The Immortal Game (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  Not wanting to waste any power he doesn’t have to, Rook decides not to fire on the husks he doesn’t have to, and rushes to the next pillar, battling 2.8 g’s of gravity as he does so. The sonar warns him of movement from behind. He turns and looks back whence he came—the doorway from the stairwell is now jammed with two of the walking dead fighting their way through at the same time. One of them finally pushes through, and unleashes a dam. Three more husks enter, now two more, now six more. They’re all in various stages of decay and disassembly, some staggering, some crawling, all of them twitching like an insect with half its limbs or a wing cut off, and all of them trending towards his hiding spot.

  Rook is up and moving fast, temporarily taken off-balance by a slight change in gravity’s direction, which causes him to bump into a smashed computer terminal. He leaps over the junk, and lands and halfway twists his ankle, falling forward on his chest and sliding across the floor.

  More movement from all around. Rook performs the hardest and most agonizing push-up of his life, the Stacksuit pumping up to maximum, the proximity alarm now ringing persistently in his ears. He gets to his feet, and is almost grabbed by a husk before he fires directly into its face, sending in twisting to the ground. Another Ianeth is on the ground beside him, skittering after him on all fours like a wounded dog. He scrambles away, headed to the far end of the room.

  And then, a particle beam lances out of the darkness. It misses him by a wide margin, but slices one of the pillars overhead, bringing down superheated debris.

  “Jesus! One of them’s armed! They’ve still got weapons!”

  “Ianeth technology is made to endure,” Bishop replies calmly.

  “I’m sure you’re very proud of that!” he yells, diving for cover behind a steel table, just as another shot splashes against the wall behind him. Rook lands in a “speed kneel” position, raises his weapon, and fires at a horde of lumbering husks coming at him. One husk is barely held together at the waist, and his particle beam slices it half. He fires again, hitting two more husks directly between the eyes, and another gets hit in the chest and is sent spinning against a pillar. Another shot glances across the face of one husk, yet it keeps coming.

  Up and running, another green beam cuts through the darkness, and this one hits Rook on his left ribcage. His Tango armor’s high-frequency magnetic field disperses the energy, but there’s still some overheating, and he feels his skin burning just as he dives for more cover, this time behind a large steel cabinet. It seems an impossible distance, gravity is now up to 3.9, and breathing is becoming very difficult. It feels like an obese man is sitting on his chest. Rook is exhausted and his spine and head are killing him. Motion signatures all around him. He’s being surrounded.

  Fires another shot, misses. The g’s are still climbing. Exciter is now heavy enough that it’s affecting his aim. Grinding his teeth, breathing in through his nose and out through his lips, Rook takes aim again, and this time takes out a husk. He takes cover a second later as a shot slices through the air where his head was one second before.

  Suddenly, Rook feels an immense relief. The obese man gets off his chest. His spine decompresses probably two or three centimeters. Gravity is down to 1.1, almost Earth-like. Between the relief and the Stacksuit being dialed up to max, he’s never felt more spry in his life. Rook is on his feet and sprinting for the door, zigging and zagging behind cover along the way, readying the thermite and plasma charge before he gets to the door. Once there, he applies both, runs ten feet back to take cover behind a pillar. He watches the thermite superheat the crease between door and doorframe, and then detonates the plasma charge. The explosion is soundless, but he “hears” it through the vibrations in his environment suit, and the door is strong enough that it’s barely torn open. Rook lays down a suppressing fire as he moves to the door, barely squeezes through the gap, and runs down another corridor, takes a left, then a right. For the moment, he’s lost his undead followers.

  Another application of explo-gel gets him through a small set of doors. He steps through, and into an enormous, spherical room the size of Yankee Stadium. Gigantic cranes reach upwards towards the floor out from the curved ceiling in front of him, looking like dusty mechanical hands reaching out of the grave. They look like assembler arms, almost like you’d see at an old car manufacturing plant. They cling rigidly to the ceiling, whereas all the furniture in the rest of the room has been tossed about by the whims of the uneven tide.

