The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  In recent years, Rook has come to use some of their terminology. The Deep, for instance, was an accurate description of infinity, of the vacuum. And the Bleed…where all matter became a blur, all colors bled together, and one section of space became even more indistinguishable from another.

  Now, Rook is lost in thought. He recalls his first time away from Earth, out into the Bleed, that cascading light, the stars wheeling over end sickeningly. That first liberating burst of speed, that exhilarating feeling of pushing beyond the final boundaries. It’s as if every human being’s suspicion was suddenly confirmed—there was a way to go beyond the limits set by Nature.

  Progress. One new discovery here, another newly invented material there. Slowly but surely, we nickel-and-dimed our way into the future, whittling away at small problems, which led to disproportionately magnificent results.

  Rook looks at his gloved hand, watching it adjust to his hand size. Without these materials, he thinks, shrugging each of them on and feeling them automatically seal around him, we couldn’t have gone out into the deep end of the pool. We wouldn’t have found the Bleed, wouldn’t have naively leapt into the Deep. The knowledge is maddening. We would never have found the Cerebs, and they would never have detected us. At least, not before we were better prepared.

  It’s a terrible, sinking feeling. Like Icarus, we flew too close to the sun.

  Another alarm. His enemy has moved again. He is now emerging from a ventilation cover just outside the cockpit, and a bit down the hall. Rook briefly checks life support systems—just as he figures, he doesn’t have enough air to risk another fireball ploy, and his enemy likely knows that, or at least suspects.

  Rook taps a few keys on his left glove’s keypad, activating both the Tango armor and the Stacksuit—the Tango armor was meant to stand against his enemy’s weapons, but the Stacksuit was for CQB; the Cerebrals are known to be, on average, one and a half times stronger than a fit human male. Their reflexes and sensitivity to environmental changes is also stronger, thus they are much faster, roughly twice as fast as the average human.

  Pulling on his helmet, Rook takes a moment to switch on his suit’s atmosphere, and then slaps the sidearm to his side, draws it. He turns on the atmosphere in the rest of the ship, as well. Then he taps the four-digit code into the keypad, and steps quickly through the door. The sidearm is held tightly in his hands at low-ready position.

  The corridor wasn’t scorched at all by the inferno, but various MRE’s have been incinerated, and what compristeel cases were bolted down were lost to the vacuum when he opened the door to jet the flames. Don’t cry over spilled milk, Rook. You can find them later and gather them up.

  A few steps down the corridor, he presses his back against the wall, peeks around the corner quickly, and pulls back. Through that brief peek, he spotted the ventilation cover plate on the floor, torn down from the ceiling. His enemy is in here with him, inside the corridor, no doubt hiding behind one of the stacks of compristeel cases cluttering the hall.

  Rook lowers his weapon. His breathing has become erratic, though he’s only just now noticing. Tactical training tells him he ought to “slice the pie,” moving an inch at a time around the corner, sneaking and peeking. Then, he ought to move in a low crouch, from one side of the corridor to the other in a scan-and-strafe.

  Then, he smiles. He holsters his sidearm, taps a few keys on his glove’s keypad, and dials up a frequency. It is a frequency that ISF’s Intelligence Gathering Service (IGS) discovered just months before the end, one that they found the Cerebrals commonly used. A short beep tells him the channel is open. “You out there?” Silence. “Can you hear me?” Silence. “I know you guys are like super-geniuses, so it’s a safe bet you worked out our language. I know you typically communicate along a datafeed. I also know you boys have vocal cords, and you communicate using various poly-harmonic dialects and a highly complex syntax, but you have a translator built in to your helmets and natural-user interfaces so you can respond.” Silence. “I know something else, too. I know I’m the last. I’m the last unlanced boil. At least, I’m pretty sure of it.” He closes his eyes, leans his head back against the wall, chuckles. “And I know one more thing. You’re all alone here. Your friends are all gone. And your pals back in the luminal ship? They can’t see us, not from this far away. The skirmishers, neither. I’ve activated the sensor shroud, and painted this whole section with sensor-scrambling nonsense. You and me, we’re floating inside an invisible needle in a very dangerous haystack. Get it?” Silence. “In case you don’t, here it is: it’s just you and me.” Silence.

