The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  Once back aboard ship, Cassandra noticed that droids were indeed leaving the landing bay in numbers headed for the obelisk. The miniature probes looked like a toy space armada deploying for war.

  The Nautilus must have wanted her out of the way first, wisely deciding she would have swatted the self-piloted vessels out of the way like bugs if they came between her and her inspection of the obelisk.

  The instant the last of the “space armada” left the Nautilus, the space doors closed behind her. The walls of the vast launch bay chamber, loaded with tools and spare parts, rotated to reveal metal-glass-encased warrior bots on the other side. The glass panels slid up and the warrior bots stepped out.

  “I’m sorry, but this is as far as you go,” one of them said.

  She grunted. “It’ll take more than you guys to stop me.”

  “We’d appreciate your cooperation,” another one said. “You’re infected.”

  So that’s why your skin is crawling! The obelisk had nanite security coursing its perimeter—or perhaps they had other functions as well, such as star gate maintenance, should the thing be hit by debris its metal-composite makeup was not immune to.

  “You leave the nanites crawling all over me to me; my own nanites are no pushover.”

  Her “lice” infestation started fleeing her in a cloud of dust that gelled into combatants. Once manifested as warrior bots assembled from the tiniest of LEGO pieces, they made short work of the Nautilus’s defense droids meant to keep Cassandra in check.

  The enemy’s nanite soldiers then turned on her. “You have a lot of nerve depriving me of my right to kick their asses myself,” she said.

  Perhaps she should have given them instructions in English first so they could appreciate the punch line.

  The Nautilus was not waiting for her to take action. It had already deployed a noxious gas into the chamber; if that killed her as well, so be it. Great, just great. As if her nanites wouldn’t have their hands full with these bastards.

  The obelisk’s tin men had morphing parts. It was bad enough that their insect-like exoskeletons were armored enough to stop most projectiles—if the horrific image they painted didn’t cause their enemies to drop dead on sight. Imagine putting the face of a spider as seen under a microscope on the body of a standing cockroach and adding some genetic variation just for color. The arms on the warriors conjured by the nanite swarms, still proliferating to increase their numbers, were currently morphing into one weapon after another, all of which were being fired at her—so far pointlessly. She would have been happy to explain to them in advance that her nanites were pretty hot shit. If they’d given her a chance to explain, they could have saved themselves the arsenal. She’d yet to move. In her current state, she couldn’t move if she wanted to. This tactic—making herself impervious—came with a price. Her nanites had basically turned her into a human statue. Once she softened into something more pliable she’d have to move and move fast, as getting hit would be something she would feel.

  But she wasn’t done with her assessments yet.

  The noxious gases the Nautilus was deploying were doing the trick, but the enemy’s warrior bots just kept morphing, not just their shape, but their material make up, until they were impervious to the chemical bombardment.

  Some of the sentient serpents recruited from the Amazon rainforest during their last encounter—once enemies, now allies—charged into the room, the sliding doors opening and closing rapidly behind them. These latest entrants were the Nomads, the dinosaur-sized sentient serpents in their elaborate caste system. They didn’t waste time discussing the finer points of alien negotiations with her. They proceeded to masticate and stomp any warrior bot silly enough to not beat a hasty retreat.

  The jaw crushing abilities of those glorified modern-day, genetically-enhanced T-Rexes being what they were, the warrior bots were starting to look like Christmas day kibble treats for pets. But as the last warrior bots fell to either broken pieces on the floor, or the gullet of one of the giant dinosaurs, the Nomads were getting sick on their food. They coughed and staggered. Then their drool got more viscous and milky and the exudates from their eyes grew pussy. Moments later the Nomads painted the room red with their blood as they exploded from the inside. The nanites would have had to penetrate them deeply enough and aggregate thoroughly enough to form the formidable bombs that should have taken out Cassandra and the landing bay, but both were too fortified for that.