  Panting, grunting in pain, muscles trembling, Rook moves across the room with his Exciter up and at the ready. Simply entering the room presents no difficulty; there are no husks, and no security measures.

  “Status,” Bishop calls, in a tone that is so frustratingly calm that Rook has to force himself not to curse the alien out.

  “I’m in…the inner nest,” he pants. “I’m in the…the room…you told me about. Looks like an assembly room.”

  “That’s it. The generator should be somewhere inside there. It will be in a few pieces, maybe as many as five, depending on how far along they were in the assembly. The main body will be black and large and rectangular, but with rounded corners—”

  Rook spots the device almost immediately. “Check! Got it!” He says, and begins moving towards the object. It is indeed about a quarter the size of the Sidewinder, exactly as Bishop said it would be. What he failed to mention was just how much it would resemble a piece of useless, twisted, black metal, and how awkward the pieces would appear. There is no mistaking that the various pieces belong together—they are all the same style of charred metal. The main pieces, as Bishop described them, are the induction stabilizer, collimator, containment field generator, particle accelerator, graviton rotator, quantum foam paralyzer, granular stabilizer, beam emitter, and emitter array. One piece is a long rod, which Bishop explained as the primary beam emitter, the “barrel” for this would-be weapon.

  Rook moves over to a far wall, applies a plasma charge, and wastes no time blowing it wide open. On the other side is a short hallway, and he has to blow the far wall open there, as well. When he does, and the smoke has cleared, Rook is once again staring out into space, at the upside-down world, and the Sidewinder is now climbing with its ass end facing Rook, the cargo bay door open. “We’re all good here,” says Rook. “Ready for main cable.”

  “Copy that. Stand clear. Firing main cable.”

  Rook gets out of the way, and the graphene tow cable fires out of the back of the ship. He moves quickly to connect its magnetic grip to the graviton generator’s main body. “This thing’s not gonna suddenly turn on, is it?”

  “Negative, it will require a lot of work on my part before it becomes functional.”

  A few more seconds of work, checking his sonar for more signs of husks, and hurriedly finishing attaching the magnetic grip. He steps away. “All right, she’s ready. Take her away.” As Bishop begins reeling in the generator, Rook moves to the doorway, kneels, and aims his Exciter around the corner. Motion sensors detect movement all around, but there are all sorts of interference, so it’s hard to pin down exactly where all of the husks are.

  “Generator main body is home,” Bishop calls. “Firing tow cable again.”

  “Copy, standby for more parts.”

  Over the next ten minutes, they remove eight solid pieces, the longest and most awkward one being the beam emitter. The rod is about twenty feet long and a foot wide, and is much, much heavier than it looks, for it is filled with plasma coils and magnetic rings, as well as quantum particle oscillators that no human being ever dreamt of.

  Everything seems fine for a moment. No enemy fire, no sign of husks besides movement outside the corridor. Then, gravity shifts slightly to one side and intensifies to 3.2 g’s all at the same time. This causes the beam emitter to try to go out through the hole in the wall longways, where it gets lodged. Rook curses.

  “Having trouble reeling in it,” says Bishop.

  “That’s because the emitter’s got hung. I’ll try to disl
odge. Stand by.”

  “Standing by. Be careful.”

  Suffering under the g’s, Rook moves over to the wall and tries to give the long barrel a push. It doesn’t budge. Sighing, he looks around for answers, finds a crack in the wall that promises to break off into a large chunk. He dials up the power on his Exciter, then aims at the wall, five feet away from the emitter, and fires. It takes three seconds of sustained particle-beam fire before the strange alloy heats enough to melt and finally break away. When it does, it comes apart in a larger chunk than Rook imagined, and he leaps back. Everything seems fine.

  The emitter comes away successfully and dramatically just as gravity shifts again. Rook is nearly brought to his knees as the gravity intensifies to a smothering 4.5 g’s. A moment later, a chime goes off on his HUD, and the motion tracker in the top-left corner shows movement just behind—

  Rook turns and brings his rifle to bear, but he’s too late. The husk charges at him, lifting him off the ground, but the directional shift of gravity, combined with its momentum, makes it unable to stop. When the dead Ianeth collides with Rook, it takes the wind right out of him, and sends them both flying out of the hole in the wall, out into the bottomless pit of space, earth “falling” away above them as they tumble into the bottomless pit of stars.

