The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song) (5 page)

Pulse racing,
Rook is lost in it.

“
Well my temperature’s risin’ and my feet left the floor,

Crazy people rockin’ cause they want to go more,

Let me in baby I don’t know what you got,

But ya better take it easy,
cuz this place is hot!
”

Ensconced in the sudden sunlight and miles upon miles of obfuscating steam clouds, Rook decelerates, elevates his pitch, and angles up, up, and up, laughing madly at his enemies, at his desperate situation, at the universe, and then rolls to port as he begins a wide arc.  Were you and I not apparitions, we wouldn’t be able to hold on, so tight is his turn.

Blinded by light and a seemingly eternal veil of white, Rook takes us on
a course that completes his tight parabola around Big Ben, and then accelerates.  His sensors are struggling to keep up with Gonzo’s effects and all of the abrupt environmental changes going on around the Sidewinder.  On top of everything else, the massive solar winds are causing GIC (geomagnetically induced currents), affecting even the most hardened electrical systems.  In effect, Rook is flying blind.  Big Ben is mostly without hills, yet there are bumps and random dips that rise into sharp, deadly spikes, so flying like this was near suicidal.

“Ya gotta get up
preeeeeetty
early in the morning to get the Phantom in his own house, boys!” he laughs.  “Understand?  This is my house!  Got that!  My! 
House!
”  He howls like a wolf, and beats his fist hard against the main console.

Stand back; this fever can be catching.

All at once, the fog lifts in front of him.  It’s only for a second, but he’s able to see them, and so are we.  Two fighters, obviously very much lost, trying to ascend exactly as Rook did in order to get above the dense mist, and the sunlight coming through it.  They want the respite of shadow, either Gonzo’s or Little Ben’s, but they won’t get it.

Sweating heavily,
Rook targets using his eyes and instincts—the Sidewinder’s systems can’t help him now.  He takes a moment to watch their yaw, then their roll and pitch, and then produces a workable theory on which way they will move.  “Guesstimating” as his wingman Cowboy used to say.  He taps a few buttons to set his course, drawing even with theirs, and then, tapping a button on his armrest, he rotates his chair to the firing station beside the pilot’s console.  The visual comes up shakily on his screen, with plenty of static interfering with the 3D image.  “Rotate the targeting axis point-seven microns,” he asks of the computer.  It cannot verbally reply, but it can obey.

For a moment, a loud whine goes off, indicating he’s got his enemy targeted.  “I’ve got tone,” he says to no one at all, speaking in pilot’s jargon out of habit.  Then, he loses his target.  “
Damn!  No joy!  I repeat, that’s a no joy!”  Sweating, his hands slipping on the controls.  A few seconds later, he has tone again.  He takes a deep, deep breath, lets it out slowly, just how Sergeant McEvoy taught him, and fires.

At first,
nothing happens.  The particle beam doesn’t fire.  There is a tense moment while the DEW’s (directed-energy weapon) AI command recalibrates the focusing lens—recently forged from the Sidewinder’s onboard fabricators from particles of various captured asteroids, another sobering reminder of the ship’s limited lifespan—and finally sets the beam through the lens.  Then, the accelerator itself almost fails, the subatomic particles overheating in the accelerating tunnel, causing premature shutdown.  After a moment of adjusting the heat sinks and overriding the safety protocols, Rook finally gets it to fire.

The particle beam cannon fires its subatomic particles at nearly the speed of light, forming a blue-green beam
worth five terajoules of energy, which cuts silently through the vacuum and superheats the first target until it explodes a second later.  Seeing this, the other fighter breaks and tries to run.  Rook is in on him five seconds later, and gets a glancing blow at his aft thrusters.  That’s all he needs.  The fighter explodes silently in a burst of white superheated alloys, but there are no flames—no air in outer space.

“You boys came into
my
zone?  Into the
Phantom’s
territory?  Didn’t your mamas teach you nothin’?  Hahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

Rook can’t stop laughing.  He
knows who he is.  He knows he is their Phantom.  What little his people learned of their language was taught at ASCA, and he has heard their radio chatter. 
I’m the Specter
. 
Their Ghost in what they call the Deep
.  Over the years, he’s started thinking of himself as just that, a ghost.  Just as he’s come to think of space as they seem to—a great Deep, not quite knowable, no matter how long you remain in it, no matter how long you stare into it, no matter how many names you give to the planets and stars and asteroids.

Unknowable.

