A Mind of a Child series spin-off
SPACE COWBOYS
“The Star Gate”
Featuring Alpha Unit and Omega Force
And Introducing Theta Team
By
Dean C. Moore
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Dean C. Moore. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
“Even though you try to put people under control, it is impossible. You cannot do it. The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in a wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it is with people: first let them do what they want, and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good. That is the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them.”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
ACT ONE
THE TOY CHEST
THETA
ONE
MONTANA
2 AM
The speedometer said one-hundred-twenty. It was more than the 1965 Mustang should have been able to do. But the Montana flats were just that, flat. And his pedal was to the metal. Leon had been speeding along like this for over an hour, when he braked suddenly and just hard enough to send himself flying out the window, were it not for the NASCAR seatbelt—inspired by his driving.
The car was now at a complete stop.
Hovering just in front of him was the spaceship he’d been sent to meet. It looked big enough just hanging there in the air to swallow up Chicago.
The CB radio in his car crackled. He picked it up, squeezed. “Talk to me.”
“You’ve got to get on that spaceship, Leon.” Natty’s voice sounded all-too familiar at the other end.
“Not on your life.”
“Let me recap for you. Our droid excavators found evidence on the moon of an artifact.” Leon sighed. Here it comes. “As best as we can tell, it only has one purpose, to move both the Earth and the moon out of the solar system to some place far, far away. The prevailing theory is whoever built it knew this day was coming, when they’d have to hide the planet lest it fall to hostile alien concerns.”
The spaceship was just hanging there, kind of taking a break from gravity the way Leon’s mind was taking a break from reality. The ominous hum coming from the vessel rattled his teeth and loosened his bowels. “I gotta tell you, I’m still not feeling it.”
“Leon, if you don’t get on that spaceship billions of souls, that’s 8.0 billion to be a little more precise, are going to go from ashes to ashes in a heartbeat following a nuclear blast. Or by means of whatever even more daunting alien tech is about to be thrown at us.”
“You could be wrong about that; I don’t care if you are the equivalent of Dr. Strange when it comes to weird genius.”
“That’s why we’re going. To unravel the root of this mystery, billions of years in the making.”
“So, even you admit you could be dead wrong.”
Natty groaned. “Not only do I admit it, it’s my worst fear! That damned moon artifact might not have been put there to save us. Maybe it’s there to track us, so that even if we had planet-moving technology, the bad guys will always find us. There may be even more ominous possibilities, which I haven’t considered.”
“What about the signs from the other two alien civilizations you’ve been tracking?” This is why Leon hated getting dragged into conversations with Natty—it was like falling down a rabbit hole in which it was just one strange thing after another. One alien civilization at a time was enough to contend with—none of them, mind you, responsible for the ship hovering in front of him. Natty’s father had built that thing—off-world—at the bottom of the ocean on Europa—where he could work in peace and undetected; it was left to be seen if Natty was the poor Xerox-copy of the old man or something more vivid yet.
“It’s possible all three alien civilizations are in on this, or they’re working at cross purposes. But let’s not complicate things. Let’s stay focused on that big bad-ass spaceship that would make anybody shit at the thought of getting one step closer, even the lion of Sparta.”
Leon sighed. He hated rising to the occasion so predictably, but the fact was the gauntlet had been dropped. And the lion cowered before nothing and no one.
He turned the key left in the ignition and got out of the car, leaving his classic Mustang parked where it was in the middle of the highway. The bastards better have the sense to beam it up along with him or his first mission was going to be to dismantle that spaceship until they came by a genuine sense of urgency regarding the matter.
Leon ran toward the spaceship because if he walked slowly he’d just have more time to think about what he was doing—how nuts it was—and that was never a good thing. Not even for the leader of the special ops teams OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT; formerly charged with overthrowing corrupt warlords and defending hapless insurgents; currently tasked with saving the world from even more out-there threats; and well on their way to acting in the role of Guardians of the Galaxy. Talk about mission creep.
Once Leon was inside the tractor beam, it did more than make every cell in his body tingle. It was delousing him on the outside to make sure any earthly bacteria remained behind. It was also scrubbing his insides, removing unwanted contagions. The light-headedness could have been on account of many things, but Leon suspected it was the way the spaceship toyed with the basic laws of physics—laws which Leon found rather comforting. The levitation ray was already souping-up his immune system, preparing it to engage with the more sophisticated aerosolized microbes aboard the spaceship.
“Natty!” Leon growled. Leon did not like to be toyed with; even going into war, it was his choice of weapons, gear, and men, or forget it.
“Relax, Leon. The only reason you know what’s happening to you at all is the nanites in the rarefied air you’re breathing have already saturated your body and opened a COMM line to me and to the ship’s various AIs.”
“My body’s a temple, and you’re violating it!” Leon barked.
