The Immortal Game (Rook's Song) (33 page)

“They’re moving a little strangely,” Bishop
comments.

“How do you mean?”
he says, continuing to adjust to the enemy’s yaw.

“Look at their speed.  They’ve slowed down twice, ostensibly because debris was coming right at them, but they could’ve easily deflected debris that size with their solenoid guns.”

Rook looks down at his scanners, sees that he’s right.  “Maybe they’re just trying to save on power.”

“Possibly.”  The Ianeth sounds unconvinced.

In his viewport, more skirmishers slowly glide into view.  Meanwhile, Turks 10 and 12 complete their journeys, but Turks 7 and 3 aren’t looking so hot.  The flagship lashes out at both of them with one hard blast apiece.  Both of their shields were already down, and now the same lasers that burned away the atmospheres of countless worlds melts and explodes the top hemisphere of Turk 7.  Turk 3 fares a little better, but almost all its mass drivers are offline in a single blast.

“That’s okay,” he informs Bishop.  “The
debris still blocks them off.”

“Both luminals are activating solenoid guns.  Both are concentrating on removing the debris from the flagship’s path.”  He looks at Rook.  “They’re not satisfied with a retreat to the planet.  They don’t want a wall to their backs.”

“They want maneuverability.”  He sighs, nods.  “Okay, so, they don’t want the retreat—”

“Hold on.”  Bishop waves his hand at a holo-display, zooms in on the flagship, which appears to be cutting through the debris field and is angling towards the planet, but is changing its pitch.  “
Look here.  I sent Turk One up from underneath, ramming through the debris field left by Eight.  They’re responding to it, backing away so as not to get rammed.”

Rook smiles.  “Good thinking
, pal!  Okay…okay, so, they’re backing away towards the planet.  Let’s see how long this holds—”

“We’ve got
massive debris incoming fast!”

“Are deflector shields working?”

“Checking.”  A few seconds.  “Shields insufficient to deflect an impactor this size.  Need to adjust our plane.  Suggest roll to port, fifty degrees should let it pass underne—”

“Copy!”  Rook does it, and two seconds later he sees she sharp edge of an apartment building-size piece of debris as it passes partially in front of the viewport, another portion of it passing beneath them.
  “Jesus, if they don’t get a move on, we’ll all be pulverized.”

“That…might actually be their point.”

Rook looks over his shoulder.  “Come again?”

“That piece of debris, it was rather convenient.  That is, it was on a collision course with
them, yet they did not activate their solenoid guns to deflect it, yet they moved anyway.  A moment ago I told you they were moving suspiciously.”

Rook looks back out the viewport.  “What’re you sayin’?  That they moved in a way that if we followed them at our current speed we’d be right on course to
get hit?”  He shakes his head.  “I don’t think so.  That’s too…too
deceptive
.  If they’re gonna kill something, they go right for it.  That’s how Cerebs work.  They don’t value deception.”

Bishop looks at him.  “They also
never wanted to take you prisoner before.  You’ve changed them, perhaps more thoroughly than we know.”

“One defeat in an asteroid field can’t undo
thousands of years of evolution and computer programming.”

“Maybe not to any other creatures,” the alien counters, sending signals to the remaining Turks to keep funneling
the two luminals towards the planet.  “But to a race that learns from every single mistake?  As deeply embedded in their psychology as it may be, the Cerebs have proven they evolve quickly.”

Bishop doesn’t yet know both how right and how wrong he is.  We may travel across the wide gap of space, past the secondary luminal, and slip amongst those on the bridge of the flagship.  We do indeed find the Supreme Conductor “evolving,” but we also see how hard it can be.  He’s fighting it.  He’s fighting all the recommendations that the Phantom File is sending his way, all the little corrections, even as
he follows them.  He’s extrapolating from the data from the Event Anomaly, he’s seeing where the flaw might’ve been.  The Conductor doesn’t know it, but he’s coming into alignment with Rook’s thoughts.

He’s alone, and that is his strength
. 
He made his weakness into a strength, and our great numbers
…
he made it into a weakness?
  A conclusion not even the Elders had, for it comes from a combination of the Phantom File and the current data, forcing an educational and even blasphemous extrapolation.

These new thoughts, mere continuations of what the Elders constructed from the Event Anomaly’s data, are fighting their way through his seven-tiered brain, exacerbating an already strained and fragile mind.  It’s doing something unnatural to him.  The madness, which ought to take several decades at the least, is being accelerated.

I am not built for this
.  The logical conclusion asserts itself. 
It will take another Supreme Conductor, one constructed specifically to combat the Phantom and his methods
.

In an instant, he reluctantly adds this conclusion to the Phantom File, expanding upon it before he sends out a burst signal back to Four Point, where it
will be rerouted back to the Elders.

Exactly 2.32 seconds later, it occurs to him that, since he’s just sent the information away, it’s almost as if he’s planning…for the possibility…
Of failure?  Is it possible that I’m thinking these things?  Does it make me inferior?  Am I truly obsolete so soon?

The Supreme Conductor never gets to answer these questions, because, as the two luminals back
up towards the rogue planet at dozens of miles per second, the datafeed informs him of something else.  The planet is flawed.  There is something not right about it.  Quick scans and 3D visuals show the world breaking apart, but old records show this was inevitable under the right conditions.

But it isn’t the fact that
the planet is coming apart that concerns the Observer-Manager teams all around him.  No, what concerns all of them, besides the Ianeth defense stations and the debris field and the Phantom and the Sidewinder’s powerful new weapon, is the size of the lava streams.  The data isn’t conducive with a separation of mantle and tectonic plates—there is an incredible amount of magma being sent into the thermosphere, almost exiting orbit completely before gravity flattens it out at the top and brings it all raining back down.  Great geysers of molten-hot magma churn into the skies, twisting and turning, pushing through the dark clouds.

