The Immortal Game (Rook's Song)

by Chad Huskins

  The next temblor shakes them on their way to the cargo hold. The winds nearly knock them sideways as Bishop uses the exo-suit to remove all the parts to the graviton gun and Rook goes and checks on the derelict Sidewinder, making sure no quakes or collapses have damaged it.

  When assembly begins of the graviton gun, Rook feels mostly useless just watching. He watches Bishop work, hoping to memorize his motions in case one day he has to repair the big gun himself. He listens to music and exercises as the Ianeth works tirelessly with his tools puddled around his feet. Rook is just starting in with a set of push-ups when Bishop begins turning on some of the graviton gun’s test screens, running diagnostics checks. “There has been energy corrosion caused by corrupted injectors.”

  “What does that mean?” Rook asks, hitting his twentieth push-up.

  “It means we’ll have to leave orbit in order to make another injector vein—most of the elements that make it are metamaterials, only possible to make in zero-gravity. Neither the Sidewinder’s fabricators nor the omni-kit will be able to even come close to simulating the materials while we’re down here on Kali.”

  “Will it take long to construct it?”

  “Four hours to get the fabricators and the omni-kit to understand what I want them to make, another few hours for me to assemble them into injectors strong enough to channel quantum gravity foam.”

  Rook pauses. “Quantum foam. The foundation of the universe. You guys figured out how to isolate it, then channeled it?” He shakes his head, then goes back to his exercise.

  An hour later, they’re working on a system of the graviton gun with twenty-three different holographic displays, some of which Bishop claims aren’t working properly, and none of which make sense either to Rook’s or our eyes. “These screens all deal with the spin angular momentum operator. You’ll need to understand how to interact with the screens so that spatial quantization is realized in the computer’s system.”

  “Where I’m from, our brains were never really fitted for quantum mechanics.”

  “I can see that. From what I can see in your history, your vocabulary is woefully inadequate for discussing certain quanta. Many of the items I have to teach you, there are no words for in your language.”

  “I’ll have to make up some new words, then. Heh. Never thought I’d be the one adding to Webster’s Dictionary, or expanding the field of quantum physics, for that matter.”

  To this, the alien says nothing. Another hour goes by, and the graviton gun hums louder. Louder. Louder. Then, all at once, it stops humming. Bishop powers it down to check on other systems. Some of the chambers, he explains, contain atom smashers, and highly electromagnetic-absorbent liquids that can only be made in simulated singularities, which together give the generator its power. He gets to work aligning channelers, in order to better direct the gravitons that the gun will excite.

  Rook starts working on developing an area on top of the Sidewinder that will act as the mount for the graviton gun. Welding flat compristeel plates to act as the main platform takes up much of his time. With his exo-suit, Bishop hands up the large pieces, then hops out and helps Rook align the components to the mount plates. Once they’ve gone as far as they can with the mount, Rook returns to his exercises, and Bishop goes back to tinkering with the gun.

  “So tell me,” Bishop says, as he uses the exo-suit to lift two of the gun’s huge channeler cables and connect them. “Have I earned enough of your trust to know the full plan now? I understand the essence of your ‘Turk’ approach, but as for the details, I am still not sure, though I can certainly see many applications in the equipment we’ve gathered.”

  Rook is midway through his fiftieth push-up when he rolls over, lying on his back and panting as he looks up at the cave ceiling. “It’s kind of like it was back in Magnum Collectio. The whole plan has its key parts, but it’s sort of, ah…amorphous? Just need to keep track of all the irons we got in the fire right now, so we have plenty o’ choices later.”

  “So you have a plan with no definite shape, with some parts being subject to change.”

  The ground quakes beneath them, dust falls from the ceiling. “Affirmative, friend,” Rook says, wrapping his legs around a large stalagmite and starting in with sit-ups. “The plan is always in flux, like any plan has to be. We get new data on our enemies—like, what, the principle o’ ten—and it informs the plan a little more, gives us different options.”

