The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  “Hey, some of those winnings are mine, you greedy bastard,” Crumley said, grabbing some of the chips off of Cronos’s pile.

  DeWitt tried to find his way back to his seat at the table, tripping over the shell casings on the floor. Shit, his assault rifle had really gone off. It was a miracle no one was hurt. Well, the Native American Robots would have been no less immune to the bullets than the dragons of his nightmares. And his teammates had plenty of warning of what was coming no doubt by the expression painted on DeWitt’s face.

  Still… Very unprofessional. He pulled himself off the floor after tripping on the shell casings and took his seat. “Yeah, yeah, let’s see how well you do, smart ass,” DeWitt said smiling at Cronos and reaching for another shot of Native American hooch. Even better than real Indians—he meant Native Americans—these guys had perfected the art of liquor distillery.

  Cronos stared at DeWitt hang-jawed. “You realize you’re drinking NAR piss, right?”

  DeWitt spit out the liquor in his mouth, spraying Cronos. “I can’t believe you’d ruin a good high like that.”

  “I’m telling you, man, that’s their excess lubricants, mixed with whatever micro-particles make up the wear and tear of metal composites grinding against one another.”

  “Well, to hell with it. It’s better than 80 proof Scotch.” DeWitt took another swill.

  Crumley poured himself a glass as their Native American Robot host shuffled the deck in his hands and prepared for another round of cards.

  Cronos observed Crumley pouring. “Not you, too.”

  “As philosophers go, I always favored the pragmatists,” Crumley said. “If it does the trick, don’t much care if it came out of a cow’s ass.” He downed the liquid without further ado as Cronos made a disgusted face.

  The gorilla at the table—who never missed a card match, even if this was hardly his game of choice—gave Crumley a querulous look. “Pragmatism? Well, I’ll take it over idealism, and anything to do with Hegel.” He anted up for the next round. “Though I’d love to hear you rationalize how a pragmatist got aboard the Nautilus.”

  Crumley ignored him and sighed satisfaction as he set down his glass of hooch. “Shit. We give this to the enemy, war over. I guarantee you, we’ll be the best of friends come morning.”

  “Give that here,” Cronos said, grabbing the booze away from him. He drank right out of the bottle.

  “Yeah, yeah. Drink your courage. Trust me, pal, there isn’t enough NAR piss for that,” DeWitt said, smiling at the thought of Cronos getting the next card.

  DeWitt allowed himself to be distracted briefly by the Native American robot card dealer. He’d been given an entirely human body—at least in outline. Though his surface was made of a transparent metal-glass composite that was, well, at the very least bulletproof, as DeWitt had just proven, much to his dismay. The transparent housing showed off the NAR’s hydraulic parts and insides, probably because they were intimidating as hell. There was no way to look at how he was powered and not think that human muscles and bones just weren’t going to do the trick. Even scaled up to their size as Omega Force had been the instant they stepped through the portal to gain entry into the room—DeWitt didn’t feel any more formidable relative to these guys. It was DeWitt’s guess that the portal leading into the room functioned like the transporter on Star Trek, breaking him down into constituent atoms and then beaming those atoms to another location where they could be reconstructed by the nanite hive mind along for the ride, tasked with playing building blocks with the atoms, and also tasked, with scaling them up. But what did he know? The science was Natty’s department.

  The other Native American Robots were all dressed in ceremonial ware, their headdresses, arm and leg bands, wrist and shin guards or tassels as the case may be—all weapons. The costuming’s cosmetic look was entirely secondary. And much like Omega Force wiled away their downtime readying their weapons, checking and rechecking them, several of the Native American Robots in the room were filing away at the helicopter-sized blades or giant boomerangs or Ninja-like Shuriken that adorned their heads one at a time.

  DeWitt had the displeasure of catching Ajax’s latest off-color joke, spoken off in the distance—to a couple of the NARs sharpening their blades, no less. Did he have no better sense than to provoke these guys? Ajax must have a death wish. DeWitt was thinking of granting it just so he could get out of the room alive.