  9

  Freefall. The world escapes them. The buildings on either side of the two plummeting combatants races by them. Falling, falling, falling. The star behind them gives them a pale spotlight by which their furious, silent scramble is illuminated.

  The husk grapples at him, attempting to rip at his face. Without a working brain it stupidly scrapes and claws and even bites. Its massive mouth nearly swallows Rook’s helmet, and for a moment he’s staring down a frightening gullet. In the mad scuffle, Rook loses grip of his Exciter. The Stacksuit helps him fight back, basic grappling skills taught to him at ASCA and not used since do give him some maneuverability, and he manages to slip under one of the husk’s arms and climb around to its back.

  But Ianeth dexterity proves itself difficult to counter. The husk manages to reach backwards, as though dislocating its shoulder, and grapples him much as it did when Rook was facing him. Rook slams his head against the husk once, twice, thrice, hoping to dislodge something to affect its dead-man switch—

  The husk twists its head almost completely around and smashes back at him. Dazed, Rook loses his grip and the husk twists around to face him again, clawing, biting, smashing barbarically, grabbing hold of Rook’s arms and attempting to yank them apart.

  Stars are spinning end over end. Now the planet is above him, now it’s behind him. On each turn when he faces space, Rook’s mind fights against the oblivion and the sensation of falling, such conflicting information. Gravity shifts, moves them about in the sky, gives Rook butterflies in his stomach. More spinning stars make him almost vomit. Dizziness. His body so exhausted. The husk striking at his body, biting his visor…

  We want to help him. We wish that we could. We want to reach out and remind him that he’s got other options. We want to slap him and bring him back to the here and now. We want to tell he’s still got the jet pack on his back. Rook’s mind is so far afield, though, and his eyes are seeing things almost forgotten.

  …looking at Mom in the rearview mirror as he drives away…

  …going through MEPS, getting the thumbs-up for enlistment…

  …the first day of recruit training…

  “Do you understand what’s at stake, Recruit?” shouts the drill sergeant in his face. “Do you know what you’re fighting for? Look at me! Look me in the eye! You’d better get used to looking an ass-whoopin’ in the face, cuz this is what it looks like and there’s more where that came from up there!” He points up to the sky.

  …the first time he saw the Earth from space…so pristine…

  …his Uncle Seth telling late-night stories about his time in ASCA…

  …working on the farm and looking up at the pure, clear night sky, wondering what’s out there…

  …Mom lifting him off the ground after he broke his leg jumping off the roof…

  …hearing Badger’s last words, like ol’ Badge was right next to him…“Give them hell.”

  …kissing Cindy Millsap behind the bleachers at the big game…

  …the smell of autumn dew on the grass first thing in the morning…

  …babies laughing…

  They took all that away from us.

  …the crescent moon…the full moon…

  …the greenhouses on Tyson 788b…

  …zero-gravity training…

  “Here is your SAFER III!” says the instructor. “Today, you’re going to learn how to use it.”

  My SAFER III. The jet pack…I have a jet pack.

  …the massive aurora borealis on Hawking Beta-3…

  …the last briefing before his final SERE test…

  “Now listen up boys and girls,” his instructor bellows. “Whether you sink or swim today matters very little in the grand scheme of things. The real fight begins after today, out there with the stars. But then and now, you’ll be facing the same enemy. Yourself. Hunger, pain, loneliness. These are your rewards for graduation. But with these there is also hope. And without hope, you will fail. Without hope, you will die. But it’s all in your mind, ladies, it’s all in your mind. If you feed your hope, it will carry you forward. If you feed despair, it will consume you. The choice is yours, and your fight begins now. Which one will you feed?”

  …Mom and Dad stocking food, taking shelter…

  …Mom overstocking water…overstocking…

  She’s alive. They both are.

  The idea comes quite out of nowhere, and it’s uncharacteristic. As thorough as the Cerebrals could ever be, can they ever eradicate everyone? One hundred percent of all humans, all Ianeth, all whatever else they had encountered? Roaches survive nuclear detonations. Why not people? Why not?