  “I understand the necessity for flexibility in planning, but can you at least tell me the overarching scheme?” Bishop asks, hopping out of the exo-suit and working fastidiously to seal the connection between cables. When he does, a low, low hum begins deep inside the graviton gun’s generator. “That way, if something happens to you, I can at least try to continue with the plan.”

  “The overarching scheme is to set the stage for them when they come, to let them enter into a scenario they do not and cannot understand. Then we watch them, see what they do, and move our pieces accordingly.” He pumps out five more sit-ups. “Which reminds me, we need to work on tactical group entry.”

  “I’ve read up human SWAT tactics—”

  “Yeah, but never as a two-man unit. I wanna just run through a few scenarios with you, make sure we’re on the same page.”

  “We’re going to infiltrate someplace guarded?”

  “Maybe,” he huffs. “We’ll see.”

  “Where?”

  “Not exactly sure. Wouldn’t hurt us to train, though.”

  “Is that how this game of yours begins, with us storming another Cereb luminal like you did last time?”

  “No! Hell no!” he laughs. “That was a matter of desperation. Had no other choice.” He huffs, pushes out five more sit-ups, then stands up and wipes the sweat off his brow. “No, this game starts the way all good games start, and that’s with a good opening move.”

  “And what is our opening move?”

  “I die,” he says. The alien looks down at him quizzically. “We start by letting them kill me.” Rook pats Bishop on his shoulder, and walks away.

  10

  Zero-gravity conditions are notoriously difficult to work in. Tools tend to float off seemingly of their own accord, so they have to be tethered to one’s wrists, but that only makes for a tangle of ropes and cords after a while. Tiny parts such as bolts and screws can become easily lost, so it’s best to attach them to tactical magnets inlaid into the environment suit’s shell. Many other things come unhinged, too. Without gravity, things like buoyancy and convection don’t exist, so small flames that plume from the welding they do inside the cargo bay turn into floating spheres of glowing energy before they dissipate.

  They work inside the Sidewinder to benefit from atmosphere, but sometimes they have to go outside to assemble some of the pieces. Weightless, Rook clings to the Sidewinder’s hull by magnetic boots, while Bishop simply grips it with his claw-like feet. The lack of gravity decompresses Rook’s spine and causes him to grow a couple extra centimeters. It’s relaxing, and after the stresses his body was put under on the fortress world, he can use it.

  Their work eventually yields a few sheets of a burnt-green metal, each one a perfect square, as tall as Rook is. It is only possible because Bishop has programmed a few new parameters into the fabricator’s purview, and has done some tweaking to its particle manipulators.

  As they float outside, just beneath the ship’s fabricator exit port, they receive three of these sheets. “This metal has to be formed first as a liquid, and as a liquid it is extremely volatile, and only in zero gravity can surface tension remain strong enough to keep it together during the mixing process. But it isn’t truly tempered until we force intense sound waves through it.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Back inside.”

  They reenter the Sidewinder, leave arti-grav off but fill the cargo bay with atmo so that sound waves can carry. Here, the alien utilizes the bizarre ways that sound operates in zero gravity. He works with the ship’s sonar wa
ves and even his own infrasound voice to affect the sheets. Rook watches, as do we, with intense fascination. The dark-green sheets float in zero-grav and ripple like water, yet remain solid and perfectly square. When Bishop is finished, the sheets look like small ponds frozen a second after a stone has been tossed into the water.

  “That,” says Rook, “was beautiful.”

  “This metal is now about ten times stronger than graphene, the hardest substance humans ever created, and will assist in controlling the granularity of the quanta for our graviton gun.”

  “What do you call it?”

  “My word wouldn’t have meaning for you, and your people never created it, so the question is what do you call it?”

  Rook gives it some brief thought. “Strongium?”

  “Strongium it is, then.”