  “A little Native American boy asks his chief how babies in their tribe get their names,” Ajax said, setting up the joke. “The chief replies, ‘When a baby is born, the father takes him outside of the teepee, holds him over his head, and names him after the first thing he sees - like ‘Running-Wolf’ or ‘Flying-Cloud’. Why do you ask, Two-Dogs-Screwing?’”

  Ajax paused for the expected laughter. The Native American Robots merely paused with the sanding or hammering motion on their blades, before resuming. DeWitt couldn’t tell if those expressions on their faces were smiles or scowls. Maybe the servo-mechanisms controlling their lips weren’t all that sophisticated.

  “Tough audience. All right, all right, I like a challenge,” Ajax continued, undaunted. “This white guy’s hitting on a Native American. He goes up to her and says, ‘Hey Beaver’s Breath.’ To which she responds, ‘How did you know my name?’”

  The Native American Robots stopped their sanding, scraping, hammering and filing in sync. The chamber, the size of an airplane hangar—suddenly felt very small. The tense moment lingered until DeWitt was certain it was going to explode the room into total chaos. DeWitt was Leon’s second, God damn it. It was his job to keep Omega Force in line. If they lost control of the room, this shit storm was all going to fall on him, not Ajax. Leon would have his head.

  Finally, the laughter came, echoing from the Native American Robots at first like a slow, low frequency rumble, the kind that shook the earth. The floor beneath their feet vibrated so fiercely that the tendons on either side of his ankle were screaming from the oscillations. DeWitt had to lift his feet off the ground for fear of getting a sprained ankle—in his breaktime. He’d never live it down.

  Crumley whistled, aping the sound of some Amazonian jungle bird. Ever since their first adventure with Natty in the Amazon, he’d picked up some extra animal calls to add to his signaling repertoire. DeWitt shifted his attention back to the game to see why Crumley wanted his attention. Sure enough, Cronos was hypnotized by the latest card the NAR playing the game with them had dealt. The face card showed a pentagram. DeWitt didn’t even bother to check his smug smile, just heaped some of his chips on the table. “A little early to place your bets, huh?” Crumley chided him. “Give the kid a chance. He’s holding up well so far.”

  Crumley stared at the changing expression on Cronos’s face. “Yeah, I better get in on this action while there’s still some profit to be made.” He chucked a pile of chips on the table.

  “Please tell me you’re the witch doctor for this crew?” DeWitt said to the NAR card dealer.

  “Nah. We all come with even more ways to mess with your minds than with your bodies. We find that is far more effective most of the time. Bodies can be fixed a lot more easily than minds, especially in an age of nanites and computer-printed replacement body parts.” This NAR, with the “plumage” of a cockatoo, spoke in a breathy, tinny manner, like a car trying to talk out its exhaust pipe.

  “Can’t fault your reasoning there,” DeWitt mumbled, throwing some more chips on the table at the sight of Cronos’s deteriorating expression. “Shouldn’t you guys, you know, speak in more broken English, though, like, “Me Kemosabe, you, Dick Face.”

  And suddenly you could hear a pin drop—from halfway across the universe.

  And then…

  Cronos’s scream. Everyone knew it was coming. Just that no one expected it to signal the battle royal to follow.

  DeWitt found a “helicopter blade” slicing through the card table and falling just short of his nuts. Crumley, despite his added years and heavier body, r
esponded sooner than DeWitt could. He already had the table up, using it as a shield in one hand. He yanked the blade out of the metal card table and used its narrowed point of attachment to the headdress to which it belonged as the handle; the blade had become a sword in his hands.

  DeWitt, for his part, undid his belt. He still couldn’t believe it was him that had caused the NARs to lose their cool, and not Ajax. What were the odds of that? The buckle on his belt was the handle of the nano-infused whip that coiled about his waist numerous times over to give him the length he needed. It didn’t have much by way of thickness, but it handled like a traditional leather whip, and it sliced through solid metal like butter courtesy of the nanite-infusions. The nanites the whip deposited in the wound it opened up also did a nice number on you, continuing to eat away at the wound.

  Lashing out with the whip, DeWitt, brought down one of the NARs, severing its Achilles heel, forcing him to fight on one leg, and then on no legs as the whip made contact with the remaining Achilles heel—or the robot hydraulic equivalent. Not that the NAR was down for the count; these guys never stopped fighting. Omega Force had learned that much when they tangled with them in the Amazon forest not too long ago.