Rook now taps another switch, which swivels his chair back to the forward viewport, and places him directly in front of the flight controls once more.  Still chuckling, he turns his attention back to his navigational computer, and makes for his escape.  For the moment, he appears to be in the clear.  Their net will still be all around him, but they won’t have a fix on him, not this close to Gonzo and the others.

Rook banks hard to starboard
, still laughing, still sweating, still feeling his pulse moving well beyond his control.  He’s heading for the Twins now—a pair of rocks roughly the same size and shape, both orbiting Little Ben in low orbit, never too far from one another.  He’ll slip into their shadows, and from there he’ll make for King Henry VIII, and then…

He stops laughing.  He turns at once, and looks towards the back of the cockpit.  At us.  Oh
no…has he somehow…can he
see
us?  No, no it’s not possible.  We are apparitions, he can’t be looking at us.  So what is he looking at?

Rook stands up.  The look on his face tells the tale.  “Fee-fi-fo-fum,” he says slowly.
  “What have you Cerebs gone and done?”

What can he be talking about?  More importantly, who is he talking to?

Then, we understand.  Just as Rook understands.  It can’t be that easy.  It never is, not with these creatures.  They have stomped across the galaxy and weeded out every human being they could find, they have sacked whole worlds and undid the entire legacy of Man, and they did it in a summer and a winter.  Rook survived partly because he has forsaken the comforts of worlds and cohabitating with others like him.  He has survived because he decided to cut and run when he had to, exactly as he was trained.  A loner.  A small flea out in the void, too miniscule to attract that much attention.  Yet, a flea with a degree of paranoia that is perhaps unequaled by the rest of his kind.

So then, what’s their game this time?  Maybe they sacrificed those two ships, and maybe they didn’t.  Maybe they only took advantage of a bad situation.  Maybe those two ships
were merely lures to get his attention away from something else.

Away from what?
he wonders, as do we.

His pulse is still pounding, his brow still beading with sweat.  He turns back to his console and starts bringing up three-dimensional holograms of the area beneath the Sidewinder.  He is not surprised to find
a few of the cameras are out.  Neither should we be.

If we float out from the ship, and pass through into the void and swim just beneath the Sidewinder’s belly like a
school of pilot fish, we see that four dark figures have alighted on the underbelly.  A unit of commandos, highly trained, encased in suits suitable to the stresses of space and the stresses of high-speed travel, are pressed flatly against the hull.  One of them has just finished taking out another camera, while another has produced a kind of torch-welder: a plasma cutter.

The metal is turning red.  Very soon, they will
make a dynamic entry.

3

As ghosts, we are privy to so much that no one else sees.  We are able to flit from one soul to another, hearing and
feeling
the nature that drive each.  It is for this reason that we almost cannot be angry at those who annihilated us.

Almost.

We find the Conductor, the one who gave the final order for our destruction, and the destruction of trillions of others, resting.  It is almost incomprehensible that one who has murdered so many could be sitting with such a clean conscious, sitting so comfortably, his only problem the growing headache that his constant connection to the datafeed has earned him.

The Conductor’s spirit is willing.  It certainly wants to go back to the bridge and get an update on the Phantom and how he finally met his end.  But his body, and more importantly his mi
nds, have their own imperatives.

Eyes shut.  Sound nullifiers placed on his ears.  A bland-feeli
ng cushion beneath him.  He hasn’t cut himself off from the datafeed, but he has “scaled down” his connection to it and left himself in a state of thought-only.  His seven brains need to slow down, recuperate, and reorganize.  Years before, he learned that human beings underwent the same mental cleansing, in a state they referred to as
sleep
, where they experienced mental hallucinations called
dreams
.  Prevalent thinking among humans—before their end—was that dreaming was for the classification of experiences, testing and selecting mental schemas, or certain plans on how to view the waking world and prepare for it.

Again, it appears that the two species have (had?) this in common, only the Conductor’s people didn’t fall into any kind of sleep, though, there were indicators that in their distant past, they once
slept as humans did.

The breaths he
takes in are slow, lasting more than five minutes on the inhale.  He holds his breath for about five more minutes, then exhales for another five.  All in his species require this kind of regular mental maintenance, none more so than the ones born and forged as he was.  The seven brains are each about the size of fists, with three housed in the cranium’s upper hemisphere, and three housed in the lower.  The one that bridged them is only slightly larger than the others.  Grammar, vocabulary, sensory interpretation and literal meaning are all housed in the upper hemispheres.  In the lower hemispheres, there is logic, the sciences, strategy, and reason.  The center-brain is where intercommunication happens between the two hemispheres, where all traffic is routed to and ultimately consciousness happens.  It is connected to the other hemispheres by a colossal commissure, similar to the corpus callosum in human brains, and the 450 million contralateral axonal projections perform the same function as those in humans: to keep all hemispheres connected and facilitate communication.

