The Immortal Game (Rook's Song) (30 page)

“Turk Eight’s mass drivers are down by sixty percent,” Bishop reports.  “Another shot like that will disable all the drivers completely.”

“Momentum will still carry the bulk of it where it needs to go.  It’ll block their escape.”

“
Affirmative, friend.  But a third or fourth shot will blow it apart entirely.”

“They won’t be able to get as many shots in if Turk Eight reaches the flagship’s stern in time,” Rook says, checking to see if 8’s momentum will put it there in time without drivers. 
It’s going to be close
.  “Only the flagship will be able to fire on it, the others won’t be able to fire for fear of hitting the flagship.”

“They already know that.”  Bishop points to a holo-display.  “They’re already moving the two luminal ships to be able to target the station.”

Rook looks, sees that he’s right.  “Then it’s time to move another piece.  Begin powering up the graviton gun.”

“With pleasure
, friend.”

Over the next few seconds, skirmishers streak across both his viewport and his sensor screens, all of them
on their way to inspect the worrisome Turk 8.  So far, none of them have detected the Sidewinder.  Rook is hoping that the sensor shroud keeps them off of any scanners just a little while longer.

“Graviton gun cuing up.  Any second n
ow they’ll be able to detect its energy signature.”

“Copy that,” says Rook.

“Whatever we’re targeting, you better choose fast.”

“I already know our target.  The luminal ship down below the atmosphere.”

Bishop looks at him.  “It’s a little over a thousand miles down, out of range if we want to encapsulate the whole ship in the reverse-field beam.”

“I know.  We’re gonna have to get closer.  Hang on.”  He engages forward thrusters and pushes them down, following in the ionic wake of the luminal ship, hoping that the Sidewinder’s own signature will be blurred in that
giant wake.  “How close do we have to be to get all of that luminal ship?”

“Our beam isn’t big enough to encapsulate all of it,” says Bishop.  “Not even if we were touching it.  But we can get about eighty-seven percent of it if we remain a safe mile or so back.”

“Copy that.  Ready targeting sequence.”

“Copy.”  Two seconds later.  “Targeting sequence readied.”

They move through the heavy atmosphere, passing purple and even blood-red lances of lighting as they streak through into the relatively clear underside of the clouds.  They’ve emerged on the opposite side of Thor’s Anvil from the mountain cave that has been their home all these weeks.  They sore low at first, hugging the ground to defeat radar, then Rook holds his breath as he pulls back on the yoke and shoots for the sky.  Seconds later, they are skirting around the Cereb ship.  Seen from above, the luminal is a dark shape against a slightly darker ground.  The holo-screens highlight it for them.

“
Got it locked in?” asks Rook.

Bishop makes a weird grunting noise, which might be a sarcastic snort.  “I couldn’
t miss this target if I tried.”

“Copy that. 
Go for maximum
g
’s.”

“Roger
.  eight-point-three
g
’s it is.”

“
Tell me when we’re in range.”

Seventy-three seconds pass in total silence, both Rook and Bishop hoping beyond hope that they
aren’t being detected by the skirmishers buzzing around the luminal like gnats.  They get a little closer.  The luminal’s dark hull now takes up most of the viewport.  Now all of it.  Rook has to watch the electromagnetic situation in the clouds all around, flying the Sidewinder in such a way to hide their ionic trail within each pocket of invisible energy.  Skirmishers are zipping all around them, oblivious to the Sidewinder moving amongst them. 
How much longer can that last?
Rook thinks.  The Sidewinder’s mirrors do good reflecting the darkness of space and the many stars, but down here with the random bursts of lighting, clouds above, and magma below, the jig could be up fast.

“
We are at optimum range,” Bishop calls.

“Fire when ready.”

Bishop’s hands move across the controls.  From outside, we see the red-and-blue energy field briefly highlight the graviton gun’s mount, then dissipate quickly—it shows up as a random atmospheric spike on the Conductor’s datafeed, incidentally—and the long beam emitter hums to life.  The entire Sidewinder quakes with heavy vibrations.  A second later, the invisible beam shoots out faster than the speed of light and suddenly grabs hold of most of the luminal’s midsection.

