The other Theta Team members in the background scattered across the landscape far and wide were beaming up the whole time Theseus was talking. Leon nodded; he wasn’t the type to brook insubordination, but he had even less patience for stupidity, and so far the guy hadn’t said anything stupid. Alpha Unit served in a similar capacity, only engaging when Omega Force couldn’t push back what needed pushing back with their extraordinary abilities. But if the solution was environmental in nature—if it had to do more with the Gaia-like consciousness of this planet and getting it to stand down—that would mean throwing more mind power and more specialties at the problem than Alpha Unit had to offer.
As to reinforcing their own numbers, Omega Force had the Goliath Bots and every other kind of bot that the Nautilus could spit out in numbers. Leon and his special forces group would be doing some assessing of their own as to what was coming up short in their own battle strategies before calling on either Alpha Unit or Theta Team.
Theseus ended on a low note before dematerializing himself, “It probably goes without saying, sir, but Level 2 access to the Nautilus’s supersentience is down, far less level 3 access to the All. Your fighting will be limited to whatever your latest generation nanites can do for you without the additional assists. Ergo, go with God.” And then he was gone.
Crumley checked another smile. “I like him.”
“I want to tear his head off.”
“You’re assuming that’s a head. I wouldn’t take anything for granted with that lot.”
***
“Natty, I succumbed to your rhetoric to drag my teams out into space,” Leon said. “Hell, it didn’t take much arm twisting; it sounded like my idea of fun. But while we’re out here, we can’t defend the earth if that obelisk in the moon fails to fire up in time, fails to get the Earth out of the line of fire in time. Hell, we don’t even know if any of this business with the star gate is connected to the obelisk on the moon. Your theories about the actual functions of both, what’s more, could be way off.”
“No worries, the challenges, as stated, are already being addressed. I created a clone team of you and your guys, Laney and I, before we left; I call them the planet movers. It’s their task to figure out how to fire up that obelisk as needed to move the planet out of harm’s way to buy us the time we need, if we’re under sustained attack, to catch our breaths and to regroup.
“As for the Nautilus itself, it too has been cloned, and for now, remains Earth’s sole sentry. I’m unclear myself on how she is able to pull this off, but I believe it’s related to ongoing studies in stem cell therapy. She simply grows a new self from an egg that matures and self-differentiates, much as stem cells do in a human embryo. Theoretically, she could create an entire fleet this way up to the task of staving off any attack. But… alien technology might well be sophisticated enough to circumvent her rebirthing process. Also, it’s questionable whether she would create that much mind power just to keep it idle and in waiting for a day which may never come; the numerous iterations of her would likely go insane without the ability to put their genius to work in pursuit of challenges worthy of them. So, it’s unclear if she will survive this Catch-22. Still, the safeguard should set your mind to rest for now; especially since she won’t be alone in the endeavor; the cloned crews will do everything in their power to keep her together.”
“You know our friendship is conditional on you making my day, right? Well, you just made my day.”
“Any time, Leon. Best part, the cloned selves… I imagine they can’t help but be a little in touch with one another, the way identical twins can feel when the other one is in danger. You might get to share in the drama going on on all the stages you’re acting on; in your dreams perhaps, or your worst nightmares, as the case may be.”
Leon smiled ruefully. “I’ll take it.”
Leon came out of the reverie he’d slipped into while standing on two feet. The daydream, or more properly, the remembrance of a past conversation with Natty, had come unbidden. As far as he could tell the trigger for it was watching Theseus beaming back to the Nautilus. No doubt it was on account of how powerless it made him feel. Theta Team, apparently, was not exactly his to command. The last time he felt that out of control must have been during that talk with Natty.
All Leon could think right now, regarding one of Natty’s talking points during that conversation, was he hoped to God the clones of Leon kept their problems to themselves until he was in a better position to eavesdrop on their dramas—snuggled tight in bed say aboard the Nautilus—far out in space, when this crisis was long over.
It was going to take all of his concentration to survive what was coming next. You could say that was the other reason why Leon didn’t contest Theseus and the rest of Theta Team beaming back to the ship. Theseus was right, the fighting was about to begin in earnest. Nobody beat Leon’s gut instinct when it came to knowing when a battle was at hand, nobody.
When Leon had encountered nothing on the planet that justified a military presence, and had made the decision to recall Omega Force to the ship, that’s when the hairs on the back of his arms and neck really stood on edge. The planet didn’t like that decision at all; not one bit; somewhere in the depths of her Gaia-like consciousness she was cooking up something special for them to perish any thoughts of returning to the ship, ever.
Leon now understood the real reason for the uninvited flashback to that conversation with Natty. He may well have gotten himself into an inextricable situation that had nothing to do with saving the Earth, which would make their deaths out here in the depths of space all the more ironic. Was this one mission he should have said no to?