  Cronos, who had come out of the fugue in a fighting state, just confusing what battlefield he was really on, was better prepared for action than the rest of them. “What the hell?” he blurted. “How did I miss the beat change?”

  Cronos ripped off his shirt and pants. He was buff enough, despite a few battle scars, and losing some of his tan after weeks in the Amazon dealing with the “sentient serpents”—a pet name for the genetically modified horrors Omega Force found waiting for them. Though his overall sex appeal was hardly the point. His body was riddled with tattoos. He peeled one off like one of those Fruit Roll-Ups and tossed it at the NAR that was attempting to smother him in gas ejected out its curled up tongue. It was like a campy take on a Binaca Breath Spray commercial. The “tattoo,” or shaped charge, made short work of the NAR, but the hole that Cronos had just blown in him just permitted the gas the NAR was emitting to vent even more rapidly into the room.

  Cronos was already down on all fours, hacking up a storm, acting as if death couldn’t come soon enough. DeWitt had gotten a whiff of some poisonous gases in battle before, none of them particularly pleasant; but, even from this distance, out of range of the intended target, this one took the cake.

  Cronos vomited up his insides. Then, in the glassy, watery emulsion of undigested liquor saw the creature he was turning into. It was like Attack of the Swamp Monster—The Sequel. His body had grown thicker, its surface pustular. He stood up, regarded himself in the larger reflective obsidian surface of the card table that Crumley was now using as a shield. “Shit, I’m even more of a chick magnet,” Cronos mumbled, before getting punched so hard he flew into Crumley, knocking him over.

  Crumley peeled Cronos off him, did a double take at the new Cronos. “Hey, at least no more cracks about my mother being a silver back gorilla,” Crumley said. Crumley was graying, and hairy as hell, and well, built like a gorilla. “Not with Swamp Thing to take the heat off me. Thanks, pal.”

  Cronos grimaced. “Don’t mention it.”

  Ajax got tossed toward DeWitt, both of them knocked over like a pair of bowling pins by a bead in one of the NAR’s hair; the one with hair like Bob Marley’s dreadlocks and with all manner of things braided into it, each lock wielded like a whip at the end of the NAR’s head.

  “What the hell set this off?” Ajax asked.

  The gas dissipating in the room made it easier to talk, a mixed blessing at best, DeWitt thought. “I might have said something that registered as an off-colored joke.”

  Ajax glared at him. “I told you, if you’re going to go with offensive, you have to be consistent. Then people know you’re an asshole and aren’t surprised. When you’re sporadic about it, they think you’ve been trying to get over on them all along, and now they’re really pissed.”

  “I’m in no condition to argue the point.” DeWitt groaned as he used Ajax’s seated-upright body for leverage, helping Ajax off the floor when he pulled himself up in one smooth motion.

  Crumley, despite hating to be teased for his gorilla-like countenance, was nonetheless acting very gorilla-like. He’d climbed up one of the NARs as if he were scaling a tree, and starting from the top down, was dismembering him, head first, with gorilla-like strength. The nanites percolating throughout his body no doubt helped make his impersonation that much more realistic. The actual gorilla in the room was hanging to the sidelines, staying out of the thick of things; turned out he was a pacifist.

  When Crumley was back on the ground, he picked up one of the arms he’d yanked off the NAR by the finger because it was easier to swing like a bat than one of the legs, and he was proceeding to pummel the NAR whose “feathers” were meant to be indicative of a peacock. Pissed off, and refusing to take the bat to the face without comment, the peacock NAR let go some of those peacock-like whirling disks of color that sawed through the floor as if rotary saw blades powered by invisible giant rotary saws—wielded in turn by invisible carpenters determined to make a piece of furniture out of the “raw wood” of Crumley’s dense head.

  Ajax jumped out of the way of the rotary blade coming toward him. “Of all the things I’ve thought of taking into battle, why the hell did I never think of bringing a rotary saw? How could I have been so blind to the possibilities?”

