The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  Asger restrained his smile. “No, they’re just better at politics. If you women are to learn negotiation tactics, but refuse to listen to Hertha, you might do well to pick up a thing or two from them.”

  Eira grunted. “Whatever. Lead on, contingency friends—contingent on this being one hell of a party.”

  Leon rose. The others of his kind followed. “Summon your dragons,” Leon said. “My people might enjoy some cultural exchange themselves.”

  “Hell, yes!” Crumley barked. “Can I keep one as a pet?”

  Leon grimaced and turned to Hertha. “Don’t you dare.”

  Hertha smiled.

  “What is the difference between a knife and an argumentative man?” Ajax asked, standing. Leon had turned six shades of green. “A knife actually has a point.”

  A moment of tense silence ensued.

  And then the Nouveau Vikings erupted laughing, men and women alike.

  “Just so you know,” Leon said, addressing the natives, “most of his jokes offend. Feel free to kill him if he gets on your nerves. God knows, you’d be doing us a favor.”

  Hertha smiled. Leon was growing on her. She had already decided he would be a better mate than Asger for a new breed of children. But such a thing was impossible. Even if it were not, she now needed to do what she could to build Asger up and bolster his ancestral memory, not tear him down. Their people and their world now depended on it. And so, apparently, did the world from which Leon and his kind had come.

  She was going to have her work cut out for her. All the more so as Leon had not told her everything. She could read him well enough to know he and his people weren’t entirely sure what to expect on the other side of that star gate. Had what was threatening their world come from there or not? Wherever the master race hailed from, and whatever its ultimate aim, whether they were more at war with other master races than with the lowly likes of Earthlings and Eresdrans, Leon was going to find out. He was headed toward danger, wherever he found it. Because knowing what he knew and doing nothing about it left his world vulnerable, and he was not about to stand for it. How alike one another the two races were. In his position, she would have acted no differently. Be honest, Hertha. You are in his position—only you, like the others of your kind, who barely survived their past encounter with a master race, chose to deny the horror of a situation so great that you couldn’t face it. Something you will do no more. Regardless of how you fare against a master race the next time you encounter one—the little people have already saved you.

  FOURTEEN

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  “So what’s the story with the nanites?” Cassandra asked. The chamber doors to Solo’s lab hadn’t even finished closing behind her as she continued strolling toward him. She was referring, of course, to the nanites infesting the star gate, which she’d unwittingly brought aboard the ship. Solo was smart enough to figure that part out for himself.

  “Out of curiosity, do you ever do pleasantries? You know, ‘hello, how are you, nice to see you after such a long time’?”

  Her stride stopped short of knocking over his work station; she was now standing beside him. “Have I tried to kill you recently? There’s your pleasantry.”

  Solo decided not to provoke her further and returned his eyes to the big screen monitor on which he was studying the star gate. “As far as I can tell, the nanites bear no relation to the monolith.”

  “I was certain they were part of its security and self-maintenance.”

  “A valid enough hypothesis, but one that I’m afraid doesn’t hold up to testing.” He showed her the nanites under magnification. They were the ones imprisoned in the crystal head of his cane. They were fighting valiantly to escape their multidimensional prison, showing off the extent of their morphing ability. “They’re definitely superior to your own nanites, able to morph faster, and able to learn even more quickly from failure to build better escape artists with each generation that might one day free them from my crystal prison. For all that, they’re really just a few generations ahead of what your mother gifted you by way of heredity.”

  “So, they were studying the monolith then, as we are.”

  “That’s my guess. They were probably sent into space to search out advanced life, or vestigial signs of it, as with the star gate. Whatever race designed the nanites—”

  “I think we got a good look at one of them back in the hall.”

  “They were in the market for higher intelligence, not additional real estate. I guess that makes sense, being as with nanites this advanced, taming worlds would not have been much of an issue.”

  “Why then isn’t this race simply everywhere?”

  Solo’s eyes darted to her briefly. “I have only theories.”

  “Like possibly they’re a warring species interested only in sport and finding the next contenders for its arenas.”

  “That’s one plausible explanation, yes. It’s also possible these warriors left a dying world the only way they could, by uploading themselves to the nanite hive minds before leaving behind a planet decimated by their kind.”

  Cassandra snorted. “And the monolith? If it’s not using the nanites to repair itself?”

  “As far as I can tell it is impervious to everything, you could stick it in the center of a sun, and it wouldn’t be fazed in the slightest. As to bombardment, you could fire a planet at it the way you do a cannon ball, and it would just bore through the planet and come out the other side.”

  “So, it’s self-repairing?”

  Solo sighed. She interpreted his sigh as “Once again I don’t have all the answers; I can only speculate.” “As far as I can tell, the obelisk doesn’t need to be. The material is just that immune from the ravages of time and space, which I guess makes sense if you’re going to build star gates. You couldn’t very well drag what you needed out here to maintain them, especially if the gate is down. And if outages are a no-go, well, why would you build the gates any other way?”

  “I can’t believe I’m asking this. And the pentagram shape itself? Is it actually employing magic to do what it does?”

