Leon traced his fingers over the screen, wondering what Truman was trying to communicate to him now across time and space by way of these cabalistic images, and by way of that timeless language only he and minds like his spoke.
If prior civilizations existing tens, hundreds of thousands, even millions of years ago had managed to surpass modern day man, and had reached out to the stars, and had established communication with extraterrestrials—maybe the artifact on the moon was a kind of gift offered early earthlings the way Cortez brought blankets riddled with small pox for the Native Americans. Or, maybe it was a more benign trinket not of any great value to a far more advanced civilization, but one that would trigger endearment on the part of the giftees; being able to teleport your planet out of harm’s way to avoid mass extermination from a hostile invading alien civilization could earn a lot of good will.
But how did Solo fit into all that? Had Truman bioengineered him more in keeping with those extraterrestrial civilizations that had visited and perhaps befriended us once? Were there abilities inherent in him then that Truman himself couldn’t entirely predict as he never lived long enough to see what Solo was capable of?
And as to Solo’s character—well that would depend on the alien race that had been used as a template, wouldn’t it? Maybe they had been benign but only as a matter of political subterfuge. Maybe they had been the ones hurtling planet-killing meteorites at us from day one, even as they extended a hand of good will.
Did the Nautilus have a modern-day Dr. Smith aboard in Solo? Leon was referring to the turncoat in the old TV series, Lost in Space. There was a lot of such scuttlebutt floating about the ship already about one or more saboteurs who could bring the whole house of cards down on them. Bad enough no one, not even Natty, fully understood how the Nautilus worked. Solo’s true nature might well not reveal itself until he’d achieved all his aims, steered them and the Nautilus toward whatever destination he had in mind.
Leon relaxed his mind around this recurring theme, wrapped inside the boomeranging worries that kept circling back to Leon during his more meditative moments like now. So long as Solo had to get past the Nautilus’s supersentiences, the terrifying genius of Natty’s father and mother who had collectively designed not just the ship but the next generation on line—the improvements on themselves embodied in Natty and Laney—well, suffice to say that Leon felt sufficiently safeguarded on that score for now. And until he felt otherwise, he had better things to worry about.
Natty hadn’t exactly married his sister in Laney, but he’d come damn close. Laney’s mother had, much as Natty’s father had, genetically altered her child while it was still in the womb. It was perhaps a sign of the times, eugenics enjoying a kind of post-modern and post-moralistic upsurge with the ascent of CRISPR units in every garage and attic that allowed even the semi-literate on the subject to tweak their own genetics on the fly and that of their children.
Once Natty’s mother got wind of Laney’s potential, she slipped in some additional genetic tweaks of her own and then arranged for Natty and Laney to meet and to let nature take its course. I mean where were the two brightest people on the planet to go exactly except into one another’s arms?
As much as Leon would like to delve into their back story, Leon wasn’t feeling nearly as threatened by what he didn’t know about Natty and Laney at this point than by what he didn’t know about Solo and some of his other teammates; so it was to them that his attention now returned.
The Nautilus’s chief supersentience must have picked up on just how much Leon was struggling to make sense of the latest file before him. She manifested an avatar which took solid form before his eyes. The figure was fetching, to say the least, dressed like someone he would meet at a high society soiree. Think Julia Roberts advertising her latest line of perfume. Though he doubted there were too many people around today who would catch that reference. Leon couldn’t help but think this was the kind of communication he could expect from a supersentience, one that was overloaded with just a few more layers of subtext than he could decode in one sitting. Was this the Nautilus’s way of provoking Leon to make more of a move on Cassandra, by showing him the side of herself that Cassandra was aching to reunite with—if only she could cut through all the sociopathy and PTSD and the rest of the damage done to her wittingly or unwittingly by Truman and Natty both? Both men had collaborated to create a superspy whose very success came at a steep price. The Nautilus coaxing Leon to find a way to hack past Cassandra’s resistance to him was the first thought that had popped into his head despite having nothing to base it on—unless it was the Nautilus signaling him that she was getting ready to educate him on multiple levels at once; it was just the kind of insight she could sneak past his neuronal webs without him detecting the intrusion.
“You came to help me sort through all this over-my-head information?” Leon asked.
“Not all. Some of it there’s no point in understanding now; it can’t help you until it can.”
He thought, “Why don’t you let me decide that, bitch? I’m the one whose lives everyone will depend on come time for battle, and I don’t appreciate other people limiting my field of knowledge based on what they think I will or will not make use of, especially when I myself don’t even know yet.” But he held his tongue. She was likely reading his mind anyway, and if not, then his poorly held poker expression. And why provoke a supersentience further who typically didn’t even bother to insert herself into human dramas? He supposed presenting him with an avatar was already more of a show of respect than he deserved.
“Can I count on Solo’s loyalty?” Leon asked, cutting to the quick of things, not knowing how long the Nautilus would justify leasing even this level of thinking time to him.
“No.”
Leon hoped there was a “but” coming down the pike because he flinched despite being trained to hide any such reaction from an enemy looking to pump him for information, the smallest bit of which could betray his own people, and cost them the outcome of any battle.