  Rook unholsters his sidearm again, checks the rounds available.

  Then, a crackling sound over his helmet’s phones. Brief static. A voice, wavering and obviously forced through a filter that almost did the job flawlessly, but not quite. “If it is just you and I, then you have a very simple choice to make here,” it says.

  He snorts out a laugh. “Yeah? And what’s that?” As if I don’t know.

  “Surrender.”

  Gee, how did I know? Rook knows because it is always this way with them. The Cerebs believe it is virtually impossible for them to be defeated—and, as it turns out, they are mostly right. They allow for a very small margin of error, and are quite honest about it.

  “You are outgunned, you are low on resources, and you must be at your wits’ end.”

  “That your way of saying I’m batshit crazy?”

  A moment. Probably his guest’s translator needs a little time to work out the parlance. When finally the intruder responds, he says, “If that is how you wish to see it. I am only telling you what you probably already know. Seclusion isn’t good for any person, no matter their species. Neither does it help that you are the last of your kind. Despair must be a problem. It is, is it not?”

  “Trying to dissect me, comrade?”

  Another moment. Maybe the translator had a problem with the Russian origins of comrade. “I’m trying to help you to see.”

  “Oh, you’re trying to help me now.”

  “Help, yes, but not in the congenial context,” his enemy clarifies. At least he’s freakin’ honest about it, Rook thinks. “I mean that I am trying to assist your thinking, and guide you towards the only logical conclusion.”

  “Which is?”

  “You are beaten. There is no chance to procreate with another of your species. It is best to self-terminate.”

  Rook raises an eyebrow. Then, he starts laughing. After a moment, he’s guffawing. When he’s finished, he says, “You’re trying to talk me to death? Is that something you boys get in your training?”

  “It is.”

  “Has it worked before?”

  “Many times.”

  “On who?”

  “The other stragglers.”

  Rook takes a moment to sit on this. Stragglers. How many others are out there? Were there any left? A random man or woman or family locked inside a spaceship, hopping from rock to rock, using up the last of their pycno fuel to get through the slipstream, trying in vain to cover their exhaust trail from the damnable seekers and luminals? “How many?” he asks.

  “How many what?”

  “How many are left besides me?”

  No hesitation. “You are the last.” After a moment, his enemy adds, “As far as we can tell.”

  He snorts. “Bet you tell that to all of the ‘stragglers,’ eh?”

  “I have not, because it is only true in your case.”

  It hits him like a kick in the groin, only the sickness that follows is worse. In all his years, Rook has never known a Cerebral to lie, and has never heard any tales of their lies. Not that they didn’t have their own basic levels of deception, but for the most part, they just said what they were thinking.

  “They’re like…like that kid…Bobby Fischer,” Cowboy said to him, lying bleeding in the emergency ward after the failed Hawking Offensive, one of the last great stands humanity made. When Rook shook his head, Cowboy told him, “You…yo
u don’t know him? Much as you play chess?” Again, Rook shook his head. “Chess player…like the greatest of all time, or something…my dad told me about him…the guy was…always ten moves ahead…always…ten…always…always…” Cowboy passed into unconsciousness thanks to the pain meds, lived another two days, and presumably died when Rook and his remaining squadron had fled Nomar 442b in a hurry, watching the planet’s entire atmosphere ignite, the blooming fire the last thing he saw before moving into the Bleed.

  “So…I’m really the last,” says Rook. It’s almost better to hear it this way. It was the not knowing that bothered him the most over the years. And yet, even now the finality of it was slippery to him, an idea that was so simple and yet so hard to accept. Somehow, he had always known he would be the last of us. Being the last had become a part of him. But now, it was suddenly and irrevocably a condition of his existence. In his mind, he can no longer choose to be the last human. He simply is.

  His enemy reminds him, “As far as I know.”

  “So, you did it. You actually did it. You lot went from one end o’ the galaxy to the other, just stomping us out, huh?”

