And suddenly Leon understood his friend’s second-guessing Leon’s judgement; Patent really did empathize a little too strongly with the teens because at heart he was still one of them.
“We can’t afford to lose the war for the battle.” Leon let the gravity of his tone speak far more than his words could. “Let’s not forget what’s on the other side of that portal. Ironically, a suicidal plunge headlong at an enemy that is undoubtedly technologically far superior to us is the only chance we have of buying Earth time, and possibly finding a way to keep it from being blown off the star map—to say nothing of protecting these Nouveau Vikings, and any other friends we meet along the way.”
Patent sobered. “Yes, of course, Leon. Forgive me. My behavior is inexcusable under the circumstances.”
Typical Patent. He hated letting Leon down in any way to any degree—ever. In his mind you couldn’t be part of Omega Force otherwise. Patent may be Alpha Unit’s leader, but he was on loan from Omega Force. Leon put his hand on his friend’s shoulder to keep him from ripping the Omega Force symbol off his sleeve.
“And if your kids beat up on themselves like that after a failure, what would you say?”
Patent snorted. “Only a sorry excuse for a soldier feels sorry for himself. Now get off your ass and get moving!”
Leon smiled. He handed Patent a kit with hypodermics. “They’ll need to inject themselves with one of these syringes to ward off the radioactive effects of the alien vessel. The Nautilus has it within a containment field, so it won’t affect the rest of the ship. But they’ll need the shots to last even a few hours on the other side of that energy field. Make sure they set their watches to rotate out every two hours for another injection. That or program one of your bots to find them and inject them if you think they’re too incorrigible.”
“Plan B it is,” Patent said taking the kit of needles from Leon, probably thinking his teens were no less incorrigible than he was; he was a pit bull when he got his jaws around a problem, never letting go.
Patent turned and made his bird calls, each one attuned to a different one of his cadets, no doubt summoning the three Leon had requested. Leon was already beaming back to the Nautilus. He needed to confer with Natty and Laney, and the other dynamic duo, Cassandra and Solo. The Nautilus would automatically hack the nanites responsible for Leon’s gigantism, reducing him to his normal size upon receiving him back on the ship.
***
Satellite and Ariel double timed it to Patent’s location. “Where’s Starhawk? Why isn’t he responding to the royal summons?” Patent asked, his tone testier than he would have liked, but he didn’t brook disrespect all that well.
“He’s riding one of the dragons overhead, sir,” Satellite explained. “As far as we can tell, he’s the one keeping them all flying.”
“Have to admire his ability to patch their wounds as fast as those jet fighters can deploy their arsenal,” Ariel chimed in, “being as the smart planes and smart weapons can morph, too, and that the craft are all basically flying laboratories for cranking out new in-flight fighting solutions.”
“Since when?” Patent blurted, taking the cigar out of his mouth.
“Oh, we realized that where we’re headed, there’s no way Alpha Unit techies can tweak weapons systems fast enough without employing the AIs. Our job from here on out is to upgrade their algorithms over time to increase the weapons systems survivability and morphability.”
Patent realized he was turning into stone, his hang-jawed expression at risk of being forever etched on his face. He shook it off. “I’m sorry, did you say that Skyhawk is up there? I’m sure I heard you wrong.”
“Yeah, I don’t get it either; he’s terrified of heights,” Ariel said.
“Ooh!” Satellite said excitedly, talking to Ariel now instead of Patent. “You think he has some mind meld thing going with the dragon to mitigate his fears? Keyed in to her adrenaline rush, it might be enough.”
Ariel smirked. “I think not everyone has your way with communications, Satellite. That goes for interspecies communications as well. You should remember that.”
“Yeah, you’re right, I’m being silly. Watch way too much old movies like Star Trek, and, well, Eragon, too.”
“Enough, you two,” Patent barked. “Find him and the three of you get your asses back to the Nautilus. You’re needed to access the artifact on the crashed alien spaceship Leon found if we’re ever to get through that star gate.” Patent stared up at the star gate in the sky, surprised that even all the battlefield antics could pull focus from it; it was a hell of a sight.
“Yes, sir!” They gave him a mock salute because that was the only kind they ever gave. These teens weren’t exactly recruited for being army brats. They respected authority like Patent respected a restraining order to keep his hands of a combatant’s throat.
Satellite signaled Skyhawk—who proceeded to land his dragon right in front of Patent. “Well, I’ll be,” Patent said, taking his cigar out of his mouth to reprise his flabbergasted expression.
“Um, you think I can fly that thing some time?” he asked Skyhawk as he slid off his mount.
“Hell, you can fly it all the time as far as I’m concerned. I’m desperate to get her to mind meld with someone else. I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life from tonight alone.”
Patent smiled. “Well, in that case, beam that thing aboard the Nautilus before the locals get wind of what we’re doing.”
“Ah, there’s no way that ship is big enough for a flying dragon,” Starhawk said.
“Oh, yes it is.” Satellite was already putting through the request to the Nautilus to beam them up—three plus one dragon.
Ariel was doing some beaming of her own Skyhawk’s way, her smile nearly as wide as her face. “You have no idea how big that ship is.”
