The Immortal Game (Rook's Song) (15 page)

6

The work begins apace.  Rook leaves Bishop mostly to himself
, the alien culling more information out of the Ianeth base’s databanks.  Rook works at moving the few supplies from the derelict ship over to their Sidewinder.  As fate would have it, there are some blankets which will be welcome on cool nights when they’re saving on energy by cutting heat, and the SAFER III jet pack might come in handy, but the MREs are one of the more precious supplies—the Sidewinder’s fabricators can approximate most alloys, and the Cereb omni-kit can flash-forge a great many things the ship cannot, but food good enough for a human and an Ianeth to eat?  That’s a little trickier.

The
rest of the supplies are power packs, most of which are empty but can still be used for reloading particle beams in a pinch. 
It saves Bishop the time of forging more of them
, Rook thinks.  By this time, his partner has already been working himself all hours of the day (and Ianeth days are longer than humans), so it will be nice to have him freed up to focus on other matters.

Speaking of Bishop, the alien spends a whole day
repairing some of the exo-suit’s actuators.  Each joint of the suit has its own computer processor, and two of them are working at half capacity.  Its cells are filled with an expansive supercritical liquid, which serves as both a fuel and a lubricant, and it needs to be run through the Sidewinder’s fabricators for purification.  Finally, Bishop maneuvers the exo-suit carefully out of the tunnels, making larger pathways for them as he goes. 

On the
second day of their labor, Bishop is able to use the exo-suit to rip away some of the large chunks of the derelict ship’s hull.  The scraps are ripped into smaller pieces, say as big as a shoebox, so as to fit inside the Sidewinder’s fabricator.  The compristeel is re-sequenced and re-fitted using plasma welders.  However, when Bishop goes to place the new bits in the Sidewinder’s cargo hold as reserves, Rook tells him to hold on to it.

“
What for?” asks the alien.

“Got somethin’
else in mind,” he replies, waving Bishop back inside.  “Put them back on the derelict ship.  Get repairs started on the exterior.  Make it look as much like new as possible.”

“
That will take some time.  Days.”

“We’ll
take as long as we need.  We need it to pass inspection.”

“If you’re thinking of using it as a decoy, its engines will never get it off the ground.  It has nearly zero maneuverability, and zero chance of ever hitting warp again.”

“It’s more than just a decoy, it’s a cog in the machine.”

“What machine?”

Rook doesn’t answer directly.  “And I don’t need it to warp or maneuver.  At least not too much.  Just get its OMS working, we need orbital maneuverability.  The anterior, posterior, and axial thrusters only.  Vertical thrusters only need to work enough to get it off the ground, so she can assist when the Sidewinder tows her into orbit.”

Bishop gives him a look.  “If you want to tow it, I think we’ll need more power than what she’s capable of.
”

“She?  Did…
do
Ianeth refer to their ships as females?”

“I’m attempting to match what I know of your parlance.  In any case, s
he’ll practically be dead weight, and I don’t think the Sidewinder can lift it out of here if those vertical thrusters fail.”

“Take extra care with those thrusters, then.  Get them working properly.”

“That will take a few
more
days.”

“Get the repair bot to help you.  I’ll lend a hand as much as possible.”

“What else has your attention?”

“
Kali.  I need to know this planet back to front.  I need to know the exact power of her magnetosphere, what it takes to bounce something off her atmosphere.”  He nods up at the sky.  “I’ve also got a mind to check out those space stations together when you get a chance.”

“The defense stations?  That’s a good idea.  Maybe we could
mine them for some alloys.”

“Don’t mean to mine them.  I mean to see if I can get them up and running again.”

The Ianeth makes his queerest look yet.  “I told you, there’s nothing in them, just some functioning drives, far too large to assist the Sidewinder, perhaps energy shields.  There are absolutely no weapons on them.  None at all.”

“Even better.  Means they have less mass, and will be easier to move.”

Bishop goes still, and quiet.

“What is it?”

The alien shuffles a bit uncertainly.  “I have followed you without question across hundreds of light-years, though we aren’t yet blooded and I’m not sure what it is you have planned.  I understand your reluctance to trust me, especially considering how your race views deception games such as mine, but I feel it incumbent upon me to push the point now: what exactly are you planning, friend?”

“Your people play deception games, mine play trust games.  Consider this a kind of ‘trust fall,’ all right?”

“Trust fall?”

“Yeah, ya know, where you stand with your back to a friend and cross your arms and fall backwards, trusting they’ll catch you?”

Bishop takes a moment.  Then he says, “That sounds absurd.  And intriguing.”

“If you’re really my friend, my ally, or however you see us, then you should note that I’ve dealt with your weird little deception play, so now you’re gonna have to play along with my weird little paranoia.  I’m not saying I think you’ll betray me, but there’s no guarantee you won’t get captured
by the enemy before we’re done building here.  If that happens, I would like it very much if you couldn’t give up my plan.”

“I’m…on
a ‘need to know’ basis,” Bishop clarifies.

Rook smiles and slaps his arm.  “Now you’re getting it.  Now hop back inside that suit,
you’ve got some scrapping and welding to do.”  He walks away.  “I’m off, gotta go scan the planet.  See you at oh-four-hundred.  If you need to talk, use the open QEC channel.”

“Affirmative, friend.”

Rook takes the Sidewinder and lifts off, leaving Bishop to his work.  The alien spends the hours before rendezvous tearing off great big hunks of the derelict ship, and replaces them with the last batch they welded from the Sidewinder’s fabricator.  He uses the exo-suit to hold them in place, then hops out and uses the plasma torch to weld them to the frame.