  Still, it was a bad omen. The sentient serpents of all classes, including the Umbrage to which Solo belonged, were genetically modified and nano-infused. They were built that way to fight off the parasites of the Amazon jungle which could probably go the distance with the best of the buggers on other worlds for sheer orneriness and out-and-out viciousness. And, of course, the Nomads and Umbrage had been weaponized, meant by their creators to be used in warfare; so their wound-healing capacity was second to none. She’d seen more than one of these things come back from the dead. They’d earned her respect and that of Omega Force and Alpha Unit’s as well; they were damned hard to kill. And yet, here they were, down for the count—in all likelihood. She didn’t see how they could rebound from the nanite bombs after such complete destruction.

  Cassandra unfroze herself, padded to the shimmering pools of nanites still showing life amid the blood and gore. She crouched down and placed both palms on the metal grid surface, meant to lap up fluid spills before they became combustibles anyone had to worry about, or fumes anyone had to breathe. The floor was refusing to do its job today, perhaps sensing the danger of comingling any further with these alien nanites.

  Sending a pulse through her body, Cassandra electrocuted the nanites while they were still acting as individual agents. She saw some of the shimmer go out of the pools of blood, indicating the nanites had been disposed of before they could regroup. All the same, they could be playing possum. They may well have wanted to get further into the ship and figured she was the best vector for getting them there.

  Cassandra hammered the button to raise the airlock seal, opening the landing bay to deep space. In a flash, the vacuum of space swept the room clean. She had long since magnetized her feet to the floor to resist the pull of the vacuum, and the suction wasn’t any match for the rest of her souped-up musculature.

  She punched the fist-sized red button again, and resealed the compartment, then she headed out of the landing bay—toward the rest of the ship.

  Solo was standing not too far down the wide hall that was just big enough to accommodate the wings of a landing 747. As if she were touring Sax Fifth Avenue, lit display cases illuminated both sides of the hall, and ensconced in each were any number of ship treasures. For all practical purposes, the Nautilus was a space-borne museum collecting up specimens from all over the universe, to add to the ones the ship’s builder and the AIs had themselves created—all in an effort to be prepared for anything the Nautilus might encounter out in the cosmos. No one truly knew who or what lifeform might have what you needed for survival come the next run-in with sentient life.

  Cassandra didn’t have time to take in what was in these display boxes. Solo’s eyes pulled her focus. The rainbow eyes were lit—probably not a good omen. She’d squared off with his caste before—they made the T-Rexes look like harmless pets by comparison—but never against Solo, who she had been lucky enough to befriend before finding out he was the most powerful of all the Umbrages, the name for the ruling class of sentient serpents.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Cassandra slipped into battle poise, ready for him to go on the attack.

  “It didn’t occur to you that you needed further delousing before stepping further into the ship?”

  Shit! Solo was right. When the skin-crawling sensation stopped, she’d assumed the alien nanites had all migrated off of her, or had been sucked into space by the vacuum she’d created before leaving the chamber. But she should have guessed that another wave was lying in wait, playing possum; that t
hey might well have used the first wave as sacrificial pawns to get this far. If there was one thing the Amazon jungle encounter had taught them, it was never to underestimate hive-mind intelligence. They could not only outperform supersentient AIs—they could out-evolve them, too—and thus were far more adaptable in the field.

  “My bad,” she said, and this time she was in full battle stance.

  Her quarry, lying in wait for their opportunity, didn’t bother to keep them in suspense. The second cloud of nanites wafted off her—this cloud black, where the previous wave had merely the quality of early morning fog with just the faintest of shimmers.

  This time the hive mind had no desire to give her a target she could punch or dropkick. But the nanite swarm was held in check by Solo’s outstretched hand. He was keeping the entire collective within an energy field of some kind—or perhaps a psi field generated with the power of his own mind. Either way, Cassandra wasn’t counting on him holding them off for long; his abilities were exhaustible; it was unclear if these alien nanites could be depleted.

