It was weird seeing how thoroughly Theta Team swept over the interior, like a CSI unit to end all CSI units—adapted to poring over alien environments. He wondered what they might do set loose on a world. This much coordinated intelligence focused on the life sciences—shit, they might just be able to hack Gaia—the supersentience that coordinated the lifeforms on any planet; back on Earth they also referred to Gaia as Mother Earth.
Starhawk’s skin was suddenly riddled with goose bumps. Had the Nautilus put that insight into his head? Was that what she was up to all along with the creation of the crew? One of her self-imposed assignments? Maybe Theta Team was her designation for this unit and maybe she got to name it because she came up with it, and she was just using Starhawk as an emissary to communicate the essence of the group to Leon and the others.
He couldn’t shake the skin-crawling sensation Theta Team triggered in him. Maybe it was just the Nautilus that was creating the sensation to highlight or punctuate his thinking, to let him know he was on the right track. So, now they had a squad of super fighters in Omega Force, of super-techies to enable those fighters in Alpha Unit—and these guys—the planet talkers, that in their own way, might well avert confrontations of a militaristic nature with their more sophisticated acumen for understanding the entire gestalt of a planet, or failing that, could empower Omega Force and Alpha Units to survive new habitats in ways they could only dream of. Shit, why hadn’t they thought to bring along these specialists before leaving the Earth? So much for Leon as the supreme logistical be-all-and-end-all strategist. Maybe Starhawk should cut the guy some slack; it wasn’t like he didn’t have his hands full taming a universe that wanted to kill them in ways they also couldn’t dream of. And, to be fair, no one on Earth could have been procured to match the expertise these humanoids came with—they were created the only way they could be, bioengineered by the Nautilus’s super-sentience; no human bioengineers, not even a city full of scientists with Laney’s aptitudes could have matched this endeavor. A humbling thought, for more than just Laney.
But Starhawk did not come here to be humbled. If he was right, he was going to be feeling damn full of himself. He let go of the thunderous impact of Theta Team to his psyche and headed down toward the command bridge at the bottom of the craft; the theater-in the round.
He was already accessing the insights from Satellite and Ariel who had explored and excavated this place earlier, courtesy of the Nautilus and the nanite-COMMS array in his brain. That saved time identifying which part of the ship served as the command bridge and how to activate the bridge once he got there.
The instant Starhawk got his hands on a section of the interlinking desktop computers that connected like LEGO blocks to form a perfect circle about the empty stage of the bridge—the entire conglomeration used to manifest the digested data being filtered by the rest of the crew in the form of holograms—Satellite said, “Naughty, Naughty girl, I need your help.” He was addressing the Nautilus, of course.
“And you are such a Naughty girl, aren’t you?” Did supersentients appreciate punning humor?
The Nautilus created the avatars Starhawk needed of himself, so that another version of him could occupy each of the interlinked work stations in turn surrounding the central circle. She had synthesized the clones out of nanites in the air—they weren’t even her nanites; she’d hacked the ones aboard the alien vessel. There were gasps and an uprising of protests from the gallery of Theta Team scientist-soldiers working behind him. At least he assumed they were natural born soldiers every bit as much as natural born scientists with the physiques they’d been gifted with genetically. They did not appreciate the Nautilus or Starhawk hacking the nanites in the ship before they could be studied more in-depth. Starhawk was disturbing a precious archeological find in their minds. “Sorry, guys!” he shouted. “This’ll just take a second.”
He glanced over his shoulder at some of those soldier-scientists hiking down the bleachers of the enclosed coliseum toward him; It just occurred to “David” that he was in a room with nothing but “Goliaths” that made even Leon and Patent look diminutive. “At least it better take just a second,” Satellite muttered to himself, “if you plan to live through this.”
He and the rest of his clones rapid-keyed the displays before them. The sequence of actions Starhawk was planning to perform he’d farmed out to the rest of his avatars so they could do the work in parallel instead to save time.
“Got it!” he squealed as one of the soldier-scientists got their hand around his neck and held him a few feet off the ground. “Nauti, you can release their nanites back to them now,” he managed to get out with what remaining air he had in his lungs that he could still force out past the vice grip.
The instant the avatars disappeared and the “smell of the place” returned to a baseline the more sensitive noses of the Theta Team recognized as “Habitat restored to baseline,” the hulk—in a lovely designer cascade of purplish colors, by the way—very designer—set Starhawk down and hiked back up the coliseum stairwell he’d come down.
Starhawk verbalized though he didn’t really need to, he simply could have thought it, “Nauti, you better get those findings to Natty and Leon.”
***
Natty looked away from the next-generation nanites he was designing at his work station to interoperate at a scale never before attempted—millions of them able to saturate a single cell in the body, each one a type of mitochondria—only attuned to a different wavelength of energy or food source—at the flicking light on the far right monitor. There he had graphically pictured the puzzle pieces still needed to be slid into place to form the key to unlock the star gate, a key that was increasingly multidimensional in nature.
