The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song) (3 page)

Also in that reflection,
we can see that the name on his flight suit has been torn off, perhaps snatched on a piece of hanging metal during some random maintenance, or perhaps he was once shot there, or perhaps it burned off in an accident.  Whatever the case, we can plainly see the call sign written on his helmet:
ROOK
.

As easily as we ghosts are able to slip inside a ship, we are able to slip inside a mind.  This is where I will issue my final warning before we slip into this one’s shoes.  Guard yourself.

One scanner shows the Cerebral ship.  As always, his eyes look for a way inside.  But that is a dream, the dream of every saboteur, but one that likely can never happen, and well he knows it.

Another scanner analyzes the Cereb ship’s
pitch, yaw, and roll.  It is the roll that makes him smile.  A couple degrees to port, and then a couple degrees back.  So slow and small the naked eye might’ve missed it, but he knows what this means.  “Detect me, do ya?”  Speaking out loud would not alert his enemies—space did not carry sound.  It helped to think out loud.  Besides that, it was just good to hear a voice. 
Any
voice.

The ship remains
silent and on its course, not answering his question.

Rook
chuckles.  “Yeah…yeah, you detected me, all right.  Didn’t you, you clever devils?”

Part of him wonders what the hell thi
s luminal ship is doing out here.  It has been a long time since any Cerebrals came out this way.  The Cerebs mostly moved on from this sector of space about a decade ago, not too long after they obliterated the last human resistances in this system, that being Echelon Point, away on Shiva 154e, and then fried the two moons.

Presently, he looks
at his holo-display, at the golden orb that still bathes Shiva 154e.  That sun witnessed
homo sapiens
come and go very quickly, geologically speaking.  Two hundred years, that’s how long they lasted, which was a little over a single lifetime for a human being, at Man’s peak.

A chime goes off.  Rook checks another holo-display.  It is monitoring the interplanetary medium, that is, the vast amount of material that fills the entire solar system.  It gives him an idea of the weather in space, something he must always be aware of if he’s to competently manage the Sidewinder.  Right now, it’s monitoring a geomagnetic storm in Shiva 154e’s magnetosphere, caused by a solar wind shockwave from the sun, Prime.

Another holographic display, just to Rook’s left, shows a chess game, one he’s been playing with the ship’s computer for two days now.  The computer always makes its move the very instant after Rook makes his.  Rook, on the other hand, works out his next move slowly while conducting his repairs.  He’s made a habit out of making a move, then going off to do some maintenance.  Go check on the exhaust ports, come back, make a move.  Go repair an air-exchanger, come back, make a move.  Like that.  No reason not to take his time with each move. 

He has all the time in universe.

The computer opened up with a classic Queen’s Gambit, but the pilot had denied him that right from the get-go.  There was an initial furious exchange of pawns.  Rook recently lost a knight to a cleverly placed bishop. 
It’s always a damn bishop that comes outta nowhere and gets me
.  The game currently sits with enemy pawns at A6, C5, D5, and H6.  Two knights are staring daggers over at his queen and remaining bishop.  His king is soon to be threatened by a rook.  Checkmate isn’t far away.  His move.

Rook
looks back up at the Cereb warship, then back down at his planetary scanner—the screen is jumpy, and sometimes the image rolls. Another sign that the Sidewinder has just about had enough.  A technological marvel when it rolled off the assembly line some seventy years ago, now pushed well beyond its recommended twenty-year lifespan.

He
taps the screen, gets it to stop rolling long enough to read it:

Designation: Shiva 154e

Type: H; rocky, with sparse vegetation

Diameter: 28,865 km.

Year Length: 287 standard days

Suns: 1; designated Shiva 154 (Shiva Prime or “Prime”)

Moons: 2; designated Eye of Shiva and Wrath of Shiva (Eye and Wrath)

Atmosphere:

78.084% nitrogen

20.946% oxygen

0.934% argon

0.0383% carbon dioxide

0.001818% neon

0.000524% helium

0.0001745% methane

0.000114% krypton

0.000055% hydrogen

Aphelion:  151,197,662 km.

Perihelion:  146,088,302 km.