  Next is something only slightly less complicated: creating an energy source for the containment field generator. This will allow the graviton gun’s field to be controlled, rather than spreading out in every direction, which would destroy the Sidewinder and everything around it. They do this by using a series of simple metals that could be found on Earth, suspending them within a field of zero gravity and utilizing static electricity—in zero-grav conditions, static electricity tends to “pretend” to be gravity, holding some things together as gravity would if it were present. The more this happens, the more tiny particles will cling to each other and create static charges. The process starts off slowly, but within twenty minutes there is enough charge to hold onto the graviton field to keep it from expanding.

  “This will decide the rate-of-fire for our graviton gun,” the alien explains. “The gun can actually fire its reverse-field at the drop of a hat, as you might say, but once you turn it off it has to go through a cooling-down period in which its containment field generator needs rest. And you cannot fire the graviton gun without beam stabilization. If you did, the beam wouldn’t be a beam anymore, but an ever-expanding sphere of reverse-gravity, and it would tear us and itself apart.”

  “Right, so, we can safely fire this thing what, once every fifteen or twenty minutes?”

  “Exactly every eighteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds, if my calculations are correct. I’ve worked it so that it can pull things towards the Sidewinder, though it works better repelling things away from the Sidewinder, which is what it was originally built to do.”

  “What about the range? Now that you’ve got all the pieces, about how far away do you think we can expect to fire this thing?”

  “Fifty-three miles at its longest, but the beam would be about as narrow as the Sidewinder itself at that range. If you shorten the length to, say, twenty miles, you’ll have a beam a little under thirty miles wide.”

  Rook nods. “Okay, so, the longer the beam is, the narrower, and the shorter it is, the wider.”

  “Correct.”

  “And we can fire it once every eighteen minutes and some change?”

  “Affirmative, friend. But you can also turn the power way down and lift smaller objects up close, without having to widen the field. Just remember, even a small usage of the graviton gun like that still requires it to shut down for eighteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds while the containment field generator recycles.”

  “Affirmative, friend,” Rook says.

  Three more days of assembly, tweaking, and small field tests bring their great project to a close. Bishop finishes connecting the beam emitter, and now the Sidewinder looks like it has a giant, angry black tick on its back, one with a tank barrel jutting out of its ass. Bishop tests aiming the great barrel around. He directs a small beam to lift a few stones a hundred yards away and push them away from the Sidewinder, then sets them back down. Bishop works on slaving the graviton gun to his own onboard systems, so that he can control it remotely from inside the cockpit. Then, the two of them decide to give the graviton gun a real test, and they fly the Sidewinder twenty miles off, to a large patch of obsidian and pahoehoe lava. There are a dozen boulders weighing between two and three thousand tons, according to depth and density readings.

  “That one,” Rook says, pointing to one jutting halfway out of the ground. “It looks to weigh about as much as a Sidewinder.” He rises to a thousand feet, cants the Sidewinder to the side so that the beam emitter can point down at the earth. He sets the ship into a slow coast, then turns and looks at Bishop. “Any time you’re ready.”

  “Compliance, friend. Running a final diagnostics check.” A moment. “All systems showing green.” That terminology is for Rook’s benefit, because the color for “go ahead” in the Ianeth culture was closer to indigo. “Trouble-board is clear. Systems optimal. Checking for granularity of photons…that’s a go. Containment field enabled. Cycling up quantum foam generator. Go for a reversal of one-point-eight g’s. Considering its weight, that should be sufficient to dislodge it from the earth.”

  “Final systems check…and it’s all clear. Hang on a moment…need to reset targeting.”

  Their “gun” is a gun in name only, it was meant to join with the barriers of other reverse-field generators, and while its beam’s trajectory can be adjusted, hitting such relatively small targets with pinpoint accuracy was never what it was meant to do, and there is no way of connecting its targeting systems to the Sidewinder’s targeting systems, since human and Ianeth technologies are too dissimilar. Bishop has to do this on his own.

  We can see inside the mind of the alien, and did we have brains, we would likely suffer migraines at the seemingly endless array of details, the mind-numbing minutiae necessary to understand controlling such a potentially destructive force.

