The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  He cranks the music louder.

  “So listen up, ’cause ya can’t say nothin’!

  You’ll shut me down with the push of your button!

  I’m out, and I’m gone,

  I’ll tell ya now, I keep it on and on!”

  Rook swivels back to the flight controls. He feels confident enough to slow down, open the belly of the Sidewinder’s fabricator, and absorb some of the advanced materials that the skirmishers are made of. If he survives this day, they may prove very useful.

  Rook looks down at his sectorboard. The pieces are still moving. And now, the mother ship has cleared much of the debris field and has a clear shot at the Blarney Stone, the last hunk of rock blocking the Queen. He turns his ship so that he can see through his main viewport. He wants to watch the end of the Queen with his own eyes, not just through some screen.

  The mother ship fires on the Blarney Stone, the last of Queen Anne’s protectors, annihilating it as easily and as casually as you might have flicked a beetle off your arm. However, just as the luminal was cuing up its particle beam, Rook sent the command to Grumpy to eject the warbot hidden within. It takes a mere two seconds, and it activates its jets, rocketing away from Grumpy. The two of them now close in.

  Cerebrals may never have really feared humans, or their weaponry, but one invention that got their attention just before the War ended was the warbot. Incredibly dexterous things, capable of sharp turns in space, much like their seekers, only with far more firepower, including arm-mounted plasma guns and a shoulder-mounted particle beam cannon, capable of firing almost as many terajoules as the turrets.

  Within ten seconds, Grumpy and the warbot move across the belly of the mother ship and open fire. They target the exact same hole that Doc started on, pumping out maximum firepower with absolute disregard for overheating.

  Rook watches all of this on his 3D display, then looks out at the massive mother ship. It is angling itself just a tad. As predicted, it is addressing this new threat. Queen Anne is no threat at the moment, he thinks. She has no weapons. They’re being attacked in the same spot on their ship as before, I’m sure they haven’t missed that. The Cerebrals must now address this new threat. You gotta defend your king, can’t leave it open for attack. The Leader said sentient species throughout the universe were mostly alike. Rook is willing to bet this principle is no different. It’s a forced move. They have to do it.

  Indeed, the mother ship does address these attacks. Its weapons are now focused on the false asteroid and the warbot. Grumpy is destroyed within seconds, though not before dishing out appreciable damage of his own, according to the readings before the turret was destroyed. But the warbot is far more adroit at tactics and evasion, keeping the ship focused on this damaging attack.

  And while this worthy knight does his job, Rook moves his Queen.

  A few taps on his keyboard, and Queen Anne’s mass drivers on the south end switch off, and the drivers on the north and west side kick into overdrive, changing her direction suddenly. She’s been moving so slowly until now, conserving her remaining fuel, but now she goes rocketing straight through the chaotic debris field left by her murdered protectors. She moves at top speeds, on a collision course with the luminal ship.

  Rook watches it all unfold, almost as cleanly as he could have ever dreamed.

  “ ’Cause what you see, you might not get!

  And we can bet, so don’t you get souped yet!

  You’re schemin’ on a thing that’s a mirage!

  I’m trying to tell ya now, it’s SABOTAGE!”

  The luminal ship, in order to avoid serious damage by the Queen, must now retreat a ways. After all, it has angled itself so that its particle beam cannons can fire at the warbot, which is still dishing out considerable punishment, so it can’t just wheel around quickly and fire on the Queen.

  And here is the Cerebs’ final, and perhaps greatest, weakness. At least, if he was reading the Leader’s words correctly. The Queen is clearly an important piece to him—a home, a food cache, and a weapons cache, just like the King—so they obviously thought he wanted to protect it.

  They don’t understand sacrifice. He smiles. What’s more, they don’t understand its usefulness. Another useful proverb from Nietzsche, one that Rook discovered some years after his father told him about the German philosopher, is this: “We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.”

