The Immortal Game (Rook's Song) (14 page)

Bishop glances over his shoulder.  “Recognition of our caste system.  Memorials to each affiliation.  The hands represent our leaders, the skulls our engineers, the legs our laborers.”

“Was it ever possible for an engineer to become a political leader, or a laborer to become an engineer?”

“It wasn’t unheard of, but we were grown from certain pedigrees and developed for very specific stations.  Such a change in station would be about as rare as, say, an
entertainer of your world becoming a politician?” says Bishop, coming to the bottom of the steps and searching around.

“
Gotcha.”  Rook moves around Bishop, pans his lights around, and discovers that they’ve stepped into another immense cavern, one filled with strangely-shaped chairs, most of them destroyed or overturned, as well as what appear to be computer kiosks, outfitted almost like the office cubicles that Rook worked in one summer while in college.

Bishop lowers his Quickener and approaches the display, running a hand over it.  He taps no keys, though a dozen lights flash at once and a massive holographic orb is projected towards the center of the room, illuminating the entire cavern.  The orb is almost twice the size of the Sidewinder, and contains only a few recognizable images to Rook’s eyes, a few Ianeth faces and a dozen or so cosmic bodies—moons, stars, planets, asteroids, comets,
constellations, et cetera.

“Much of this won’t make any sense to you,” says Bishop, running his hands along another control panel.  “Your eyes have a—”

“Limited view of the electromagnetic spectrum, right.”  Rook moves around the kiosks, and comes to a sudden halt, bringing his rifle up to bear when he sees the shape…the alien appears to be standing, but actually died by being flung against a wall, where half his body became a paste and glued much of his body there.  The body is now frozen, fossilized.  “What happened here?”

“I imagine Cereb forces invaded to complete the subtraction of Ianeth on Kali.”  He moves his hands over the controls, bringing up strange interactive menus.  “They’re very good at igniting atmospheres, but we dug in so deeply, I’m sure they wanted to come down and make sure it was finished.”

“Looks like everything’s been left in standing order.  Mighty considerate of ’em.”

“The Cerebs had no need to destroy this place.  We were close to extinct by the time they came here, and those of us who fled here couldn’t ever return to this patch of space.  At least, the patch of space Kali occupied thousands of years ago.”

Rooks nods and pans his light down, scans the ground, and finds others strewn across the ground, most of them in pieces, though one or two look largely intact.  In fact, except for being covered in centuries of dust and debris, they almost look ready to stand up and move around.

“Find anything?”
Rook calls.

“Lots of things.  But none that interest us very much, I’m afraid.”  Bishop’s hands glide across a holographic tapestry of colors, some of the
m forming screens coherent to human eyes, some of them looking more like finger paintings in the air.  “Fascinating.”

“What is?” says Rook, looking around the rest of the cavern,
then panning his light over to the frozen corpse.

“It seems the last ones to leave were doing some deep surveys of the planet’s crust.  Researchers doing what researchers will do.  There’s a fault line
beneath us that runs to the far side of the planet, and it appears the Colossus was busy after I left.  There are immense empty caverns, and below that a fault line running the length of that mantle in that entire hemisphere.”  A few more motions with his hands, a number of new orbs materialize.  “This is surprising.  The caverns are filled with magnetic minerals heavy in crystals, which are generating incredible piezomagnetic effects, magnetizing crystal rock.”

“Meaning?”

A few more motions.  “When the fault line shifts, we may expect something on the scale a few trillion tons of Richter seismic energy.”  He looks at Rook.  “That would be a twelve- or thirteen-point quake.”

Eyes wide, he looks at the alien.  “Uh, i
f I’m not mistaken, a twelve-pointer is the point at which the Earth
itself
would crack in half.  Not float apart, the gravity would keep the two pieces together, but a twelve-pointer on this planet…Christ, is it safe to be here now?”