Meanwhile, Rook
hangs in orbit, and there he begins an extensive analysis of the planet’s magnetosphere, and even tracks a few pieces of random space debris that strike one of the poles.  He has the computer analyze the approaches of the meteorites, gauging velocity and mass, measuring how quickly they burn up and what sort of speed it would take for something larger to maintain orbit.  He factors in the Sidewinder’s estimate of the planet’s mass and radius, naturally includes the gravitational constant (
6.67×10
−11
 N·(m/kg)
2
), and reviews it.

Four-point-three miles per second
for escape velocity
.  Now the trajectory.  This takes in even more factors. 
It’s going to have to be exact
, he considers, looking over the math. 
Especially for something without much self-correcting capability
.  Pushing the derelict ship into orbit will take finesse.  He leaves the AI to work it out.

Meanwhile, he
dedicates a few sensors to scanning the defense stations’ density, volume, orbital constant, et cetera.  Each station is a perfect silvery orb, exactly 156.03 miles in circumference, almost 31 miles in diameter, and each one with a mass of just under two quintillion pounds.

That’s low mass for such large objects
.
Kind of hollow, aren’t they?  Guess they’d have to be if they wanted to make room for firepower serious enough to fend off a Cereb fleet and still be nimble enough to defend
.  Further scans reveal a complex network of compristeel, organisteel, and other alloys Rook isn’t even about to try and give names to. 
The key thing is the physics
. 
Let’s get to work here
.

Over the next several days,
Rook and Bishop work on separate tasks, coordinating for use of the Sidewinder—Bishop requires its fabricator for sprucing up the derelict ship, and Rook gets better analysis of Kali from orbit than if he just sends out drones alone.  During one hard day of work, Bishop sends up a call.  “The derelict’s keel-frame saw serious damage in the landing.  It may be that as soon as the thrusters engage, the whole frame may shake apart.”

“
Find a way to make do,” Rook tells him.  “We just need her to be able to handle her own weight enough so that the Sidewinder can do the rest.”

“I don’t think towing is going to work.”

“Give it a try.”

“Affirmative, friend.
  Trying.”

They work, they eat, they sleep, they wake up, and they do it all over again.  Rook keeps coffee in a thermos and pops caffeine pills frequently to get the planetary cartography finished.  He searches for hollow spots in the earth, sends
drones down to skim the surface, dive into caves, and determine the densest and most hollow points of the planet’s crust and mantle.  With this, he maps out fault lines and attempts to locate the large one that Bishop was talking about.  It requires some intense and methodical techniques for teasing out the data, including using the ship’s AI to work up a 3D model of the planet’s electromagnetic field, running through linear and nonlinear signatures, as well as planetary wave dynamics, math and sciences he hasn’t had to apply since ASCA advanced meteorological classes.  It also requires intense systematizing of all the information that comes strolling through, and then careful cross-referencing.

There
.  He’s spotted the main fault form.  He taps a few keys, sending more drones—over the next two days, his drones dig a network of tunnels, using their own low-yield particle beams and plasma torches to go deeper so they could scan farther.  As the data comes in, he marvels at the next big discovery.
It’s connected to a deep, deep glacier, which runs along to the other side of the planet
.  Sonar also reveals an interesting vein of magma running almost a thousand miles long, all the way from the far hemisphere up to Thor’s Anvil, and that vein is only separated from the glacier by a thin portion of the mantle.  Then there is the immense layer of magnetic minerals generating colossal piezomagnetic effects. 
Jesus, Bishop wasn’t wrong, the pressure waiting to be released is immense!  If this is an incubator, it’s set to malfunction soon
.

Eventually, sonar has provided as much as it’s going to, and Rook switches to QEC feed coming from the deepest
drones: the image changes from a diagrammatic representation to live video of the soil, dozens of miles down, and the computer runs analysis of the rock.  He then uses a photogrammetric sensor in one of the deepest drones to create a highly detailed hologram of the fault line’s layout, subduction zones, and the transform faults.  These are estimations and simulations.  Throughout the process, neither the computers nor the drones’ live feed reveal any troglofaunal life-forms.

If the Colossus is down there, he’s running deep
.  But it isn’t the Colossus Rook he’s after.  He’s trying to confirm beyond all doubt Bishop’s claim that the fault line is indeed that fragile. 
He might be lying to me, more of his pernicious deception play
.  But the more he looks at the data, the more the truth is staring him in the face.  This planet is fit to come apart at the seams.

Days of mapping Kali’s landscape finally behind him,
Rook starts in with experiments in orbit.  He begins by setting the Sidewinder at a particular speed and then shutting off all systems, seeing how she’ll float. 
Have to account for differences in mass
. 
Won’t be much in the derelict ship once it’s flung
.

The next day, Rook gives Bishop a lift up to the first of the defense stations, one of two hovering in perfect geosynchronous orbit above what Rook has dubbed
the planet’s “north” pole.  They dock with the station.  Bishop says there shouldn’t be a problem with security systems since there are no weapons aboard the ship, but Rook still moves in full stealth mode, with the Sidewinder’s particle-beam turret primed, and Bishop is happy to see Rook doesn’t trust just his word.

The massive station looms there like an indomitable foe.  It’s massive enough that its gravitational pull warrants making some adjustments on their approach.  Soon i
t dominates the entire viewport, and Rook finds himself in awe for the first time in a long while.  “It’s different being this close,” he breathes.  “I thought the Cerebral warships were big.  This dwarfs them.”

“
We were at work longer than you,” Bishop says, moving with those quick insect movements.  “You’ll recall that on your world one generation of computers helped build the next ones, which only made them better.  It’s the same for all species, I suppose.  One space station helped us build another.  Some of the best alloys can only be made in zero-gravity, I’m sure you know, so we had the best materials, and those materials allowed us to make larger and larger cranes and manufacturing stations, down through the generations.”  He looks at Rook.  “Does it make you feel small?”