  The mother ship activates reverse thrusters, moving backwards across S47. Now S46. Now S45. While changing its yaw to turn its primary weapon on the Queen, the luminal ship also fends off the pinpoint attacks by the warbot, still plowing away at the same section of the ship’s belly, all while it retreats back, back, back, in order to make space between it and the suicidal Queen Anne.

  Rook laughs at the irony. Queen Anne, the real Queen Anne, went fearlessly into death, a sacrificial lamb in her own time, dying, she said, for her king.

  The massive luminal ship has backed up across Sector 33. Now S32. Now S31.

  “C’mon, just a little closer. Just a little closer.” Now Rook brings in other pieces to confuse the mother ship. Here comes Sleepy and Sneezy, zipping in from Sectors 16 and 52, respectively, coming at the ship from both sides, adjusting the angles according to where the computer predicts the mother ship will move to. Look at me, Cerebs. I can corral, too. You’re just too smart for your own good, too proud to know you’re being corralled.

  Sleepy and Sneezy continue applying pressure and creating confusion. Each turret is unloading ten terajoules of energy apiece in each particle beam burst. Sleepy fires down on the front of the spearhead-shaped vessel, while Sneezy aids the warbot and fires on the same spot on the underbelly. Four skirmishers try to take out the warbot, but it is communicating with the Sidewinder and getting its orders from the computer, who advises it on how to apply the principle of four to evade them.

  Now the mother ship is backing across S27. Now S26.

  Alarms!

  Rook looks at his screens. Skirmishers are moving through S16, where he currently glides, approaching on a 267, Mark Six…but they are racing past him. Their trajectories show they are on a fast course directly for the mother ship. Gotta maintain priorities. I’m just a rook, they can kill me later, but they need their king.

  The luminal ship is now fending off multiple attacks its crew didn’t see coming. Though, they learn quickly enough. The luminal ship is angling itself quite calmly, while skirmishers quickly surround Sleepy and Sneezy, demolishing them both. However, the Queen is still coming, still charging right at the ship, causing the mother ship to back across the sectorboard, across S10…now S9…now S8…

  “Just a little closer. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!”

  The warbot is still firing at the underside of the ship, still pouring out ungodly terajoules of energy, while being small and nimble enough to evade the ship’s smaller beams.

  The mother ship backpedals to S5. Then, as quickly and unceremoniously as you please, the colossal ship finally rotates itself enough to bring its primary weapon to bear on the Queen. Its particle beam is charged in a second, and three seconds later it fires. The Queen is utterly obliterated in a spectacular array of white-hot debris, millions of pieces shooting across the field in every direction. All the pieces cool quickly, and appear like dying stars.

  “Farewell, my lady,” Rook whispers.

  In his ears, a chorus is building.

  “Listen all ya’ll, it’s a sabotage.

  Listen all ya’ll, it’s a sabotage.

  Listen all ya’ll, it’s a sabotage.”

  The mother ship now turns its attention fully to the warbot. It is just about to begin firing its main weapon again…and that’s when Happy and Bashful come bearing down on it through the debris field left by the Queen.

  They call it a discovered attack in chess. An attack revealed only when one piece moves out of the way of another. In this case, a sacrifice. The Queen made a good pu
sh against the luminal ship, backing it up towards S1, the center of the sectorboard, but there was still a ways to go yet. Happy and Bashful push now for the mother ship, unleashing fury from their turrets even as the warbot continues its destruction of the single spot at the ship’s belly.

  Rook wonders if the ship’s Conductor is surprised by this—as ghosts, you and I know that he is—and marvels as the combined efforts of his final pieces manage to push the luminal ship just one more Sector back, into S4. Then, the skirmishers finally surround Happy and Bashful and pulverize them into space dust.

  Rook looks down at his 3D sectorboard. The Cereb luminal ship sits firmly at S4.

  “Close enough,” he sighs.

