The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  The chaff itself was created in fabricators on the bottom of his ship, which could gather asteroids roughly the size of a shoebox, grind them up, and use some of their base materials for making simple objects such as bolts, screws, wrenches, and chaff. The chaff he just used was his last batch.

  They are already firing particle beams. We can’t hear the explosions, but the clouds of debris exploding outward from the asteroids all around us tell us they are close, firing into the aluminum cloud, missing terribly.

  Rook straps in, and prepares the inertial dampeners and artificial gravity—he can’t just turn the gravity off, because at such speeds it helps a pilot get a “feel” for the turns he is making. Something that couldn’t be avoided when humans first started making fighter crafts meant for the Deep. However, too much gravity too fast, and he won’t be able to stand the g’s being pressed on his body.

  He sees trouble on a datascreen—not enough power going to the vertical thrusters, so he reroutes power from all nonessential systems to give them a boost, and then kicks up his speed to around eight hundred miles an hour. He cackles, and sings:

  “Well I feel so good, everything is kinda high,

  You better take it easy ’cause the place is on fire!

  It’s been a hard day and I have so much to do,

  We made it baby, and it had to be you!

  And I’m so glad we made it!

  So glad we made it!

  You gotta…gimme some lovin’!

  Gimme gimme some lovin’!”

  Rolling hard to starboard (right), he routes extra power into the forward thrusters, banks hard around the next asteroid, which he’s dubbed Atlanta, as it’s roughly the size of the city before she burned, and holds to the generous shadow of its underbelly. The shadows have ever been critical to his survival here in the asteroid field. The small and massive rocks play interesting tricks with the light from Shiva, which is not so far away, spatially speaking. Big rocks cast big shadows against the small rocks, and the small rocks cast shadows against the big rocks. Those shadows are always moving; sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but always moving. It takes an experienced eye to gauge the rocks, their speed, their roll, and their satellites—yes, their satellites, for the bigger ones always attracted, via gravitational force, smaller asteroids the way planets capture their moons—and to navigate them and their shadows.

  Artists once called it chiaroscuro, Italian for light-dark, the study of the interplay between light and shadow, and it was one of the last tricks Rook learned from mankind’s developing Aeronautics and Space Combat Academy (ASCA), where radical new techniques were tested and developed before the great purge. Before the War.

  Another chime. They have made it through his cloud of chaff, though some were thrown off, it seems, on wild goose chases. He has six of them directly on his tail now, and just about to surmount the horizon of Big Ben.

  The asteroids have become like old friends. He knows them well, and gave many of them names. Another tactic taught to him at ASCA, just before the end. Make monuments and markers out of the natural items in one’s environment. It is healthy for the memory, and for making sense out of an otherwise senseless universe. The map is always changing, and he has various computers helping him keep things straight.

  Looming like an upset parent, Big Ben is the biggest one in the field; at 749.3 miles across, he’s about twenty times the size of Rhode Island before the end: a dwarf planet. Big Ben is covered in regolith, a layer of loose dust, soil, and broken rock. It also has a weak atmosphere and water frost on one hemisphere. A possible home for Rook, were it not so obvious to his enemies.

  Hovering near Big Ben is his slightly smaller brother, Little Ben, which is only 635.22 miles across. Each of them has no less than a hundred smaller asteroids huddling in the hundred miles between each, like children gathering around a parent, and each of them with their own unique quirks and personalities. Such as Gonzo, which Rook passes beneath now.

  Gonzo is 580.6 miles wide, but with bizarre striations across its surface, and strange jutting pieces that were utterly unlike the rest of its brothers in the field, and a tendency to bounce off the orbits of some asteroids, zip around them, collide with others, and disturb the satellites around the Bens. Scanning revealed that Gonzo has a rotating liquid metallic core, one with anomalous supermagnetic properties, which might explain why it zips around so fitfully—the great core doing battle with Big Ben’s immensity.