THIRTY-SIX
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Solo leaned on the crystal geodesic dome at the top of his cane, the ball massaging his right palm, as he gazed at Cassandra, now reliant on a sphere of her own—a globe of pure H20. The big blue marble of water floated mid-ship in the Nautilus’s pavilion where everyone could enjoy the view, no matter what deck they were on. Inside her prison with her was a dolphin. The dolphin made clicking sounds as Cassandra fired lasers from her eyes at Solo. “Cassandra pissed,” the sound system translated for the dolphin, reading its clicks and other sounds; its trills, moans, grunts and squeaks.
Solo had imprisoned her in there with the dolphin in hopes that the mammal might keep her calm, well, calmer, anyway. Though he didn’t envy the dolphin’s role in all this.
Theseus, Theta Team’s emissary marched up to Solo. “So, they’ve elected you as the go-between.”
“Yes,” Theseus replied, “and, as Leon will be looking for a report on what’s happening here on the ship, he’s going to want to know about you and Cassandra as well.”
“I’ll keep her contained for as long as I can. But she was not built to be contained.”
“I’ll let him know. And you? You are as much a superweapon as she is.”
“Until he knows more about what he’s up against, he wants to be very cautious about putting me into play.”
Theseus snorted at him. He had an additional sensory organ on his forehead, about where his third eye ought to be. The organ flared and contracted a few times, as if taking in extra information to help with Theseus’s assessment of Solo. “I concur,” he said after considering the intel filtering through his brain. He pivoted on his heels and headed for the nearest exit—a gaping hole in the Nautilus’s hull, and a consequence of the crash—that the utility droids were currently attempting to mend. They looked like bees sealing the queen inside her chamber in how they patched the seal, working in from the edges a little bit at a time.
THIRTY-SEVEN
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
“All right, let’s see what we’ve got here.” Corin, using the laboratory in her private suite, studied her son spinning slowly on a platter, still frozen solid. The show of fright on his face looked faintly comic, knowing how much her son loved to ham it up. Speaking of “ham,” if that had been a heating lamp over his head instead of
a spotlight, he could well be on the menu in some alien restaurant, one in which fright was used to sweeten the meat as it was in China, where the dogs were tortured with electric shocks to such ends before butchering. Not a pleasant thought, and it struck just a little too close to home, considering their crash landing on this foreboding world.
Corin figured it was time to do what she could to get her son off the menu; but not before scanning him and shooting the scan to the computer printers so they could immortalize this moment. Maybe she could point to the sculpture in the room, like pulling out the baby pictures to embarrass him into showing more self-control in the future. It was worth a try.
With a few keystrokes on the virtual keyboard built into her terminal, Corin zoomed in on the nanites held in check for now inside of Thor, their morphing stymied by the cryogenic freeze and the containment field. The latter had been gifted to her by Solo who was using the very same technology now to imprison the bulk of the alien hive mind in the crystal handle of his cane, not to mention Cassandra in the pavilion, as if she were the “museum ship’s” star attraction.
Solo had done little more than imprison the nanites; trying to figure out what made them tick had fallen to Corin. Giving superpowers to humans, after all, back on Earth, was what she did for a living—albeit incognito while in the employ of DARPA. And Leon was right; watered down versions of her patents were finding their way onto Starbucks menus, the designer makeovers available for order alongside the more traditional coffee fare.
She heard the computer printer spit out the sculpture of her son, making those satisfying finale sounds that punctuated any printing cycle; not unlike the noises an airplane made upon landing in rough weather. She glanced over and made a satisfying sound of her own, thinking of the endless comeuppance her son was owed that she was going to extract from that sculpture.
The alien nanites were pulling her focus, even out of the corner of her eye. She panned her head back to the picture-within-a-picture display of her desktop monitor. “What the hell?”
She zoomed the image further and enlarged it. The individual nanites, each trapped within a slice of the containment field, faced off with one another like fighting fish trying to get through the “glass wall” between them that was the containment field. The instant one poked the glass, the other changed shape. When the other one poked “the glass” back, the result was for the initial nanite to briefly take on both shapes, and then the cycle would start over again. Both the individual shapes and the combined shapes never repeated, nor did they ever come in any other order—always the pattern was morph-morph-combine morphs.
Corin thought she knew what was going on. The nanites were trying to honor their directive to reproduce in order to enhance their mind power until they had enough of it to break through the containment field. But not being able to get to one another to replicate, they were trying to teach each other how to self-replicate, by accessing a form of hermaphroditism. But they had little but random chance and dumb luck to rely on. Mutations like this in nature took hundreds of years or more to produce anything worthwhile. They might be able to collapse that timeline a great deal considering the amount of nanites running the experiment in parallel. She had zoomed out the picture enough to notice that no two of the nanites ever tried the shape or shapes another pair of nanites had discarded; an observation the AI on her desktop backed up. Somehow the individual nanites were communicating across the shielding. The signal just wasn’t strong enough to reboot the hive mind.
