The Immortal Game (Rook's Song) (8 page)

“They’ll initiate COGCON now,” his father sighed.

The young man, still a year off from becoming the saboteur and professional pilot, and years off from becoming the last human being standing in the universe, didn’t understand this concept at the time.  “COGCON?” he asked.

“COG.  Continuity of Government,” Dad said.  “The most important thing for the government right now is to ascertain that the POTUS is okay, and if he’s not, locate his next living successor.  They’ll being going to COGCON 1 and DEFCON 1.  Those are the highest possible alert modes.  DEFCON evacuates military leadership, whereas COGCON evacuates
civilian
leadership. COGCON 1 was established long ago, right after a coordinated terrorist attack in September of 2001.  It was a very specific plan to determine where all government officials ought to go and what protocols were to be observed to preserve the continuity of government.  Eisenhower started the first phases decades before that, though; all agencies were earmarked for specific evacuation locations.  Hell, the Federal Reserve even had cash stockpiled outside o’ the country to restart the economy, probably still does—”

“Hush, John,” Mom put in again.

They listened in silence then, and with greater intent.  Soon, they were all seated in chairs around the room.  Dad was leaning forward, elbows on knees, lips pressed together and brow furrowed, like he would like to get a piece of the bastards who did this himself.  Mom sat up straight, blinking rarely, with a hand to her mouth and breathing the occasional “God help us” before sniffling.  The young man…well, he was angry, as young men will be, and already fantasizing about getting some payback, as young men will do.

Over the next few days nothing would happen there on Earth, but elsewhere there would come reports of oddities happening elsewhere.  A space station outpost vanishing here, another few probes crash-landing on a planet there.  A month later Hawking Beta-3 would be completely annihilated, and the irony would be missed by few that the man the planet had been named after had been the very same man that warned against trying to make contact with extraterrestrials, saying that it would be the same as when Columbus came to the Americas: it didn’t work out too well for the natives.

Thor’s Anvil sends out another great boom—thunder or eruption?—and brings him back to the present.  The door behind Rook slides open, and in walks one of the aliens Hawking would probably have warned him to stay away from.  Rook taps a key on the console and pauses the music player, which has moved on to another Beach Boys classic, “Help Me Rhonda.”

“Are we there yet?” says Bishop.  Rook looks at him
for a beat, then snorts out a laugh. 

“What is humorous?”

“Nothing.  It’s just…it’s an old expression.  Back on Earth, ya know.  ‘Are we there yet?’  Kids would annoy their parents to death on big road trips by asking that over and over.  Adults got tired of answering, so…”  He trails off.  “One o’ those small things, you know…thought I’d never hear anybody say it again, that’s all.  Didn’t figure I’d hear anybody say
anything
ever again, z’matter of fact.”

Bishop just stares at him.

Rook shakes off the reverie, and his eyes range across the sensor screens.  “Anyhow, we’re not there yet, but we’re getting close.  Wanna help guide me down to the anterior door, give it a knock?”

“
Affirmative, friend.”

Rook watches Bishop carefully as the alien
slips into the co-pilot’s seat.  The alien looks over the controls.  Rook is still fascinated by the alien, because while the Ianeth remains stoic most times, he moves with insect-like speed and precision at others.

Bishop
begins checking possible approach vectors and feeding them to the main console.  Each vector takes them towards the same nook halfway up a mountainside.

“
It’s there?” Rook asks.

“
It’s there,” Bishop confirms.

A loud boom of thunder carries through the ship as
Rook looks over each vector, chooses one, and begins the descent.  The two of them work together mostly in silence as they experience minor turbulence, with just a few words here and there to confirm adjustments.  “Heavy wind shift,” Rook says at one point.  “Affecting delta-v.”  That’s a change in velocity.

“Advise parabola,” Bishop replies
, his hands moving over controls with those quick, insectile movements.

Rook complies without comment, setting them on a new
parabolic approach towards the ground.  “Activating torch,” he says, tapping a key that brings up the Sidewinder’s rarely-used searchlight—the basketball-sized dome extends from the ship’s belly and shoots out a wide 100,000-watt light, bringing the closest thing to daylight Kali has seen in a billion of years.  It splashes across the large notch in the mountainside, revealing a patch of ground that looks a little like a short runway leading into an immense cavern.  Ashy clouds whip in front of the viewport, so Rook checks his sensors to confirm what’s happening outside.  Though the sensors are getting a little interference, all seems to be as it appears.  “Extending landing gear.”  The Sidewinder suddenly jumps, like it hit a speed bump.  “Compensating for crosswind,” he says when they’re forty feet off the ground.

“Copy compensation,” says Bishop.
  “Sonar says ground is stable.”

“Copy that.
  Activating narrow-beam.”  The Sidewinder’s sensor array is composed of sixteen high-powered narrow-beam antennas.  Each antenna takes five hundred measurements per second.  This helps understand altitude, to allow for precision landing.  “Touchdown in three, two, one…” says Rook. 
Eeeeeasy does it
.

When they land, it’s a little rough.  The Sidewinder hits the ground and skids a bit, then jerks to one side suddenly, pressing Rook and Bishop against their seat restraints.  Rook does a brief review of the sensors and cams.  “We’re good.  Ground just gave way a little bit under the forward port landing strut.”
  He looks at Bishop, who is going through his part of the cycle-down process.  “I thought you said the ground was stable.”

“
No, I said
sonar scans
said that,” Bishop says, getting out of his seat and heading aft.

Rook sighs and nods, starts cycling down the ship.  “You ready for a little reconnaissance?”

“Affirmative, friend.”

“
Let’s do a last check of the ship’s systems, then meet up in the cargo bay in ten minutes.”