All at once, the luminal is bent, as though its belly has swollen and wants to burst.  The front and back ends are still obey
ing Kali’s 1.2
g
’s, but the entire middle section, with the bulk of the ship’s mass, buckles down, as if lassoed and yanked downwards.  Each end bends upwards and splits, but doesn’t break off entirely as whatever Conductor is in command of that ship struggles to compensate by shooting extra power into the vertical drives.

But it’s not gonna be enough, pal
, Rook thinks, smiling, watching the luminal lose the battle with gravity because the damage done at each end has already ruptured the connections between thrusters and engines—wires severed, pipes ruptured, hulls hewn, bulk heads split, important circuits disconnected or ripped apart entirely.

Slowly, the luminal begins to plummet towards Kali’s surface.

As Bishop silently fights to angle the beam to keep its target as it falls, Rook engages the forward thrusters and rockets down, baring on top of the warship.  Down, down, down.  Skirmishers surround it, as if the gnats now stupidly believe they can help.  Down, down, down.  Now the skirmishers scatter, presumably given the order to cut their losses.  Down, down, down.  From inside the Sidewinder, they can both hear the screeching metals as the luminal bemoans its fate.  Down, down, down.  Rook’s grin grows wide as he hears the vertical thrusters begin to fail, watches them sputter out, and one of them even explodes.  Down, down, down.

Eventually, the massive warship’s fate is completely sealed and its downward momentum alone should carry it the rest of the way.

“Disengage graviton gun!”

“Copy.  Disengaging,” Bishop reports.

Rook lets out a whoop and a laugh.

The Sid
ewinder quits shaking, and he kicks speed to thrusters to get them out of here, in case of a reactor breech in the plummeting luminal.  They fly right along the magma-covered surface as they watch what happens behind them on screen, and hear the great beast roar as it collides with the ground and ruptures an underground lava lake.  The thing cracks into a dozen pieces as it sends up a plume of both black smoke and red-hot magma.  At that moment, lightning chooses to split the sky, illuminating the messy end.  The massive boom jars the world.  Small explosions erupt throughout the luminal’s corpse, and skirmishers scatter even more.

Thumping his fist against the console, Rook
lets out another great howl, and Bishop sends out a guttural cry and thumps his chest with one hand.  Then Rook spins around in his seat and, without even thinking, slaps the Ianeth’s hardened shoulder, and Bishop grins all the wider.  “Okay, buddy!  Climbing to an altitude of five hundred feet!”

“Copy that.  Beginning recycling of containment field generator.”

“Starting a flyby scan of the downed luminal on a parabola.”

Bishop
looks over at him.  “You’re taking us back around to the luminal?”

“If we’re gonna do it, we have to do it now while everything’s a mess.”

“Do what?”

“Infiltrate the luminal drive core.”

Bishop only stares.  “Might we just do the same thing to the other luminals?”

He shakes his head.  “We’d never make it close enough.  Look at that field of skirmishers between us and the luminals.  We’d be detected and destroyed before we knew what’s what.  The sensor shroud works good enough from afar—or when there’s only a few ducks to trick, you can be evasive—but like this?”  Another shake of the head.  “Trust me.  We need to play the long con here.”

“Affirmative, friend.  But I should remind you we have weeds all around,” the alien says, using brevity code to describe numerous aircraft operating below two thousand feet.

“Copy that.  I haven’t forgotten.  Now let’s get moving.”

“Affirmative, friend.”

Rook is quite surprised how fast the alien goes along with him.  He almost expected an argument.

As the Sidewinder rockets towards the downed warship at Mach 7, we pass through the walls and soar to the clouds, then pass through them, through the troposphere, thermosphere and exosophere, out into high orbit where Turk 8 is just now reaching its destination, cutting off the Supreme Conductor’s luminal before it can turn around and head for deep space.  He doesn’t even want to retreat, but the Phantom File urges him to. 
Retreating is unbecoming of our people
, he thinks, sorting through the datafeed.

But what has him even more outraged than being forced into a retreat—
a retreat that isn’t currently possible—is the undeniable fact that they’ve lost an entire luminal.  They’ve
lost
it.  Completely and utterly. 
It
…
it shouldn’t be possible
.  But the datafeed argues otherwise, showing him massive gravitic distortions. 
There’s not been tech like that in use since the Ianeth graviton manipulators
. 
None of those were ever used here, all of them are off on their fortress world, light-years away
.