Mean Anomaly:  356.33271

Semi-major Axis:  150,473,901 km. 
/  1.0058559 AU

Inclination:  7.15
°
to Prime’s equator, 1.5784
°
to invariable plane

Still very Earth-like
, Rook considers.  For a mad moment, he wonders why he hasn’t yet gone over to it.  He could make the journey in two or three days.  Surely there is still drinkable water, even if the plumbing has been obliterated with all the rest of the structures of the colonies.  Probably still some wildlife on some portions, too, eking out an existence.  Even if it’s just insects, he could subsist on that.  He could find those small patches of life, find a cave to dwell in, watch the sunrises and sunsets through ashy clouds until the end of his days…

Then, reason reinstates itself.  It is a vain hope, as he’s known all along.  The Cerebs
have advanced scout ships and sensors, and anywhere a human being dwelt, they will always find him and kill him.  It is unavoidable.  Like conquerors of old, they have scorched the land of their enemies, leaving them nowhere to go, no lands to farm and till, no shelter to take from the elements.  Ruthless, like a pack of wolves starving in the cold of night, with bottomless bellies, they had moved across the stars, relentlessly hunting and devouring worlds.  There was nothing in mankind’s experience to prepare it. 
Homo sapiens
had only just started taking its first tentative steps towards the limits of its solar system, and into others, like a child venturing out of the house for the first time.  Had they known what they would attract, doubtless, they would have remained in the crib.

Presently, a chime
goes off just next to him.  Rook does not jump out of his reverie.  Rather, he slowly comes out of it, like a man emerging from a deep sleep, the layers of surreal visions peeling away, giving way to the core of reality. 
Is
this reality?  How can he be sure anymore?  How, when so much of reality is and has always been determined by the feedback one receives from others, their replies, their jokes and insults, their envies and their vices?  It is remarkable, now that he thinks on it, just how much we demanded others confirm what’s real to us.  Certainly Descartes had been correct when he said “
Cogito ergo sum
,” I think therefore I am, but what is a person once they realize they
are
?  How does a person confirm his purpose, test it, and prove it without others to bounce the idea off of?  What could a man possibly…?

Rook’s
mind now refocuses, and presently addresses the chime.  It has become a recent malady of his, to become lost in such thought.  It is so easy to do, with such silence, and so much time to dwell in that silence.  Still, duty beckons, and like Pavlov’s dog, he answers the chime.

He taps a switch, and slowly, a devilish grin spreads across his face.  They are coming.  Many of them.  A
portion of the ship’s belly must have slid open while he was lost in thought, and now a squadron of their fighters, their
skirmishers
, came spilling out like bees from their hive. 
It’s been so long since I saw a bee
, he thinks briefly.  And these have greater formation, and far more purpose.

The pilot reaches forward, and presses a button.  Music starts playing.  A powerful, driving tune, a classic from Earth’s twentieth cent
ury, from the Autumn of 1966.  So many buttons no longer work on his console, but thankfully, this button still works.

Rook
cycles up the forward, aft, starboard, port, top and bottom thrusters, primes them for heavy maneuvering.

The
n, something happens, and he has to stop.  The laugh starts deep in his belly.  It’s difficult to keep down, like holding in your lunch when you’ve got the flu, and your body needs to expel it.  It is a similar sickness, we can suppose.  When he starts to laugh, it is hard and wheezing, with tears streaming down his cheeks.  Then, it is almost impossible for him to breathe. 

I warned you.  I warned you about this madness.

Let us step back now, lest we catch this malady of the mind.  We’ll reconvene once he has it together again.

2

The massive ship hasn’t yawed, rolled, or pitched any more.  It has continued forward at its same lazy speed, the magnetic cannons still clearing a path through the asteroid field.  The smaller asteroids jump out of the ship’s way, and a faraway observer might’ve thought it looked a great spearhead cutting a V through black waters.

The Conductor now stands near the largest screen on the bridge,
drinking in the datafeed, which comes streaming in smoothly as ever.  To his left and his right, holographic monitors show rotating displays of the area all around the ship.  Everyone is in search mode now, all Observer-Manager teams have been re-tasked to find their quarry.  The Conductor can sense that others are disbelieving.  Many don’t believe him, despite his superior cognitive capacities, but they will never question him.

It i
s him
, he thinks.  There is no room for argument, not even from one brain to the other.  Though his logic tells him there ought to be a margin for error in this, he does not listen. 
It is him
.

The Conductor
knows it is him.  He knows it deep in the marrow of his bones. 
It is him
.  The last human being in the universe, last spotted in this sector ten years ago.  The last
confirmed
sighting, anyway.  Others have claimed to detect similar gravitic distortions in this sector and other exhaust clouds that spoke of this revenant, but many believe he has to be long dead by now.

But the Conductor
knows.  He knows, even if he does not know
how
he knows.  It’s him.

The Phantom in the Deep
.

A moniker
mentioned here and there throughout the end of the War, when all things were coming to a close, when there had been a paucity of humans left on any world, any moon, any space station.  Back when the mass burnings had been ordered, many of which the Conductor carried out personally, including right here in this sector.