“Affirmative, friend.”  Bishop
is at the door.

Rook swivels his chair around. 
“Was it another test?  Was I supposed to double-check your scan?”

The door shunts open.  Bishop pauses in the doorway.  “If it was a test, I would never tell you.  It would be…inappropriate.”  He steps out, and the door closes behind him.

The Sidewinder creaks a little, settling and sighing.  The engines groan to a quiet.  Rook drums his fingers on the armrest, then shakes his head and removes his straps, and finishes cycling her down.  As he does, a thought occurs to him. 
If I’m supposed to double-check his scan, then I’ll have the Sidewinder run a deeper sonar scan
.  It takes a few minutes, but when he’s done he’s rerouted some power from nonessential systems into the scan and dedicated a few subroutines for analyzing and filing the data.

When he’s finished, Rook
glances out the forward view, and takes in the runway that was carved into the mountainside long ago, and then beyond at the immense darkness of the cave, the dimensions of which the torchlight could only partially illuminate for all the interference of stray, ever-moving dust clouds.  The imagery…it suddenly reminds him of his and his dad’s first trip towards Kansas City, getting turned back because of the thick ash clouds that got thicker on the ground and piled higher in the sky every day.

The stories came in sketches, never with any complete narrative.  Communications with
Grennel 112c went out soon, some scant survivors from Grennel’s moon showed up hundreds of light-years away on Dorvin and told the story of chevron-shaped ships in the sky, then fire spreading across the world.  Vutes 295e had a similar fate.  Sagan 331a was just gone, nobody had heard anything from anybody there in weeks.

Panic spread across the remaining worlds.  The
destruction was getting closer to the Sol System:
home
.  What was it?  The religious-minded believed it was an act of an angry god or gods.  The rational-minded saw the pattern and knew it could not be just freak occurrences of Nature—someone was systematically wiping them out, starting with the outer systems and moving inward, giving them no place to run.

The first images of the alien horde came from images captured on older satellites, forgotten and left adrift in Proxima Centauri, just 4.24 light-years away
from Earth.  It came across all QEC channels.  The government tried to control the spread of the images, in order to control panic, but it just wasn’t possible.  Quantum-entanglement communication had just started becoming commonplace, it was in almost every home in every system.  Instantaneous communication had backfired on the government.  Panic in the streets.  Religions tossed into a frenzy.  WE ARE NOT ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE!  WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?

“There’s going to be a draft,” his father told him when the first images of the immense starships hit the net.  “We’re in a war now.  Nobody’s saying it yet, but what else do you call it?”
  His father looked at him, then gathered him up on his arms and held him tighter than he had even as a boy.  “Oh, God!  Not now.  We’ve come so far.”  Though their family had struggled with the farm and was just starting to make headway in the world, he had a feeling the old man meant all of us, all of mankind had come so far, not just their family.

He saw it all coming to an end
. 
A
real
end
. 
Not just a setback for humanity, but a conclusion
.

His father was a farmer, and was one of those souls who felt a kinship with the earth.  A man who had taken stock of what the planet held and what the planet actually
meant
in the grand scheme of things.  A harbor.  A place where life might always exist, at least for billions of years, whether it was human or not.

In those next few weeks, he saw the world and all of humanity change drastically.  His father presaged the draft, which happened when an emergency session of the United Nations put forth a proposal to the Collegium Planetarum—the unifying council of planetary and extrasolar governments—to begin conscripting men
and
women over the age of eighteen into active duty.  It was a proposal accepted posthaste.

The Aeronautics and Space Combat Academy, an American-British agency once used when nations still battled one another frequently and took some of their axes to grind them in the stars, had in recent years become little used, and therefore little funded. 
Countless military projects were mothballed.  ASCA made greater strides in R&D projects than they did space combat innovations.  However, when the time came, ASCA was the most prepared of all agencies for the kind of combat required, and, as it happened, many of the fruits of their projects saw use in the brief war.  The Interplanetary Space Force was solidified soon after, but ISF’s legacy was a short one, and its last remnant was Rook.

However, before the war got in full gear, something odd happened. 
After so much planetary destruction, three months passed without incident.  Without so much as a peep.  There were no more attacks, and no more sightings of the alien horde or their ships.  This increased the fear of the average person tenfold.  Billions of their loved ones were dead, and it was clear the aliens had the tech to keep coming.  So why weren’t they?

“It’s not over,” his father said while sitting out on the porch late one night, sipping his beer and staring up at the sky.

“What do you think’s gonna happen?” he asked.

“People will turn on each other,” he said matter-of-factly.

The young man snorted.  “What?  Why would they do that?”

“
Give it time,” the old man said simply.  “Paranoia.  People will start convincing themselves it was a hoax.  The attacks will be blamed on terrorists.  The government will need scapegoats, and the die-hard ‘patriots’ will be all too eager to oblige.  Give it time,” he said, taking another sip of beer.  “Eventually, we’ll have us another attack.  People will suspect terrorists, and so will many in the government.  No one will know
what
to think.”

“Then what?”

His father didn’t hesitate.  “The highest possible alert, DEFCON 1, will be put into place.  For a long time, the Pentagon has had a Joint Evacuations Program for just such a contingency.  The helicopters and jets will scramble for classified radiation-proof COG locations, hollowed out mountains and so forth, most o’ them off-world.  Martial law may be considered.  Here in the U.S. they’ll enact Operation SCATANA, which shuts down America’s airspace, like they did on 9/11.  They’ll seal off the country, all ports and harbors shut down, the borders closed.  Border patrols and Customs will be checking for terrorists and how they got into the country.  Public transportation will shut down.  The United Nations will start to divide.  United we stand, divided…well, you know.”