Skyhawk gulped. “You wouldn’t happen to have any anti-nightmare tech on hand would you?”
Ariel and Satellite were too busy playing with their toys that gave them access to the artifact, even before they were aboard, to answer him. Starhawk, for his part, wanted nothing to do with the relic.
“God damn it!” Patent snapped as the dragon, too, dematerialized along with Starhawk, Satellite, and Ariel. Patent could no longer pet the dragon; his hand was passing straight through it and he wasn’t taking well to that at all.
***
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Starhawk, Satellite, and Ariel all materialized before the alien starship inside the containment field within one of the Nautilus’s many laboratories. The chamber had the look and feel of an airplane hangar. The three teens had manifested equidistant from one another about the beamed-aboard craft. All of them were staring up at it hovering there. It looked like a giant clam.
“Holy shit!” they all said in tandem.
If Starhawk couldn’t be bothered to get out his scanner before, he did so now, reaching into his backpack. He kept running his eyes over the screens he was flicking through and the vessel in front of them.
“Ah, guys,” he said, “if my readings are correct, we really don’t want to go through that Star Gate. Not now. Not ever.”
ACT THREE
THE FOURTH BRAIN
THETA
SEVENTEEN
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Laney turned at the swishing sound of the sliding chamber doors behind her leading to her lab. It was Natty, ostensibly her husband; though it had been a long time since they’d been in the same room. “We’ve been conspicuously absent from the goings on of late,” she said, “missing out on the action on the planet and on the Nautilus, to say nothing of the Star Gate.”
“We’ve been isolating from one another as well, using our avatars to communicate, a bad habit we picked up in the Amazon Jungle, as memory serves.”
She let the dig slide. What was the point? There lay a heap of far more major injustices between them.
“Laney, if we don’t learn to work together better, fast, we may get through that star gate
, but we won’t survive what’s on the other side, and we sure as hell won’t be coming back.”
She knew where he’d been headed at “if we don’t…”. It was in his tone and on his face. She was tempted to cut him off. But giving a front seat to their relationship drama seemed selfish considering all the lives on the line. And he was right; if they didn’t learn to work together better, they were all dead.
“I agree,” she managed, her tone curt, and her back already turning to him.
She heard him groan behind her back. “What do you suggest as a pilot project—you know—so we can learn to work together?” Her tone said it all. Surprisingly, he didn’t rise to the bait.
“I have just the thing,” he answered, actually sounding eager. He moved to her console and nudged her aside. “A librarian.” He already had an image up of what he thought would make a good librarian. Not surprisingly, they were disagreeing already. “According to Cassandra, we need one. The Nautilus is too preoccupied with her many duties to run down every possible utilization of her vast storehouse of synthetic lifeforms which she conjured out of the depths of her mind. And Techa only knows which one might actually hold the key for us if we get caught between a rock and a hard place.”
“But the Nautilus’s mind works across dimensions,” Laney protested, “and it can share intel gathered from other timelines where these prototypes have already been tested. So she really doesn’t have to devote the thought.”
“Yes, well, that’s all fine and good, but what if this function breaks down? The mere act of passing through the star gate caused irreparable damage to the ship that crashed on Eresdra. Besides, who’s to say our librarian isn’t an idea that won’t catch on in the other timelines. If we keep looking to those timelines for answers, we fail to play our part in supplying them a few solutions to things.”
She wasn’t sold, but the fact that the enterprise seemed one notch above a complete waste of time to her was probably for the best. The less emotionally invested in the outcome of the experiment, the less likely she was to fight with Natty over the smallest things. They might want to save all that ardor for the battles and the war of wars to come. “Fine,” she said, “you win.” She let her tone convey for her the hollow victory that was his.
He smiled all the same. She shouldn’t act surprised; that was all the rise they got out of one another anymore, hollow victories; concessions born of exhaustion from quibbling and wanting to minimize time with one another. The last time they were on the same page was in the middle of the Amazon fighting for their lives. She could only hope for the same good fortune this time; in their own way, they had become as bad as the soldiers who couldn’t come to terms with who they were outside of battle. Though, for her and Natty, combat was more an OCD-like distraction from what was really bugging them.
She had been keying away on the desktop monitor whose images could be broadcast to the big screen out in front of them, refining his idea of a proper curator. She transferred her finalized take on the librarian with a flick of her hand for him to scrutinize. “Really?” he said, managing to sound condescending, delighted and impressed at the same time. She doubted he could have squeezed together the discordant feelings into a well-annealed whole if they hadn’t been living together as long as they had.
“My fifth grade Spanish teacher?” Natty stared at the Catholic nun in her habit.
Laney smiled. “You used to tell me you loved getting scolded by her. It made up for an absentee father and mother. At least she showed she cared.”
“But you’re going to subject her rigid psyche—which was laughable back then—to what we have to deal with out here? Seems unnecessarily cruel to her, not to me, and I’m sure you just mean to be cruel to me in a passive-aggressive way.”