  “Yes.” No apologies. No indication that the enemy believes one is warranted.

  Shaking. Uncontrollable. Rook looks down at his left hand, takes a five-second breath, then exhales slowly. It calms him some, but only some. “So I should just kill myself?”

  “There is nothing else waiting for you,” the enemy reasons. “No glory. No ceremonies. No accolades. No awards. No family. No friends. No victory.”

  “And what about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You’re alone on this ship, too, mon ami. For all intents and purposes, you’re the last of your kind.”

  “There is still something I might achieve. There is categorically nothing you can change with your sacrifice.” Perfect reason, perfectly stated. Completely flawless logic. Rook won’t argue with that. He can’t. “What you can do is end your own suffering. I know it must hurt, knowing you are all alone. I can only imagine.”

  This incenses Rook. “Can you? Can you actually imagine it? Cerebrals approach the world step-by-step, never getting ahead of yourselves. Your kind calculates and engineers! Never to go beyond your present means so you never really imagine the possibility of failure, or the collapse of your civilization. You don’t believe you are capable of failure, so how can you imagine being the last of your kind?”

  “I said that I can only imagine it. I did not say I could imagine it well.”

  Rook chuckles, and peeks his head around the corner again, searching for his enemy. They’re honest for being genocidal maniacs. “What else can you imagine?”

  A moment of hesitation. Does he suspect it yet? Does he know why I’m drawing this conversation out? “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, can you imagine your own defeat? Can you do that much?”

  “Intelligent creatures must be able to imagine threats, and the results of ignoring those threats, if we are going to do anything about those threats,” the operative says, once again in that infuriating logic. “So yes, I can imagine my defeat. I have also worked out the movements well in advance, dimensions of this corridor, the trouble spots with the clutter, the materials in the walls around me. I have figured my success with a margin of error.”

  “How low is that margin for error?”

  “By your reckoning, zero-point-zero-zero-four-three percent.”

  “That’s pretty low.”

  “It is.”

  “And it’s accurate?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You sure?”

  “Very sure.”

  “Badger, waste this guy.”

  “I’m sorry? I don’t understand your—”

  A sudden blast. A gun going off, the gunpowder igniting. A garbled scream. Return fire. A particle beam raking off one of the walls.

  Rook rounds the corner and proceeds down the corridor with his weapon up. He hears another blast, this one coming from a standard ballistic firearm. He sees the Cereb leaping out from his cover, away from the compristeel cases, taking fire from the old man that had crept up behind him. Badger has his 9mm aimed and firing; he fired on the operative, doing considerable damage to the Cereb’s particle hand cannon. Rook races forward, kicks the weapon away. The Cereb is up and tackling him with an alacrity unmatched by humans.

  The 9mm bullets have done almost nothing to him—Cereb armor is too strong—but it has damaged his weapon beyond repair. The Cereb slams Rook into the far wall, delivers a knee directly into his sternum, and if not for the Tango armor it likely would have shattered his ribs. Rook tries to fire again, but the Cereb quickly grabs hold of his hand and wrenches his sidearm free, then delivers three sharp blows at Rook’s helmeted head, smacking it hard against a bulkhead.

  “Badger! A little help!”

  The old man steps out of the room he’d been hiding in, levels the pistol at the Cereb, and fires twice more at his head. It doesn’t hurt him, but it does knock his head sideways, allowing Rook to recover, get his hands up, and begin going on the offensive. The two begin exchanging blows. Rook uses the Stark Fighting System (SFS) taught to him in CQB training. The hands stay very close to the head, the elbows out like horns, letting the opponent’s punches smash against the points of each elbow while the fighter searches for the opportunity to deliver hammer fists. Combined with the Stacksuit, SFS allows a series of powerful and frenzied blows to be used while maximizing cover of the head, throat, and upper body.

  A furious exchange takes place. Badger stops firing, lest he hit Rook and a bullet randomly gets through the Tango armor. Rook and the Cereb deliver blow after punishing blow to one another, pushing each another against the walls, up against the bulkheads, and at one point down onto the floor. Their anatomies are very similar, but Cerebs are lither, with the tight, elongated muscles and loose joints of a cheetah. Every hit is snappy, and for every strike Rook delivers, he receives three others.

