The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  “Satellite already has nanite droids swarming over their other weaponry, scanning and infiltrating them to milk them of their secrets,” Ariel explained. “We’ll be able to reverse engineer the devices soon enough, determining whether they actually create the creatures they’re bringing into being, or merely summon them, as you suggest.”

  He did a double-take her way, having never considered that the devices the Vikings were wielding might actually be more than signaling devices for their pets. He could be forgiven the oversight, being as they were, well, Vikings. Pets made sense. And they might well have had a Tesla of his time around to create the primitive signaling devices to attract the beasts of this world—but to bring them into existence? It would take more than a genius ahead of his time in a society this primitive to explain that. He nodded at Ariel dismissively and returned his eyes to the sky, as she retreated to her research station to conduct more tests.

  The camouflage netting had been thrown over a framework of pipes no less strong than the skeletons holding up the NARs for fear of his people being stepped on by those colossuses out there. The tent framing was driven in turn into solid rock to keep everyone underneath the tents from being hammered into the ground all the same by the lumbering giants.

  ***

  Asger had not known this kind of exhilaration in his lifetime; dragon-riding was a matter of legend. The creature’s every dive and swirl, every corkscrew turn, filled him with glee. As the creature dove into range to spit fire or jettison spikes from the tips of its wings or the ridge of its back, he felt the same rush the dragon felt. It didn’t matter that so far their adversaries appeared immune to the fire breathers. Nothing could curtail Asger’s passion for flying.

  The longer the battle ensued, the more his ancestral memories engaged; he was tapping now into the sensations of dragon riders from ages gone by. But more than their overflowing feelings filled him, some of their battle tactics were coming back as well. These weapons they wielded, each one keyed to their wielder’s style of fighting—so much more could be made of them.

  He changed the grip on his club, feeling along the different ridges in the handle and squeezed tight while aiming it squarely at the doll person flying toward him. The noises bellowed forth from the club not in a thunderclap like before, but in the manner of keening winds, their song warning of the coming of the summer insects. The “insect” sounds that followed were not like the ones he had become accustomed to on his world, signaling the plant-and-animal-devouring creatures that came out ever forty years that had claimed no shortage of his number, leaving not even a man’s bones behind.

  When the sounds hit the flying doll warrior with the rainbow colors like the tropical birds of their summer lands when all the world was warm as it was on the equator, and there was no running from the insufferable heat—and those birds migrated even this far north… The doll acted as if possessed, turning on his own kind. The arm and leg bands detached from Rainbow Renegade, acting as if they had a mind of their own, and flying like… once again Asger’s ancestors’ memories flooded his mind, lending some explanation for what he was seeing. Those were flying, self-piloted ships that could carry out their own missions, and deploy their own armaments. The one leg band that looked like the river plants of Asger’s world, which fed on fish, flew around another doll warrior flying toward Asger, like a self-attaching necklace. The leg band expanded to fit around the head of the doll warrior with the cerulean blue feathering. Once squarely about his neck, the long hair-like follicles grew, strangling him and cocooning him both in the countless thin strands that—with a mind of their own—also found their way to the Blue Bird Man’s most vulnerable areas—his joints—until they had grown into them and sliced through him at those points. This doll too landed on the ground below, as if cut up by the butcher to feed doll-eaters.

  Asger, his heart pounding, beating out the song of triumph his soul was singing, flew toward the next nearest doll warrior taken to the air. It was menacing Freja, though how much was hard to say. Their wrestling in mid-air did not look too different from her preferred method of lovemaking, which was frequently every bit as rough. And as with those times when she was feeling amorous, it was hard to tell who was coming out on top.

  Asger decided at the last minute she could handle herself, and dove down instead on his dragon toward Canute. The old man was holding his own, but he was fatigued. The doll warriors did not seem to tire. Asger’s ancestral memories showed him how this could be; the dolls were powered on nuclear-fusion devices that never drained, and that if damaged, would irradiate their adversaries, killing them even if the explosion didn’t.

