The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  It is a question the Cerebrals always asked themselves when dealing with humans. It is no different with the Phantom. The Phantom, whoever he is, has left the more obvious traps as decoys, no doubt knowing it would draw their attention, yet placed a far deadlier bomb inside a storage locker, destroying his weapons cache entirely. Being so isolated, he must be incredibly limited on resources. So why do it?

  After a moment of introspect, the answer is obvious. Because he knew we wouldn’t expect it. It was counterintuitive. Worse, it was counterlogical.

  Cerebs don’t do battle this way. They are blunt. They contemplate operations from the moment of inception so that they don’t have to over think them in execution. Calculations are completed well beforehand; the ratio of enemy resources to their own is always measured first, then remeasured, not only by supercomputers but by the Calculators and the Conductors.

  With Cerebs, what you see is what you get. Just as mathematics are a universal truth throughout the cosmos, so too are motives and actions. This is their philosophy. Their motives are to destroy lesser, problematic species, and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise. Subterfuge isn’t a trait commonly favored amongst their people; guile has only ever bred mistrust amongst members of a species, and thus a species—a proper species, they feel—must have a focused goal, untainted by deception. Without that focus, true uniformity is lost. That is why races such as human beings develop cloaking technologies—to hide—and superior races such as the Cerebrals do not.

  Yet humans revel in this blasphemous counter-logic, and the Leader’s fellow paid the price for his lack of understanding in it. Nothing is more frustrating than watching a calculation not pan out. His two remaining operatives look to him now for guidance. Few are trained to think like a human, and it appears even the Leader, as advance as his training is, hasn’t been trained enough.

  It matters little. We have the superior numbers and resources. We exterminated the rest of them. He has nothing and no one left to help. Humans have always fled from them, or dashed madly into suicide missions. There is nowhere left for this one to flee to, and should he attempt a suicide run, it would benefit him none at all.

  The Phantom is alone in the universe.

  But a cold tingling sensation travels up the Leader’s spine—this is not one of the good sensations that enraptures his people, either. It is a shiver of portent. Being so sensitive to environmental changes is just one of the items that has kept his people one step ahead of their enemies for millennia now. Though logically he knows the Phantom is alone and outgunned, he also knows a formidable opponent when he sees one.

  Carefully, the three remaining Cereb commandos move into the cylindrical corridor, all of it made by the hardy metal humans called compristeel, an alloy of immense strength, yet with the capability to give under the high pressures of space travel and combat.

  Well versed in zero-gravity combat, the three of them move inside, using their thrusters to adjust themselves in technical and dynamic entries, guns facing out. Wordlessly, the Leader commands his two operatives to take separate walls—without gravity, every way is up. The Leader takes the ceiling, clings to it magnetically, the other two take the floor and one of the walls. They crouch, and proceed down the corridor, two guns facing forward while one of them remains behind, “covering their six” in human parlance.

  Then, all at once, artificial gravity reasserts itself. And it is several g’s too strong. The Leader feels himself pulled straight down. His magnetic boots aren’t strong enough to keep him clamped. If not for his jets catching on quickly, he might’ve smacked hard against the perforated steel floor. The Leader expected such a ploy. His people were linear thinkers, not stupid. Far from it. And deception isn’t something they are entirely unfamiliar with, but whereas most species learned it early on as a survival mechanism, Cerebs learned about it mostly late in their existence, by hunting and destroying those species who reveled in tricks.

  The cultures, customs, and indeed the very DNA of Earth’s creatures were saturated with deception. The chameleon that changed its colors. The insect that disguised itself as a leaf or a stick in order to evade predators. The puffer fish which swelled its body to look more intimidating than it actually was. Constant deceptions. The various government agencies were always spying on each other, which made no sense to Cerebs, who have always been uniform in their goals. They are single-minded, and thus share information freely.