Leon was rotating in the tractor beam toward his Mustang, which was being lifted into the ship by way of another tractor beam. Natty was throwing him a life line, giving him something to focus on to steady his mind. Leon decided to take it; he could always rip Natty a new asshole later. Right now there was his own sanity to think about. Leon stared at the Mustang and did his Lamaze breathing. The wife was gone, taking the child with her, but the value of Lamaze training was forever. With it he could be born into new realities a bit more readily, the same way it eased the transition into a world where his son was part of the picture.
Sirens.
From every direction.
The cop cars swarmed about Leon, drawn by the light emanating from the spaceship’s levitation ray as if it were the bull’s-eye on a target. The officers jumped out of their vehicles, and aimed their pea shooters at the craft. Predictable. In the face of the impossible, do the stupid. It was like the dance honey bees did when finding nectar.
***
Officer Rex Carlton leaned on the roof of his squad car to help him steady his sniper
scope. In Montana, the police came prepared to drop a running perp at a thousand yards. If you were stupid enough to run from the law in a state where hunting ranked higher than church attendance, you deserved to get dropped at fifteen-hundred yards. His sergeant, to his left, leaning over the open driver’s side door to steady his shotgun, was more concerned with resting his arm than with acquiring additional accuracy. That shotgun would obliterate anything at a hundred paces even if it was aimed the other way.
“We’re hallucinating, right?” Officer Carlton asked his sergeant, staring up at the spaceship.
“Of course we are. All it takes is one idiot to shout ‘Spaceship!’ for group-think to take hold. The whole damned department has been drinking nonstop for the past two hours.”
“Why is that, by the way?”
“Doper bagged a buck with one hell of a rack. It was mounted over the bar. We were downing drinks to match the number of points on the rack.”
“Makes sense.”
The guns started going off. No one knew who fired first; no one seemed to much care. It seemed to be the right thing to do when confronted with a nightmare of biblical proportions; shoot it to death. The cacophony barely made a dent compared with the rumble of the earth and strange hum coming from the ship.
“It’s damned cathartic to shoot at aliens after drinking ourselves silly,” Officer Carlton confessed.
“Yeah, we should make this a thing.” The sergeant wiped the spittle from the edge of his mouth. Carlton had no real explanation for why the sergeant was drooling. Some kind of nervous response, perhaps. The discharge of his shotgun, playing hell with his arthritic shoulder caused the sergeant to cry out in pain every time he fired it, but he couldn’t stop. In the end, the emotional catharsis trumped the pain.
Officer Carlton focused his sniper rifle on the guy being levitated off the ground. But Carlton’s shots just ricocheted off the pole of light. Explain that.
Finally everything was quiet. There was no more ammunition to throw at the spaceship.
And then the strangest thing.
The ship just disappeared—without moving.
“See, I told you we were hallucinating it.” Carlton felt vindicated.
The sergeant gestured for his men to gather around. Once they’d made a circle about him, he said, “Nothing happened here tonight, hear me?”
“I’m thinking it was one of those California liberals, sir, with a slide projector, screwing with us,” Officer Carlton volunteered.
The sergeant grunted. “I like it, but then they’ll have us spending the next three days hunting down the slide projector. If any witnesses turn up, we’ll say we were so damned drunk we took to shooting down the stars.”
Most of the guys were nodding. “Perfectly believable,” one of them said. Of course, few could stand without swaying or staggering.
The sergeant gestured dismissively and they headed back to their cars. Officer Carlton approached and, keeping his voice low, said, “You sure we shouldn’t report this, sir?”
“Son, trust me, even if it was real, nobody wants to know.”
“But…”
“You’re young, kid. This is your first UFO. It’s my tenth. Louis over there is on his fiftieth. They don’t call it big skies Montana for nothing. But you go tell the Feds if you want. Not really sure where you’ll end up. I just know the ones who can’t keep their mouths shut are never heard from again.”
Officer Carlton sighed and stopped dead in his tracks; aimed his sniper rifle heavenwards at the biggest star he could find; fired off a shot.
“Excellent choice,” the sergeant said.
TWO
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Leon hugged Laney, Natty’s wife. “I see the mountain has finally come to Mohammed,” she said, looking up at his 6’ 4” frame.
They were all waiting for Dwayne Johnson to play him in the movie version of his life. Dwayne was the only one big enough—the slightly younger, more handsome, version, of course. He smiled at her ribbing. She could do no wrong right now, being as she was pulling focus, a next-to-impossible task mind you, when attempting to destress someone stepping aboard a spaceship for the first time. Her startling green-eyed beauty was something she always played down with her casual attire, right now jeans and no make-up. Her husband Natty was from the same school of pretty people; his thick, dark curly hair in generous locks, reminded Leon of Michelangelo’s David.