  There is no chime for us to hear when Bishop gets the “indigo” to go ahead. His programming tells him that everything is in alignment. “Target locked. Exciting gravitons in ten, nine, eight, seven…”

  The ship’s hull begins to vibrate, some of the Sidewinder’s sensors display increasingly erratic data from a building gravitic distortion. Rook prepares the Sidewinder’s engines for a getaway. Once gravity is reversed, and if all goes well, the boulder will “fall” from its place in the ground, along with all the extra debris caught in the field around it, and the ship will have to outrace the massive hunk of rock coming right at it.

  “…three, two, one…graviton gun engaged!”

  Outside the Sidewinder, we can see a layer of blue and red energy coalesce around the graviton gun for only a second, then it dissipates and it seems that space distorts for just a few seconds all around it. Then, all at once, everything seems normal again. We wonder, briefly if the device has failed.

  Suddenly, the earth below comes up in great hunks! The boulder Bishop targeted is indeed falling up at them. Within seconds it reaches terminal velocity, and is racing at 219.6 miles per hour.

  Back inside the cockpit, inertial dampers are activated and full burn is engaged. “All right,” says Rook. “Here we go. Let’s see if we can get it into orbit.”

  They begin rocketing for the black clouds in the sky, with the top of the Sidewinder facing the earth so that the graviton gun’s barrel can stay locked on to the enormous rocks that appear to be chasing them. The test goes off without a hitch. They tow the boulder and the other earth particles into space and race past Turks 7 and 8 before calling it a day.

  “Graviton beam holding steady at one-point-eight,” says Bishop. “Containment field is showing optimal levels. It’s going to need a recycle soon, though.”

  “All right, that’s enough. Cut ’em loose.”

  “Copy that. Disengaging graviton gun in three, two, one…” The Sidewinder suddenly stops vibrating and all sensors show normal. Gravity is operating all around them as it should be, but now that they’ve picked up enough speed, the boulders are hurtling far away from Kali, headed for parts unknown. “Graviton gun disengaged. Beginning recycle.”

  “I’d call that a success.”

  “Agreed, friend.”

  “Let’s go ahead and start back to—” He cuts himself off, looks at th
e screens. This can’t be right. He looks the data over, puzzled.

  “What is it?” Bishop asks.

  “Same heat signature bouncing off our wake,” he says. “Something’s not right, friend. Something’s…something’s wrong here.” He looks out at space, at the Turks, at Kali, wondering what he’s missed.

  “I’m detecting no spatial distortions. There haven’t been any Cerebs in the vicinity since—”

  “I’m telling you, something’s not right about this. Those readings are very close, and they always show up on our wake, just behind us, and reflecting a little off our hull. It’s like…it’s like something’s right here, right on top of us, something burning hot.”

  They spend a few minutes in silence, just searching the scanners and glancing out the viewport. Finally, the heat signature dissipates, and Rook relaxes a little, but only a little. He sighs. “Let’s go back, let the gun recharge, and finish a few other details before we haul the other ship up here.”

  “Affirmative, friend.”

  Rook takes some time to eat and hydrate, but Bishop continues to neither eat nor drink as he uses the exo-suit and plasma torch to put a few finishing touches to the derelict Sidewinder’s hull. As Thor’s Anvil erupts anew and the ground shakes angrily beneath them, the alien’s work consumes him. He’s moving feverishly around. Like an ant on an anthill, making sure all the holes are plugged, Rook considers, watching him. There’s something he admires about someone doing everything in painstaking detail.

  Meanwhile, Rook is talking himself into doing his next part. It doesn’t take much convincing, because he’s already pulled a ploy like this one before and he knows it has to be done, but it doesn’t make it any easier. He returns to the open graves of his fallen comrades, looks down at all twenty-one of them apologetically. Despite having no faith in an afterlife, Rook finds desecrating the dead extremely disrespectful.