  Solo took a deep breath—the sucking sound not too unlike the susurrus of the ship’s sliding doors—and held it. He seemed to be powering through some calculations in his head he hadn’t gotten to prior to her arrival.

  “It’s possible energy cycles through the shape in such a way that it contributes to one or more of its attributes, the way antigravity might be achieved by cycling energy through a given geometric configuration. It is also possible that the geometry of the gate is keyed to specific alternate realities that can only be accessed by attuning to the geometry of the space-time involved.”

  “You are long on speculation, short on answers.”

  “The Nautilus has tried everything in its arsenal to destroy the gate. It has also tried every means it can yet devise to communicate with it or to access any intelligence it embodies.”

  “Intelligence?”

  “It makes sense that someone would want intel on anything that passed through the gate, and that the intel in turn would have to be communicated somewhere. So yes, both intelligence and COMMS capabilities are implied.”

  She groaned. “I’ll leave you to meditate on any deeper implications regarding the obelisk. My interests are strictly related to strategy and tactics regarding how to defend against it or any civilization it’s connected to. In that regard—”

  “Yes?”

  “My gut tells me to run like hell.”

  “You’re not genetically wired that way. Just the opposite, in fact. You’re even quicker to run toward danger than the special ops forces on the planet below. Your nanites have evolved to crave battle in order to accelerate their learning curve.”

  “Yeah, well, that should tell you something.”

  She turned and exited the chamber, not bothering to look back.

  Solo thought about coming clean about the rest of his findings. But she had enough to chew on for now. The minds of the ot
hers, hers included, did not operate in multiple dimensions at once. Before this voyage was through, it was a trick he might well have to teach the Nautilus supersentience itself if they expected to survive. It was one thing for the Nautilus to communicate and even think across timelines—another thing entirely to think across dimensions.

  ***

  Cassandra considered some of the implications of Solo’s remarks as she strode through the maze of halls that was the Nautilus. Say one thing for the maze; it was very good for clearing the mind.

  If Solo was right, and that alien race behind the star gate’s nanite infestation had escaped their dying world the only way they could to continue to do what they loved best, thus spreading their wargames across the stars, they might be waiting for someone to unlock that gate for them. In all likelihood, it was just the one entity that had manifested earlier looking to get through. Perhaps members of this race flew solo.

  There was a decided tactical advantage to granting the nanite warrior’s wish. She could be the pawn they needed on the chessboard whose sacrifice might lend the crew of the Nautilus the intel they needed to do more than die, like all the other civilizations before them that had dared to pass through the gate.

  Whoever that bitch was that tackled her in the hall earlier, she may not have been much on deciphering puzzles of the kind the star gate posed, but she was one hell of a warrior—even more specialized than Cassandra at evolving under battlefield conditions to deal with evolving scenarios—scenarios unfolding so fast that no warrior—unless they were also a supersentient AI—could keep up—and the only way to do that while in bipedal form—as opposed to comprising a server bank taking up a building or perhaps an entire city—or the entire Nautilus as was the case in their situation—was to rely on hive minds genetically bred to integrate with a living body—be that body engineered as a carbon-based lifeform or a silicon-based lifeform, or some combination of substrates known and unknown to human-kind circa the early-twenty-first century. Unknown even to Natty’s father—whose mind, much like Natty’s—was likely running a good hundred years ahead of everyone else’s. Perhaps because like Tesla had himself once confessed—Natty and his father too had learned to tap the Akashic Records—or the memory of God—and so were able to pull through technologies ahead of their time for their world—but that had long existed on other worlds. A neat hat trick, assuming Natty could pull it off more than once.

  The father, likely now dead, would have uploaded the closest facsimile to his mind to the Nautilus’s AIs. Hopefully much of his creative genius thus resided in the Nautilus now as well. It might well explain her ability to store alien lifeforms aboard ship that it had engineered from scratch—that no one had yet to encounter across the heavens.

  The storehouse presented another problem, which their nano-alien infiltrator had painfully brought to light the instant she took humanoid form.

  They needed a librarian, a scholar for investigating the treasure troves aboard the Nautilus. Until such a figure was part of the team, they were working at a serious disadvantage, unable to utilize the bulk of what the ship could already do by way of its own humanoid crew still held in stasis. They would depend on the Nautilus AIs to alert Leon as to which of its humanoids was appropriate for a given mission. But Cassandra suspected that if the Nautilus’s chief supersentience was possessed by the ghost of Natty’s father, it, much like father and son, would be too interested in delving into new mysteries to pay much attention to its past accomplishments. And if Cassandra was right—they really needed that librarian.

  It was possible—once Cassandra was back in the Nautilus’s good graces—that she could put in a request for another avatar to serve as the librarian, the way the Laney and Natty avatars stood in for them. But how much mind power would the Nautilus truly relegate to creating such an avatar? There were likely countless untested potentialities related to the lifeforms aboard the vessel that the Nautilus wouldn’t take the time to explore. No, they needed someone with a souped-up brain that would give this issue their full attention—twenty-four-seven.

  Maybe Laney could genetically procure them such a person, and the Nautilus could incubate her in a matter of days using its voodoo-like tech methods.

