by Chad Huskins
Is he crying? Why yes, yes he is. We can see it plainly, though he tries to hide it from himself more than anyone else. He knows the answer to Badger’s question instantly. It’s the first time he’s heard another human voice in ages.
The old timer is frequently kept unconscious and on life support systems in the number two hold, linked to the machines that monitor his respiratory, neural, and pulmonary systems. For emergencies, Rook linked his life support systems to the cockpit’s computers, so that he can awaken instantly with an auto-injection of adrenaline, just in case Rook ever needs emergency backup.
One thing that was drilled into Rook near the end of the War, when resources were getting slim: Use everything you’ve got, scrape every resource, and hold on to it. Never let it go.
The old timer suffers from PTSD, as well as the beginnings of dementia. He hardly knows where or when he is anymore. These are Badger’s first words in years, and he doesn’t even know it. His voice is groggy from lack of use, and no doubt his eyes are sensitive to light, by the way he’s squinting so hard.
Rook pats him on the back of the head. “It’s nothin’, pal. We’re good. We made it.”
“W-we better…better call it in. W-we caught another one, huh?”
“Yeah. We’ll call it in.”
“Th-the l-l-lab boys will wanna see it.”
“Sure will.”
“One at a time. That’s h-how it’s won, right? One victory at a time.”
“That’s right, Badge,” he says, stepping away from the old man. “That’s right. One at a time.” He kneels beside the body of his captive, rolls him over, binds him with a pair of compristeel cuffs, and inspects him. Rook is looking for the pack on the Cereb’s right hip…There it is! He yanks it off his person, taps the switch at the side, and ends the four-beat signal transmission. Every Cereb operative carries one: what the human military once termed an OBET (omnidirectional beamforming emergency transmitter), for the mother ship to track its operatives.
He finds the usual gear for a Cereb operative—spare cartridge and battery for the plasma cutter, a tactical blade made of an alloy unknown to Man, a single spare power cell for the particle cannon, and, of course, the armor itself, made of overlapping alloys, fabrics, ceramics, polymers, and other materials never adequately understood by Man.
But the greatest find is perhaps the omni-kit: that was the name the IGS had given this piece of tech, anyway. Both of the four-fingered gloves that Cerebral operatives wear have a mini-fabricator in the forearms. On the underside, small scraps of ceramics, light alloys, plastics, and even organic materials can be fed into a very small receiver. From there, the materials can be flash-forged into usable tools. A perfect tool for a soldier on the move. Rook once trained with a damaged version of this tech, but only had enough time to gain a loose understanding of its commands and capabilities. If he can keep this one working, he might be able to scan various objects about the Sidewinder, and use some of his discarded trash to re-forge brand new parts to aid in repair.
“He ain’t d-dead, is he?”
Rook looks up at Badger. Smiles. “No. He’s alive.”
“Good. Good, we can, uh, interrogate him. R-right?”
“That’s right, Badge. Ya did good.”
He did do good. Very good.
We may leave them alone for the moment. Rook is on the verge of a breakdown. Soon, he’ll have to put ol’ Badge back into his hibernation tube. Its insulation is probably the only thing that kept the old man off of the Cerebs’ scanners when they first entered. The stasis tube keeps him safe in more ways than one.
Rook looks at the old man, wanting to cry. There is every reason to despair. They got the drop on the Cereb operative, and so there is the proof that the Cereb wasn’t being misleading at all when he said Rook was the last. If he hadn’t truly believed that Rook was all alone, then the Cereb would have considered the possibility of someone else sneaking up behind him, would have had a contingency plan, and wouldn’t have become distracted talking to Rook. Cerebrals are very confident in their calculations, and rarely ever wrong. It means the operative wasn’t lying.
It means Rook is utterly alone in the universe.
5
The asteroid field is quiet and content. It is also violent, and randomly so. Mostly, though, it is slow. While some asteroids do move rather quickly throughout the field, the vast majority of them just tumble slowly end over end. “Like insects swimming in molasses in December,” Rook’s uncle might have said. Once, they zipped about rapidly, during the violent creation of this star system. Over time, they pounded and pulverized one another, butting heads like animals fighting for territory. Some have been here since the beginning. Some pieces were propelled so hard they got flung from orbit, became orphans with no community.