The Phantom File urges him to pay attention.  Something is amiss here.  There is an anomaly happening
, an Event inside of this system of long-dead machines, a consciousness that is slowly being revealed.

Was this his plan?  To charge directly at us and let himself
be killed, leaving us to fight these constructs?
  Humans were so illogical, it was just as likely that that was the case as not. 
Even if so, how could he have done it?  It is not possible that a human can learn the depths of Ianeth technologies given a few months alone out here, not even if he traveled to the fortress world and somehow survived
.

The Phantom File
prods him, urges him to caution.  It nags and nags, demanding that he recall the Phantom’s last ploy.

He faked his death last time
.

How could he have done that this time?  Why would he sacrifice the Sidewinder, his only ship?  Would he really strand himself somewhere down below on this rogue planet
, just to watch a few Cerebs die?  Even if he did, that still doesn’t solve the problem of him using Ianeth tech so proficiently.

A trillion questions e
nter into his mind, and they are such difficult questions to answer that he can scarcely find the right place for them in his seven-tiered brain.

Meanwhile, the Turks continue putting pressure on his position, forcing him into a smaller and smaller space.

Machines
. 
Machines are hampering us
. 
Dead things without thought or logic
.

The Phantom File screams at him that there is more to it.  The Supreme Conductor refused to hear.

12

The damage isn’t just extensive, it’s total.  The luminal ship will never fly again and that’s for certain.  Much of the ship has collapsed and been buried underground.  Some of it has rolled over, twisting as it went, with all its main entrance/exit ports facing the ground, trapping the crew inside as jets of atmo and superheated steam come bursting out.

The Sidewinder swoops around the busted midsection, hovers on autopilot, and opens its cargo bay. 
Bishop steps to the end of the cargo ramp, dials up his Quickener to max, and takes aim at the spot the Sidewinder’s sonar has indicated is a structurally weakened spot.  Rook stands beside him and aims his Exciter, also dialed to max.  They fire simultaneously, concentrating almost fifty gigajoules of power into a space the size of dime.  The hull heats rapidly, and expands outward with explosive force.  When it’s over, they take a moment to let their weapons cool down, then dial them back to something not quite so volatile.

“We gotta move, while they still think I’m dead,” Rook says.  “Right now they’re not searching for the Sidewinder, so any distortions we create will be filed away as other energy outputs from this thing.”  He points down, at the clouds of smoke and the plumes of blue and red flames gushing out of the luminal.

“Affirmative, friend.”

Dyneema ropes are flung from the back, and the two saboteurs drop over the side and rappel down.  Jagged pieces of heated metal jut up at them, some bent and looking
like ramps, others twisted, broken, and sharp.

Rook lands first, his feet
dropping down just beside the hole they’ve made—there are massive holes farther up the length of the miles-long ship, but all of them are either pouring out flames or venting superheated clouds of smoke.  The Sidewinder’s AI recommended this as the best entry point.

Rook
whips his slack over the hole’s edge, then lowers himself inside and lands on a slanted wall.  Twisted as it is and resting on collapsing ground, the luminal’s hallways are bound to keep shifting.  Both heated and cooled gases shoot from cracks in the walls, and a strange black, jellied liquid is pouring from the ceiling at the far end, thankfully not the direction they mean to go.

A chime sounds.  Rook looks at the micropad strapped to his right arm—the extra-orbital probes have checked in, Turk 8 has been hit again and is now disabled, but for the time being it
s remains have blocked off the flagship’s retreat.  However, one luminal did manage to squeeze through, and is heading down for the planet. 
If they still think I’m dead, it’s here to assist with rescue operations.  If not, it’s here to kill us.

“
Bishop!  Looks like we held ’em off pretty good so far, but one slipped through!”

“I see that.”

“Time to start developing the rest of our pieces.  Go ahead and activate the rest of the Turks.  Have them converge to shore up the others.”

“What about the
luminal coming down at us?”

“If all goes well, it might actually work
to our advantage that it made it through.”

“Copy that,” says the alien. 
When Bishop lands next to him, the whole corridor shakes, and it’s impossible to tell if that’s the work of a series of explosions happening somewhere deeper in the ship or if that’s Kali saying welcome back.