  Gonzo also has one other very interesting property. At close ranges, its titanic struggle with Big Ben, combined with the thick ice and space dust left by the passing comet many years ago, creates a disturbance on most sensors. Moving closer to it, his sensors begin giving various contradictory reports, which is okay, because his enemies will be experiencing the same right about now, and they didn’t know the field and its movements nearly as well as he did. They knew it as well as their computers could plot the motions and trajectories of every asteroid in the field. But even their computers wouldn’t be accounting for the weather.

  The shadow of Gonzo, now cast against Big Ben, creates an orb of pure darkness. His pursuers don’t see it. They don’t see what’s coming right over the top of Big Ben. But Rook does, and he’s laughing. Again, I urge you to keep a few feet from him. Out here, madness is catching.

  He’s still singing:

  “Gimme some a-lovin’!

  Gimme gimme some lovin’!

  Yeah, gimme some a-lovin’!

  Every day!”

  There is noise about the cockpit. This time, it is no chime, but screeching alarms. They are on him, locking on. Rook blinks. Activates the Sidewinder’s rear cameras. Switches to thermal imaging. Sees them. Smiles.

  The alarms continue screeching. Rook sings louder. He kicks extra speed to his forward thrusters. His smile widens as some of the g’s start to spread it across his face. He can no longer move his lips to sing, though he tries. He flies closer to Big Ben, now just twenty feet above the dwarf planet’s surface, moving over the frozen ice and past the sole mountain peek on its surface, using it for cover. It blocks his enemy’s line-of-sight for about four seconds, then they’re on him again. It doesn’t matter. The horizon is up ahead.

  Alarms!

  They’ve locked on again…but then the alarms cease. He smiles. They’re losing him, unable to lock on as they wish. Such darkness, and with their sensors on the fritz, they are not in any such conditions that any of them have probably trained for. But they’ll find him. Of that, he is certain.

  Rook checks the Sidewinder’s fuel tanks. He is at a quarter. It might be enough, but only if his gambit works, and he is able to—

  Alarms!

  Rook checks his scanners. “Looks like I got some pals comin’ in, at one-one-eight, Mark Five.” More alarms sound. There is nothing and nowhere to go. Nothing but rock and ice below, and Gonzo up above, casting its nefarious shadow down on all of them. The alarms continue screeching. He can’t reach out and switch them off, the g’s are too great.

  They are about to fire. He estimates in five, four, three…

  He makes the dip over the horizon. He makes it to the sun. And so does the hemisphere of Big Ben just beneath him. The colossal rock’s spin has been sped up over the last few days, thanks to Gonzo’s strange properties, and it has “ping-ponged” between Gonzo and Little Ben, changing its usual lumbering spin and movements throughout the field. And the same solar winds coming off of Prime that are causing the geomagnetic storm on Shiva 154e plays a part, as well.

  Rook counts on that.

  It happens slowly at first, just a few great cones of gas jetting up into the air. Then, as the sun comes up over Big Ben’s horizon—or, rather, as Big Ben tilts its icy hemisphere to meet the sun—the sublime happens. All at once, the ice transforms immediately into gas without passing through its liquid stage. Sublimation. Great jets of superheated gas shoot angrily into the air, creating a boiling mist that covers several hundred square miles.

  Pul
se racing, Rook is lost in it.

  “Well my temperature’s risin’ and my feet left the floor,

  Crazy people rockin’ cause they want to go more,

  Let me in baby I don’t know what you got,

  But ya better take it easy, cuz this place is hot!”

  Ensconced in the sudden sunlight and miles upon miles of obfuscating steam clouds, Rook decelerates, elevates his pitch, and angles up, up, and up, laughing madly at his enemies, at his desperate situation, at the universe, and then rolls to port as he begins a wide arc. Were you and I not apparitions, we wouldn’t be able to hold on, so tight is his turn.

  Blinded by light and a seemingly eternal veil of white, Rook takes us on a course that completes his tight parabola around Big Ben, and then accelerates. His sensors are struggling to keep up with Gonzo’s effects and all of the abrupt environmental changes going on around the Sidewinder. On top of everything else, the massive solar winds are causing GIC (geomagnetically induced currents), affecting even the most hardened electrical systems. In effect, Rook is flying blind. Big Ben is mostly without hills, yet there are bumps and random dips that rise into sharp, deadly spikes, so flying like this was near suicidal.