  It was all Asger could do to give thanks to their oral traditions and the tall tales told throughout the eons of their ancestors’ wild adventures. Without those stories to keep his mind nimble for this moment, he would have been driven insane by the inrush of strange images of bygone times.

  Asger barely felt the tickling sensations on his skin. He was too worked up; his body already in too much pain to care much about what other aberrant sensations plagued him. Simply staying seated on a dragon required sustaining whiplash motions of the body that worked the muscles in ways that grew protests from within. He could not even trust that the latest tickling sensations meant anything, as they might well suggest his body’s senses were awry, pushed out of whack by the pain looking to escape along any channel it could find. But look down at his arm he did, and it was a good thing.

  There were little people crawling along his surface, not much bigger than their pesky giant flying insects that sucked their blood—a dozen or which would make a decent meal. One had a line cinched around Asger’s wrist; he pulled back on it and lopped off Asger’s hand! The club went with it, sailing through the air.

  The one doing the deed, looked up at him and said, “Consider it a sign of respect I didn’t try tying this band around your neck! I’m Leon; the name means lion, which on our world, is its fiercest beast. Nice to meet you.”

  Asger had no idea how this tiny tribal warrior could speak his language, or get his voice to carry to Asger’s ears. Again his ancestral memories came to the rescue, showing him how children could be changed in the womb by manipulating genes; the children born would be unrecognizable to the parents, with abilities so different that they may as well be a different species. But his memories also showed him ships arriving from other worlds carrying creatures big and small; ship’s with computers big and powerful enough to translate an enemy’s language on the fly, and small enough to infect their bodies. Some voice in back of his head assured Asger that the explanation for Leon’s existence involved all of these scenarios. What was that voice in Asger’s head? It answered his question: “I am the part of you that is forever. I carry the memories of all your lifetimes on this and all worlds.” Ancestral memory or no, and tribal traditions or no, Asger’s head was starting to swim from concepts for which his lifelong training and his ancestral memories had prepared him; still that training wasn’t enough. He could not blame the lightheadedness on the loss of blood; his polite enemy had made certain to cauterize the wound of his arm in the same instant he made the cut. Asger had felt the heat sealing the slash as he had cried out.

  It would have been impolite of Asger not to fight back, even one-handed, and even against such a runty enemy, so he promptly drove the fist he still had down on Leon’s head. But the wee one’s tribe had other ideas.

  ***

  Ajax fired his grappling-hook gun—meant for climbing up cliffs and scaling buildings, incidentally, though he supposed scaling giants qualified—at the Nouveau Viking lowering his fist like Thor’s hammer on Leon’s head. The cable spun around the colossus several times before the hook seated itself in his one good arm. That had to hurt like hell. Ajax remembered getting a fishing hook caught in his finger once, so he could relate.

  “What’s the best way to find a truly committed man?” Ajax shouted at the giant. “Visit the closest mental hospital.” Of course, the crack was
meant both as a nod to the Viking’s bravery and refusal to surrender the ghost, as much as a dig regarding the stupidity of his actions, though he doubted the joke would cross the cultural divide, nanite-language-translating algorithms percolating Omega Force’s brains or not.

  From the raging fire in the giant’s eyes as he glared at Ajax, and the way he twisted against his sudden confinement, Ajax felt safe to say that the joke had gone unappreciated. A shame. His best audiences were almost always foreigners who weren’t nearly as politically correct as Americans.

  ***

  Crumley just had a split-second to react. The giant, agitated further by Ajax’s grappling hook trick, had elected to bend at his waist and use his head as a mallet to pound Ajax and Leon both into bone meal in one quick flexing-forward movement. Crumley let go on his grappling hook rifle and looped the rope around the giant’s neck until the hook sank into the back of his neck, hopefully deep enough to anchor at a spinal vertebrae. Meanwhile he tied off the rope at his end around one of the dragon’s scales. That stopped the giant’s head-butt maneuver about a third of the way down. The “rope” was strung with buckyball filaments; it would take more than the strength of a titan to pop that line.