  Like Fischer who sacrificed his queen for the greater “windmill” scheme, and like Kimura who “sacrificed” his king so as to know his enemy’s mind and never lose a game to him again, Rook has given up everything for this moment. This one chance. This pale hope. His food stores on Queen Anne could not all be taken aboard the Sidewinder, so she still held a great deal of his lifeline, and thus the lifeline of humanity. And the convenience of King Henry VIII’s size, porousness, and location cannot be overestimated. But they had to go. For the greater scheme.

  Rook’s fingers move quickly over the keyboard, dimming the glass of his viewport, preparing for the flash. Then he activates the transmitters on the King’s surface, and then punches in a ten-digit code. On the main command screen, it asks a simple question:

  ARE YOU SURE? YES/NO

  The mother ship is turning back around, aiming itself for S16, where he now resides. Even though it still fights against the warbot, the ship’s guns are angling for the machine, and the skirmishers are free to continue their pursuit of the Phantom.

  Alarms. The squadrons are on their way. Each one made of four groups of four.

  Rook prepares himself to make a run for it. He looks out the viewport, takes in the King’s splendor for one last time, and then looks at the mother ship hovering a couple dozen miles in front of it, silhouetted against it, partially in its great shadow. “Checkmate,” he says, and selects YES.

  There has never been a manmade explosion in space of this magnitude.

  “But make no mistakes and switch up my channel!

  I’m Buddy Rich when I fly off the handle!

  What could it be? It’s a mirage!

  You’re schemin’ on a thing, that’s SABOTAGE!”

  13

  For the last several minutes, the Conductor has watched the impossible happen. No longer is it the improbable, it is the impossible. He is certain of it now. What he is seeing…there must be something wrong with the datafeed. A minor malfunction that became like a snowball going downhill, picking up size and speed as it went, affecting everything systemically.

  It simply wasn’t possible that he had lost sixty-four skirmishers in less than a minute. Not after he had deftly dealt with the particle beam turrets and the asteroids.

  Now, facing the flash that suddenly bursts out from the three-dimensional representation of the asteroid field, watching the destruction expand towards him, feeling the influx of data nearly crippling him, he knows that there must be a malfunction. Not with his thinking, but with their machines and computers, or with the Observers, or something.

  The flash is immense, and he sees the concentric rings of superheated gas jetting out from it. There is nowhere to run. They cannot jump into the Bleed from here, there is too much debris. If they tried to rocket out of here, they would collide with those hunks of rock. And at lightspeed, it would destroy them. Had the Phantom counted on that? Had he counted on boxing them in?

  No…no, there are too many calculations for a human being to consider.

  The wall of light, debris, and superheated gas is just outside, ready to knock on his door. There is nowhere to go.

  There is nowhere to go.

  There is nowhere to go.

  But…how? he thinks, seconds before the first shockwave hits. How can an asteroid just explode like that? How could the Phantom have nuclear capabilities? Our scanners showed nothing but slightly higher-than-normal radiation spikes for space. How can he—

  His seven-tiered brain is what separates him from the others of his kind, and it’s what allows him to see it, only too late. Somehow, he found a deposit of hidden nuclear weapons caches, or…or…discarded drive cores!

  No one knows what to do. They all look to him for guidance. The entire bridge is silent, right up until the first shockwave hits. When that happens, they are all flung to different parts of the room. At first, their shields absorb some of the impact, but not the successive shockwaves. Sparks and lances of electricity shoot out from their consoles. Artificial gravity is lost, then reestablished, then lost again. They are floating about, slamming into one another for a few seconds, before finally gravity is reasserted and they all fall to the floor. Observers and Managers lay dead all around him. A sliver of some metal burst out from the wall and cut his brow. Another piece embeds in his stomach.

  A crease in the bulkhead. A loud, strident moan. The ship protesting against such misuse. A hole opens somewhere down the hall, and atmosphere begins to leak out into the Deep.

  “Seal everything!” he screams along the datafeed. There is virtually no one alive and cognizant enough to listen, much less able to relay his orders. So the Conductor does it himself. Override initiatives gain him total access to the datafeed, circumventing the many fail-safes that the Observer-Manager teams represented. Now, he pours his consciousness across the ship, merging his destiny with it, conducting billions of calculations and commands all at once.