  Behind them, a thick, compristeel door quickly lowers from the ceiling, sealing off the hall behind them. A hissing sound. The Leader’s interface tells him that atmosphere is being restored. Then, the door ahead of them opens. What is this? An invitation? Is it a surrender? No, if that were the case, he would present himself for surrender. Remembering his training on humans, he thinks, It’s a lure. Something the Cerebs had only used to catch their food, but never on other sentient creatures. It’s so unnatural.

  He doesn’t move. Neither does his team. Maybe that’s what he wants us to do. Sit here and over think it. Difficult to say with a creature from Earth.

  Using his interface, the Leader commands his men to use a single-line corridor approach. This technique is the most logical and efficient when passing through such a narrow corridor that is aggressively held. The operatives walk in a single-file line, the one in the front in a low crouch, aiming his weapon forward, while the operative directly behind him stands straight up with his weapon also aimed forward, and the operative bringing up the rear checks their tail. Should they encounter heavy resistance, the operative in the lead drops flat on his belly, the operative behind him takes a kneeling position, and the third operative stands straight up—this way, all three operatives could use maximum firepower, and could fire directly over each other’s head without risking hitting each other. A tactic also once used by Earth SWAT teams for such narrow passages, incidentally. (Humans had logic skills, too.)

  They progress slowly down the hall, their retinal enhancers alternating between standard, infrared, and EMF vision. As the Leader slowly scans his gun by the closed doors on all sides, the sensor at the end of his barrel detects, via X-rays, what is inside each room, and a three-dimensional display is projected against the back of his cornea. Mostly storage. Lots of compristeel cases stacked in corners, lots of discarded weapons and food packages. It’s obvious the Phantom has been subsisting off the barest essentials, but he’s at his limits.

  The Leader continues guiding his team forward. He is familiar with the Sidewinder ship series. He therefore knows that the cockpit is directly ahead.

  There is an atmospheric generator behind one door, where the life support systems are housed, along with a shoddy air filter/exchanger. Behind another door is the engineering bay, and X-rays reveal a badly damaged warbot, one of mankind’s attempts to produce more soldiers, since they were greatly lacking when the Cerebs came. A fearsome war machine, one that, had the humans been able to produce a billion or so more, could have changed the War completely for them. But the Conductors conferred with the Calculators early on, and saw this problem well before it got out of hand. They attacked warbot factories on Shiva, an operation the Leader had helped—

  The Leader suddenly feels something. A slight change to his environment, but very noticeable. The porous quality of his armor allows some of the airflow in, so that his skin may judge, yet it mitigates the airflow enough so that it doesn’t overwhelm. It is a surge of oxygen. Then, a surge of hydrocarbon gas.

  And all at once, he knows why the Phantom sealed the corridor behind them, and why he reactivated the atmosphere.

  You can’t have fire without an oxidizer. The horror of the realization almost stuns him to inaction. He wouldn’t. He has so much to lose. He can’t…

  A few seconds before it happens, the Leader listens to his training and turns his particle hand cannon on the door closest to him. He fires at the keypad, then at the door’s latch, and summons his fellows to help him pry it open. Via the interface, they all know what he knows—they�
�re in trouble.

  Pulling and yanking and pushing, they finally manage to open the door just wide enough for one of them to pass through. The Leader is just about to squeeze through when combustion happens. The Phantom set fire to the air. The ball of exploding gas comes churning angrily right at them. He flings himself through the door, and, knowing that he cannot save himself and his fellows, opts to save himself. He shuts the door back quickly, just at the fire bathes them in baptizing heat. With the door shut, he can just hear their screams. Within five seconds, they aren’t screaming anymore.

  The Leader looks around. He now stands in the circuitry bay, which, if his memory of Sidewinder schematics is still accurate, has a ventilation access shaft right about…there! Wasting no time, he uses the plasma torch from his tactical belt to remove the ten bolts holding the flimsy cover plate on, and then crawls inside.