The world
that the humans called Shiva 154e was nearly ideal for all humanoid life.  It didn’t take the humans much terraforming to make it habitable, and it didn’t take the Conductor long to obliterate it.  It was done in a single afternoon, while many of their species were attending their own meditations in a sacred church.  A day they called Sunday.  As the Conductor opened up the napalm cannons and set fire to the air, he wondered how many of them would believe it was the day foretold in their various prophecies, specifically the one from the book called Revelations.

The human race built itself up over a hundred thousand years, and was utterly annihilated in less than a year.  They fought bravely, and proved most industrious when trying to coordinate and focus their efforts on building
bigger ships and better weapons.  There was even evidence that they had set up labs for captured Cereb skirmishers, and tried to reverse engineer the technology of the Conductor’s people.  Industrious, competent, technologically savvy, but wholly unwise.

Unwise, because they expanded too far, too soon, and with too little
resources to fend off the Conductor and his people.  Rather than remain inside their own solar system and learn to harvest the materials from the various planets, moons, and gas giants, they had reached for other stars.

The Conductor remembers first hearing about the sightings.  His people began detecting the emissions from the human’s pycnodeuterium
-fueled drives (similar to Cereb drives, though less efficient), saw their influences on the Bleed, and tracked disturbances along that quantum slipstream.  The Calculators collated the data, and confirmed that a new spacefaring race had emerged in the galaxy.  The Conductor was the first to act, getting permission from the Elders to take aggressive action, to ensure that their harmony was not compromised.  An extermination job, conducted well before these newcomers’ expansion could become an infestation.

The Conductor opted to strike first at the home world.  Since he was the senior general, the Elders
bowed to his expertise.  He was, after all, engineered for just such tactical and strategic decisions.

Encountering their species for the first time, the Conductor
wasn’t surprised at all to find that humans shared certain physical similarities to his own people.  Of the other seventeen spacefaring races his people had exterminated throughout their time in the universe, all have appeared roughly the same.  There are differences, of course, but the differences are minor.  The Cerebs, for example, stand an average of two feet taller than the humans, are more angular and slim, with a uniform charcoal flesh, with the occasional albino, such as the Conductor, the like of which possess the highly coveted seven-tiered brains.  But the rest of the requisites for life—hearts, lungs, brains, livers, kidneys—are relatively close in size and function between the two species.

Many of his people believe that there are very clear, logical reasons as to why so many intelligent races appear the same, why so many lived and evolved around G-type main-sequence stars, like Earth’s sun, and the sun of the Conductor’s home world.  The reason so many sentient creatures look very much alike was because
, according to most modern biologists and anthropologists, there has always been a clear sign of favor in Nature for bipeds and creatures that walk upright.

It is well known that tool usage prompts brains to grow, and creatures that walk upright can use their upper limbs for manipulating tools.  The more one learns about using a fork, or a drill, or a computer, or a knife, or a weapon, the more one’s brain is fed neuron-stimulating hormones, thus
promoting even more creative thinking, which also feeds into the neuron stimulation, and the cycle continues as long as a person keeps learning with tools.

Gravity is also a
key component in growing resilient, intelligent life.  Gravity accounts for height, weight, and cranial similarities between all sentient races.  Many Cereb Researchers have found that life tends to grow best on planets with gravity close to Earth-like—too heavy and life is crushed or smothered out, too light and the proteins usually don’t form strong enough chemical bonds, and even if they do, the bones, muscle and ligaments don’t have enough resistance to grow strong, and so only microbial life may exist.  In order for strong, intelligent life to rise, conditions must be just right.

To some Researchers, this reveals
a brotherhood amongst all sentient species, a thing that bound them together as a celestial family.  Some of the Conductor’s people believe this process, seemingly shared by all sentient beings, make all sentient creatures everywhere a part of a great fraternal cosmic order, and often speak at length to have their voices heard in debates.  Those that subscribe to this philosophy argued that they ought not to exterminate the humans, just as they argued for all of the others before them.

But preservation of species always wins out.  Always.
  And when it became clear that each of these species had no intention of settling down, and were only interested in expanding, it didn’t take long for the rest of the Elder Collective to see the Conductor’s point.

So war it was.

But whereas so many other species had taken several years to exterminate, the humans had gone out the quickest, yet also the most heatedly.  No other species that the Conductor has ever gone up against was ever so ready to use nuclear weapons, or so ready to sacrifice themselves in suicide missions, or so eager to enlist in the military effort to fight back.  Well, none besides the Ianeth, but we’ll get to that.  In his experience, there was always a carefully made caste system, a social order that put certain privileged people at the top of any people, and certain inferior sorts at the bottom, usually as slaves.  Human were the first species the Conductor encountered that had completely eradicated slavery before heading for the stars, and yet, volunteers to fight against the “Cerebrals” (the human name given to them, a Latin word for “brain”) were so numerous that it boggled the minds.