  “Ya gotta get up preeeeeetty early in the morning to get the Phantom in his own house, boys!” he laughs. “Understand? This is my house! Got that! My! House!” He howls like a wolf, and beats his fist hard against the main console.

  Stand back; this fever can be catching.

  All at once, the fog lifts in front of him. It’s only for a second, but he’s able to see them, and so are we. Two fighters, obviously very much lost, trying to ascend exactly as Rook did in order to get above the dense mist, and the sunlight coming through it. They want the respite of shadow, either Gonzo’s or Little Ben’s, but they won’t get it.

  Sweating heavily, Rook targets using his eyes and instincts—the Sidewinder’s systems can’t help him now. He takes a moment to watch their yaw, then their roll and pitch, and then produces a workable theory on which way they will move. “Guesstimating” as his wingman Cowboy used to say. He taps a few buttons to set his course, drawing even with theirs, and then, tapping a button on his armrest, he rotates his chair to the firing station beside the pilot’s console. The visual comes up shakily on his screen, with plenty of static interfering with the 3D image. “Rotate the targeting axis point-seven microns,” he asks of the computer. It cannot verbally reply, but it can obey.

  For a moment, a loud whine goes off, indicating he’s got his enemy targeted. “I’ve got tone,” he says to no one at all, speaking in pilot’s jargon out of habit. Then, he loses his target. “Damn! No joy! I repeat, that’s a no joy!” Sweating, his hands slipping on the controls. A few seconds later, he has tone again. He takes a deep, deep breath, lets it out slowly, just how Sergeant McEvoy taught him, and fires.

  At first, nothing happens. The particle beam doesn’t fire. There is a tense moment while the DEW’s (directed-energy weapon) AI command recalibrates the focusing lens—recently forged from the Sidewinder’s onboard fabricators from particles of various captured asteroids, another sobering reminder of the ship’s limited lifespan—and finally sets the beam through the lens. Then, the accelerator itself almost fails, the subatomic particles overheating in the accelerating tunnel, causing premature shutdown. After a moment of adjusting the heat sinks and overriding the safety protocols, Rook finally gets it to fire.

  The particle beam cannon fires its subatomic particles at nearly the speed of light, forming a blue-green beam worth five terajoules of energy, which cuts silently through the vacuum and superheats the first target until it explodes a second later. Seeing this, the other fighter breaks and tries to run. Rook is in on him five seconds later, and gets a glancing blow at his aft thrusters. That’s all he needs. The fighter explodes silently in a burst of white superheated alloys, but there are no flames—no air in outer space.

  “You boys came into my zone? Into the Phantom’s territory? Didn’t your mamas teach you nothin’? Hahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

  Rook can’t stop laughing. He knows who he is. He knows he is their Phantom. What little his people learned of their language was taught at ASCA, and he has heard their radio chatter. I’m the Specter. Their Ghost in what they call the Deep. Over the years, he’s started thinking of himself as just that, a ghost. Just as he’s come to think of space as they seem to—a great Deep, not quite knowable, no matter how long you remain in it, no matter how long you stare into it, no matter how many names you give to the planets and stars and asteroids.

  Unknowable.

  Rook now taps another switch, which swivels his chair back to the forward viewport, and places him directly in front of the flight controls once more. Still chuckling, he turns his attention back to his navigational computer, and makes for his escape. For the moment, he appears to be in the clear. Their net will still be all around him, but they won’t have a fix on him, not this close to Gonzo and the others.

  Rook banks hard to starboard, still laughing, still sweating, still feeling his pulse moving well beyond his control. He’s heading for the Twins now—a pair of rocks roughly the same size and shape, both orbiting Little Ben in low orbit, never too far from one another. He’ll slip into their shadows, and from there he’ll make for King Henry VIII, and then…

  He stops laughing. He turns at once, and looks towards the back of the cockpit. At us. Oh no…has he somehow…can he see us? No, no it’s not possible. We are apparitions, he can’t be looking at us. So what is he looking at?