“Shit, someone did it.” Natty rolled his chair over to the far right monitor, passed his hand over the screen as if to confirm what his eyes were relaying to him by way of the extra sensory input of his fingers. “Starhawk hacked the technology that crashed ship was using to warp space inside it. Without this, Natty, you could never have scaled down your nanites enough to establish a connection with the quantum mind and keep it open. That guy just saved your butt. You promised Leon you’d be ready in two hours, but two centuries wouldn’t have been enough without this missing piece. Remind me to kiss this guy—even if my wife is in the room.”
Natty slid his chair back to the monitor he was at before and, utilizing the latest intel, drilled down to the next scale in nano-design. Laney would have the same information at her end and would be working to scale down the biological components she was designing for their humanoid bodies to get those components to better interact with the new nanites he was creating. She’d be doing that and so much more; most of the heavy-lifting in fact was really down to her as the final pieces came together at the quantum level of the biophysics at which they were now both working.
***
Laney paced her lab. Each aisle contained innumerable computer printers assembling viral components with which she could infect hosts at a scale she could not appreciate even through a microscope. So she walked the aisles with her Augmented Reality visor on, observing what was happening at the assembly level.
A beeping sound caused her to rip the visor off her face. Against the far wall, the graphic of the puzzle pieces now being slipped into place depicted on the giant monitor showed one of the formerly blank slots now blinking—it had been filled in. Just moments earlier the graphic had flashed with reports of Starhawk’s findings, which she and Natty were already employing so she could come up with the ultimate viral-makeover drug.
These latest pieces were being filled in by the Nautilus, however indirectly. She had eavesdropped on Satellite’s and Starhawk’s conversation in the Alpha Unit barracks when Starhawk came out of his catatonia, and was broadcasting that conversation now. She must have devoted enough mind power to the matter to decide they were on to something. “Shit!” Laney said. She could almost hear the collective gasps across the ship as Natty, Solo, and Leon took
in this information. Cassandra and the nun would have been the only ones of the bridge crew—in so much as the Nautilus had a command structure—that would have been too preoccupied to care about anything but the end results. Patent, as one of the team leads, would have also been less concerned with the hows and whys than with the outcomes. It was their highest level strategists and tacticians and theorists who would be made giddy by the latest intel coming in.
Somehow, Laney and Natty had to find a way to incorporate the insights that the star gate was even now being hacked by other possible Stage 1, 2, 3, and 4 civilizations—in addition to the one Stage 4 civilization that Leon and Natty had already identified as their chief nemesis. Their enemies were multiplying—and Satellite was still quantifying their numbers. Whatever solution Natty and Laney came up with at a sub-nano-scale to help the Nautilus and its crew travel through the star gate safely—it would have to factor the latest threats into the equation—the increasingly numerous parties looking to sabotage that transit.
If each one of those civilizations attempting to hack the star gate had managed to recalibrate it just slightly—perhaps not enough for their own kind to pass through but enough to thwart the passage of others until they could…
The one saving grace allowing Laney and Natty to crunch the latest data and intel and arrive at solutions in the impossible timeframe they’d been presented with was the just-in-time procurement and deployment of Theta Team. The Nautilus had conjured a third battle group to supplement Omega Force and Alpha Unit to contend with all the variables of deep space; these naturalists had specialties that covered every physical dimension of the cosmos. And they were currently sucking the remaining intel out of the crashed, cooked ship they were collectively referring to as The Clam Bake. At least Theta Team came with a sense of humor. The crashed alien shape did indeed bear resemblance to a clam and it had been good and baked passing through that star gate.
With all the intel rushing in at the last minute, Laney was feeling overwhelmed. There was no time, what’s more, to correlate her work with her husband’s. The Nautilus, already inside her head as it was inside everyone’s heads aboard the craft via their brain nanites, started relegating more mind power to Laney. She’d finally been deemed worthy of access, apparently.
Laney noticed as her mind entered a kind of hyperspace, her cognition accelerating at a rate well beyond what she was used to even when she was at her best, that she was also linking with her husband’s mind, which she noticed, had been gifted the same uplifting by the Nautilus. It was perhaps the best argument for uplifting and marrying their psyches to a supersentience they’d been presented with yet. Laney’s and Natty’s minds were not only joined now—they were working at light speed. Human neurons could only transmit data at a 100m/second. A fraction of light speed so infinitesimal that it was barely worth mentioning.
The clock on the wall was counting down from 59 seconds—the time remaining in the two hour timeframe Leon had allotted the team. So long as this remained a military mission, he was technically in command. That 59 seconds may as well have been 59 thousand years at the speeds at which Natty’s and Laney’s minds were now working.
They were going to make the deadline.
TWENTY-NINE
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Cassandra drop-kicked one Theta Team serviceman and woman after another. She bounced off corridor walls when she wasn’t outright running along them to get the springboard momentum she needed. She drove both her feet into the chests, heads, and backs of her quarry after coming out of a somersault or a cartwheel or a flying arabesque—whatever rotating motion she needed to add speed and unpredictability to the delivery of her blows.
