“I think humans would have noticed.”
“Who says their conscious minds do most of the heavy lifting?” Mich realized she was digging in. “Most of this processing, in so much as humans were aware at all of the transmissions, would be going on at the level of the quantum mind underpinning our biological brains, which on their own couldn’t possibly have sufficient bandwidth.”
“And if the broadcasting is being done at the quantum level, considering the nature of quantum entanglement, it is entirely possible these planets are communicating to one another across the cosmos.”
“Think about it; if you’re trying to evolve an entire multiverse, you’d need some way of ensuring that differentiation was occurring with maximum efficiency and no two evolutionary paths were being replicated. Otherwise as much as 99% of the creative energies in the cosmos would be useless redundancy.”
Savoy made a scoffing expression he doubted she could appreciate. “It could work the other way; that’s how group think occurs, too much communication between individual parties that are best left in the dark to find their own way.”
“I can see why they paired you with me. Tell me, is our arguing doing more for group think or more to advance new methods for double-checking one another’s b.s.?”
“Touché,” Cabbage Head said with a sigh. Double Sigh: Even he was beginning to refer to himself as Cabbage Head. Alas, they all had nicknames, why not this one for him? “I suggest after deploying our probes we get back to our labs aboard the Nautilus to see what we can do to prove or disprove one another’s theories, and, if we’re right, what we can do to ensure continued cosmic evolution.”
She laughed, or at least he thought she laughed. Maybe that was how Mich made scoffing sounds. Maybe it was both. “You go back to the Nautilus if you must. I have everything I need with me to evolve my studies right here in the field.”
He bowed to her, respectfully, and beamed himself back to the Nautilus. “Let’s hope he makes up for being a lightweight in the fieldwork department by being more sophisticated at the theoretical science end of things,” Mich thought, continuing with her investigations without leaving the area she was deployed to. “Let’s hope also that he has the sense to keep his musings about cosmic evolution to himself, since we’re tasked with protecting Alpha Unit and Omega Force when deploying in alien surroundings. All other considerations are rather secondary to those. If they’re not secondary to him, he might just find himself being genetically hacked by the Nautilus to where he can’t even remember who he was a moment ago.”
Mich dismissed out of hand that their ruminations regarding what their early findings pointed to—namely planetary communications between Gaia-like supersentiences—could have any direct bearing on their present survival—as any sane person would. If only Cabbage Head could be as grounded as her—forgive the pun, considering his nickname. She continued to hold fast to her belief even as her investigations continued to indicate that the planet itself was sponging up intel from all over the cosmos. The damn thing was more satellite antenna than planet. Mich had hacked the communications lines between worlds sufficiently now to understand better the true nature of the local lifeforms’ hardiness. They weren’t just adapting to local prey-predator relationships in a Darwinian fashion; they were availing themselves of lessons learned on the other planets. Again, as shocking as that revelation was, she couldn’t see what alerting Leon would do; it was something beyond their control. Hope you’re right about that, Mich, or you’ll be the one repurposed for failing your most basic duty.
***
“Hey, Scoop, you mind? It’s damned traumatizing to watch how you go over a landscape.” Scoop had earned his nickname by virtue of having a head that opened up like one of those earth moving pieces of heavy equipment that took a giant shovel full of earth into itself at one time. His head and mouth were big enough and his throat through which the “food” passed to his GI tract thick enough that it made the “scoop” moniker less of a bad analogy than one might think if one never saw him in action. She’d just watched him chew up a piece of earth, plants and all, insects, whatever could fit inside that two-gallon bucket-size “scoop” of his, which didn’t exactly discriminate with what it uprooted. As soon as he’d gotten that down his throat, he took an equally large bite out of a tree, then out of an animal panicked enough by the chewing sounds he was producing to make the mistake of darting the wrong way—straight into his mouth.
“Sorry, Narco, just how I carry my own weight around here. Once these things start dying in my GI tract I can evaluate how they respond to tissue necrosis, and also to the various stages of chemical attack by my digestive tract. I can see if the microbes are enough to defend the lifeforms on this planet from my predation, or if they’re just strong enough to keep themselves alive in my GI tract. If the latter, I need to know if they play nice with the other microbes in my gut or if they’re determined to wipe everyone out.”
Narco shook her head. “Hell of a way to make a living. Anyone I can send your effects to when you die sooner rather than later from this half-assed approach to planetary investigations?”
He smiled at her. “Just you, sweetheart. I willed all my holovids that I create in dream state of the two of us making out to you, so you have something to remember me by when I’m gone. The download commences as soon as my nanites verify that I’m dead and they don’t have what it takes to bring me back.”
She stifled a smile. “I shudder to think what your sex fantasies are like.”
Narco had continued with her own investigations the entire time she was shooting the shit with Scoop. Namely, she had continued hurling loogies on any lifeform she found interesting. Each loogie was a different cocktail of chemicals cooked up by her salivary glands in conjunction with her nanites, meant to study how well the individual plants fought off onslaughts from interlopers into its region it hadn’t faced before. Her methods of investigating new worlds were a hell of a lot safer than Scoop’s. All she had to do was wait for the nanites in each chemical bomb she dropped to get back to her with their findings.