  “Are you cracking wise out of some nervous defense mechanism, as in, it’s that or cry?” DeWitt asked, flicking his whip and going for one of the NAR’s heads, hoping to slice it off with one good yank on the whip, once it curled about the NAR’s neck.

  “No, I was being dead serious. Why can no one tell when I’m joking around here?”

  “I guess I should have known when you weren’t being positively obnoxious.” That last word got away from him a bit off register as DeWitt found himself flying about the room like one of those carnival-come-to-town-rides when his head-slicing-off trick didn’t exactly go the way he’d intended. It was like a ride for kids who wanted to know what being inside a Demolition Derby car was like as DeWitt crashed into one wall after another—all lined with NAR ceremonial gear that were also weapons. All in all, DeWitt figured he was being given the opportunity to select his weapon of choice at this rate, as he tried to get a feel for each new implement in his hand before discarding it for something better. If his head could just survive long enough to make a decision on which weapon suited him best.

  ***

  Leon, Patent, and Cassandra were standing at the doorway leading into the room with the NARs. They’d been standing there a while—from the moment DeWitt started staring into the face card with the dragon embossed on it.

  “These guys are great!” Leon exclaimed, rescuing his hang-jawed expression that had him drooling, as he wiped the edges of his mouth. “How come you never made me some to play with out in the field?”

  “Hey, there are limits to what miracles I and my Alpha Unit techies can work on a battlefield, okay?” Patent bitched. “Why didn’t you draft the NARs into our Special Forces teams when we were back in the Amazon?”

  “How was I to know—”

  “A lame-ass cover for leadership incompetence if you ask me.” Patent spat some tobacco onto the floor in front of him—noticed that as soon as it crossed the threshold it grew in size and stink, like something dropped out a bovine’s ass.

  Cassandra ran her upgraded eyes over the lip of the doorway, scanning it along various frequencies, then pushed both men into the room ahead of her. Leon was delighted to find that he and Patent were now as big as the rest of his Omega Force team.

  Patent helped him off the floor with a yank on the arm. “Come on. We better get some fun in ourselves before my Alpha Unit teens discover what they’ve been missing out on. We’ll never get this close to these bots again; the kids will adopt them as their own.”

  “You don’t have to twist my arm.” Leon
charged the field like a bull rhino.

  “I didn’t say jump into battle naked, you nimrod.” Patent grabbed a lance off the wall. His “lance” probably belonged in the costume of one of the porcupine-worshipping NARs; like real Native Americans, these guys and gals had a thing for animal deities.

  Patent drew up short on his charge with the lance out in front of him like one of those knights battling on horseback in medieval times. Standing in a circle about him in a room big enough to park a dozen or so 747s were three female NARs. “Shit,” he mumbled. “Do I fight, or do I get down on my knees and pray for the best sex of my life?”

  The three women held out their hands, which were evidently magnetized, as select weapons adorning the walls went flying into them.

  Patent gulped. “What did you learn from your Amazon encounter, Patent? The female of the species is always the most deadly. Always,” Patent mumbled. Then, he smiled. “Appreciate the show of respect, ladies, you waiting to activate yourselves on my account. Well earned, I assure you, as you will soon find out.”

  ***

  Cassandra, disgusted at the lack of decorum on all sides, Omega Force and the NARs, just shook her head and marched toward her cabin which doubled as a work station, gym, and scientific lab that she used to continue to tweak her body modifications. The only real relaxation she got was in actual battle. She just didn’t get the others’ need for letting off steam between missions.

  FIVE

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  Natty found Leon staring out the metal-glass viewport portion of the wall that rimmed the saucer section of the Nautilus. Leon had rested his drink on the counter that rose to just above his waist, but he couldn’t quite take his hand off the mug. Another few seconds staring at the infinite tapestry of stars and he brought the cup to his mouth again.

  Natty was standing by his side now. Leon must have sensed his approach because he addressed him without turning away from the viewport. “How did you draft me into this space opera that Techa knows should be set another few hundred years into the future?” Leon asked. Techa was the goddess overseeing a technological world; she had more fans these days than the Christian God, as sacrilegious of an idea as that was in some circles.