The stars surrounding us are ambivalent gods. They don’t care what’s happened to us, to humanity or its enemies. They look on, slowly leaving us, slowly dying their own quiet deaths. The closest star, the one humans called Shiva Prime, is brilliant but lonely. It is midway through its own life cycle. Nothing that either Mankind or Cerebralkind has ever accomplished can even gain its attention. Organisms so tiny they are virtually indistinguishable from bacteria. Both races rose to prominence, harnessed some of the power washing away from Prime and its brethren, and yet Prime remains unimpressed. Life is far more anomalous than stars, and it has traveled millions of light-years to hover in this star system, yet Prime takes no notice. The universe turns in its due course.
The crater-pocked asteroids don’t notice the change, either. They have no agenda. Their gravitational forces compete with one another, and that is the only routine they follow. Shiva Prime keeps them in an obedient and wide two-hundred-million-mile orbit. There is no escape for them. They don’t plan on escaping. It’s not their nature to plan, and, from the vantage the Conductor holds, they seem perfectly content with their nature. As content as Cerebrals with theirs.
There’s no conflict, he muses, walking through the holographic representation of the field, studying the large ones and the small ones, noting their subtle gravitational plays, but mostly just allowing them to glide soundlessly in front of him. No real conflict, anyway. They have a nature, and they obey it.
“Sir,” says one Manager. “We have confirmation from our skirmishers. There’s no sign of the Phantom’s exhaust and they’re having trouble with radar transmissions.”
“The Sidewinder has gone to full stealth.” It was always their way, after all, in that War. Sidewinders were designed for that purpose. The vessels of infiltrators and saboteurs, all of them. “He’s painting his targets with jamming frequencies, preventing serviceable outgoing transmissions.”
“It appears so, sir.”
“He will keep the area blanketed with that effect for some time.” He turns to the Manager. “Did he take any damage?”
“Some, sir. Only enough to—”
“To wash over his endoergic armor and replenish his energy stores, yes, I understand.” It is as he and other Conductors have long suspected. The Phantom is running terribly low on power. With these random attack runs that provoke a response, he hopes to keep up on his energy demands. The Phantom must be low on pycnodeuterium, which is used both for its FTL drive and his particle beam weapons. He probably doesn’t have enough to even leave this system. The energy he gleans from his ship’s EA system will only prolong the inevitable. The logical answer, then, is to just leave him alone, let him die. He cannot reproduce asexually, therefore mankind can pose no further threat.
The problem with that is, every so often the Phantom conducts a raid on a passing skirmisher, or kills a survey shuttle in this area, scavenging the ships and leaving the empty hulk floating in space, charred and adrift, yet not quite so hidden that it can’t be found.
He attempts to provoke us further with these acts, he thinks. And perhaps the Phantom has accomplished that. The Conductor’s people didn’t mind being provoked. They have never lost a single battle. N
ot one. To them, being provoked by an enemy is a stupid ploy; it merely reveals exactly where the enemy is. The humans, being insufficiently prepared as far as technology went, never had a single trick up their sleeve that worked even reasonably well. Oh, they certainly tried, but it only ever ended in devastating defeat.
But there’s just one of them left. Just this one. So why bother with him?
The answer is simple.
Because he’s here. Hubris is not a terrible thing for a Conductor to have. Indeed, they are formed, bred, and built for it.
The Conductor turns back to assess the field. He communes with the datafeed. With a command of his eye, a specific area of the field is zoomed in, and he now walks among giants, asteroids dense enough to have survived as larger chunks. Somewhere in all of that mess is an invisible chunk of compristeel, glass, and plastic. A canister holding the last remains of mankind. The Conductor always knew there would come a day when there would be only one of them left, when there would be just one last cleanup job to perform.
Presently, the Conductor assimilates more data on the Phantom’s ship.