“Hey, Narco, spit on my dick, will ya? I just want to see if I can survive one of your blow jobs.”
She shook her head slowly, desperate not to smile at his totally inappropriate remark. He was incorrigible, reckless, and boundary-pushing by nature, but she supposed that’s what she liked about him. The Nautilus had paired them up, figuring out they’d get along great. How right she was.
“Huh,” Narco said.
“What is it?” Scoop came up for air after devastating the vicinity’s eye candy better than a hooligan with a blow torch.
“Listen,” she said.
The “calls of the wild” coming from various locations in this region of the planet, across a few square miles were in fact coded messages being broadcast from various Theta Team operatives. “Shit, that can’t be right, can it?” Scoop asked.
“I suggest we run some experiments to find out.”
Scoop meditated on the glands secreting digestive enzymes into his gut, putting through a request to synthesize the biological agents that could put this wild theory to the test. But Narco’s findings were in well before his.
“What?” he said, seeing the sparkle in her eyes.
“My findings confirm that this planet is not only communicating at a microbial level between all its lifeforms, it’s communicating at a quantum level with all other stellar bodies across the cosmos.”
“It’s insane, I don’t care what you tell me,” Scoop said.
“Wasn’t one of the theories floating about the Nautilus before we passed through the gate that the star gate itself might be a kind of bug light—meant to lure bugs and zap them?”
“Yeah. What are you getting at?”
“Carry that idea over now to anything we encounter on the other side of the star gate. Maybe the various spiders have woven different kinds of webs on this side that serve different containment functions, if the gate itself couldn’t block o
ur passage. For instance, maybe this entire planet is an artificial intelligence, constructed for the sole purpose of collecting all these broadcasts from all these stellar bodies on a quantum level. Only it’s not interested in making sure evolution rockets forward with no wasted duplication of efforts on multiple worlds following the same evolutionary trajectories. What if its function is to figure out how to destroy any and all of these worlds? It could synthesize the lifeforms here hardened against all of them, immune to the various biospheres’ protections, and with the knowledge in hand for conquering those worlds. Or, at the very least, this planet and its emissaries could thwart anyone from those worlds from expanding too far out into the cosmos, especially if they decided to come this way.”
Scoop snorted. “Narco, I think you’ve been imbibing too many of your own drugs. You don’t get to make those wild kinds of speculations. That’s for people higher up the food chain. Our job on Theta Team is to hand in very grounded evaluations, based on what we can prove, not what we can hypothesize. If you don’t respect your place in the food chain, you may very well end up on a conveyor belt aboard the Nautilus, headed for genetic reconfiguration, to fix what’s broken in you.”
Narco sighed. “I suppose you’re right. No doubt a lot of Theta Team operatives are having this same conversation right now.”
“Don’t go trying to circumvent my sexual fantasies by committing suicide by proxy, okay, throwing those ideas in the faces of Omega Force and Alpha Unit, far less the Nautilus herself.”
“Yeah, yeah, reading you loud and clear, five by five.” She went back to her work; he went back to staring at her ass in-between collecting his samples. All was right with the universe once again; at least as far as Scoop was concerned.
THIRTY-THREE
THE UNCHARTED PLANET, AGEMIR
Leon opened his eyes and tried to find some context for what was staring him in the face; maybe then he could make sense of it.
“Well, the bad news is this is not the Olympics, and you did not win the discus throwing contest for that giant saucer sticking out of the ground in the distance, although it is one hell of a throw,” Crumley said, his back leaning up against a tree on the forest floor beside him. He was already making fast work of the planet’s edibles, shelling some nuts in his hand, and sampling them to decide whether they were gut-worthy or not. “The worst news is, that’s the Nautilus, and I’m guessing she’s out of commission.”
“Like hell you say. I didn’t come this far to play settler of the cosmic outback.”
“Says a man who had better hope he still remembers how to build a shelter and forage for food.” Crumley’s smart-ass remarks kept coming, but his face said he was as immune to them as Leon was, as he continued to stare at the very sobering sight of the now smoldering Nautilus in the distance. It was a worrisome enough sight before the smoke started rising out of it.
“Shit, we have to get there to put out that fire.”
“Put it out of your mind.” Crumley tossed him some nuts. They landed in Leon’s lap; it wasn’t like his reflexes were working yet, this early into a state of shock, or he’d have batted them away. “That thing is over a hundred miles off. Yeah, I know, you wouldn’t think so, but I checked. You forget how big the ship is, and its scale is hard to judge without anything to measure it against.”
“Crumley, why in the hell didn’t you wake me earlier? And why haven’t you sent out a party to facilitate repairs on that vessel?”
“Not sure what the command structure is around here these days, but, if you’ll calm yourself, you’ll see everything is going to plan.”
“Plan? What plan? Get through the gate, do our best to survive whatever the hell was on the other side. That the plan you referring to?” Leon looked up at the freaky alien dude marching toward them with a distinct sense of purpose. “Shit!” Leon said, reaching for his gun, not finding it, then reaching for his knife and not finding it either. “What the hell?”