Kali won’t be happy we returned
, he thinks. 
Not if this all goes off like I’m planning
.

Rook checks the 3D map on his HUD, some of it reconstructed from memory from his first (and last) venture into a luminal ship.  There is substantial smoke, so the HUD will have to guide
him a lot.  The temperature gauge on his environment suit shows the external temperature is at three hundred degrees and is still climbing.  The ship’s many ruptures are turning the corridors into ovens.  “This way,” he says to Bishop.

“Affirmative, friend.”

Singsong voices can be heard screaming—the Cerebral crew in their death throes.  It makes Rook nervous, and it fills Bishop with immense joy.

The two of them move down the corridor
in a careful two-man approach, clearing the hallways.  “I’ve got deep,” Rook calls, as he slowly slices the pie around the corner.  “Corridor.  About thirty yards.  Four openings, two on each side.”  Rook scans with the Exciter’s scope, which uses sonar to form images on his HUD.  A few seconds later, he gives the go-ahead.  “Clear!”

“Moving up,” says Bishop, bringing his Quickener up and aiming down the hallway, which has been twisted
from the stress exerted by the impact.  The floor buckles a little, but the Ianeth remains steady.  Rook follows him inside, and they perform a bounding overwatch down the corridor until they get to the next corner.  The Ianeth gets there first, and calls it.  “I’ve got deep.”  He slices the pie.  “Corridor.  About fifty yards.  Seven openings, three on each side and one in the ceiling.  Three bodies on the floor, no life signs.  Clear!”

“Moving up,” Rook steps around the corner while Bishop holds his aim down the hallway, then falls in behind Rook.  They step around the corpses of the Cerebs,
all of them bleeding profusely; the floor is covered in the black, viscous fluids all Cerebs share.

At the end of the corridor there is a doorway that leads into a large room.  If Rook’s memory serves, this will lead them into the primary engine room, where the core is.  He and Bishop flank the door, press their backs to the wall.  Rook peeks inside.  Sonar shows a wide-open room that looks
at least somewhat familiar to him.  He looks at Bishop, and makes a hook with his index finger.  Bishop nods, and a second later they step into the engine room with a button-hook entry.

“Contact!”
Bishop calls, letting out a salvo of particle-beam fire.

The alien hits his first target, and Rook sees more of them on his HUD—in the smoke,
they are impossible to discern, but they appear on his visor as nothing more than glowing red silhouettes.  Rook squeezes the trigger, downs all three targets, and moves up to cover, kneeling behind a large steel beam broken free.  Bishop takes cover beside him, and taps his head, indicating he wants cover.  Rook nods and aims over the top of the beam as Bishop gets up and runs to take cover behind a hunk of a twisted bulkhead.  Then, Bishop aims around to cover Rook as he joins him.

Leap-frogging like this,
they cover one another all the way across the massive engineering room, encountering some of the same kinds of robots as Rook encountered last time, trying to conduct repairs even as they themselves are falling apart.  Rook and Bishop take out a dozen of them before finally arriving at the drive core.  It’s just as massive as he remembers, and just as sturdy.  “Let’s get to work.”

Over the next five minutes, they move quickly about the engine room, stepping over corpses and shooting one injured and confused Cereb engineer.  They use sonar scans to find the weakest points around the base of the core container, which is
almost exactly as Rook described it to Bishop before they entered.

Almost.

There is an extra layer of some alien alloy surrounding this core that wasn’t there on the luminal in the
Magnum Collectio
. 
An add-on
. 
Something they put there because of me?
  Trying not to flatter himself too much, Rook gives Bishop the signal to start looking for structural weaknesses.

Applications of thermite and plasma charges weaken
the extra shell.  This saves their particle-beam rifles from having to use too much power, which they will need momentarily.

As soon as the outer shell is removed, the radiation levels in the room spike, and Rook knows they’ve broken through to the core.  A deep hum fills the room as the two of them get to setting the explosives. 
After a seventh plasma charge is planted, Rook says, “Ready to synchronize timers?”

“Affirmative, friend.”

“Setting timers in three, two, one…”  He activates the thermite charges he’s planted, and Bishop sets his plasma charges to go off thirty seconds later, giving the thermite time to corrode the surface metals and expose the naked core.  If all went as they did in
Magnum Collectio
, the plasma charges will rupture all key components and release the annihilated exomatter core’s energy.