“How’d you ever get Natty aboard this thing? His name isn’t exactly synonymous with a thirst for adventure.”
“Watch your foul, truth-spewing mouth.” Natty strolled up until he was beside his wife and hugged her from the side. He kissed her on the head and turned his eyes to Leon. “I’ll have you know this thing is a flying fortress. Way safer here than anywhere on Earth, especially after decoding that message left for us on the moon from over a billion years ago.”
“You think you decoded it, dear. Forgive my husband. Being full of himself is largely a defense mechanism, owing to perpetual insecurities over most everything.”
Leon bit off his smile. “Smart of you to marry a psychiatrist, Natty. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it, with all the PTSD you’re giving me of late.”
“Ha, ha. Save the droll commentary, both of you. And she’s not a psychiatrist! She’s the world’s leading bioengineer, which trust me, will be helpful where we’re going. I can’t guarantee how human you’ll look after she’s done engineering you up to humanoid standards a bit more suitable to surviving space, but at least your odds for lasting more than a few seconds will be greatly improved.” Natty kissed Laney on the head again and walked away, leaving her to deal with Leon.
“Where’s he off to?” Leon asked.
“Do you really want to know?”
Leon grunted. “Touché.”
“Come on. I have someone I want you to meet.”
Leon smiled at her teasing tone. He was always smiling around her. That was kind of her job; getting him to relax around Natty. The young couple was in their twenties and Leon loved them both in their own way. But Natty’s people skills were lacking. He had a way of getting Leon and his special ops guys to turn their guns on him instead of at the enemy. Laney kept the peace as best she could. As far as Leon was concerned, she was the most important person on this mission—on any mission going forward.
His eyes went to the cavernous interiors of the ship as he followed beside her. “How big is this thing?”
Natty’s avatar materialized on the other side of Leon. “Impossible to say; the Nautilus adds to its real estate daily, building out new labs and so on.
“Moreover, the ship exists in innumerable parallel universes at once. There is a clone of me that heads up operations aboard ship in each parallel universe. Findings from each of the clones percolate into the other clones’ minds if they’re relevant to the situation at hand. Even my nano-enhanced human mind can only handle so much. But if my intuition alights on an answer to a novel problem, it’s very possibly because a clone in a parallel universe is beaming me the solution because the problem is not at all novel for him.
“Similarly, the ships’ AIs communicate across dimensions, sharing intel across singularities used as phone lines because of how they cut through space-time. Still, these are largely distress signals going out to keep data traffic to a minimum, this time owing to limits of the parallel processing brains of the ships’ AIs. They have quite a lot to tend to just keeping the ships in each timeline humming.”
Leon gazed at Laney with a perplexed look on his face.
“Natty came up with the avatar to spare me all the techno-talk. Besides, he’d much rather toot his own horn than have someone else toot it for him, as they can never toot it well enough.”
She sounded weary of her husband’s childishness, but seemed to take him as a work in progress. Leon could attest that the child in Natty was a bit more in check of late, but it was also the source of his genius; so who knew how in check exactly it would ever be? Leon
and Laney had both become resigned to having their patience taxed on that score for however much “personal growth” Natty pulled off after one of these missions. Leon was the ultimate man-maker; nothing like tagging along with special ops guys and gals for that; but even he, like Laney, could only do so much.
Natty’s avatar gave Laney a dirty look for the “loves to toot his own horn” crack and bleeped out.
“I think you hurt the avatar’s feelings,” Leon quipped. His eyes went to the ceiling. “Why is the scale of this ship so damned off? I feel like an ant crawling around its insides.” Laney made a pained face. “What?” Leon asked. “No avatar that time?”
“He’s probably just trying to pace the shock treatment,” Laney replied. “Too much too soon and you’ll pass out before he can recondition you.”
Leon grimaced. “I swear he’s been hanging around me and my team way too much. I’ll make sure he’s not present at any more enemy interrogations.”
There was a roar like the sound of thunder—only deeper, and it carried farther. “Please tell me—”
“I would never in a million years consider being that cruel.”
The scratching, clawing sounds came next; they caused the metal the talons were tearing into to scream even louder. Layers of metal-composite being peeled back sounded suspiciously like the first gate of hell being opened—where the banshee choirs could be heard singing off-key.
Around the bend of the hallway intersection up ahead came the dinosaur—sort of like a T-Rex, only bigger and scarier, and far more genetically modified. It charged straight toward Laney and Leon.
Leon reflexively shoved her out of the way. Laney went skidding across the floor. “It’s okay, Leon!” Laney said trying to get ahead of the knife coming out of the sheath on Leon’s side. But her reflexes weren’t as good as Leon’s.
“It is most decidedly not okay. That chicken is running around with its head still on, evidently because the cook didn’t get it in the pot fast enough.”
The Star Gate Page 1
