The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  Cronos saw the bottom half of himself fall away as he held on to the closed beak of the dragon’s tilted head. “Why does this shit always happen to me? I got my balls cut off the last time I was out with you guys.”

  “Really? That’s rough, man.” Skyhawk’s tone was sincere. What guy’s wouldn’t be?

  Skyhawk’s dragon righted his head, and what remained of Cronos fell away to the ground below; Cronos bitched the whole time. It was weird seeing him vulnerable like that. With that chrome-dome, shaved head of his, and those Mt. Rushmore features, he always looked more impenetrable than vulnerable.

  Cronos’s dragon took serious objection to her rider being cut in half. It came after his dragon with a vengeance. “Leave it to you, Skyhawk, to play tick on the back of a dragon—while its wrestling in midair. And they say you can’t deal with reality. Can anyone blame me?!”

  He kept his head down and his chest glued to his dragon’s back. The other dragon was reaching for him, but his dragon was really good with the corkscrew turns, the barrel rolls, the deadfalls, the duck and covers. He’d be able to describe this aerial wrestling match better maybe if he was a World War II flying ace. “Could you just explain to that other dragon that it was all a big mistake! You thought the human on its back was a worm trying to burrow into her. You were really just performing a social service.” He wasn’t sure if his raised voice just wasn’t cutting it out here with all the noise of war, or if neither dragon could be much touched by reason at this point of their heated exchange.

  “’Em, need I remind you, guys,” Starhawk stubbornly continued to address the dragons, “we’re really just having fun here. This isn’t meant to be a real fight, you know, just downtime between battles. At least that’s how it was explained to me.”

  ***

  Patent put his hand up to his forehead, using it as a visor. You’d think he was staring into the sun at high noon so had no other choice but to shelter his eyes. Between the incendiary eggs the dragons were dropping and the fiery blasts coming from the mouths of the dragons with riders, the night sky was brighter than his aging eyes could adjust to in time.

  “Is that Skyhawk riding that dragon?” He squinted further. “Nah. My eyes must be playing tricks on me.” Patent donned the Augmented Reality shades, which automatically corrected for too much or too little illumination, stared at the dragon rider in the sky. He still looked like Skyhawk. Patent took off the shades and shook them. “Must be a short in the lenses.”

  ***

  Skyhawk’s dragon dived down and he could suddenly feel his stomach in his throat. “Could we at least kill off the other side, and leave my guys alone!” Skyhawk shouted at his dragon.

  “I can read your mind, remember? You don’t need to shout.”

  “If you can read my mind, then why aren’t we in a cave somewhere, taking shelter well away from this madness?”

  “There is no safe haven on Eresdra. But I can lower your stress level by putting a quick end to the war games.”

  “Really? Well, in that case, carry on.”

  She banked right and noticed how ably Starhawk shifted his upper body weight left. “How come you have the reflexes of a trained dragon rider, if you have never flown before?”

  “I play beaucoup video games.” He tried to visualize what he was talking about for her.

  “I see. You won’t need those anymore. Now that we’re mind-linked I can treat you to my many battle encounters from the past. You’ll see them from the perspective of my last riders. I’ll come to you in your dreams at night.”

  Skyhawk sighed. “This just gets better and better. Those aren’t called dreams by the way; they’re called nightmares. Apparently you haven’t mastered all the subtleties of our language.”

  “I’m known as Unas.”

  “My name is Skyhawk. Never mind the irony.”

  He could hear Unas laughing inside his head. “You cannot escape your destiny, Skyhawk.”

  “I would say the longer I stay on your back the better my chances of escaping all destines.”

  Unas dove down and with one of her signature swirling moves plucked Canute off his mount. While still turning over on herself, she sliced him in half by simply closing her beak. Canute’s outcry carried all the fury of a dragon’s. He stared at the bottom half of himself falling away faster than the top half. “Well, that cures the arthritis problem in the legs,” he quipped.

  “That’s a good one-liner, old man!” Starhawk shouted after him, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Too bad your sword isn’t as fast as your tongue!”