“Timers set,” Bishop calls.

“Check.  Let’s go home.”

The two of them
dial their assault rifles up again, and aim at the mangled ceiling.  Their concentrated fire explodes the hull even faster than before, and they take cover from the falling superheated debris.  Rook taps a few keys on his wrist, summons the Sidewinder to home in on their signal and hover directly over the hole they’ve made in the ceiling.  Within the darkness and swirling smoke, it’s impossible to tell when the Sidewinder arrives, so Rook must trust the coordinates being fed to his wrist computer.

They move slowly across the engineering room, climbing carefully over razor-sharp detritus, using sonar to try and locate the Dyneema ropes, which are hopefully
still hanging from the Sidewinder’s cargo bay…
There!
  Rook snags his line, and a few seconds later Bishop calls that he’s found his.  They attach the ropes to their harnesses and Rook commands the Sidewinder to reel them up.  They climb back into the cargo bay, close the ramp, and rush down the corridors and into the cockpit.

“Sensors showing at least a hundred skirmishers descending on us,” Bishop calls
, sliding into his seat.  “And the skies are filling up with seekers.”

“
The skirmishers will probably begin slow sweeps, search for life signs, see if the structure is safe to enter.”

“We didn’t.”

“We were desperate, and we’re also on a timetable.  They’re not.  At least, they don’t think they are at the moment.”

“What about that luminal coming down on top of us?”

Rook checks his screens.  “He’s still three hundred miles up, we’ve got time,” he says, checking to see how the other Turks are faring.  Much of the space up there is covered by enormous space stations and titanic debris.  Turks 10 and 12 have started to box the remaining two warships in, but Turks 9 and 11 have taken heavy hits, and none of 9’s mass drivers are working anymore, it’s just coasting at close to a thousand miles an hour towards the luminals.  “How much time before the graviton gun is—”

“
Four minutes, thirty-five seconds,” Bishop says.

“Damn it!” 
We won’t be able to use it against the other luminal in time
. 
We have to get clear, and fast
.  He looks at his sensors.  The skies are indeed filling up with skirmishers.  In one way it’s a good thing, because more are landing and beginning rescue operations by the minute. 
That leaves more of a chunk to take out when it goes off
. 
If this works out, that is
.

“
Hooking left,” he says, indicating an in-place 180-degree turn to the left.  Now they start gaining altitude.  However, they aren’t a hundred yards away from the crashed luminal’s hull when a random massive explosion from farther up the ship starts a chain reaction.  White-orange light comes through the viewport in an instant, blinding them, and the explosion puts Thor’s Anvil to shame: it sounds like the end of the world.  The shockwave hits the Sidewinder knocks them off-kilter, slams them against their seat restraints.

One of the holo-displays goes dead.

Some of the lights go off the control panel.

Energy shields go down.

Arti-grav is offline.

Engines shut off.

For a dreadful two seconds, they are in freefall.

“Tumbleweed!” Rook calls, indicating zero situational awareness and systems failure.  “Status!”

“Working with backup AI on the problem…”

The world starts to
slowly spin.

Then, all at once, the Sidewinder comes back to life and the AI
begins to address the problems.  Vertical thrusters are activated and inertial dampers are switched on.  Then, dampers switch back off.  The entire ship shudders and whines as the light from the explosion dies away and the world is filled with the blackest smoke.  Sensors are confused.  All the Sidewinder knows is that it can’t let itself fall, it fights to keep its altitude, then keeps climbing.  The inertial dampers switch back on, then cut back off again.

Another alarm goes off.  He looks at his screen.  “Oh no,” he whispers.

“What is it?” Bishop calls, hands racing to reactivate systems.

“The DERP’s been damaged, so has our OPG.”

“Without a DERP or an outward plasma generator, the sensor shroud is virtually—”

“Not a sensor shroud, yeah.  Tell me somethin’ I don’t know.”  Rook quickly looks over their energy output.  For a moment, all of their energy might just be misconstrued as coming from whatever caused that explosion…

Oh no
.

Several of the mirrors on the belly and side of the Sidewinder have been damaged, and at least one cooler has also seen damage, so…