The Immortal Game (Rook's Song) (11 page)

“Can you at least get a reading on the age of the ice?”

“Negative.  Samples are too miniscule to quantum-date.”

The reply comes down from the Supreme Conductor, through the Manager, and flows into the Leader.  “Then it’s possible it was left by the ship of some ancient spacefaring civilization.  Nevertheless, as per executive orders from High Command, we will treat this as conclusive evidence of the Phantom’s transit.”

On his display, the Squadron Leader sees his data absorbed and a final decision made by the Conductor.  Calculations are made based on the current movements of the ice particles.  Next, he sees various courses laid out for each squadron to follow
, all of them leading outward from that zone of invisible ice.  On holographic display, the Leader sees a path drawn for his own squadron that leads into nothing but darkness.  There’s a single small reading of some gravitic distortion or other, but it’s so tiny and distant…

The Leader
doesn’t expect to find the Phantom living there. 
There’s nothing that way but the edge of the galaxy, some sparse clouds of hydrogen, helium, and dust, maybe a pair of far-flung protoplanets, a gas giant with no useful resources, if these readings are right
. 
Nothing to attract a rational, sentient being
. 
There is nothing but coldness and death out there
. 
Nowhere to take up permanent residence or to even hope to stage a fight
.

Still, the Phantom is no rational being, is he?  He is human, and so something so foolish as plunging farther into the Deep may seem sane.  Such madness paid off
once, didn’t it?

The Leader recalls the data from the Event Anomaly.  The battle in the asteroid field seemed to some to indicate a flaw the Phantom had stumbled upon in Cereb thought processes.  But the Supreme Conductor has developed new maneuvering protocols that will ensure that no Cereb pilot is caught so off-guard again.

“All squadrons!  You have permission to conduct reconnaissance following projected lines.  Each squadron will take along a Bleed Driver, should you require it.”  That is only natural.  Skirmishers can make quick, sub-light jumps with their onboard drives, but it just isn’t efficient to put Bleed-capable engines on every single skirmisher.  A waste or resources, so sayeth the Calculators.  So in order to open the Bleed, a squadron needs a ship known as a Bleed Driver, which moves ahead of the squadron and warps spacetime by one part in ten million, just enough to open up the quantum slipstream, then envelopes them in all in a bubble of real space to carry them through.

“Attention, all squadrons! 
Maintain your individual search lines, and make sure your teams report any anomalies along the way.”

The Leader sends a brief acknowledgement and wordlessly takes the lead of his squadron.  He and his three cohorts move away from the others, plunging ahead for the darkest regions they’ve ever crossed in
to. 
It’s come to this
. 
The search for the last human takes us to the edges of the galaxy
.

We experience a moment of panic.  It m
ight take a little while for this Squadron Leader to put it together, and maybe he’ll even become as confused as we briefly were when he comes to Rook’s staggered trail, but that doesn’t weaken the fact that he
is
on the Sidewinder’s trail, whether he knows it or not.  There is not one chance in hell that we can warn Rook—it’s the one power our incorporeal form forbids us to exercise—but we
can
rush far ahead of this squadron and check on Rook’s progress.  With any luck, he and Bishop have finished their search of the Ianeth installation and are on their way out.

Racing past the squadron now, past the low-mass brown dwarf, around
the nebula, past the gas giant, and then through the deepest and emptiest regions of space.  Finally, we have arrived at the dark planet.  Kali looms ahead, and we pierce through cloud, ash, thunder and lightning, and though it’s difficult to find the Sidewinder in all this darkness, we follow the two minds made for meddling just fine.

They’re still in the cave, and they haven’t even made it very far inside.
  This is…disconcerting.

The cave started out on a slight decline, but
now has gained in steepness.  Rook steps around a stalagmite, jutting out jaggedly from the floor.  Numerous stalactites hang from the ceiling.  Together, these teeth reinforce the illusion of some creature’s mouth.  They also point to the fact that moisture was once running through the ground above.  Some of the stalactites have even merged with stalagmites to form columns.  “Cave formations like these take hundreds of years to grow,” Rook says.  “How long were your people gone from here before they met their end?”

“Difficult to say,” Bishop replies.  “I was hardly around to see the
very end, was I?”  Was it sarcasm?  If so, was it coupled with genuine ire, or was it just Bishop trying again to meet Rook on a language he understood?

Sarcasm or no
, Rook realizes suddenly that while he and his partner both share the unique perspective of lone survivors, only Bishop knows what it’s like to be kept a prisoner for…how long was it exactly?  “How long were you kept prisoner?”

“I have no real way of knowing, though I estimate
a thousand years or longer.”

As Rook proceeds, down and down, deeper and deeper, he considers that. 
And for the first time, it occurs to him to ask, “Were you awake?”

“Some of the time,” says Bishop simply.

“Was it…?”

“Horrible?  Affirmative, friend.”

Rook pulls up short.  He looks at the alien, and has a moment of sympathy.  “I’m sorry.  I, uh, I didn’t know that.”

“Of course you didn’t.  You never asked.”

Was that aggravated shortness or just a statement of fact?  For Rook, it’s hard to tell.  For us, we know that it’s a bit of both.  “Well, I’m sorry,” he says, remaining diplomatic just in case.  The safest way to play it.  “I can’t imagine what it was like.  Staring out at your captors, unable to move while they examined you.  It must’ve taken a lot of discipline to keep your sanity.”

“That wasn’t what threatened my sanity,” Bishop says, turning
away.

“What was?”

Bishop is walking off.

Rook almost pursues the question, but lets it go for the moment. 
The alien doesn’t seem eager to recount the story, so Rook just follows him.  The ground and walls tremble, and dust falls from the cave ceiling.  Down and down they go, deeper and deeper.