Bishop goes silent, runs a few figures.  “I don’t believe we have anything to fear, at least for the next three
hundred and fifty years.  That’s according to the researchers’ last estimate.  It seems the very last of my people here were looking for a way deeper into the planet, a chance to hide from the coming assault, but they decided to flee instead.  They placed some seismic survey charges near the fault line, but decided not to activate them, fearing a chain reaction.  The charges were left behind, but I suspect all of them have since fallen into the canyons they were placed inside of—the constant temblors have rattled them free, so there’s no chance of us salvaging them.

For a moment, Rook says nothing.  Something has
just occurred to him.  “Hey, how much power would it take to cause that fault line to give?”

The alien do
esn’t hesitate, his hands race across the air, from one holo-display to another.  “According to last calculation, a direct hit with three to four hundred petajoules would split the crack, cause the chain reaction.”  He looks at Rook.  “Why?  Does that have some value to you?”

Rook shrugs,
and then looks back at the dead Ianeth splattered on the wall.  “Maybe.”

“Even if so, we do not possess even a fraction of that kind of firepower.”

No
, he thinks. 
But I know something that does
.  He marinates on the thought a moment, then files it away, figuring it is a long shot.

Rook steps
over to the body plastered against the wall, and starts running an analysis.  The organisteel shell is still in pristine condition, and there are faint signs of electrical activity still—

All at once, one of the hands reaches out and smacks the barrel of his rifle and grabs hold of his wrist!  Rook gasps as he’s lifted off his feet.  The hand squeezes with so much power it feels like it’s going to crush his wrist.  Panicking, he kicks the
corpse’s chest once, twice, thrice.  Each time the pulverized shell collapses inwards, and all the while it squeezes Rook’s wrist tighter.

The body quivers, looks like it’s trying to move, but can’t.  It lunges forward and falters
, then splits from the wall and falls on top of him.  Its shattered spine allows for no other movement, but its hand squeezes tighter and tighter.  Then a shadow falls over Rook, and Bishop is standing there, smashing his foot down on the corpse’s arm, weakening it enough so that Rook can pry his wrist loose and scramble free.  Bishop looks around circumspectly.  Meanwhile, Rook backs up, raises his gun and begins to fire on the prostrate Ianeth, but Bishop stands in his way.

“Get
the hell outta the way!”

“
Calm yourself,” the alien says.

“That thing tried to kill me!”

“That ‘thing’ is a comrade of mine, a member of my own Clan.”  Bishop fixes him with a gaze, and there is a note of asperity in his voice.  “He’s dead and he’s only doing what he was designed to do, what his duty requires him to do.”

“Yeah?  And what’s that?”

“To kill an unknown face,” Bishop says calmly.  “It is a kind of…how would your people call it?  A Death Trap?”

Rook nods.  “A dead-man switch.”

“Yes. The ocular lenses and the forebrain are on different circuits than the rest of the brain, the personality-brain.  They’re outfitted with advanced facial-recognition systems that long outlast the death of the person inside, and if they identify anyone unfamiliar nearby, auxiliary power can be utilized to perform basic assault tactics.  You’re lucky he didn’t have a weapon in his hand, or that he didn’t snatch yours.  You would have been incinerated before you knew what was happening.”

Panting and wincing inwardly at the pain in his wrist, Rook bites out a curse, then looks the alien over mistrustfully.  “Why didn’t you
tell me your people have a backup killer switch?”  Bishop starts to answer, but Rook waves him off.  “Ah, don’t tell me.  Another one o’ your tests?  Curiosity killed the cat, and I just proved that I’m the cat?”

“I wouldn’t say—”

“Forget it!”  He fumes for a moment, massaging his wrist, and then sighs.  “Did you find anything in the computer that we can use or not?”

“Almost all
matériel is gone, and there are no food stores left,” Bishop says.

“
Great.  So, nothing here.”

“I said
almost
no matériel.  However, there is something that may interest us.”