  Along with the complex items of astrophysics and astronavigation, the basics are also reported in.

  Damage report: ship’s integrity threatened.

  Casualty report: exactly 4,415.

  Wounded: exactly 1,009

  Operational efficiency: down by more than half.

  Hull breaches: 397.

  Atmospheric loss: not negligible.

  Primary weapon: destroyed.

  Solenoid guns: inoperable.

  The Conductor immediately begins issuing orders to Engineers to isolate and contain leakages, and to shut all four emergency doors in the nonessential areas. He does this, as well as working out how to stabilize the ship’s heading. The multiple blast waves severely knocked it off course, and without its solenoid guns working at the moment, it cannot deflect asteroids too large for its magnetic shields to deflect.

  Along the datafeed comes a stream of distress signals. The Conductor issues orders for all remaining skirmishers to continue their search for the Phantom—they would not begin search and rescue until their target was destroyed.

  The indignity of it all!

  The Conductor fights to keep thoughts of the Phantom from entering his mind. He must remain focused if he is going to save his ship. Save my ship, he thinks. The thought has never crossed his mind before. It’s never had to. I will kill him, he thinks. Personally. I will see him suffer. It is a most unusual reaction for a Cereb, but perhaps not for a Conductor. Madness, after all, is waiting for them all.

  We leave the Conductor now to deal with systems failures and repair work. A couple hundred miles away, moving fast to stay ahead of the wall of superheated gas and all the debris, is the Sidewinder. The flash wasn’t so bad, since he dimmed his viewport seconds before detonation, but racing away from the two-hundred-megaton explosion was the most difficult thing he’s ever had to do in his piloting career. No simulations were ever rendered at the Academy for something like this.

  Four petajoules of energy were displaced in an instant, creating a surge of first white, then orange-hot superheated debris, gases, plasma clouds, and a series of shockwaves that expanded outwards. It is a great, hungry beast, intent on swallowing the Deep. But nothing can do that, no matter how large it was, no matter how hungry it is.

  The Sidewinder shakes as Rook pushes it to its limits. He can’t reach his top speeds, because he has to reduc
e speed in order to make turns around asteroids in his path, but he has enough of a head start to reach the cover of other asteroids a hundred miles away.

  However, Rook hasn’t survived unscathed. The race away from the blast was intense, and the Sidewinder is nimble and fast. Still, enough of the displaced energy caught up to him to cause his ship some damage. The electromagnetic pulse coming off the detonation threatens to shut many of his systems down, despite all of the radiation-hardened components. The Sidewinder shutters as lights go out, coming back on, go out, come back on. A crack forms in the hull over his head, leaking atmo. A small hose ruptures overhead, jets gases into his face.

  Rook wastes no time. As soon as the ship is settled, he sets himself to repairs, and gets the repair bot working on the circuitry bay, where it looks like they’ve blown quite a few fuses. For Rook, the first thing to do is to use sealant on the hull breach in the cockpit, and then to check life support and make sure everything is running optimal.

  After half an hour, though, Rook checks the luminal ship’s status. Lots of radiation and debris is obfuscating his sensors’ view, but it looks like the ship wasn’t entirely destroyed. He sighs. Still one last play left to make, he thinks. He never intended this, but then, what else is left? He tries to encourage himself by reminding himself that the rook is always most powerful towards the end of the game.

  Rook spends a few hours preparing, never taking his spacesuit off. We still don’t know what he’s hiding under there…

  The omni-kit is indispensible for certain repairs. Many items he wouldn’t have been able to replace are easy to scan, break down, cut with the Leader’s plasma torch, and feed into the kit’s mini-fabricator. He also uses the Sidewinder’s own fabricator to produce a few workable pieces out of the debris it collected from destroyed skirmishers. This takes a bit of time, but eventually he’s able to birth a section of a skirmisher’s tail end. It looks warped, kind of burnt, but that’s just fine for what he needs it for.