  We’ve spent enough time with the Leader and his doomed men. We need to leave him now, because another drama is transpiring not far from him. In fact, only about thirty feet directly ahead of him, just inside the cockpit, the man with the call sign “Rook” remains safely behind the solid compristeel door. On the other side of it, in the corridor, a blazing inferno is still churning wildly, fed by the Sidewinder’s air-exchangers. Only moments before, he tore a few pages out of the hefty user’s manual for the navigation computer, lit the pages on fire, tossed them into the hall, sealed the cockpit off and increased the oxygen and hydrocarbon outflow.

  Laughing so hard he’s wheezing, Rook decides to let them cook for another minute. This is a good laugh, probably the funniest thing he’s experienced in five years. His mind is far afield now, and he knows it. Accepts it.

  Then, finally, he switches off all life support systems and opens the emergency door he used to seal in his unwanted guests. In the span of ten seconds, the entire blazing inferno is jetted out into space, where it is immediately doused. He turns life support back on, but only in the cockpit and in one other room.

  Rook takes his seat again, and it automatically swivels around to face the console. He straps himself in, runs a quick systems check, makes sure that most of the lights show green on the trouble-board, then gets underway.

  A sensor chimes. He has ten more Cerebral skirmishers closing in. Doubtless, they detected the sudden jet of flame amid the asteroid field. He curses himself, yet knows that he had no other choice.

  The incoming fighters are currently making their way around the considerable girth of Fatty, an asteroid that to Rook has always looked like the large, round swell of an alcoholic’s beer gut. It is 62.337 miles at maximum length, but moving at their speeds, they’ll be around it in minutes. Time to move.

  Rook takes the Sidewinder off of autopilot, and reclaims the controls for himself. A chime goes off, and he turns his attention to the pycno mixtures in his engines. One screen measures the Joule-Thomson effect on the exhaust gases, gauging the temperature change of the gases as they’re forced through the primary insulated valves. He glances at another screen, checks the enthalpy, or the total energy of his thermodynamic systems. There are endothermic/exothermic fluctuations there, indicating a valve that needs repair.

  Another chime goes off. He looks at yet another one of his 3D monitors. It appears he has a lone survivor. One of the Cereb infiltrators is moving slowly through the tight confines of the vents. Rook thinks, I ain’t got time for you just yet. So he taps a few keys, which lowers a few emergency shutoff seals within the ventilation shafts, encasing his enemy for the nonce. He’ll have a plasma cutter on him. That’s probably how he got in. It’ll take him a while to cut through those compristeel doors, though, so I’ve got time.

  Rook engages forward thrusters, rolls to port, moving around the Clam (it looked to him rather like a clam with its front pried open), then around the Five Fists, and now into the Field of Showers. He’s catalogued all the names, and the computer keeps up with them. Though the AI no longer speaks to him, it still works well enough to keep tabs on the asteroids’ movements and predicts their trajectories.

  Another chime sounds. They’ve cleared Fatty.

  Rook starts to cry. Then, he laughs, and keeps crying all at once. He’s been on edge for more than a decade. Sometimes, the anticipation morphs into the jitters, and the jitters sometimes manifest themselves in strange, contradictory emotions.

  Rook reaches forward, taps a few keys:

  SEARCH: CLASSIC BANDS: ERA/YEAR: 1968

  ARTIST NAME: STEPPENWOLF

  ALBUM NAME: THE SECOND

  The music cues up. He is ready to die.

  4

  The Conductor says, “Let me hear it.”

  “Sir, I must advise against—”

  “Let me hear it,” he repeats, in a tone that brooks no argument.

  An instant later, the entire bridge is filled with a horrible, wonderful whine. A classic earth instrument. The guitar. It is screaming, even while another one cues up slowly, ominously in the background. There is a threat in that music. Something awful is being portended. Then, there is an explosion of voice and bass and drums, and the tension is released.

  “I like to dream, yes!

  Yeesssss, right between my sound machine!

  On a cloud of sound I drift in the night,

  Any place it goes is right!

  Goes far, flies near,

  To the stars away from here!

  Well, you don’t know what,

  We can find!

  Why don’t you come with me little girl,

  On a magic carpet ride?”