  ***

  The dragon, sensing his rider’s mounting distress, and afraid to do a barrel roll for fear of losing his rider, too, was Cronos’ guess, craned its head and shot a bolus of fire at the lot of them, probably realizing his rider was immune even if they weren’t. Cronos had even less time to react than Crumley had. He disgorged his grenade launcher, firing the projectile into the dragon’s mouth. The flames were snuffed out before they got too far and the dragon was coughing from the “lozenge” lodged in its mouth. That “pill” would continue to swell with the fluids the dragon used for its flame throwing.

  ***

  DeWitt observed the behemoth bringing his left leg around for a seated roundhouse kick, determined to throw himself off his mount in an effort to use that fanning leg movement to knock off the human “ticks” of Leon and his Omega Force crew, which had infected his dragon.

  DeWitt hated to kick a guy when he was down, but he fired his laser rifle at the hulk. The leg was severed cleanly just below the waist and could do little but follow the trajectory of the stored momentum in the body part right over the dragon to the ground below.

  ***

  Whether from shock or a moment’s inattentiveness, Asger lost his mount, and plummeted to the ground below. His dragon was already diving down to snatch him up, but it was blinded by two piercing columns of light emitted by one of the doll warriors—coming out its eyes! Focused light weapons—his ancestors had names and concepts for these too; they called them Ragari, or “trained light.”

  Asger knew he would not survive the fall. Blinded by the Ragari, his dragon was attempting to find him by smell—probably an easier thing to do considering he hadn’t bathed in weeks. But the enemy was frustrating it with gases they could emit from the thrusters in their feet; they were able to adjust the chemical mixes to produce noxious fumes poisonous to Asger’s kind and to the dragons.

  The voice in his head once again assured him that though he would die, the little people would bring him back to life; it was part of their magic. Though the term used by his ancestors was different; it wasn’t a word for magic exactly, something else.

  “They’re like you, Asger. They came to pay their respects and to make friends. They wanted to show you that they are no different than you, not really. Like you, they are a warrior caste in search of a cause worthy of them. Neither of you can find that cause without one another, but working together, your destiny will reveal itself.”

  Asger snorted. Surely the enemy must be able to get inside his head. More of their magic. But the voice talking to him… He’d heard it many times before; only he’d dismissed it. Before today, there was really not much context for it. But after today, everything and nothing made sense.

  It was the last thought to pierce the veil of consciousness.

  ELEVEN

  THE NOUVEAU VIKING PLANET, ERESDRA

  Hertha saw Asger fall. There was no reaching him in time. He would be dead in another few seconds. He was their leader, the one whose ancestral memories and connection to their past was the strongest, and so he was the wisest. He was fierce in battle, able to do things others could not, in part off raw ability, in part off his knack for tapping his ancestral memories.

  But for all that, he knew never to make a decision without consulting with the women. The women of their tribe were the deep thinkers. The men were quick to action, and quick to die. They were not as long-lived. Worrying about the future and how best to ward off the dangers of their world did nearly as much to expand the mind of the women as Asger’s superior connections to their once vaunted past.

  Asger’s death meant leadership of the tribe would transfer to her. She was the oldest, had survived the most battles, and was responsible for the tribe avoiding annihilation during many such battles with her superior strategizing.

  Asger had tried to mate with her many times, seeing in their progeny the future of their people. But she appeared to be barren. It hadn’t stopped them from trying, of course, over the eons.

  Only of late had they managed to have children, a boy and a girl. They were each about elbow-high now. And they were strong and smart and in the glints of their eyes was the hope for the future. She hoped they had the sense to stay off the battlefield; they knew the burden they carried; they knew their lives could not be made forfeit in the name of glory and honor; for them it would be foolishness. But kids being kids, she worried. It was her job to worry.