  Like a seed, it grows. Somebody had to survive. Somewhere out there, someone else made it. Bishop said it. Two is a pattern. If I made it, if he made it, then there must be others. Other humans. Other races. Where are they?

  All at once, a promise.

  I will find them.

  The alien is still beating at him, clawing at him. Rook comes out of his reverie, reinvigorated and screaming, laughing madly, as madly as he did in Magnum Collectio. He lashes out, striking and grabbing hold of the alien husk’s joints, twisting, pulling, kicking and head-butting. He finds an opening, scrambles to the husk’s back, manages to shimmy free for just one second, and before the husk can reach out at him again, he activates his jet pack. In his scramble, in his exhaustion, in the severe beating he has taken, he forgot about it completely. Until now.

  The thrusters take him away. They won’t allow him to fly, but they make space between him and his plummeting foe. The husk twists silently in space like an insect with clipped wings, framed by the blue sun millions of miles away.

  A chime in his ear. His oxygen is nearing zero. Very soon, he’ll be rebreathing spent air and—

  “Born down in a dead man’s town,”

  Springsteen?

  “The first kick I took was when I hit the ground;

  You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much,

  So you spend half your life just covering up;

  Borrrrrrn in the U.S.A.,

  I was…borrrrrrn in the U.S.A.”

  “Bishop to Rook, do you copy?”

  “Uh, c-copy…yeah, roger that, I copy! I copy!” he sputters, watching the fortress world shrinking and spinning away. Depending on the stream of the graviton tide he was passing through, he was falling between 200 and 480 miles an hour. “Where…where the hell’ve you been?”

  “I had to finish reeling in the emitter. I couldn’t just let it drop and try to catch you. If I had, it might’ve caught up to us both, fallen right on top of us—”

  “Copy that! Just get over here! Where the hell are…I see you!”

  Th
e Sidewinder is above him (below him?) rushing up from the planet’s surface, slowing quickly to match his speed. It comes alongside him, then pushes just slightly ahead.

  “I’m going to cut the engines so I can get in front of you without roasting you,” Bishop says. “Then I’ll drop the ship into freefall, open the cargo bay, and activate the anterior thrusters to slow the fall.”

  “Copy that! I’ll see if I can use the SAFER to catch up!”

  The alien uses the Sidewinder beautifully, like a bird with perfect instincts of flight. The nose is pointed out towards space, and Bishop masterfully steers the ship so that its momentum will carry it in front of Rook. The engines are cut. The Sidewinder coasts in front of him. Its reverse thrusters activate, and he engages his jet pack’s forward thrusters. It’s going to be a rough landing.

  He slides inside the cargo bay, now cluttered with the huge generator parts. His entry isn’t lovely, the graviton tide sways both his trajectory and the ship’s. He bangs his head against the roof a second before he smacks against the beam emitter. “I’m inside! Close bay door!”

  “Copy that. Closing bay door.” A few seconds later, it’s done, and Rook is holding tight to a safety grip along the wall. “Hold on, I’m going to slow our descent before reasserting arti-grav.” He starts to feel the g’s. It takes several minutes to get to safe enough speeds where Bishop can switch artificial gravity back on—to do it sooner might’ve caused Rook immense trauma.

  “Arti-grav in three, two, one…”

  Everything smashes to the floor, including a few cases full of MREs. Rook smacks hard against the floor and lets out a baneful moan. Then a sigh. And a laugh.

  “All systems clear. Exiting graviton tide in ten minutes.”

  He’s still laughing, as well as wallowing gratefully in the simple, gentle, gorgeous 1.0 g. The ship shudders a deal, fighting against the limits of the graviton tide. By the time they’re completely clear of the reverse-field, Rook is finally getting to his feet. He feels as if he’s made of feathers, and peels his environment suit off, then his armor and Stacksuit. With each layer gone, he feels that much more rejuvenated. Like a freakin’ butterfly, free of its cocoon at last. I’m ready to fly. He’s still laughing.