  Cassandra emitted a nanite fog of her own. The tiny robots fled every cell of her body like a space armada of millions of nano-scale jet fighters all headed out for war. The outcome of that war would be determined by the nature of the “color therapy” to ensue. If the color of the swarm changed from black to any other color, Cassandra’s nanites had won the day.

  It was a bit of a gamble. If the alien nanites were triumphant, they’d understand a lot about how to get past many of her defenses. But the nanites she’d dispatched weren’t nearly as morphable as when they were in her body and could use her altered genetics to play off of—there they were at their most potent. But let the enemy assume what they will.

  The black fog exploded like so many fireflies flitting through the night mist. The Sax Fifth Avenue feel of the hall she was in had a dusk-like overall illumination that fostered the firefly effect perfectly, since that was when you usually saw the creatures come out to play. Cassandra thought of the starbursts also like suns lighting up the blackness of space, the soulless void that would torment mortal minds were it not for the lights. But in this case the lights were her nanites committing suicide when all else was lost; they had exhausted every trick they could think to throw at the enemy, so were left to take as many with them as they could as they flickered out. The fact that the number of lights in the darkness was increasing was a sign that the hive mind was no match for the alien hive mind; it just didn’t have the computing power or the morphing power to get around it.

  When the light show ended, Solo didn’t need her to tell him what that meant. He’d been leaning on a staff with a crystal grip in the shape of a geodesic dome; his black cape with its collar turned up behind him like a lizard-take on Dr. Strange. He sucked the nanite swarm into the crystal. The five percent or so that escaped the magnetic draw of the crystal did so by taking solid form.

  Cassandra would deal with the nanites taken humanoid form, though she was curious to know how…

  Solo explained telepathically. “The crystal defines a multidimensional zone; there is no one dimension that all of the nanites can materialize in. That means the hive mind power is reduced to a fraction across ten dimensions. The AI in each of those ten dimensions continues to create even smaller, ever-harder-to-escape prison cells for the nanites, faster than the nanites can reproduce. It is a veritable quicksand pit for supersentient nanite intelligence. I’m a long way from mastering the amount of intelligence each dimension can accommodate. This staff’s geodesic dome handle is still a relatively crude device.”

  Cassandra grunted. Solo had a way with different dimensions. That much they’d found out when they’d recruited him. The exact nature of his scientific magic in this area was not understood; hell, even the crude outlines of it were not understood.

  But she didn’t have time to give him the third degree or to be particularly impressed. The fraction of the hive mind that had taken solid form had intelligence left to spare for any number of tasks.

  Her solidified nemesis was female—and pregnant, her womb growing right before Cassandra’s eyes. It was Cassandra’s guess that the nanites were replicating a mile a minute, attempting to recapture the glory days of moments ago when it had access to far more group mind power. That was one pregnancy Cassandra wasn’t looking forward to.

  The femme fatale before her was nearly eight foot tall, bald, with skeletal features and a chalk-white complexion. The rest of her was covered in flexible body armor that glistened black.

  Cassandra heard Solo snort. “You two deserve one another,” he said, before turning his back on both of them and heading down the hall. Perhaps he meant to pay the alien a compliment, as in, “You look nearly as bad-ass as Cassandra.” Yeah, that had to be it.

  Cassandra back-flipped a couple of times to land with her legs about Skull Face’s neck. By then, Cassandra’s legs were lined by ridges much sharper than any razor; the blades growing longer, and Cassandra’s scissor-hold growing stronger. She meant to take off this bitch’s head, mount it on her wall. Maybe she could ask the decapitated head to guide her through her dream journeys into the netherworlds, where she sparred with unfathomable enemies in preparation for what the depths of space had in store for her.