Corin felt she knew how to solve both problems for them—how to get them to communicate better across the barrier, and how to make fertile hermaphrodites in case this situation ever recurred, so that even reduced to a single nanite—the hive mind could reconstitute itself. But did she dare go down this road? That kind of power might well be something Leon and his forces could not keep in check. On the other hand, it could put a quick end to warfare, as what would be the point? If both sides could kill each other the livelong day only to reconstitute themselves just as quickly—even from a single nanite, it would be an exercise in futility. The idea that a single nanite could still hold enough of the greater whole within it was fanciful at best, but not inconsistent with the holographic theory of the universe, which suggested the part contained the whole as much as the whole contained the part. The Ken Wilber lectures on holographic universe theory from college were still fresh in her head; certain things left a lasting impression. By helping those nanites out of their prison, she would finally get her husband to be at home where he belonged, helping to raise their kid. They should thank her, really.
“Don’t do it,” the frog doll said, jumping up on the desk. “Whatever you’re thinking, just don’t. You can’t rescue him from his fate, trust me, I’ve tried.” The frog doll was gesturing toward Thor for emphasis. “If there was one kid that was born to die over and over again, it’s this one.”
Corin smiled feebly. Maybe the doll’s on to something. It’s a phase of childhood, right? Sooner or later they outgrow the superhero thing, realize that being mortal, for all its failings, beats being a god. What god doesn’t suffer from ennui in short order? With any luck the overgrown kid that her husband and the rest of the “soldier dolls” were in the Nautilus’s collection would finally get a chance to realize this, too, finally mature, and set down their childish ways. All she had to do was give them “the gift” of godhood; so they could realize for themselves that it wore like the ancient Chinese curse: May you get everything you wish for. That college course on the I-Ching had left a lingering impact all its own.
The ploy was sure as hell worth a try. But it was a strategic military move she had no right making. Leon could skin her alive; she might just be ejected into deep space along with her son for endangering everyone aboard, and possibly for endangering all of existence. Maybe with that in mind, she was the one being childish.
She took a deep breath and exhaled her frustration, the sigh morphing into a groan. No, she had to find another way. If she did as she was thinking, it would be game over, alright. But the good guys might not be the last ones left standing. What she was considering might just deliver the ultimate weapon to the enemy. That event horizon of ever-better nanotech was one they could inch toward, but they could never actually get to—not without all of creation going out in the same flashbang in which it had come into existence.
Stymied, Corin got off the stool and paced and rubbed the back of her neck.
Wait! What if I did the opposite? Created a weapon to boost the containment field? Each setting on the dial could check the morphing of even faster-evolving nanites. Yes. Then Thor gets a toy to play with that keeps him safe. Long enough anyway for Leon to get him and everyone else to hell out of Dodge when the efficacy of the weapon wanes. Just one problem, Corin: a weapons designer, you’re not.
Why don’t you just write the equations and let the Nautilus handle the rest? Sounds like a problem even her backup DNA-based brain can handle.
She rushed back to her terminal and started keying in the equations, her eyes going back to the “fighting fish” nanites periodically for inspiration. Each time the nanites got lucky with one of their mutations, Solo’s containment field showed her how to reverse the reaction. As it turned out, Solo had done most of the work for her, enough anyway for her to extrapolate the rest. Lucky for her, her bioengineering prowess hinged heavily on biophysics, probably more so than bioengineering, which was more Laney’s department. This meant Corin had the equation-writing aptitudes to run with her crazed idea.
How exactly Solo’s containment field worked would remain a mystery to her. It might well have many more aspects to it than she could grasp. All she needed to do was to create a weapon that could fend off what for now Cassandra alone could fend off. In the hands of Omega Force it might mean some of them besides Cassandra and her son would get to come home. It would at the very least give them a fighting chance. She hated herself for getting sucked into their wargames, but this was her son she was ta
lking about. So long as he engaged in his reckless behavior, Leon and his people were perhaps the best babysitters in the world. And they were about to get better.
***
Hours after she’d started, Corin fed the last of the equations to the Nautilus’s DNA-based backup brain. Could it have pulled off what she had in a fraction of the time? Perhaps, but then again, even more than the Nautilus’s higher-functioning supersentiences, it would be tasked to the extreme with its numerous duties; too much so to queue up a solution for her problem in the required timeframe without a little assistance from her. That aid given…
Corin glanced over as the DNA-based biological brain fed the instructions back to her lab on how to build the weapon in keeping with her mathematics and with what she understood of the biophysics of nanites working on this scale. The computer printers picked up the job from there, spitting out the weapon to the DNA-soup’s engineering specifics.
She smiled at her son’s latest toy.
Job one done; now for eradicating these nanites infesting my son. She couldn’t damn well use the weapon on him. Or could she?
It seemed to call to her. She trudged over, picked it up, held it. “Techa help me if this GI Jane shit is contagious.” She leveled the assault rifle at Thor. “Thaw him and drop the shield.” She was talking to the DNA-based back up brain which was the only thing that could possibly respond to her. Just as well. The supersentience at a higher level would likely not have approved her request.
Her son showed signs of awakening. He blinked his eyes. “Mom? Why are you aiming a rifle at me?” The shield dropped. She let him have it with the rifle on the lowest setting.
“Shoot first and ask questions later. You’re finally learning to be cool, mom,” her son quipped, sounding mortally wounded, before keeling over.
The Star Gate Page 40