In the end, though, it only helped to accelerate their extinction.  By and large, human beings were incredibly eager to die for
culture, and so they had.  It was the briefest campaign the Conductor, and all the other Conductors before him, ever launched.

And yet, it left a permanent mark on him.

Silk
.

The humans had so much to offer, at least in the form of unique resources. 
Had
, he thought.  Obliterating the Earth got rid of the unique creatures, known as
spiders
to the humans, that produced the fine material.  Try as they might to recreate it in their fabricators, nothing else could compare to—

No, I will not become lost again
, he thinks presently.  The Conductor knows about his own weaknesses, and that of his people.  Very sensitive to touch, a thousand times more than the humans.  At times, it could create sensory overload, which is why their culture developed with clear social and physical barriers.  It is the reason that an unwanted touch of the skin is enough to be considered assault.  It is the reason this entire bridge has been homogenized, with carefully laid soundproofing panels controlling the acoustics, and the seat covers made of a bland texture.  Sometimes the Conductor wonders, if the humans had lasted long enough to exploit this hypersensitivity in their enemies, what might they have come up with?

“Sir?”

It took him a moment to realize that the Manager had been trying to contact him via their linked nodes for a minute now.  The Conductor became aware of more than a few stares coming from Observers and Managers all around him.  “Report,” he finally says.

“We ha
ve identified exactly 4,608 priority asteroids prime for future mining, and 137 asteroids we may accept into our fabricators now and begin basic maintenance.”

Another Manager chimes in, “I have cleared the excess from our fabricator bays.  We have room to accept new stores.”

“Open the bays, begin the harvest.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about the skirmishers?”

Another Manager sends the answer along the datafeed. 
“Sir, the first skirmishers are away.  The anomaly had started to move.  They report picking up strange sounds.  They’re activating sound-suppression—”

“Bring it up on speaker.”

The Manager looks at him for a moment.  Then, he turns to look at all the others on the bridge.  “Sir?”

“You heard me.”

“Sir, do you think it wise to listen—”

“Bring it up on speaker,” he commands testily.  “I won’t say it again.”

A second’s worth of hesitation from the Manager, but he finally does as he’s bidden.  The speakers activate, and everyone in the room winces.  Even with their protective sound-suppression cochlear implants, it isn’t quite enough to keep the garish yet compelling waves from tickling the tympanic nerves deep, deep within of each of them.  This is another dangerous stimulation of a commonly off-limits erogenous zone—off-limits, at least, in public.

The music starts
off with a hard bass, with subtle yet determined drums.  Then, all at once, a loud, blaring organ—a Hammond B-3 organ, if the Conductor’s files on Earth and its culture are correct.  As soon as he hears the music, any doubts he has about the nature of this anomaly immediately evaporate, as do the doubts of every Observer and Manager surrounding him.

The Conductor feels vindicated. 
The information scrolls holographically in front of him, and he imbibes it, as he does the music itself.

Of their late twentieth century
. 
The Spencer Davis Group
. 
A musical group from Birmingham, England
.  The Conductor recalls England.  He recalls the streets, the tall buildings, the sky traffic, and the structure known as London Bridge.  The Conductor remembers it well.  He also recalls setting fire to the air, to the land, to the flesh.  He remembers the devastation…

The name of the song
is “Gimme Some Lovin,” a song that brought some small success to The Spencer Davis Group, apparently.  The Conductor wonders if those artists ever had any inkling that their song would be the last representation of human culture in the universe.  It certainly seems that it is, for the Phantom in the Deep is never known to play any other music in a skirmish.

The last man in the universe, playing the last song of mankind.

And then, something occurs to the Conductor. 
Does he know?  Did he actually figure it? 
It was possible that, in the last moments of humanity, they had discovered a weakness in the Cerebrals, what humans might have called an “Achilles heel,” yet hadn’t had time to act on it. 
Does he know what allure it has for us, what affect it has?

“Sir,” says a Manager, “I would recommend we discontinue listening.”

The Conductor glances at his assembled minds, and finally nods.  “I just needed to be sure,” he tells them.  They all accept this explanation, though he can sense that not all of them believe.  His seven-tiered brain misses nothing, it was why he was selected to absorb and collate such colossal loads of data.  And also why he is the most at risk of sensory overload.  Pushed to their limits, Cerebs can achieve great calculations, or fall into a well of immense madness.