This complicated system for compartmentalizing and managing thought wasn’t all gifted by evolution. 
As far as anyone could tell, the Conductor’s people were once the same as all other pre-industrialized civilizations.  Nomads.  Savages.  Unhygienic.  Simple tribesmen.  A fascination with stars was common throughout all their tribes, as evidenced by the countless cave paintings, sculptures, and even their emerging vocabulary.  To call someone brilliant they would say he is a “sun student,” to say someone merely regurgitated what they were told with no original insight, they would say he is a “moon student.”  Even so far back then, they had known the moon reflected the sun’s light.  Like the Mayans of Earth, so far ahead of their time.

Everything in their culture
is saturated with understanding the stars.  The first science of their home world was astronomy.

Then, at some point no one will ever know, there came the spark of
true
intelligence.  They developed multiple brains.  Two at first.  Double the thinking power meant they progressed in half the time of other civilizations.

There is evidence to suggest that whatever caused this mutation also created many creatures that could not deal with a duplicitous mind—indeed, according to old texts, it was once a great struggle for his people to deal with two minds at war within one body.  Countless religions came and went, all attempting to explain this divide
, all while pushing meditation and prayer so as to keep the thoughts separate.  The ones who could control themselves and keep their sanity were revered above all, and became the natural leaders as the weaker ones died out.

The Cerebrals
looked up for answers.  They searched the stars for meaning to their plight, wondering if there was something beyond that veil of black.  Unlike most other sentient species they have encountered, the Conductor’s people did not recoil from the night, they embraced it.  It brought them closer to something, an answer they all sought, hidden somewhere in the night sky, a riddle waiting to be unriddled.

Even that far back, they aimed high.  They were m
eant for the stars, and every single one of them knew it.

If only they had known what we would find
, he thinks now, even as he sifts through perfect memories of the last twelve hours.  He manages them, weighs them, labels them, and files them away in the appropriate brain. 
If only they had known
.

Stars.  Endless seas of them.  And nebulae.  And more stars.  And comets and asteroids and gas giants and more stars.  They searched for meaning, found none.  Other
sentient species emerged in star systems around them, others that were no more intelligent than their lowest worker, and yet they discovered space travel in their own time.  The audacity of it was…

The Conductor’s people
saw what happened when other beings went through their own industrial revolutions, pushing past the borders of their solar systems. 
Idiots in charge of technology they have no true mastery of, all of them using concepts they have no command over
.  All apparent by these species’ rapid expansion.  Without the wisdom of Calculators to manage their size and establish a critical limit, or the leadership of Conductors or Directors to carry out actions with the exactness of a proper civilization, all other species faltered and fell.

We must be as careful here as we were around Rook.  The Conductor is quite in control of his faculties, at least for the most part, but what he is carrying is the weight of an entire race’s ego, one built and emboldened by its inability to fail, and one that finds umbrage anywhere, especially in the act of an inferior race to achieve a destiny they haven’t yet achieved themselves.  This is every bit as contagious as the despair the Sidewinder is saturated with.

Breathing, breathing, breathing…analyzing one thought here…measuring another thought over there…judging it…labeling it…filing it.

Down through the centuries, hormonal shifts and rapid changes in
his people’s diet—and even breeding experimentation—brought about three- and four-tiered anomalies.  Then came more hearts, because a body with more brains needed more blood and oxygen pumping to them. 

In time, the
four-tier brain people became the great sages of their society, the Calculators and the Architects, the Engineers and the Directors, the Gatherers and the Builders.  The Calculators came up with the exact number of people, food, water, and resources they would need to be sustainable and maintain optimum efficiency, constantly recalculating as the Architects and Engineers used their findings to utmost efficiency, and the Gatherers augmented their resource supply.  The Directors heeded the words of the Calculators, planned out their exponential growth, and devised the necessary system to keep it all working.  Everyone knew their place in the grand scheme of things.  To this day, historians speak of how it seemed their entire race knew it was destined for the stars, and hadn’t stopped after that first spark of intelligence granted them the vision.

A caste system formed, and those cursed with the ancient single-brain were set to manual labor, yet even they were too stupid to see that they would eventually work themselves out of their own jobs by helping to build the machines that replaced them.
  Genetic experimentation gave rise to the Strategists, those of the five- and six-tiered brains.  Then came the Advent Children, the Conductors, they of the seven-tiered brain, augmented by advanced implant technologies, and currently the greatest organic thinking machines in the known universe.