The Sidewinder. It has plagued his thoughts before. If not for the Sidewinder itself, the Phantom could not remain so elusive. Rather prosaic in comparison to Cerebral luminals, it was one of the last glories of mankind. It has various cloaking measures, but perhaps its stealthiest and least appreciated attribute comes from its cryogenic coolers, which were added at the ends of the engine nozzles and used Bose-Einstein condensate to cool the ions just before they left the exhaust. That’s why it can be so difficult to locate a Sidewinder, especially once it has cut its engines to low power.
Every attention paid to stealth, he ponders. I suppose that was all they had left to try. So overpowered, so overwhelmed by numbers, what else could they do? The Conductor tries to imagine a civilization or a war effort managed around deception, and finds that he cannot. They must have suspected their way of life couldn’t work. Their leaders couldn’t even decide who ought to lead them. They weren’t uniform, so suspicious were they of each other.
“Sir, the skirmishers await new directives. They are running low on fuel. Should they continue searching?”
The Conductor gives it a millisecond’s thought, then says, “Have them return. Once they’ve refueled, they will give their review of the mission. After review and data assimilation, they will be going out again, this time with a larger force.”
“Sir?”
“We’re not leaving until the Phantom is destroyed.”
“Sir, our objectives are merely to scan the field for resources—”
“You do not have to remind me of our objectives,” he says, his tone that of an approaching storm. “I understand our objectives far better than you. In fact, it seems you have forgotten our prime directive: wipe out humanity. There is one outstanding. As long as one exists, humanity exists. Our directive hasn’t been met fully.” He looks at all of them, Observers and Managers, their faces awash in the glow from their consoles. “We are not leaving until the Phantom is destroyed. Do I make myself clear?”
The “yes sirs” come in the form of endless streams of data routed to his seventh and central tier.
“I need all the information we can get on this asteroid field. Send out more seekers; they are strictly on reconnaissance this time. Have standby skirmishers fan out around the limits of the field—the Phantom can’t have gone far, there’s been no detectable tachyonic distortion, so he hasn’t exited into the Bleed. As fast as he can maneuver, the field is far too cluttered for him to hit top speeds. Give me an estimated maximum range he can have gone, and get a detailed analysis of the asteroids in that area.”
Instantly, the data coming in from the Observers expands his own understanding of the asteroid field. The Conductor is being fed more information on the various carbonaceous asteroids, their size and girth, their mass, their speeds and trajectories, their porous qualities, their gravitational pulls and satellites. Already, he is locking on to the asteroids that look most like they could contain some sort of shelter. That’s where he’s going, after all, he thinks. Shelter.
It only makes sense. Surely the Sidewinder can’t be the Phantom’s only home out here. The Cerebs found out early on that human beings developed a means of setting up temporary shelters on worlds and moons that had unlivable conditions. The Phantom almost certainly has a home somewhere in this asteroid field, a habitat to go and hide and recuperate after a raid.
Where is that place? he ponders, staring into the field. Where have you gone?
As the Conductor attempts to penetrate that labyrinthine mess, we are able to do what he cannot. We move seamlessly into it, passing through even the most troublesome of boulders. We, the ghosts of humanity, can go where we please, whenever we please. Deeper and deeper, following the scent of desperation, as easy for us to detect as it is for the Cerebrals to detect exhaust left in the wake of a ship. We follow this trail for hundreds of miles, all the way to what appears to be a blank patch of space between two random pieces of rock. However, we soon realize that this patch of space isn’t so blank.
We pass through the reflective shields of the Sidewinder, through its hull, and into its cluttered corridor. A middle-aged man helps an older man back to his room. He takes the old man back to the number two hold, settles him back into his stasis chamber, and then begins plugging him back into his IV and monitors. Beside the stasis tube, there sits a pair of freezers, both of which contain spare blood of both Badger’s and Rook’s type, as well as a spare heart, grown from stem cells. It is meant for Badger (his ticker is failing him), but Rook seriously doubts the stasis tube’s automated surgical hands are in good enough shape to conduct the transplant without fail. So much is in decline around the Sidewinder, and repairing medical stasis tubes was never covered at the Academy.
“How ya doin’, Badge?” he asks.
“I hurt. I h-hurt all over.”