  Canute’s dragon took out her frustrations on Skyhawk. Skyhawk ducked and pulled the hoodie over his head to avoid being scalded along his back by the other dragon’s flames.

  He sat back up in time to see Unas take a thorny projection from the spine of Canute’s dragon to the eye. Unas shrieked in pain. She didn’t get long to be distracted by it. In the next instant the dragon she had clipped of its rider much earlier—Cronos to be exact—came up from behind her. It swooped down below her and turned on its back in time to line up its talons with her underside, and then gutted her with one swipe of its raking toenails.

  “Shit!” Skyhawk went to work. He pulled a headband out of his shoulder pocket that, as it turned out, did a half decent job of keeping his long hair and bangs out of his face. He should have thought to employ it earlier, though that was hardly its function. He reached into one of the pouches on his belt and tossed a handful of crab bots onto the dragon. These weren’t nanobots, exactly. They functioned at a higher scale of magnification. You could probably fit a dozen of them inside a sugar cube, but no more.

  Receiving instructions “telepathically” from Skyhawk, by way of the headband, they scurried toward Unas’s partly eviscerated organs and commenced stitching her together, while excreting powerful painkillers. They had been multiplying in number and growing in size as they scampered toward the belly wound, converting the radiant heat energy given off by the other dragons along with the piezoelectric energy of their own movements, and the rich mix of hydrocarbons in the air that were a consequence of so many fire-breathers in the vicinity, to foster their proliferation.

  As to Unas’s damaged right eye… For that Skyhawk would need the snake. He pulled the serpent out of another waist pouch on his belt. It was a few feet long and about the thickness of a pencil. The different colored bands along its surface denoted the different types of nanites that made it up. The snake, responding to Starhawk’s headband, slithered along the dragon’s back, toward her eyes.

  Once at the damaged eye, the snake slithered into the eye socket between the spike in Unas’s eye and the tear duct. Starhawk could see it burrowing into the cavity to commence work on the wound. The various bands of the snake were dissolving; each set of nanites marching off to do what it did best. One set of nanites was already pushing the spike out of the eye by multiplying themselves to serve as the wedge, and by increasing the slipperiness of the socket, reducing the friction the thorn needed to maintain its hold.

  The other colors of the banded snake were differentiating further to heal blood vessels and nerves, stem the flow of blood, fire up the stem cells to repair the damaged tissue. And, of course, the most important band on that banded snake of all was the color mastering the alien physiology, to fine tune the fix to Unas.

  The entire time that was going on, Unas stayed in the game, fighting, dealing with the pain, and causing more shock and awe among the enemy.

  She swooped down and flambéed Dag. But Dag, like the rest of the Nouveau Vikings, was largely flame retardant, owing to generations of riding the dragons. “Worry not,” Starhawk said. “I’ll fix his ass.”

  Starhawk reached into one of his cargo pants pockets and released the catfish. This assemblage of nanobots possessed a hive mind that held this configuration long enough to use the big eyes on the catfish and the vestigial legs to get its bearings and assess the situation. The whole time it was subdividing into ever smaller catfish.
When it had scaled down enough to slip between Unas’s scales, it, or they, did so. Each of those hive minds would now devote themselves to attending to Unas’s psychic requests for weapons retrofits. The first one being the upping of the intensity of the flames she shot out of her mouth.

  Skyhawk was conveying the hows and whys of what he was doing the entire time by projecting the pictures into Unas’s head that told the story. She was a quick learner. The next time she dived down and breathed fire on Dag he looked like a roasted marshmallow before falling off his mount. He screamed and convulsed in agony all the way down to the desert floor below. The dry terrain they were in within this crest of mountains, cordoned off from the more tropical foliage beyond the ridge lines was a good location for their wargames—unless they wanted to unsettle the local wildlife and add to their woes.

  Unas’s wounds had healed now, the spike driven out of her right eye, and the belly stitched back together. The crab bots, their job of belly-wound healing completed, scurried about her surface ducking for cover underneath her scales and waiting for the next opportunity to spring into action.

