The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song) (8 page)

Asteroids don’t have motives
, you say.  Well, that’s exactly what the Cerebrals think, and therefore, that’s what the seekers think.

You see, technologies are always limited by the imagination of those that wrought them.  In this case, the Cerebrals.  Thus, no matter how much the seekers understand about the asteroids’ shape, weight, mass, and trajectories, they know nothing at all about their scheme.

Just two years before humanity met its end, it developed a few theories about its enemy.  The Cerebrals were clearly possessed of great mental and computational power, their stratagems impeccable, their technology so advanced that at times it seemed magical in origin.  But there was a bluntness to their operations, a forthrightness in their approach.  Some called it brutal.  Others called it merely calculated and cold.

Of the handful of Cerebs that were captured, none of them were ever interrogated—the soldiers were trained/programmed well to self-terminate when taken alive—but they were dissected by mankind’s greatest researchers.  The Cerebs were discovered to be bio-machine hybrids, their thought processes far too sophisticated for standard IQ testing
.  Their bodies and minds enhanced by complicated isotopes, nanomachine-augmented blood cells, and bone-fortifying polymers.  Most of it seemed designed to create a balanced equilibrium of the senses (since it was found they naturally were so sensitive to environmental changes), making it exceedingly difficult to sneak up on them.

The Cerebrals are near-perfect creatures.  The Phantom in the Deep understands this now.  But he also heeds the lessons of his brothers and sisters
in ASCA, and the rest of humanity’s assembled military researchers.  The Cerebs know something about deception, but they have little
use
for it.  Their machines, therefore, scan for the
properties
of things, but never the motives of things.

The thirty-seven asteroids now closing in on the seekers are not asteroids at all.  Rather, they are
drones coated in mimetic clay—a shape-shifting polymer that human beings were using since the late twentieth century.  Just below these bundles of clay, there are sensors, which detect certain objects around them, analyze their dimensions, and stimulate the clay with electrical currents that can alter the shape, density, and even the color of the clay.  At the very center of these false asteroids, there is a complex explosive: cyclotrimethylene-trinitramine.  A military explosive as old as World War II.

The seekers note that these asteroids are on a trajectory that somewhat intersects with theirs, they just don’t understand that there can be a motive.
  Asteroids are dead, dumb things.  How can they have a motive?

The seekers use ground-penetrating
radar to map the various tunnels inside Holey Roller, and soon they will detect the Sidewinder inside one of them.  They hug the surface tighter, communicating with one another, fanning out around the asteroid’s surface, converging on the only exit the tunnel has.  They are mere seconds from forming their net.  Once the Phantom exits, they will have their—

They don’t even get the chance to begin a targeting scheme.  The thirty-seven false asteroids that Rook has littered throughout this sector detonate all at once.  In space, there is no loud bang, no noise at all.

Two of the seekers manage to get away, though somewhat damaged, and when the Sidewinder emerges, they take potshots with their particle cannons.  These are relatively low-powered beams when compared to the beams from the skirmishers, so Rook dares to allow them to hit him.  The EA system absorbs some of the energy, channels it, and uses it to fill a few of its smaller batteries.

He can’t take too much, though.  If the seekers keep pumping the beams into the Sidewinder, it’ll eventually overheat and explode.  Here, we rejoin Rook inside the cockpit as he
once again swivels his chair to man the firing station.  After tapping a few keys, the targeting computer locks on to the first seeker, and the beam does the rest.  It disintegrates to its tiniest pieces—Cerebs program their machines to destroy themselves at the last second by way of a massive explosion, so as to leave no tech behind to be reverse-engineered.  Five seconds later, the same happens to the last seeker, and Rook is back piloting the ship.

A quick scan of the field shows that the explosions have attracted more skirmishers to his location.

He has enough space, and thus enough time, to turn his thrusters back to full.  Cutting around Gladys and the Cat’s Eye, then diving between Ivan and his brother Mikhael, the Sidewinder weaves a curving trail of ionized exhaust.  Now, Rook cuts all aft thrusters, then puts full power to the starboard side forward thrusters, and the portside reverse thrusters, which creates sharp yaw rate, inducing a tactical flat spin.  While still moving on the same trajectory, the Sidewinder faces backwards, towards Holey Roller.  He activates the DERP, then uses the Sidewinder’s active jammer to paint a transmission-scrambling wall.

An alarm goes off.  The ventilation shaft has now suffered a great deal more damage.  His unwanted guest has cut through another compristeel door.

Rook activates reverse thrusters, keeping the Sidewinder moving backwards, then activates the sensor shroud.  In six seconds, various panels open and extend the multi-walled carbon nanotubes and metamaterials, which join and snap into place.  An electrical current passes through them, and all at once the Sidewinder becomes invisible.

That’ll
ditch the skirmishers for a while
, he thinks.

Rook is still laughing, still crying, still angry and
on edge.  He taps a few keys to run a diagnostics check on the ship’s collision-avoidance system—it acted up on him a few weeks back, and the autopilot nearly allowed the Sidewinder to smash into a random streaker; an asteroid almost as big as the Sidewinder itself, just hurtling through space, probably a portion of debris from some other mid-space collision.  Just one of a million dangers he takes into consideration on a daily basis, living out here in the Deep.

Standing up,
Rook quickly peels off his flame-retardant Nomex flight suit (virtually unchanged since the early days of spaceflight), and steps over to the locker containing his Tango armor and Stacksuit.

The Strength and Tactical Assist Combat Suit, or STACS, or
Stacksuit
, is the Mk. III version of ISF’s powered exoskeleton/underlay suits, designed for military personnel.  It is very lightweight, and enabled Rook to carry heavy objects, up to 155 kg. (341 lbs.) while running or climbing stairs at normal speeds, depending on how high the power was dialed up.  Not only can he carry more weight, but he can wield heavier armor and weapons on top of the Stacksuit.