“He is responding to urges he himself doesn’t fully understand,” she explained. “But I suspect they may lead us all down a garden path worth traversing.”
“You suspect?”
“Unlike the world you inhabit, the one I exist in is largely probabilities, countless alternate realities vying for their right to be the best of all possible worlds for us. Which one will win is hard even for me to predict. And like Solo, I’m just not working with enough information yet to say if his subterfuge will do more harm than good. But I suspect the latter.”
“Because you think he does hold the key to the alien race that gifted us with the artifact on the moon, and for better or worse, we need to know more about them; and the best way to do that is to turn a spy in our ranks into a double agent—whether he realizes he’s acting in that capacity or not.”
“Spoken like a military man, but yes, that’s a perfectly valid, if partial take on his role in things.” She continued to speak as if feeling personally injured that Leon refused to take note of any of her feminine wiles or her ability to give him so much more than what he was asking for. Her body language, the way she kept flipping her hair out of her face. Or maybe it was just the way lovers talked to one another when they weren’t trying to arouse one another; still they did so in a roundabout way owing to being so utterly open and vulnerable to one another in ways that they didn’t allow when around other people.
Leon brought up Cassandra’s file next, shifting his attention between it and the woman before him. “You’re concerned that your two greatest assets are loose cannons that could just as easily be aimed back at you,” the avatar said.
“Yes.” Leon allowed himself a second to highlight a bit of text on the screen and ponder its deeper ramifications. “All my training insists that the worst thing you can do is fight from a place of emotions. I have to be able to keep a cool head to make the best decision; otherwise, I risk being played by my enemy; I risk them pressing my buttons o
r driving me with the force of my own emotions the way a martial artist uses the momentum of his opponent against him, turning it to his advantage.”
“And yet channeling that torrent of emotions is what makes her so effective in combat. You cannot resolve the dichotomy.”
“No, I suspect I can; that’s what worries me. She’s a sociopath; by all rights she shouldn’t feel anything. I believe she’s trying to doctor her way to wellness; but she won’t get there on her own, not without my help, and I don’t have time to play medic right now; accordingly, she may well take us all down with her. Until she can feel something on a very deep level she can’t give enough of a damn about her own survival far less anyone else’s. Any joy she takes in trumping the enemy now comes from a sociopath wanting to punish the world for their very existence.
“But I could be wrong; it could be that this torrent of dark emotions she’s tapped into has nothing to do with wanting to find a reason to live—because it’s better to feel anything, even hate, than nothing at all; it may already be proof of her unraveling; like a serial killer who wants to get caught; she’s setting up the means by which her enemy can take her down, and by extension, being as she remains our best defense, the rest of us.”
He focused his eyes back on the avatar when no response was forthcoming from her. “I’m afraid our time is up,” the avatar said, as if Leon had paid to be shrinked. “I’m repurposing my algorithms.” The avatar faded.
Leon didn’t like the sound of that. It meant the Nautilus was heading into danger that required all of her attention, not just some of it. Never a good thing when a supersentience signals it’s feeling overwhelmed. Never.
Leon jumped up from his chair and headed for the sliding doors.
It was finally time to take that leap of faith, a jump more daunting than crossing any star gate.
Was that the crisis “Mother” was responding to? His gut told him they were as ready as they were ever going to be to cross that star gate. Very possibly, she, sensing that even before he did, now had her own crisis of faith to contend with, having been able to hide behind their hundred and one acts of preparedness up until now, just like Leon.
***
As if Crumley was working off of some psychic radar all his own, he materialized before Leon, blocking his way to the action room—at the very moment Leon had come to a clear decision that now was the time to move through the star gate.
“I’ve failed you, Leon. I haven’t given you my customary data dump of options to wade through before coming to any firm and fast decision.”
“Here it comes,” Leon thought, Crumley’s last ditch effort to throw up a smoke screen to obscure any clear path through that star gate. He couldn’t blame Crumley; in his own way, he considered it his duty to apprise Leon of any possibilities that bore on their survival—no matter how far-fetched or unlikely. Philosopher-types like Crumley had been advising kings for time immemorial; always giving more options prior to any potentially fatally wrong strategic move—just so they weren’t the ones to bear the burdens of any final decision.
“Talk fast, Crumley,” Leon said, reverting to his determined march toward the action room, and forcing Crumley to step aside and keep pace with him.
“Have we discussed lately the perils of mission creep? We started out looking to get a handle on the moon artifact. We quickly went from there to chasing down the Truman probes. All the while using cloned ships and crews as an excuse, mind you. And here we are now staring at a star gate that we have no business messing with. Is it bothering us? No. Any indications that it impacts us at all, if they are to be believed, are by and large positive. As in if it ain’t broke…”
Leon aborted his already abbreviated smile. So far Crumley had suggested nothing that had caused him to break from his stride. The fact was that technology this advanced had to be looked into; Leon didn’t care what its reason for existing was; anything which wasn’t fully understood posed a threat. Sensing Leon’s refusal to waver, Crumley redoubled his efforts. The guy should really consider heading up a psy-ops division all his own, specializing on how to incapacitate an enemy with indecision.