  “You are my best rider ever!” Unas declared.

  “Somehow I doubt that,” he said, putting on a pair of shades after popping out one of the opaque, black lenses.

  “You’re blinding yourself in one eye to take away your depth perception?”

  Skyhawk gazed down at the ground below. “Yeah, it’s working wonders. Now it looks like the ground is just a few feet away instead of, what is this—miles? Wait, don’t tell me, I really don’t want to know.”

  She chuckled in his head. “Your commander is wrong, Skyhawk. You do not need more courage and fighting prowess; you need to be more you.”

  “Good luck selling that idea, but I like where your head’s at.”

  ***

  The staggering along the desert floor, burning alive, charcoaled Dag wandered into Canute. The two halves of Canute were being brought back together again and mended by the Earth people’s robots. The tiny robots came in different sizes and reminded Dag of Eresdra’s many insects—all vile and deadly; only these were all transparent and damn hard to see. He assumed that was on purpose.

  “How are you doing, old man?” Dag asked.

  “Who are you calling old? I’m not old; I’m just greying prematurely.”

  “You mean you’re aging prematurely. Well?”

  “I haven’t felt this good in years,” Canute confessed. “Though, once they reattach my legs and I can feel my arthritic pains again, who knows how long that will last?”

  Cronos, who had also been cut in two, being made whole again on the ground beside him, interjected himself into their conversation. “The repair bots can read your minds—the smallest of them, anyway, the ones we refer to as nanobots that live inside your body. You can request they take away the arthritis and any other signs of age you’d like to get rid of.”

  Dag and Canute regarded one another, and then Dag replied to Cronos, “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m putting in a request for a bigger dick myself, while they’re at it,” Cronos informed them. “I miss the one I had; this one was cut off an enemy and stitched on me.”

  Canute sighed. “At your age I can’t argue your sense of priorities. As for me, I rather enjoy not being harassed by the women. I will stay old, minus all the aches and pains.” He scrunched up his face as he concentrated at the nanites in his mind’s eye to broadcast his instructions to them.

  “You really don’t have to burst a blood vessel to communicate with them,” Cronos explained.

  “He’s right,” Dag said. “I told mine I want to keep the whole burning alive thing going permanently, to intimidate the hell out of my enemies. Look, isn’t this wonderful? And no pain!”

  Canute watched his charcoaled friend regain his stride and burst into flames again, and frowned. “Should be a godsend in winter. I’ll take curling up next to your fiery body over the wife any day.”

  Less than an hour later Canute was whole again and already drunk. He stared at the bottle in his hand. “Marvelous stuff,” he said, swaying like a frond in the breeze. He hugged his new best friend, Crumley, from the side. “How do you say this is procured?”

  “Worry not. I will leave the distillery and the recipes for how to do a dozen or more of these fine liquors from your local fruits, and an even longer list of potential candidates that I think you might enjoy experimenting with that I didn’t have the time to.”

  “You are the greatest friend ever.” Canute gazed up at Dag making a ruckus. Now that he was a human charcoal briquette, walking about burning alive, he was getting testy with some of the local insects—with the size and disposition of Earth’s tigers, or so he was told. He charged them head on and wrestled with them. Canute shook his head. “I’m so glad I’m over having to prove myself like that.” He sighed. “Sad, really.” He panned his head to his new best friend. “Hey, want to go jump off a cliff next? In your language it would be referred to as God’s perch. It’s sure death, I’m told.” He held out the bottle. “But on this stuff, I’m not so sure.”

  Crumley laughed. “You’re definitely a few drinks ahead of me. Let me catch up and you can ask me then.”

  Canute graciously filled his mug for him with the bottle in hand and returned his eyes to the antics in the sky—the younger generation having the time of their lives in the jetfighters and on dragons.

  ***

  “Is that Skyhawk on that dragon?” Leon asked, gazing up from the desert floor, as Patent came up to him, smoking his cigar.