Eventually, they get so deep that even night-vision starts to fail—it requires ambient light to amplify, and
there is still some in the cave, it’s starting to get much dimmer.  Rook switches off his visor’s NV setting and now turns on both his helmet-mounted light and the light at the end of his Exciter.  Now he can see the cave in color, and it’s actually quite wondrous!  Thin lines of rusty-red soil go along the cave walls like the trail of a whimsical finger-painter, and there are dark greens and deep purples, and bursts of white here and there.

A chime goes off.  Rook checks the lower-right corner of his HUD.  The Sidewinder has completed a more thorough sonar scan of the planet’s surface.  The ship’s fabricator can drill a hundred feet into an asteroid’s surface to mine for resources, but here its drill allows for the implanting of one of
Bishop’s specially-enhanced drones.  Now they send back detailed readings of Kali’s crust, which consists mostly of volcanic basalt.  There’s a mantle about 1,100 miles thick, and scans say it’s probably about the consistency of a rocky paste, made up of silicon, oxygen, magnesium and iron.  However, there are key nutrients here, such as potassium, sodium, magnesium and chloride.  There is also—

What the hell is this?

One reading stands out, leaves him utterly stymied, and then makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.  He looks at Bishop, who has continued on down into the cave.  Rook says, “Somethin’ you wanna tell me?”

The Ianeth stops, turns, and looks at him.  “What do you mean?”

Rook walks over to the nearly tall creature and looks up at its deep black eyes.  “Since our little, uh, minor hiccup on the landing, I decided to run a more thorough check of the surface, and also what’s beneath the surface.  Know what your special little drones found?”  The alien just stares at him.  “There are astonishingly few apertures near the crust.  The crust on this planet is almost one piece.”

“And so.”

Rook sneers and shakes his head.  “You’re really going to make me say it.”

“I am.”

The cave trembles all around them.

“It doesn’t take
a second-year geology student to know that without tectonic plates riding a planet’s mantle, there is
no way
a planet’s terrain can be constantly reshaped like this one has.”  He stares daggers up at Bishop.  “And if that’s the case, the planet couldn’t have this kind of volcanic activity, but this place is a freaking oven, a lava pit!  The crust here is one piece, yet the scans
do
indicate there is movement.”

“So, your question?”

“My question is, you son of a bitch,” he says, pointing down at his feet.  “What the hell is making all that racket?”  Just then, the cave trembles harder than before, a four-pointer to be sure.  It’s as if the planet has suddenly become aware that it’s being talked about, and wants to have a say in this conversation.

Bishop stares at him a moment, and then, finally, he says, “Very good, friend.  Very good.  You didn’t rely on my word alone, and you didn’t just double-check my work, you went deeper.  That is a worthy step.”

Rook isn’t feeling the compliment.  “Just tell me what the hell is going on beneath our feet.”

“Troglobites.”

Rook blanches, then searches his memory.  “Troglo…bites?  What the hell are you talking about?  You mean subterranean life?”

“Affirmative.”

He tries to wrap his mind around that, then shakes his head.  “No, no, no…wait, no, you’re pulling my leg again—”

“I’m not, but I fully encourage you to doubt the veracity of everything I
have said, and I did tell you before we made our approach to Kali that there is life beneath the—”

“Troglobites are tiny creatures, insects or small animals, bats and small fish,
but even they can’t survive without lots of energy that—”

“They can survive if there are enough thermal vents,” Bishop interrupts.  “Extr
emophiles on your world survived in oceans, near heat vents where no sunlight reaches.  There is a complex troglofauna ecosystem going on below us.”

“There’s life here,” Rook clarifies.
  “Life that large.”

“Yes.  Non-intelligent life, but life.”

That causes him to take a step back.  Then, reeling from the shock of that, Rook wraps his mind around something else.  “But how do troglofaunal life-forms cause temblors?”

“It’s a very big ecosystem,” Bishop says.  “And the largest at the top of the food chain is the…well, my species speaks m
ostly in infrasound, so the word would be mostly meaningless to you.  So let us call it the Colossus.”

Rook blinks. 
“Well, now, that certainly sounds ominous.  What is it?”

“I don’t know.  None of us ever knew.
”

“Then how do you know it’s even there?
”

The ground shakes as Bishop speaks.  “The same way you did, we scanned for tectonic movement, so as to better predict earthquakes.  What we found was a different kind of movement.  A few expeditions yielded discoveries of biological life, small at first, but larger the deeper one goes.”

“Larger the deeper one goes?”  That is odd, because it was universally the reverse back on Earth.

“The life on this planet isn’t and has never been fueled by photosynthesis—it has always been
thermo
synthesis.  The core has supplied all the heat energy necessary for subterranean plants and animals.  Though, as you stated, there isn’t much movement between Kali’s mantle and plates.  Activity on this planet is winding down, and therefore so is life—maybe it has another forty or fifty thousand years, maybe a hundred—but the core is still hot enough to keep the ecosystem going for now.”

The idea of some living thing that
huge…it’s difficult to grasp, hardly assimilable.  Rook shakes his head in disbelief.  “This is another one o’ your games.”

“It’s not, but I’m glad that you’re—”

“Has to be!  What kind o’ creature makes
that
kind o’ noise?”  The world shakes again, not as hard as before, but enough to be heard.

“Our theory was that the Colossus has been providing the friction necessary
to fuel the engine usually conducted by plate tectonics—”

“A creature like that would have to be massive!  Like, the size of a continent!”

“It may be that there are several Colossi, a community of twenty or more—”

“I don’t care if there are a hundred!  That’s far too big for any ecosystem to sustain!  What the hell would it feed on?”