  Rook stands up. The look on his face tells the tale. “Fee-fi-fo-fum,” he says slowly. “What have you Cerebs gone and done?”

  What can he be talking about? More importantly, who is he talking to?

  Then, we understand. Just as Rook understands. It can’t be that easy. It never is, not with these creatures. They have stomped across the galaxy and weeded out every human being they could find, they have sacked whole worlds and undid the entire legacy of Man, and they did it in a summer and a winter. Rook survived partly because he has forsaken the comforts of worlds and cohabitating with others like him. He has survived because he decided to cut and run when he had to, exactly as he was trained. A loner. A small flea out in the void, too miniscule to attract that much attention. Yet, a flea with a degree of paranoia that is perhaps unequaled by the rest of his kind.

  So then, what’s their game this time? Maybe they sacrificed those two ships, and maybe they didn’t. Maybe they only took advantage of a bad situation. Maybe those two ships were merely lures to get his attention away from something else.

  Away from what? he wonders, as do we.

  His pulse is still pounding, his brow still beading with sweat. He turns back to his console and starts bringing up three-dimensional holograms of the area beneath the Sidewinder. He is not surprised to find a few of the cameras are out. Neither should we be.

  If we float out from the ship, and pass through into the void and swim just beneath the Sidewinder’s belly like a school of pilot fish, we see that four dark figures have alighted on the underbelly. A unit of commandos, highly trained, encased in suits suitable to the stresses of space and the stresses of high-speed travel, are pressed flatly against the hull. One of them has just finished taking out another camera, while another has produced a kind of torch-welder: a plasma cutter.

  The metal is turning red. Very soon, they will make a dynamic entry.

  3

  As ghosts, we are privy to so much that no one else sees. We are able to flit from one soul to another, hearing and feeling the nature that drive each. It is for this reason that we almost cannot be angry at those who annihilated us.

  Almost.

  We find the Conductor, the one who gave the final order for our destruction, and the destruction of trillions of others, resting. It is almost incomprehensible that one who has murdered so many could be sitting with such a clean conscious, sitting so comfortably, his only problem the growing headache that his constant c
onnection to the datafeed has earned him.

  The Conductor’s spirit is willing. It certainly wants to go back to the bridge and get an update on the Phantom and how he finally met his end. But his body, and more importantly his minds, have their own imperatives.

  Eyes shut. Sound nullifiers placed on his ears. A bland-feeling cushion beneath him. He hasn’t cut himself off from the datafeed, but he has “scaled down” his connection to it and left himself in a state of thought-only. His seven brains need to slow down, recuperate, and reorganize. Years before, he learned that human beings underwent the same mental cleansing, in a state they referred to as sleep, where they experienced mental hallucinations called dreams. Prevalent thinking among humans—before their end—was that dreaming was for the classification of experiences, testing and selecting mental schemas, or certain plans on how to view the waking world and prepare for it.

  Again, it appears that the two species have (had?) this in common, only the Conductor’s people didn’t fall into any kind of sleep, though, there were indicators that in their distant past, they once slept as humans did.

  The breaths he takes in are slow, lasting more than five minutes on the inhale. He holds his breath for about five more minutes, then exhales for another five. All in his species require this kind of regular mental maintenance, none more so than the ones born and forged as he was. The seven brains are each about the size of fists, with three housed in the cranium’s upper hemisphere, and three housed in the lower. The one that bridged them is only slightly larger than the others. Grammar, vocabulary, sensory interpretation and literal meaning are all housed in the upper hemispheres. In the lower hemispheres, there is logic, the sciences, strategy, and reason. The center-brain is where intercommunication happens between the two hemispheres, where all traffic is routed to and ultimately consciousness happens. It is connected to the other hemispheres by a colossal commissure, similar to the corpus callosum in human brains, and the 450 million contralateral axonal projections perform the same function as those in humans: to keep all hemispheres connected and facilitate communication.