. Rook checks the baby star’s temperature: more than fifteen million degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, atoms of gas are beginning to fuse together, releasing tremendous energy.

  It’s the first time Rook has ever seen an emerging star. He’s read accounts of the first explorers to venture into space using the slipstream to watch a newborn star, two of which dared to come within a hundred million miles of such explosive energy, but none ever came this close. Another first for humanity, he thinks, smirking. What draws Rook’s attention most of all, though, is the space station hovering about a hundred miles ahead of them.

  At least, he thinks it’s a space station. A large, purple, translucent and bloated sack hangs there in the void. The AI estimates it’s about twenty-two miles in diameter. It also detects several octagonal steel containers dotted around the exterior of the massive sphere, and energy readings from those are staggering, as much as 190 petajoules pumping from each one. The steel octagons appear to be generators, and they are the only steel structures he’s reading right now, for the sack itself is giving off a biological sign, and a strange soup of an atmosphere is detectable inside. The sack itself appears to be supported by a strong lattice shell on the outside, and an icosahedron shell on the inside.