“Took the liberty of relieving you of your weapons. I know how you feel about aliens marching up to you with an eye to killing you. Personally, I think you’re too sensitive about these things.”
The alien arrested his approach twelve feet or so in front of Leon. “Sir, I just wanted you to know that the smoke you’re seeing in the distance is nothing to worry about. We set off some nanite-incendiaries in there to bolster the Nautilus’s immune system until we can get her higher brain functions back on line.”
Leon swallowed hard. “You’re not one of the locals here to eat me?”
The guy smiled at Leon. “I’m partial to sea food, not much on red meat, sir.” He abruptly marched off in the direction whence he came.
“Yeah, Theta Team takes a bit of getting used to.” Crumley chewed another nut and eyed the guy receding in the distance, wondering how long it would take for him to start looking smaller.
Leon tried to get a better sense of his environment. “Why does everyone look so purposeful and mission focused. I haven’t given any orders yet.”
“Damn annoying, isn’t it? They just seem to know what to do. The more I look on in amazement, the more creeped out I am.”
“What do you mean? Can you imagine trying to bring that many people up to speed? We have our hands full with Alpha Unit as it is.” Leon was secretly delighted that there would soon be a lot of intel to feed his brain on from the looks of how Theta Team took to new worlds. They were crawling over the forest terrain for as far as the eye could see, like an invading army of locusts, sampling every leaf and twig, experimenting, analyzing. And Leon could see damn near forever. They were at the low point in this valley, with the hills rising to the mountain in the distance allowing him to spy his people at various elevations. Even up close they were visible at different heights, climbing trees, crawling out on limbs; one dived into a pond Leon felt certain a moment ago he could stand in without getting wet above the knees. “The more I look at them at work, the more I calm down.”
“Wait until you hear how they signal one another.”
Leon heard some terrifying animal noises that had him reaching for his weapons, even if he had to get off his ass and strap them back on. “What the hell was that?”
“Theta Team. Sort of like how we signal one another when we’re too close to the enemy, only their outcries carry enough information to fill several shelves in a library with books. The nanites in their bodies compose the coded messages to be decoded by the nanites in the bodies of those at the receiving end.”
“Fuck me.” Leon lowered the rifle but took it and his knife back toward the tree he was using as a backrest. Crumley yanked the assault rifle and his favorite knife out of his hand. “You’ll get these when you’re ready for them. Can’t have you mistaking our own people for the enemy and shooting one of them; could be damn demoralizing to the others.”
Leon glared at him with the “Give them back now or die” face. He was summarily knocked over by what appeared to be a headless ostrich that had a giant eye the size of a softball where its head ought to be. The ostrich hadn’t gotten too far away after stomping on Leon before ejecting his eye and loading up another one, pumped up its long slender neck from its stomach, forcing the neck to stretch in an unseemly manner to load the next shot. Before the ostrich was entirely out of sight it had disgorged another eye. The eyes exploded like smoke grenades. Leon was embarrassed to find himself reaching again out of habit for weapons that just weren’t there.
“Damn it, Crumley. You left me defenseless. I’m lucky that thing didn’t fire one of those eyes at me.”
“That is another Theta Team member.”
Leon craned his neck to Crumley. “You’re toying with me.”
“Nope. The eyes are AIs with advanced scanners that identify smaller ecosystems within the larger one about us. The incendiaries are actual nanite bombs meant to tease out the secrets of that smaller ecosystems within the larger one. I know because I asked. Of course, being older and wiser than you—”
“You mean o
lder and slower.”
“Yes, that, too… so, pausing to ask questions comes naturally. My advice, don’t carry any weapons at all for the first few days. You sure aren’t going to hurt any of those guys by busting some ninja moves on them. You’re likely to come off like such a damn ass, the ensuing laughter will be payment enough for your faux pas.”
Leon groaned. He rubbed the back of his stiff neck. “And what if one of those things turns out to be a local?”
“Trust me, you want Theta Team handling any initial encounters. They speak alien way better than we do; look at them.”
Leon sighed, forced to concede the obvious. “Why isn’t Alpha Unit trying to get the Nautilus back on line?” Leon asked, trying to bring his own mind back on line with his itinerary of far more pertinent questions that bore on their survival as opposed to focusing on his feeling bent out of shape.
Crumley made a dismissive sound with his lips that sounded like a gorilla snort. “The Nautilus’s AIs are the only things we have in our possession more alien than Theta Team cadets. If anyone can figure out how to get that ecosystem of AIs within the larger ecosystem of the Nautilus back on line, it’s them. The Nautilus is an entire world onto itself, moreover, and taking worlds apart and putting them back together is sort of their thing.”
Leon shook his head slowly. Crumley was right, of course; Alpha Unit was a military asset specializing in combat solutions that relied less on fighting skill and experience and deployment of existing assets than pulling some hi-tech solution out of their asses in a hurry. Right now they were probably feeling as useless as Omega Force was feeling. But it was a matter of staging and sequencing. Without the intel from Theta Team they wouldn’t even know if a military solution was necessary, who or what the enemy actually was, or if they were even under attack.
The Star Gate Page 36