The alien leads him to the far end of the room, where a large, dusty chamber sits, half embedded in the rock wall.  A beam of blue light suddenly lances out at Bishop like a laser, touching his forehead, and Rook pauses for a moment, going for his
Exciter.  Bishop continues forward, though, as the door to the chamber breaks up into six pieces that recede into the wall, revealing something there in the dark recesses.

Rook shines his lights on the thing, and for a moment figures he might need to retreat.  The thing is at least twelve feet tall and looks to be made out of the same twisty, blood-red organisteel that Bishop’s exoskeleton is made out of.  It is humanoid in shape—two arms and two legs—and each hand has three digits.  The belly, though, is split open, and hanging out of it are what look like both wires and viscera.  “What the hell is this?
  It looks like its guts are hanging out.”

“It is a
powered exo-suit,” Bishop explains.  “We use it for heavy lifting.  At one time there were a dozen or so here, all of them being used to move computers and military equipment in and out.  We conducted some emergency repair work here, too, and these suits were required for lifting the massive engine drives.”

Rook nods appreciatively.  “Not exactly what I’d call ‘
matériel’ but…”

“Remember, I’m an engineer.  One of my focuses is rebuilding, and for that we need resources.
  And didn’t you say of chess it’s all about gathering resources?”

“Oh, I’m all about resource-gathering.
  It’s just that this thing is large, and will take up most of the free space left in our cargo hold.”  Rook shrugs.  “’Course, it’s not like we’ve got a lotta demand for that space, and if we come across more supplies later that require the space then we could dump this thing…”  He trails off, lost in thought.  “Getting it out of here could be a chore, though.”

“
No, it won’t.  I can step inside and connect with the exo-suit, and it can do most if not all of the work itself.”

“It’s that badass, huh?”

“Affirmative, friend.”

“Can you teach me to use it?”

“Negative.  It requires special link-nodes connected directly to the control-brain, which only Ianeth have.”

Ro
ok sighs.  “Well, if that’s all then, I reckon we can move her outta there after we’ve finished with the burials.”

“Burials?”

“Yeah.  Don’t you wanna bury your friends here?”

“We
do not bury our dead.  We have a different sort of ceremony, one I will attend to later by myself.  You’ll only, eh…”  He searches for the right word.  “
Aggravate
them.”

Rook looks back across the cavern.  “Right.  About that.  Listen, I’m sorry I called your clansman there a
thing
.  That…that was inconsiderate of me, especially after you helped me up there with my comrades.”

“No apology necessary, friend.  The matter is closed.”

Rook looks him up and down.  “You knew some o’ these guys?  As in, personally?”

“The matter is closed,” Bishop says, and stalks back across the cavern
, his feet thumping heavily on the ground.  Rook watches him go, and then looks back up at the massive exo-suit.  Then, all at once, two more connections are made. 
The Turk
, he thinks.  It comes back to him.  Actually it never left him, it’s been nagging at him the whole time.  The derelict Sidewinder, the bodies of his fallen comrades, the “dead-man switch” of the Ianeth, and the exo-suit itself, being an empty husk unless someone operates it from inside…they all have one thing in common: they’re all dead and empty on the inside.

The Turk
.

Rook stands there a moment thinking, vacillating between telling and not telling Bishop what plan he’s started working on.  For the moment, he decides to keep it to himself.

The plan forming is like some burden he knows he must soon take up, suddenly thrust upon him without his wanting it.  The plan is now picking up components, collecting little nuggets that orbit the Master Plan, the same way a large asteroid hurtling through space will naturally collect smaller rocks that gravitate towards it.  And, like an asteroid that’s whipped around a massive planet, the Master Plan is picking up speed.

Meanwhile, approximately thirty-seven light-years away, something else is picking up speed.  The Squadron Leader has detected a slightly larger patch of striated ice,
and with it, an ion trail.  It is not long before they find the rogue gas giant, or the ancient Ianeth space station hidden within it.  The trail is getting warmer.