  The fact that Skull Face’s neck muscles looked like steel cables should probably have been Cassandra’s first clue that the scissors hold was a bad idea. Skull Face peeled her off, her grip crushing Cassandra’s upper arm as she flung Cassandra into the nearest display case. Cassandra’s upper arm took a split second to reinflate as the nanites that made it up healed her crushed bones and bruised and torn muscles and ligaments. As Cassandra pawed her way up the now-cracked display case, a warrior no less formidable than the one she was battling, and no less alien looking, stood frozen inside, waiting to be thawed, if Cassandra just needed another Battle Barbie to play with. The cryogenic stasis that held the genetic creation inside the case also allowed her to mock Cassandra with the indifference to her plight painted on her face.

  Why wasn’t the Nautilus reinforcing Cassandra? Releasing some of these creatures from their cases? Were they simply waiting for her to expose the enemy’s weaknesses to know what alien lifeform might have the best chance against it? Or did the ship’s AIs just have that much confidence in her that she could handle things before they got out of hand?

  Cassandra watched the display case glass mend itself, and barely dodged the fist directed at the small of her back by Skull Face. The metallic glass it contacted instead was now resistant enough to shatter the arm that had impacted it. Whatever the Nautilus thought of the duo duking it out inside its hallowed ground, it definitely wasn’t brooking any further disturbance to its specimen collection.

  Cassandra studied the shattered arm’s components on the ground. If she didn’t know any better, she’d say a robot had merely exceeded its carrying capacity, resulting in shorn cables, crumpled metals, and smoldering acid leaking out of the circulatory system meant to keep out unwanted microscopic invaders, and at the very least, bleed out on the enemy, doing them in at the same time.

  A thought occurred to Cassandra.

  She picked up the still-in-tact hand lying on the floor, broken off from the rest of the limb, drove the talons—you really couldn’t call those things fingernails—into the mother, cutting the womb right out of her. By the time Skull Face had exorcised her pain with a scream and cocked her hand to backhand Cassandra across the floor, Cassandra was long gone with the womb. As with a beehive ripped out of a tree, she held the one end closed lest the “bees” get out. The roar that had started when the talons of the alien’s hand cut into the alien’s mid-section, merely crescendoed as Skull Face realized she was out of moves. Most of her hive mind intelligence was now in the enemy’s hands, and the Nautilus was blocking signaling between the mother and the “infant.” The nanite hive mind in Cassandra’s hands would hack its way through the Nautilus’s coded COMMS channels and its signal blockers soon enough, but
by then Cassandra hoped to have it dispatched.

  She glanced back at the alien mother; Skull Face had collapsed on her knees before falling face down on the floor. She barely had time to turn over, writhe in agony, and call out. Some distress signal to others of its kind? The alien was quickly silenced by the floor morphing around her. The next thing Cassandra knew, Skull Face was being added to the display cases, kept safe for now in cryogenic freeze. The temperature would have had to drop so fast that the alien didn’t have time kick her way out of her tomb; she may have been on the verge of death, but she was still plenty strong.

  Cassandra made it to one of the Nautilus’s server banks—analogous to a neuronal cluster in the Nautilus’s distributed brain spread throughout the ship. She tapped the control besides the sliding doors and threw in the “sack of bees,” closed the door behind it. Let that nanite swarm square off with the countless nanite swarms inside the relay station there tasked with guarding the neuronal junction. The Nautilus would throw as much mind power as needed to shut the “bees” down rather than risk its own higher brain centers. It was a hell of a way to recruit the ship’s involvement in what was otherwise callous indifference to Cassandra’s own fate; if the Nautilus couldn’t repel the alien infection, like throwing off a good head cold, the entire ship would be impacted, as the supersentiences were tied to everything.

  Well, it wasn’t like Cassandra had a choice. Like it or not, she was the most bad-ass lifeform on the ship, and if she couldn’t contain the problem—the buck stopped with the Nautilus herself. The numerous lifeforms aboard might have specialized uses at which they might well outperform Cassandra, but when it came to putting down any bad guy anywhere, when you didn’t know what it could throw at you next, and indeed it and its hive mind intelligence could keep inventing new things to throw at you—well, none of these designer freaks were going to be of much help with that. For that you simply needed more creative mind power than Cassandra could throw at a problem.