  “No, our eyes are playing tricks on us. Perhaps it is the noxious dragon farts. Must be some kind of hallucinogenic. Trust me, that kid is hiding under a rock somewhere playing video games. He doesn’t do reality at all, swore off it years ago.”

  “You’re getting soft in your old age, Patent. There was a time—”

  Patent waved Leon off dismissively. “Ah, the kid makes up for it in other ways. I’m not saying I’m not determined to break him of his virtual reality fetish, but his saving graces are definitely buying him some time.”

  Round two of the aerial skirmishes had begun. The two men were watching the battle taking place above their heads between the dragons and the jet fighters the entire time they were yakking. Sufficiently pickled, Dag and Canute joined Eira, and Freja in the jet fighters. It had taken the Nouveau Vikings some time to get their minds around the controls in the cockpits. But Alpha Unit supplied them with headbands to give them a telepathic connection with the smart ships. And they were now taking to the air with a gusto. The last of the Nouveau Vikings that had been hesitant to jump into those craft had since abandoned their dragons to fight for them while they took to the jet fighters. The fighter craft buzzed around the dragons, smaller, and far more maneuverable, and moving way faster. For all that, the dragons were adapting. They were proving immune to the jet fighters’ weapons.

  “There’s no way those dragons are surviving our jet fighters without help from Skyhawk,” Leon said. “He really must be up there, doctoring them. He’s quite the animal lover, I hear.”

  “We’re hallucinating, I tell you,” Patent said, taking the cigar out of his mouth. “You couldn’t get him into a battle waging this hot if you sprayed the air with pheromones strong enough to throw him into heat and make him think everything that moved up there was an angel come to mate with him.”

  Leon snorted. “Well, I’ll leave you to readying your Alpha Unit teens for battle. That’s what you do best. For right now, I need their help, and yours, with something else.”

  Patent peeled his eyes off the sky to take in Leon directly.

  “We found the spaceship with the artifact we need to get through the gate. The Nautilus has already beamed the ship aboard.”

  Patent’s mouth went wide. “You beamed an entire ship aboard! Just how big is the Nautilus?”

  “It’s constantly being built out, so the short answer to that is ‘bigger by the day’. I’m told there
’s a Roman coliseum in place already where we can watch the genetically uplifted dinosaurs, the Nomads, pitted against one another. Apparently that’s how they were trained to fight us initially in the Amazon.”

  “Why, that’s marvelous! Who doesn’t enjoy a Roman blood bath before breakfast?”

  “Try and contain your excitement. First we work, then we play. You think…?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. I’ll redirect the teens to your science project, though pulling them away from here will be no small feat now that they’ve gone hybrid on me.”

  “Hybrid?”

  “They’ve got their VR headgear on. So, in their minds, none of this is real, it’s just next-generation VR. Actually, I think they call it AR—for Augmented Reality. And now that they’ve perfected the back-from-the-dead technology, it may as well be both. They’re used to dying over and over again in VR. They just limit how many lives they get based on how well they’re performing in battle. No doubt they’ve already got a points system worked out.”

  “A hundred points, or two lives, for each dragon someone takes out,” Satellite said, walking by and overhearing this snippet of their conversation.

  Patent frowned. “It’s always preferable to think I’m merely blowing things out of proportion.” He glanced away from watching Alpha Unit in action and back at Leon. “Does seem a shame to take the kids away now that they’re fully engaged. They could use the battle practice.”

  Leon sighed, thinking of what was coming. “Yes, they could. Very well, just lend me Ariel and Satellite then, and Skyhawk—if you can find him. They’ll know who else to draw in if they get stuck hacking that artifact.”

  “Why isn’t the Nautilus on the job?” Patent’s tone suggested he was having second thoughts about Leon’s judgement.

  “It is. But she will only devote so much mind power to the problem; it’s got too many other tasks that require her attention.”

  Patent sighed his resignation. “You’re really painting me as the bad guy here. I know how much I hate to have my fun interrupted. You’re making me out to be a hypocrite.”