  Finally, Rook slips his foot just in between the Cereb’s legs, hugs his foot close to his enemy’s, and performs a shin press. Knocking his opponent off balance, he rushes forward with a shoulder strike, then places his hands against the Cereb’s biceps, smothering his arms and entering into pummeling range. Here, he knows he has entered into the Cereb’s main realm—their bodies are extremely sensitive to change, and some at ASCA likened trying to catch a Cereb like trying to catch a fly.

  But pummeling is a very old facet of martial arts, and humans actually got very good at it before the end. Cerebs rarely train such tactics, since they rarely ever get this close to an opponent. It is the skill of a human versus the natural ability of a Cereb.

  Badger is too old to help, and he knows it. The old man staggers around, looking mostly confused.

  The pummeling moves down the hall. Rook and his enemy are so close that, here and there, they exchange headbutts, which mostly disorient and cause little real damage. They stomp and kick each other’s feet, searching for methods of off-balancing. The Cereb shoves him at his chest, and Rook takes the opportunity to perform an arm drag, yanking the arm down and using it to spin his opponent around, grabbing him around the neck from the back and oblique-kicking the back of his knee.

  Rook glances down at the items available to him. Random objects all around his feet, no real weapon that can help him penetrate the hermetic seal that keeps the Cereb’s helmet on. He spies a few MRE’s, plenty of compristeel cases, and the ventilation cover plate, scorched by—

  Scorched by his plasma cutter!

  Rook reaches down, grabs hold of the torch clipped to the Cereb’s side, and his enemy’s hand meets his there. The Cereb knows exactly what his game is.

  Now, Badger runs at them, grabs the Cereb’s hand, and combines his strength with Rook’s to tear the hand away. Just as Rook gets the handheld torch free, the Cereb kicks Badger hard in the gut, sending the old man twisting to the floor.

  The plasma torch is familiar to Rook�
��he’s seen it on the handful of Cereb corpses his pals in the Corp. brought back—and he presses the nozzle to his enemy’s neck and thumbs the switch, pulls the trigger. The Cereb screams as the heat cuts through his suit’s hermetic seal like butter, the flames inside no doubt giving serious third-degree burns. After just three seconds, Rook uses his other hand to slap the helmet off the Cereb’s head. The alien drops to his knees. The agony of the burns overloading his delicate sensory perceptions, he writhes on the floor.

  Rook gives him room to thrash, then looks for the particle hand cannon, holds it by the barrel so as to swing it like a club, and smashes it twice against the alien’s head. The first time slows the Cereb down, makes him look about with rheumy black eyes, with a dull blue light pulsating behind each pupil. The second strike opens his pale-gray flesh, and rocks his four brains, putting him out.

  Badger is climbing slowly back to his feet. Panting, Rook makes sure his foe is out, then steps over to help his last friend in the universe. “S-s-sorry Rook,” he says quivering. “I-I-I did the b-best I—”

  “I know ya did—”

  “I didn’t know wh-wh-what else to—”

  “I know, old timer, I know.” He throws one of Badger’s arms around his shoulder, lifts him up.

  “I-I-I knew…I knew you wanted me t-t-to help when—”

  “When I remotely opened your stasis tube, right?”

  “R-right. And when—”

  “When the air-exchangers cut back on the rest o’ the ship, right. Can’t fire bullets without air around the bullet. Heh! You still got it, old man. You’re sharp. You read my cue.” He pulls his combat helmet off, gives the old man a kiss on the top of his own dilapidated helmet, and pats his back.

  “We…w-we got him, huh? Got him! I heard him jes outside m-m-my door, I did. Heard him moving around. Then, I ch-checked my channels, figured you might be trying to c-contact me. Heh, figured right!” Badger’s whole body is shaking. He looks at his young friend, his last lifeline in the universe. “Rook? Wh-why’re you cryin’?”