  The Conductor thinks, Steppenwolf, if I’m not mistaken. And he never is. A group of musicians that hailed from Canada and America in their year of 1968. The sounds are dampened some by his cochlear implants, so that he doesn’t overindulge—indeed, it is his people’s hypersensitivity that taught them the dangers of excess. If they hadn’t overcome that aspect of their being, they never would have made it to the stars. Those first four-brained ancestors had calculated this and wisely listened to those calculations.

  “Guard yourself,” he says aloud, though it’s as much for himself as the others. Then, as any good Conductor ought to do from time to time, he advises them. “It’s important that we know our enemies, but become a student of a thing for too long, and soon you become that thing.” He turns to the Manager directly behind him. “Cancel that noise.”

  “Yes sir,” the Manager responds with more than a smidgen of relief. The music stops abruptly, and everyone on the bridge visibly relaxes.

  “How long before our skirmishers close in?” he asks, turning back to the three-dimensional representation of the Deep all around them.

  “They’re coming into visual range now, sir. One of their scanners has detected the remains of one of our commandos. Do you want me to dispatch a team to gather his remains?”

  “Leave him. Continue the search for our Phantom.” There was no room for sentiment. As a rule, the Conductor and his kind did not like to leave any trace of their biology or technology behind, lest weaknesses be found and exploited, but it is only the Phantom left. What weakness could he possibly find and exploit on his own?

  Now we once more float away from the bridge, away from the mother ship, across the fields of shifting rock, and past the squadron of skirmishers rocketing towards the Phantom. We alight soundlessly on the hull of the Sidewinder just as it is cresting the horizon of a two-mile-long asteroid, nicknamed Zipper. We pass through the compristeel hull and casually slip into the ventilation shaft, past the Leader who is hard at work with his plasma cutter, and then beyond to the cockpit.

  A loud noise amid the silence of space.

  “You don’t know what,

  We can see!

  Why don’t you tell your dreams to me?

  Fantasy will set you free!”

  The pilot sings. Chimes are going off. For a moment one alarm sounds, but he quickly switches it off.

  “Close your eyes, girl!

  Look inside, girl!

  Let th
e sound take you awayyyyy!”

  They’re just behind him. A few shots are fired, but they’re only glancing blows. Rook taps a few keys, setting the computer to randomly rotate the frequency of his energy shields. Hopefully, that will prevent his enemies from setting their own weapons to the same frequency and getting through his shields.

  Of course, some of the energy still came through in powerful bursts. Secondary and tertiary shielding consists of ROK (rapidly-oscillating kinetic) shielding, as well as a modified EA (endoergic armor). EA allows the ship to absorb and transfer some of the energy displaced. Working in tandem with photovoltaic solar cells, the EA converts the energy of particle weapon impacts, electromagnetic attacks, and energy from any nearby ambient starlight to fuel other systems—in other words, the Sidewinder borrows a bit of the energy used in attacking it to fuel parts of its own system.

  It is this endoergic armor that requires he step out of the shadows from time to time and pick fights. The Sidewinder is dying—has been dying for many years now—and the only power he gets any more comes from what he can absorb endoergically. The ambient starlight, and even the nearby sun isn’t enough to fill the tremendous needs of his engines. The energy has to come from somewhere. Picking fights with Cerebs brought energy from the glancing blows of their particle beams, just as long as he didn’t stay out in them too much, overheat, and explode.

  These systems require constant maintenance by a specialist. Rook’s entire crew died years ago, leaving him to do the work himself. Well, he and one other, but we’ll get to that.

  Right now, the Sidewinder is handling some heavy gravitational disturbances. His ship is a much smaller object than all the rocks around him, which means they all cast effects on his ship, and he is now in the very thick of it. Even the sun, far away as it is, plays into his maneuvering. The Sidewinder is always barely holding it together. It is a complicated system of artificial alloys, polymers, plastics, glasses, fibers, and quantum-level-manipulating machinery. “A tin can designed to hurl an ant through an angry ocean,” was how one of his ASCA instructors once described the Sidewinder series.