  She made her dragon sing a song to the other dragons with merely a thought; the fact that she could do that was surprising to her, but not to the dragon. The creatures appeared to hold on to their memories across the ages; no amount of hibernations and rebirths after hundreds of years or more had passed dimmed their memories in the least.

  The other dragons responded to the signal from her dragon. They captured the flying doll warriors in their beaks or their talons by the neck, by the arm, by the ankle—wherever they could grab hold—and they dove down. As they did so, they played a game of catch and release so they could enfold their wings about their prey. Even if the doll warriors used the thrusters in their feet or along their torsos, or out the palms of their hands, they would accomplish no more than incinerating themselves in the furnaces of those thrusters; the dragons themselves were immune.

  At the last second, nearly half the dragons unfolded their wings and bashed the doll warriors against the rocks of the mountain ridges before the dolls could engage their thrusters again. Those doll warriors were now shattered, tumbling down the mountainsides like giant avalanches of painted rock and stone.

  The remaining dragons dove straight into the earth; their beaks and heads could withstand the impact; and their wings would be even more compacted about them the further into the earth they drilled, crushing the doll warriors in their grip.

  As the dragons unfolded their wings, they forced themselves out of the tight holes in the ground they’d made. They took to the air as their riders, who had jumped off at the last second, climbed back on.

  Canute was not among the riders taking to the air again. He lay on the ground where he’d vaulted off his dragon. He was wailing in agony from the broken leg; he had misjudged the timing to dismount his winged lizard in such a way as to avoid harm to himself. Hertha imagined his reflexes just weren’t fast enough anymore to find that sweet spot of height from the ground from which he could leap and sustain the fall. That, or his ego and refusal to allow for age had forced the misjudgment. It was considered cowardly to sing out in pain like that for their kind. The old man must have been hurting something fierce.

  He was spared the indignity of moaning aloud a moment longer by an attack from one of the dolls, which sent its plumage into him, jettisoning it the way some animals do their horns as a last-ditch defense before fleeing. The blades impacted C
anute over every inch of his body; it was a death by a hundred swords, instantaneous.

  Hertha had the strangest sensation that the doll warriors wished to spare him the embarrassment as much as she did; if she had been closer, she’d have driven her weapon into Canute’s head herself. But she may well be misreading the intent of a tribe of people whose customs she couldn’t truly comprehend.

  ***

  Freja was using the back of her dragon as a stage to wage her personal war with her doll warrior—a female like herself—content to trod on the beast’s back with her feet rather than plant her ass in the saddle. Freja punched the black-plumaged doll to the face so hard, her body cracked; countless web-like veins splintered off from the point of impact, making her surface no longer transparent but opaque. Freja was secretly relieved because she no longer had to stare at the eerie insides of the doll.

  The doll repaid the kindness by blasting Freja back against the arched neck of the dragon with a well-calculated firing of a palm thruster; Freja felt the dragon’s scales at the back of her head like an enemy’s shield. But Freja had a hard head, and her people trained to make their heads every bit as fortified as the helmeted heads of their adversaries. They broke rocks of increasing hardness against their heads throughout their lives until their skulls were harder than rock.

  Freja demonstrated for Black Bird by head-butting her. There went the outer casing of the doll, exposing the undersides; nothing but bones that moved by making strange sounds. Freja’s ancestral memories were attempting to pierce the veil of her understanding, but she couldn’t be bothered with an explanation for the strange sight. She was too pissed.

  She grabbed the square box inside the body of Black Bird, yanked it out, was about to crush it in her hand when the doll just shook her head. She projected the image of what would happen if she did that into Freja’s mind. That or it was an ancestral memory stabbing her in the back from the past as efficiently as this Black Bird venerating doll fought. Either way, Freja handed the box back to Black Bird, who reinstalled it where it belonged before continuing the fight.