The thing looks like a diver’s
body-glove suit, only about half an inch thicker.  It is a formfitting body-glove, easily pulled on by stepping in and allowing it to seal itself in the back with an advanced adhesive.

This Stacksuit has
seen some repairs, though Rook is no expert.  The way he understands the technology, whenever he moves his body, nerve signals are sent from the brain to the muscles through the motoneuron, moving the musculoskeletal system.  Small biosignals are detected on the surface of the skin.  The suit catches these signals via the sensors attached to the skin.  With this communication complete, the power unit moves the limb simultaneously with the user’s muscle movement.  The suit helps provide free movement based on a robotic system which works in partnership with the ACS (autonomous control system).

Because the Stacksuit’s legs
can lift as easily as the arms, a user can leap more than twice the distance they normally would, and can run at the speed of an elite athlete.  This makes it a potential aid down the road, if he survives long enough and becomes too old to do this job anymore.

Cerebs have incredibly dense bones, hardy flesh, and genetically-engineered subcutaneous tissues that make it very difficult to cause damage to the skin.  If a physical confrontation were to occur, the Stacksuit would help level the playing field.

Rook now pulls out the Tango suit.  He recalls the first time he was introduced to it, about four months before the War ended.  “We’re callin’ it Tango armor,” said Sergeant Carlton, his close-quarters combat (CQB) instructor.  “It’s a prototype, like the STACS was, and DARPA has worked on it extensively over the last two years.  The U.S. government is now using this kind of technology, but so far it’s completely utilized on heavy-weapon-bearing vehicles.”

“I guess that means it’s fairly expensive,”
said Cowboy, with a grin smeared across his face.  “They really trust it with us?”

Carlton nodded curtly.  “
Nearly fifteen million dollars just for one suit of this tech.  That’s why so far the government is only buying a few of the prototypes, so that they can attempt to engineer it themselves, only for cheaper.  We have an understanding with DARPA and a few British scientists who are helping us develop Tango, and that agreement is more or less that we
all
share whatever breakthroughs we come across in our research of this tech, as long as we keep it all top secret.”  He looked at them meaningfully.  “That means, don’t be taken hostage with this.” 
Die first
, was the unspoken addendum.

Presently, Rook pulls the armor
over his Stacksuit.

The
77/p Tango armor has an interesting property.  It can disintegrate high-velocity projectiles once they interact with a magnetic field generated around it.  Once the magnetic field detects the incoming projectile, the suit’s internal computers alert the suit to prepare to dissolve the projectile.  In an instant, the suit is ready to defend itself.  Tango functions off of the high-voltage charge from his batteries.  When an incoming object penetrates the plates, it closes the circuit to discharge the capacitor (which has been readied by the magnetic field disturbance), dumping a great deal of energy into the penetrator, which vaporizes parts of it and turns the rest into a plasma, significantly diffusing the attack, and practically disintegrating a bullet.  A high-frequency magnetic field dispersed energy attacks.

This particular Tango armor has been through the rigors of many combat situations, yet, for all the damage it has received, it looks practically brand new.  That reason is simple: self-healing armor, an invention humans had had since the late twentieth century.

A combination of smart-materials made from DARPA scientists, in conjunction with materials created by Parnes Industries, makes it all possible.  A solvent-borne urethane coating from DARPA works with a three-layered system from Parnes’s R&D department.  A specially-formulated plastic forms the inner and outer layers, and can stretch to triple its normal size.  When a bullet tears through the coating and the armored exterior walls, this plastic stretches around it, and then snaps shut.  It leaves a pinhole-sized leak, not even noticeable, and easily re-coated.  But, the thin, middle layer seals it shut, since it’s made of tiny leaking beads that absorb condensation from the inside of the hull and expand, making it airtight after penetration.

Much of this technology was available by the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.  Such materials and research made it possible for mankind to venture out further from its solar system, out into
the quantum slipstream. 
The Bleed
. 
The Cerebs call it the Bleed
.

In recent years, Rook has come to use some of their terminology.  The Deep, for instance, was an accurate description of infinity, of the vacuum.  And the Bleed…where all matter became a blur, all colors bled together,
and one section of space became even more indistinguishable from another.

Now, Rook is lost in thought.  He recalls his first time away from Earth, out into the Bleed, that cascading light, the stars wheeling over end sickeningly.  That first liberating burst of speed, that exhilarating feeling of pushing beyond the final boundaries.  It’s as if every human being’s suspicion was suddenly confirmed—there
was
a way to go beyond the limits set by Nature.

Progress.  One new discovery here, another newly invented material there.  Slowly but surely, we nickel-and-dimed our way into the future, whittling away at small problems, which led to disproportionately magnificent results.

Rook looks at his gloved hand, watching it adjust to his hand size. 
Without these materials
, he thinks, shrugging each of them on and feeling them automatically seal around him,
we couldn’t have gone out into the deep end of the pool
. 
We wouldn’t have found the Bleed, wouldn’t have naively leapt into the Deep
.  The knowledge is maddening. 
We would never have found the Cerebs, and they would never have detected us
. 
At least, not before we were better prepared
.

It’s a terrible, sinking feeling. 
Like Icarus, we flew too close to the sun
.

Another alarm.  His enemy has moved
again.  He is now emerging from a ventilation cover just outside the cockpit, and a bit down the hall.  Rook briefly checks life support systems—just as he figures, he doesn’t have enough air to risk another fireball ploy, and his enemy likely knows that, or at least suspects.