  Cassandra steered a path through the maze toward Laney. Cassandra was good at mazes—it was part of the battlefield deployment acumen she was born with. If the Nautilus was looking to frustrate her because it was fishing for an apology for her rudely dropping a nanite-bomb inside its brain, it would have to do better.

  FIFTEEN

  THE NOUVEAU VIKING PLANET, ERESDRA

  Asger stared down into the valley below from the crest of the butte they were standing on, Leon at his side. “It’s best to jump,” Asger said. “It would take weeks to hike down.” Without waiting to hear how Leon felt about that, Asgar leapt. That was a shame, because Leon was distinctly not a fan of the leapfrogging idea. His bones were not made of steel from kicking around boulders and bouncing his head off of rocks all day; Leon had observed the pastime among Dag and Canute, looking to ward off decaying further past combat age.

  Leon sighed. His smart-suit would have to compensate for him. He vaulted off the cliff, spreading his arms and legs as he would in freefall jumping out of a plane. His camo fatigues sprouted the “skin flaps” between his arms and his chest and between his legs that one would expect on a flying squirrel. This passed as an extreme sport back on their world; the Alpha Unit kids needed a little more stimulation to get their blood flowing. Leon could only think of the flying morsels of food the earlier battle with this Viking-style race had created by way of severed limbs—and the predators all too happy to snatch them up.

  Leon got ready with his Bowie knife, pulling it from its sheath in advance.

  A third of the way down to the valley below, day turned to night—without the slightest warning. Whoever designed the orbital course of this planet around its sun was now officially on Leon’s shit list.

  Leon donned his night-vision goggles; his next-generation lenses wore like designer shades, not much of an impediment to hike around with, and easy enough to store in his cargo shirt’s pockets. The nanites on the periphery of the frame would keep them glued to his face despite the wind shear.

  Though he wished he hadn’t put them on.

  The sounds of the flying predators were daunting enough. Their good looks didn’t exactly detract from the fear factor.

  A soaring pelican—of sorts—swallowed up Leon before he could even react. Leon cut his way out of the gullet with his knife, resuming his freefall. The bird shrieked its protests, but didn’t follow him. By the time Leon had hit the ground below, he’d cut his way through the equivalent of three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree. Not that he could be counted on for numerical accuracy; it was all a blur. His psyche wasn’t ready for more combat just yet. There came a point when even the minds of veteran war horses like him, raised on battle, shut down; and everything just became reflexes and unconscious training, while the rest of his mind was out to lunch.

  Once on the valley floor, Leon was relieved to find that he didn’t really need the glasses. The forest was bioluminescent. Of course, the creatures that glowed—plant and animal alike—well, they would be the deadly ones. So, this much glow activity wasn’t meant to assist him in any way except to help him into the harrowing arms of the nearest predator, hoping he’d be enticed by all that glowed in the dark.

  As for the stars above, there were precious few in the night sky. The atmosphere wasn’t blocking them out, so… Leon didn’t much care for the implications. They had not traveled far enough to be at the edge of the universe, where stars had had time to burn out. So, who out here was lobbing suns at one another like fireballs thrown from catapults in medieval times? For civilizations with the technology to do so, Leon couldn’t argue the decided advantages it would give them. As to a black hole being responsible for the darkness of the night sky… Well, it would have taken a good many of them to vacu
um up this many suns. That meant the way out of here might well be a minefield of black holes to navigate—something that would tax even the Nautilus’s technology. Leon didn’t like that explanation any better for what was going on up there than the last one. Did the star gate itself consume them—five at a time—each time it fired up, in keeping with his original intuition of how it powered up?

  Why hadn’t he or anyone else noticed the paucity of stars in the vicinity previously? Was it just the way the star gate loomed out the viewport, the distance the ship was from it?

  “It’s over there, in the pool of darkness,” Asger said.

  Leon shifted his attention from the heavens above to the ground below, and stared in the direction of the black—the zone had zero illumination, even with his Augmented Reality field glasses, which included the night-vision function. “Is that because nothing grows there?”

  “Yes.” Asger’s abrupt response spoke volumes; Leon could feel Asger’s skin crawling though there wasn’t enough light to glimpse the goosebumps on his body.

  “You’ve been haunted by dreams of this place, and still you did not investigate?”

  “I didn’t want to end up like the plants and animals that got too close,” Asger replied, his voice as filled with reverence as with tempered fear.

  “But if it’s the key to your past…” Leon pressed, though he found Asger’s response satisfactory. The past might have enticed, but it likely had little bearing on their survival.

  “More like a puzzle piece. Who knows how they all fit together? This planet is littered with such gateways to the past which work no better than that star gate in the sky.”

  Leon gazed heavenward and saw it; the glowing pentagram was every bit as large as one of the planet’s moons from this distance. It had taken a bit more time for the sun’s radiance to catch it just right in order that it could brand the psyches of those upon whom it kept watch.

  “What the hell?” Leon found that try as he might he couldn’t get any closer to the killing field. He glanced down at the glowing grass fronds about his feet. They had cinched down on his boots, and their roots were too much for his legs to pull out. If Leon was still one of “the little people” they’d have cocooned him entirely.