“I know you do. Here, let’s get you hooked back up. That’s it. That’s it. Easy.”
“Got him,” says the old man. “Got him, d-didn’t we?”
Rook looks down at his last living ally. Badger has become old and frail, his skin pocked by sores, and his joints so stiff that no amount of stimulants or anti-inflammatory injections can help. Parts of him have been replaced, though you can’t tell it. Bones replaced by alloys long ago, parts of his flesh regrown by the stasis tube’s synthetic flesh reserves, some of it regrown in a lab on Tyson 788b. What was that, like, thirteen years ago? It was something like that, sure. Back when they were running from star system to star system, trying to outrun the holocaust, staying barely one step ahead of it.
“Yeah, Badge,” Rook says, taking a seat on the edge of the stasis tube. “We got him. Everything’s fine, so you can rest easy now.”
“Rook?” he whispers.
“Yeah, Badge?”
The old man smiles, and his eyes fill with tears. “We lost, didn’t we, boy?” Badger sometimes hits these moments of lucidity, where he can suddenly recall things. Other times, he just saw what was written on Rook’s face.
Rook hasn’t the heart to tell him the truth.
“My mind’s not so good, and I d-didn’t hear everything that Cereb was s-sayin’ to ya, but I got the gist. And I-I-I…I can feel it…in my bones. And I can see it in your eyes. W-w-we lost, didn’t we?” Rook bites his tongue to maintain his composure. He will not cry. Not now. He’ll cry enough when he was alone, trying to sleep, trying not to think of the blooming fires in the skies over Earth. But ol’ Badge sees right through him. He always could. “Tell me the truth, son.”
“Yeah, Badge,” he confesses. “We lost.”
“H-h-how bad is it? Where’s…where’s our next port-of-call? How far out are we from it?”
For the last decade, Rook has been feeding Badger a steady diet of nutrient injections and lies. Every so often, the old man wakes up and asks about their condition. He actually kept Badger up to speed in the beginning. But then t
he old man’s mind started to drift, and he became easily frightened whenever he woke up, convinced there was something he forgot to do, like calling in for reinforcements, or checking with HQ. After a time, Rook assuaged him by saying things like, “I’ll call them, Badge. You just sit tight and rest.” It just became easier to feed him those lies. They were good for him. That is, if he wanted to die peacefully.
Over the years, as Badger’s mind started to drift, so too did Rook’s. Their talks became more infrequent, because the old man had to stay knocked out more often to deal with the pain in his back—a large piece of shrapnel, sent flying after the impact of a luminal particle beam, nearly hewed him in half, and a portion was dangerously close to a delicate piece of the spine. Rook got his squadron leader to Tyson 788b in time to get him somewhat patched up, but they had to leave when doom came.
In his mind’s eye, Rook can still see it. The Cerebral armada suddenly appeared in the skies out of nowhere. Blink, and you missed it. One moment the skies were clear blue, with just a hint of that late afternoon pinkness that Tyson was known for. Then, a radiant, almost gorgeous series of concentric yellow rings. They radiated from the bottom of the four luminal ships. Rook was at the airbase, just about to hop into the Sidewinder on an STP (standard training operation), when he felt the temperature rising. Grass, his co-pilot, was staring up. Rook hollered for her to get inside, but she just kept looking up, transfixed.
He yelled and yelled and yelled, but Grass would not listen. She would not get inside the Sidewinder. After all they had been through, after all the close calls they had, after all the worlds they had skipped out on before the doom came, Grass just stood there and let it happen to her. Was she frozen by fear? Not likely. Grass never showed fear of anything. She was a fighter.
But, then…why did she just stand there?
Perhaps Grass was tired. Maybe that’s why she didn’t budge. Maybe she didn’t want to run anymore, knowing that their last resort, the last refuge of humanity, was obliterated. Maybe she was the smart one, he thinks now. A second before Rook closed the hatch, he saw her hair ignite, the flesh bursting into flame, and the screams of an entire world dying. The armada hit the Tyson System in four waves that ensured the atmosphere was utterly destroyed, just as they did every other world. Never three waves, never five, always four.