Free The Phantom in the Deep (Rook's Song) by Chad Huskins Page A

more Cerebral skirmishers closing in.  Doubtless, they detected the sudden jet of flame amid the asteroid field.  He curses himself, yet knows that he had no other choice.
    The incoming fighters are currently making their way around the considerable girth of Fatty, an asteroid that to Rook has always looked like the large, round swell of an alcoholic’s beer gut.  It is 62.337 miles at maximum length, but moving at their speeds, they’ll be around it in minutes.  Time to move .
    Rook takes the Sidewinder off of autopilot, and reclaims the controls for himself.  A chime goes off, and he turns his attention to the pycno mixtures in his engines.  One screen measures the Joule-Thomson effect on the exhaust gases, gauging the temperature change of the gases as they’re forced through the primary insulated valves.  He glances at another screen, checks the enthalpy, or the total energy of his thermodynamic systems.  There are endothermic/exothermic fluctuations there, indicating a valve that needs repair.
    Another chime goes off.  He looks at yet another one of his 3D monitors.  It appears he has a lone survivor.  One of the Cereb infiltrators is moving slowly through the tight confines of the vents.  Rook thinks, I ain’t got time for you just yet .  So he taps a few keys, which lowers a few emergency shutoff seals within the ventilation shafts, encasing his enemy for the nonce.  He’ll have a plasma cutter on him .  That’s probably how he got in .  It’ll take him a while to cut through those compristeel doors, though, so I’ve got time .
    Rook engages forward thrusters, rolls to port, moving around the Clam (it looked to him rather like a clam with its front pried open), then around the Five Fists, and now into the Field of Showers.  He’s catalogued all the names, and the computer keeps up with them.  Though the AI no longer speaks to him, it still works well enough to keep tabs on the asteroids’ movements and predicts their trajectories.
    Another chime sounds.  They’ve cleared Fatty.
    Rook starts to cry.  Then, he laughs, and keeps crying all at once.  He’s been on edge for more than a decade.  Sometimes, the anticipation morphs into the jitters, and the jitters sometimes manifest themselves in strange, contradictory emotions.
    Rook r eaches forward, taps a few keys:
     
    SEARCH: CLASSIC BANDS: ERA/YEAR: 1968
     
    ARTIST NAME: STEPPENWOLF
     
    ALBUM NAME: THE SECOND
     
    The music cues up.  He is ready to die.
     
     
     

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    The Conductor says, “Let me hear it.”
    “Sir, I must advise against—”
    “Let me hear it,” he repeats, in a tone that brooks no argument.
    An instant later, the entire bridge is filled with a horrible, wonderful whine.  A classic earth instrument.  The guitar.  It is screaming, even while another one cues up slowly, ominously in the background.  There is a threat in that music.  Something awful is being portended.  Then, there is an explosion of voice and bass and drums, and the tension is released.
     
    “ I like to dream, yes!
    Yeesssss, right between my sound machine!
    On a cloud of sound I drift in the night,
    Any place it goes is right!
    Goes far, flies near,
    To the stars away from here!
    Well, you don’t know what ,
    W e can find!
    Why don’t you come with me little girl,
    On a magic carpet ride? ”
     
    The Conductor thinks, Steppenwolf, if I’m not mistaken .  And he never is.  A group of musicians that hailed from Canada and America in their year of 1968 .  The sounds are dampened some by his cochlear implants, so that he doesn’t overindulge—indeed, it is his people’s hypersensitivity that taught them the dangers of excess.  If they hadn’t overcome that aspect of their being, they never would have made it to the stars.  Those first four-brained ancestors had calculated this and wisely listened to those calculations.
    “Guard yourself ,” he says aloud, though it’s as much for himself as the others.