“What about turning around and heading back to Eresdra? Did you get a look at their frontal ridges—they’re prominent enough to suggest an entirely new lobe of the brain devoted strictly to war games and associated strategies and tactics. Imagine what they could do saving the universe if given access to our technology. Yeah, sure, we gave them a way to fast-track their way into the future by revisiting the heights reached by prior civilizations, but if we coupled our technology with theirs, cloned the Nautilus infinitely many times with infinitely many copies of their best and brightest, hell, we could actually consider an early retirement for once.”
Leon smiled a bit more broadly on that one. The fact was, it wasn’t a half bad idea; and more paths to the future was always better than one path to the future if you wanted to ensure any future at all. But the dilemma could be easily enough solved by requesting Natty clone yet one more version of the Nautilus to address Crumley’s concerns. At the realization, Leon merely picked up his pace.
Crumley sighed; he was down for the count but not out. “If, at the very least, you brought Hertha aboard…. You could retire today and devote yourself to stag service, making sure to copulate with both her and Cassandra in order to procure a next generation of Special Forces’ leaders superior to anything we can do. Give them their own Nautiluses to captain and send them out into the stars. If you truly want to safeguard the future in the best possible way, that one gets my vote.”
Leon smiled, perhaps more genuinely this time. Knowing the Nautilus’s chief supersentience, she could study what it was that made Hertha, Leon, and Cassandra truly great at their jobs, and continue to enhance their progeny further with her own genetic tweaks. Once again, it wasn’t a half bad idea when it came to hedging their bets about the future. Once again, Leon didn’t slow his pace. If anything, Crumley was giving him a taste for stretching his far ranging strategies across various timelines, where he could try out all of Crumley’s ideas, not just any one in particular. Maybe from some altered state of consciousness the Nautilus supersentience helped him to lock in, he could indeed employ all of these strategies at once, just separate them according to timelines, by continuing to participate in more than one timeline at a time through this surgically tweaked altered state.
Realizing Leon wasn’t taking him on, Crumley groaned deeply and loudly enough to excite one of the Nomads some distance away in the ship with its sensitive hearing. If he kept that up, the beast was going to bear down on him at full trot with the intent of mating with him. “Have you considered that the star gate isn’t a star gate at all?
“That it wasn’t built to facilitate passage through it so much as to play a game of ‘Mirror, Mirror, which is the most beautiful reality of them all?’ And all we need to do to gain entry into that alternate reality is to recalibrate the gate? We already have numerous insights into how to recalibrate it. So long as we stay on this side of the mirror, we save earth and everyone else by simply skipping the needle on that record until we find a groove we want to be stuck in.”
That time, Leon stopped cold. They stared into one another’s eyes as if playing an entirely different Mirror, Mirror, Who’s-the-Fairest-of-them-All-game. But, even if he admitted it was a brilliant insight, this contingency, too, could be handled with yet another cloned version of the Nautilus and its crew.
Leon was finally ready to admit that he was going through that star gate on sheer will and stubbornness alone. He’d started this walk thinking his actions were in keeping with his gut check; now he wasn’t so sure. He had a way of getting his mind set on something, and nothing, no force on earth or in the heavens, was going to get in his way. Was that what was really going on here? Bless Crumley for at least getting him to consider the possibility as it bore weightily on the survival of everyone—and not just the crew of this ship. Hell, they could awaken a sleeping giant by flying thr
ough that “mirror” straight into the abyss.
“We’re going through the gate, Crumley, and that’s the end of the matter.” The way Leon said it, the enervated quality of his voice, communicated his doubts for him. If Crumley’s intent was to sew doubt, he’d succeeded. Maybe that’s why he backed down and stopped shadowing Leon as he continued towards the action room. Crumley knew he’d done the best he could do.
Could Leon say the same?
***
Leon was standing alongside Solo, Cassandra, Laney, Natty, and the Nun in Solo’s chamber.
Everyone turned to Solo. With a nod he would give the final approval—just in case that puzzle with the picture on it of how to get through the star gate wasn’t as completed as they thought. With the capacity to think in numerous dimensions at once, it was the ultimate truth test that their solution worked not just in their timeline—but in all timelines. If other versions of them had attempted to cross that gate and failed, Solo would let them know. Of course, they might well have been in the first timeline to make it this far.
Solo’s face was as disheartening as ever; his nebulous expression hard to read, but the eyes imparted their usual ominousness and lack of trustworthiness. He was a hell of a final check if you were looking for peace of mind. But Leon figured if you stared into the abyss long enough, in this case the black void at the center of the star gate—it wouldn’t just stare back, it would possess you. And the man most qualified to stare into it, therefore, had the right to look the most haunted of them all—and that was Solo.
Solo nodded.
He readjusted his stance to face the viewport with the star gate looming as he leaned on his cane.
All eyes then turned to Natty. “This is so cool!” he exclaimed. “ Do you have any idea how cool this is? The miracles we’ve worked in a span of no time at all. Nothing can stop us now. Nothing. Not even that very scary star gate.”
The Star Gate Page 34