The Theta Team members walking the ship’s corridors did not even take her on. “What’s with her?” one of them said after Cassandra dealt her what should have been a fatal blow to the side of the neck. She hissed at Cassandra as her neck and shoulder muscles flared, giving her entire head and shoulders a cobra-like look, in the same way the actual snake went on the defensive.
“I think one of the children’s action-figure dolls may not have been stowed away properly,” suggested another one walking beside her, neither of them bothering to slow to fathom the mystery of the crazy woman further. Her partner’s skin comprised of nodules that could shoot up from the surface on stalks, and the nodules widen like blooming flowers, which then attracted the hummingbirds from the Nautilus’s central courtyard jungle. The exact nature of the symbiotic relationship between the Theta Team operative and the hummingbirds was not one Cassandra could be bothered to puzzle out, even as she observed the hummingbirds flying to the Theta Team operative’s latest blooms.
Cassandra landed on both feet again after back-flipping repeatedly from the duo that had just disrespected her with those comments to put some distance between her rising wrath and the two of them. Still panting, Cassandra found herself standing directly in front of the nun. “Have you finished embarrassing yourself yet?” the nun asked.
“You! You’re the librarian!” Cassandra exclaimed as it dawned on her what a woman wearing a nun’s habit might actually be doing aboard the Nautilus. “You’re supposed to be the sliver of the Nautilus’s supersentience that knows what each person on this ship can and can’t do. And unlike the Nautilus you will always respond when summoned.”
“That is correct,” the nun said.
“What is going on here?”
“You are no longer the most advanced lifeform on this craft. Your nanites are now several generations behind the ones infecting Theta Team. I’m afraid Theta Team’s assessment is correct: you are little more than a child’s action figure doll anymore, one they must be careful not to break.”
Cassandra flushed red, which her built-in skin camouflage nanites rushed to mask. In their over-determination to conceal her embarrassment, they had made her invisible. But no one walking the halls to their destinations collided with her; they stepped around her. “They can still see me? You can still see me?” Cassandra said taking her eyes off the ones navigating around her stationary figure to put them back on the nun.
“Of course. If you wish to spar, I’m afraid you will have to spar with me. I can shapeshift into any of the Theta Team crew whose humanoid limits you’d care to explore. The same goes with Alpha and Omega Force operatives. You wish Level 1 engagement or Level 2?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Level 1 is what the individuals from the various battle groups are capable of on their own, based on a combination of their inborn genetics, nanite-upgrading, and training.”
“And Level 2?”
“At Level 2 their abilities are enhanced further by interlinking with the Nautilus’s supersentience, allowing them to think and evolve faster on the battlefield than they’re capable of on their own.”
“Shiiiiiiiiit.”
“Level 2 is not guaranteed, as the linkages can be recalled at any time based on the Nautilus’s supersentience decisions regarding where it’s computing power is needed most, or the COMMS links could simply be interrupted by other means beyond the Nautilus’s control. Level 2 access will likely be sporadic at best, for now.”
“What do you mean, for now?”
“Laney and Natty are working on Level 3 access, which supersedes and makes access to the Nautilus’s supersentience irrelevant. At Level 3, the three teams will have quantum mind access to the All; to the Godhead. Unlimited evolutionary capacity in the moment to deal with any situation which arises.”
Cassandra gulped. She was actually perspiring—profusely. “And if they succeed, what is the likelihood of that connection failing?”
“It will be an opposing army’s number one priority to sever that link; Natty and Laney understand that. That is why much of the work they’re doing now involves self-evolving algorithms designed to constantly reestablish the connection to the Godhead no matter how many times it goes down; and failing that, to at the very least restore Level 2 access.”
“Th
at’s a Catch-22. The nanites of the infected hosts will not have access to the mind power they need to do that without access to the All.” Cassandra felt some self-worth returning for finding the prima facie problem ahead of everyone else, the Achilles heel of their so-called next-generation defenses.
“That is the nature of the missing piece supplied by Starhawk. It allows the nanites’ hive minds to stuff Nautilus-like supersentience into the heads of each of the operatives on each of the three teams when off the ship. Without this, leaving the ship for combat or any other purpose would be highly inadvisable the second we’re across the star gate.”
Cassandra cracked her index finger knuckles with her thumbs on both hands. “Refresh my memory on why that is.”
“Because everything on the other side that we’re likely to encounter will already be in Singularity State,” the nun replied matter-of-factly. Her dry-as-desert-sand reporting of the facts did nothing to help Cassandra contain her exploding emotions that her own “primitive” nanites were having trouble containing.
While no two civilizations were likely to approach Singularity State in the same way, or use the runaway technology to the same ends—the one thing they would all have in common, would be this ability to morph and to evolve in the here and now to deal with novel situations at an alarming rate. The nun was right about that much.
The Star Gate Page 30