That shouldn’t happen
, he considers, running through the nuances of seismic waves, tectonomagnetism, and an analysis of the earthquake’s hypocenter. 
Not even with a planet splitting in half, that shouldn’t happen
. 
It would require far too much energy from the center than what a rogue planet this size has
.

“Sir!  We’re getting supermassive life readings from deep beneath the surface!” informs one Observer.

The Conductor goes over the data, imbibes it, becomes it, and realizes there is indeed something far below the surface, something large and moving.  The last scans of this planet were hundreds of years ago, and while there were detections of troglofaunal life far below, even large ones, none of them indicated something this colossal.  With the whole upper layers of the planet hemorrhaging, something is being squeezed out.  And it’s nothing beautiful.  More like pus from an infection that has festered too long, finally released. 
There’s only one thing it can be
.

Another Observer hastily adds, “Readings show it’s quickly rising, sir.”
  A split second later, “Seeker scans confirm.  It’s one of Theirs, sir.”

Theirs
.

A day of wonders, and no doubt
about it.  Not only has it seen the death and resurrection of the Phantom in less than an hour, it has seen the destruction of a Cereb fleet, the second defeat of the Everlasting Empire, and the emergence of a relic belonging to the Old Ones.  A passive society, they were more concerned with discovery than war.  Having mastered organic technologies and infused their culture with its worship, they had become the antithesis of the Cerebrals, as opposite as opposites come.  Rather than weeding out their outmoded emotions, they heightened them, particularly the ones supporting empathy.  Whereas all other cultures sought to surround themselves with technology, the Old Ones only used it sparsely, and feared it getting out of hand.  They primarily used technology to advance their understanding of biology.  The only energies they revered were those that pulsed from life.  They cared little for steel batteries, energy was derived from the BTUs from their own body heat, or from supermassive animals they engineered over millions of years, and almost every propulsion system they devised came from jetting natural gases from highly pressurized organic sacks they attached to their bodies.  Only a drive to gain admittance into the Bleed forced them into ships made of alloys, but even then the interior looked more like a garden set in the throat of a giant creature.

A nanosecond’s worth of surveying the planet, its exosphere now only a hundred miles or so away and closing fast.  The Conductor has retreated them far enough out of the debris field,
and now only one Ianeth station remains in their way.  A few blasts to it will cause more damage by debris, but it has to be done.  “Concentrate all fire on that station.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell the skirmishers to move above and below the Sidewinder.  Tell the ones above to target that reverse-field generator—if they hit nothing else, make sure they destroy the beam emitter.  As for the ones below and behind, have them target main thrusters and exhaust ports.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Once the Sidewinder is crippled, concentrate all fire on the—” The datafeed interrupts him.

Whatever it is, it’s rising, and rising fast.

“Sir!  We have incoming!”

He starts to ask where, but it’s obvious that it’s everywhere.  Everywhere, that is, along the surface.  The
planet’s surface is buckling, and something is fighting to get out, stretching its limbs all at once.  Something that has been dormant for so long, merely tossing and turning in its hibernation.  The dark planet is now aglow with not only the residual light from the twin super-explosions, but it is now etched in bright red and orange lines where seas of magma race outwards.

The Supreme Conductor has time to start sending frenzied orders to evade, but it seems all of space is completely cut off.  Wherever there aren’t space stations or debris, there is something massive, like an unraveling tentacle coming up from the planet’s surface, moving at breakneck speeds.

Leaving him to his commands, we find Rook and Bishop both staring—not at the multiple screens, but directly out the viewport.  Angry dark clouds are being pushed beyond Kali’s atmosphere.  The planet seems to be silently expanding, pushing for the reaches of space, ready to devour the stars.  It uncoils so fast, with light echoing through the great limbs.  Each are three or four times the size of the Turks, with ghostly white skin common to most all troglofaunal life.  But they are slightly translucent, and within them soft blooms of light radiate upwards through each massive appendage, casting shadows the size of mountains across the surface as they race upwards into space. It is something straight from a nightmare and bled into consciousness, something unholy that even we ghosts may have need to fear, for it expands further still, perhaps ready to devour everything, every dimension.

Rook swallows.  “
Your Colossus theory was wrong.  It’s not some race’s last attempts to salvage a bit of home.”  He shakes his head.  “It’s a doomsday machine.”

But
machine
isn’t quite the right word, is it?  Even as we watch the first great tentacle try and ensnare the luminal at the rear and watch it get blasted in half, spewing viscera and mucus, we know that this is no clunky construct.  It has vicious fluidity and terrible grace, winding and unwinding from every end, every pole.

Rook checks his scanners even as he starts to back the Sidewinder away from the luminal in front of him.  “Jesus.  What the hell have we done?”

“We woke something up.  Something that’s been thinking and marinating down there a long time.”  The alien’s hands are moving to target the supermassive tentacles—almost every skirmisher is abandoning their vigilant watch over the Sidewinder and is streaking back towards the luminals, sending out beam after beam of energy at the titanic limbs, most of which seems wasteful.

The space around Kali is now supremely covered—two starships as large as cities fill the view in front of the Sidewinder, and now with the planet coming unraveled in front of them, Rook finds that they’ve been boxed in by their own machinations.  Turks 1 and 9 cover up almost every angle behind them, and the debris from the other ten Turks has space choked.  Seekers and skirmisher latecomers are only making things worse.

“Open targeting parameters to freeform!” Rook shouts, banking hard to port.  “Shoot anything that gets in our way!  We’re getting the hell outta here!”