There is a tremor just below him.  As humans
, and especially as apparitions, we do not sense it directly, but the Conductor surely does, and we sense it only vicariously.  Not only is he vastly more intelligent than most members of his species, he is also a dozen times more sensitive to changes in the atmosphere, and to his general surroundings.

Slowly, he opens his eyes.  The floor trembles again.  When he stands, he removes the sound nullifiers from his ears and listens.  The natural-user interface of his left eye gives him a display.  The ship is altering its course.
  “Why?”  He says the word aloud.  That isn’t a good sign.  Conductors don’t do that.  Certainly they seek counsel with themselves, but they don’t
talk
to themselves.  “And why not?”  When no one answers, he says, “It’s a fair question.”  When still no one answers, he steps away from his bland-feeling cushion, steps onto the cold floor, and lets the sensual vibrations move up through him.

Silk
.

It isn’t silk.  Nothing will ever be sil
k again.  But it is a sensation; a glorious, rapturous sensation like no other.  His skin cells and his nerve endings quiver.  There is a delightful agony just behind his eyes.  It feels as though tiny needles are being pressed into each of his pores.  Normally, his flight suit would dampen such sensations, but he stands naked and defiant, accepting wave after wave of forbidden sensations.

The exultation lasts only a few heartbeats before someone chimes in. 
A voice imposed along the datafeed:  “Sir, your presence is requested on the bridge.”

He replies without a moment’s hesitation.  “Is it over?”

“No, sir.  He’s downed two of our skirmishers.  We believe we have operatives attempting a dynamic entry at the moment.”

“You believe?”

“Sir, his sensor shroud is still—”

“
Active.  Yes.  What is their status?”

“
We do not think they have made it in yet—”

“Is the music still playing?” 
If the music still plays, he isn’t yet dead
.

Ample hesitation from the Manager.  Finally, “It is our
Consensus that it is best if you come see for yourself.  Sir,” he adds sharply.

The Conductor isn’t anxious to cut his meditation short, and neither is he happy to put his
flight suit on—the same suit that insulates him from such wonderful sensations.  But like Rook, he is a creature of habit, and duty beckons.  He can’t know it, but even as he steps into the suit chamber, and even as the plastic-metal-alloy suit is formed around him and the foam is injected into the seam to seal it and pad it against vibrations, the last human in the universe is also heeding the call of duty.

Outside of the
Cerebral mother ship, there is an ever-expanding orb of nothingness within the asteroid field—the magnetic cannons are still pushing away thousands upon thousands of rocks, still carving a path for itself as it searches endlessly.  Some of the cargo bays have opened, and we see the tentacles spilling forth.  Numerous vacuum-jacketed hoses, made of complex composite alloys, extend from the bottom with the slow, thoughtful grace of a jellyfish.  The tentacles select random morsels here and there, tasting them, fondling them so delicately, as though they might break.  Slowly, they are reeled into the bays.

Beyond this harvesting, we pass through a
tremendous sea of rocks, great and small.  Some zip fast, as if late for something, but most are lumbering and disinterested in the goings on of the cosmos.  Farther and farther into the Deep we go, squeezing through tight clusters of the behemoths, passing through showers of the smaller ones.  Here, we see a few collisions take place.  This is a common occurrence, though not nearly as common as when the field was first formed—in the beginning, these rocks had been much larger, but they had rapidly pulverized one another, whittling each other down to the bits and pieces we see orbiting and arguing with each other.  The arguments grow louder the deeper we go, the party more crowded, the gravitational forces more opinionated.

At last, we see an object that cannot be one of these rocks, for it has nature-defying shape and purpose.  We have found the Sidewinder again, and now she coasts silently within a terrific shower of hundreds of rocks, roughly her size or a bit smaller.  The autopilot has been engaged, and she now avoids the
asteroids big enough to destroy her.  The smaller stones try to smack against her hull, but glance off the invisible force-field inches off her surface, just as if a child had skipped a stone off of water.

On her underbelly, the four
Cereb commandos have finally melted their way into a cargo bay.  As soon as they do this, a jet of air silently blasts out at them, carrying with it over a dozen compristeel cases.  The Leader of the team checks inside.  The Sidewinder’s emergency protocols have been enacted, and the AI has sealed the door into the cargo bay and shut off all vents into that room to save on life support.