Laney smiled. “Don’t look now, but this latest adventure is all about reconciling discordant aspects of our psyches, and forging relationships that similarly have no right to exist at all. In the latter case: your Nouveau Vikings of Eresdra versus the futuristic Omega Force and Alpha Unit warriors; you and I. In the former case: plunging headlong impulsively through that star gate while simultaneously considering every angle; risking the earth on a gut intuition regarding the true nature of the artifact on the moon—to then summon more scientific acumen than is possible in support of that hunch, in the form of the Nautilus…”
“Fine. You’ve made your point. It’s about time that silly old bird got over herself,” he said, staring at the image of the nun. “Dying to see how she resolves the contradictions between creationism and evolution—speaking of the forging of unlikely bedfellows.”
Natty snapped his fingers. “Wait! Creating paradoxes! What if that’s the way through the star gate!”
She looked at him deadpan. “I thought we were leaving the star gate for Alpha Unit, and letting them figure out how to activate it.”
“We are, I mean, I am, but… Think about it. We’re all imagining that some kind of scientific power we don’t understand is behind the star gate, which uses a different technology than the hyperspace technology the Nautilus uses. E.g. maybe the gate cuts travel time across our universe. Maybe it is more like a time machine that moves you between timelines and alternate realities. But none of that would stop true evil from getting through the gate. If that was your aim, you’d need a way to ensure that only Zen masters, holy men and women, and the like, who have learned to control their minds, to reconcile opposites, to fully integrate their psyches, conscious and unconscious minds, left and right brains…could get through.”
Laney sighed. “You think the star gate runs off of psychic energy?” She had to admit she rather loved the idea, but she was never going to let her face show it. “Wait a minute, wouldn’t that nullify your whole gut instinct to begin with regarding what the artifact on the moon actually signifies? If the monolith on the moon was put there as an if-all-else-fails measure, for when the master race comes through all the gates again, in case we haven’t learned to defend ourselves properly in time, to move the planet out of harm’s way, at least temporarily… Well, a master race of warring Zen masters? You have to admit, that doesn’t exactly make sense.”
Natty sighed, deflated. “No, it doesn’t.”
“And you’re mixing two ideas into one. Is the gate meant to thwart those who wish to spread evil across the cosmos, or is it meant to thwart those who haven’t fully integrated every facet of their psyches in order to have the additional mind power they need to deal with what’s on the other side?”
Natty groaned. It wasn’t just her logic… He was succumbing to the gravity well that had become his mind, forged as it was on growing insecurities of living up to the challenge of why the star gate was constructed, how it worked… and then… “Unless…!”
Laney knew her husband had a mercurial personality. He was up as rapidly as he was down; the revelations were the up on the yo-yo, and problems that wouldn’t yield to his particularly quick mind, the down. So she was used to this; she supposed she even liked this quality about him, but it was closely married to the boyish part of his personality, and she was getting a little too tired of the perpetual child that was her husband. When she grew too tired of this side of him, which he presented to the world to the exclusion of all other sides, this is where they ended back up, at square one, where they were now.
“What if moving through the gates is more like a game of checkers than chess? You have to get through all of them to be crowned on the other side—so you can turn into a master race?”
“But…” Laney tried to keep her mind in sync with his. “Wait, you’re saying that the civilization that laid them out knew that for anyone to survive what was beyond the last star gate, they had to already be playing at their level? So the creators of the star gates designed a game to graduate the players to master race status the only way they knew how?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s what I’m saying, which when you say it makes me realize it’s just a restating of my earlier hypothesis. I mean, it stand
s to reason we have to survive all the star gates that come before first…”
“Yeah, but you were just banking that traveling to alien worlds and battling what was on the other side of the star gates would do the trick. Part of you had to know that couldn’t be all there was to it, and if it was, it would explain why you could get to the last gate and still not be ready to face what was on the other side.”
“Not just a part of me, a part of you. What do you think was up with the Catholic nun and the whole getting-the-many-irreconcilable-elements-inside-and-outside-our-heads-to-sing-in-key strategy of yours, but—”
“Okay, fine; so I guess we both landed on the one obvious revelation that should have occurred to anyone. Let’s not go patting ourselves on the backs just yet. All the more true when you think that our unconscious had this very revelation to bestow to us on day one; it just had to cut past all the resistance from our conscious minds for our original notions to go from being half-baked to fully baked.”
Natty’s eyes widened. He kissed his wife’s forehead. “You’re a genius, my dear.”
“We both are, so what?”
“It was theorized a long time ago by Ken Wilber that there are many dimensions to the unconscious mind, beyond the one dimension that Freud identified. Jung speculated, for instance, that a deeper level put us in communication with all our fellow humans, perhaps with all of conscious life throughout the cosmos. But Wilber went further. He suggested that if you drill down deep enough, you arrive at the quantum brain—the part of us that can outmaneuver the smartest and fastest supercomputers, because at this level, we’re not just in communication with the All, we think as the All thinks; we share the same mind. If that’s true, and I can open that connection and keep it open, we might yet have a chance against those master races.”
“So, you’re saying not just our conscious minds were rebelling from these higher truths, but various levels of our unconscious minds as well? Like Moses, unable to look into the burning bush.”
The Star Gate Page 17
