The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  ***

  Starhawk awoke from a nightmare, trying to escape freefall. As it turned out, he wasn’t falling into an abyss, he was flailing his limbs, dangling off the ground, held by the collar in one arm by Patent. “Wake up, Mighty Mouse!” Patent said in his overly-authoritarian baseline tone. “You want to explain to me why Omega Force is trying to commit suicide? Doesn’t seem to go with the whole Omega Force vibe.”

  Starhawk tried to focus his eyes on the waterfall in the distance as Ajax took a leap off the crest of the waterfall into the valley below. “They’re trying to find a way to level two. Idiots. Why didn’t you wake me sooner?”

  “Pretending to be dead is a good survival strategy on you. I suggest you stick with it.” Patent set him down on his two feet.

  Starhawk reached into a couple of his cargo pants and shirt pockets and started assembling his device. “Someone go get those bozos away from there before they actually hurt themselves.”

  Patent whistled in Leon’s direction by putting his fingers in his mouth. The strange aria was meant to carry over the drone of the waterfall. Leon and the rest of his team craned their heads back Patent’s way and headed over, including Ajax who came bounding over the cliff like Superman.

  “Is it me,” Ariel said, surveying the terrain, which was flatter and less littered with trees up here, the ground a lot more level, “or does this planet have a suspicious dearth of hostile predators? They ought to be checking us out as potential food, if nothing else, or trying to mark their territory by chasing us away.”

  “Even God took seven days to create the world,” Patent said. “Give the AI time. I think God saved Adam and Eve for last, too. Good things come to those who wait. I sure as hell am not packing all this gear to shoot at birds.” He eyed the condor-like birds catching the updrafts beyond the crest of the butte in the distance. They looked to be having a lot more fun than Patent, which soured his mood. No one was supposed to have more fun on these little adventures than him. He was old school; he and General Patton lived for war; they were true war dogs. For the rest of the cadets it was a get in and get out as quickly as possible kind of thing; no endurance at all.

  ***

  Omega Force had finally made their way to Patent and his three handpicked cadets. “I gather you’ve detected a flaw in my approach?” Leon said, addressing Patent, but it was Starhawk who spoke up, without lifting his head from what he was doing.

  “I’m not sure you can call having your head up your ass an approach,” Starhawk said.

  Patent flashed red and his hulking body actually got hulkier as his muscles tensed. He was in the middle of blowing a gasket. Leon gestured for him to settle down. Patent wasn’t much on disrespect. He’d take a certain amount of it headed his way, but he had zero tolerance for any of it directed toward Leon. When God was handing out loyalty Patent must have been at the head of the line.

  “What have you got for us?” Leon asked, directing his remark at Starhawk.

  “Five, four, three, two, one,” Starhawk voiced. Everything went dark. Three suns in the sky overhead—Leon could swear he hadn’t counted three before—were entering solar eclipse at the same time, with the smaller worlds acting as moons passing between their planet and the suns. “This cosmic alignment peaks in another thirty seconds.” Starhawk looked up from his device. “Well! Start running. Now you can jump off the damn cliff!”

  Leon bit down on his jaw to stifle his exasperation as Omega Force ran for the edge of the bluff. Thanks to their now souped-up bodies they were in place before the alignment had finished peaking to jump off the waterfall. And then they were just gone.

  “Our turn,” Patent said.

  “Too late.” Starhawk double-checked his device. “If we go now, we have to find another way to level two, or wait for the next alignment.”

  “We sure as hell aren’t waiting,” Patent declared. “We’re their backup. Pull a solution out of your ass before I demote you to Theta Team and you can stare at the ass end of bugs all day long, the damn tree huggers.”

  “Admittedly a fate worse than death. Consider me sufficiently motivated.” Starhawk went back to playing with his device.

  “Hurry!” Patent barked.

  “A second. I need room in my head to think, Techa, damn it!”

  “Would my putting a hole in it help?” Patent barked, unwittingly launching spittle Starhawk’s direction.

  “I have COMMS established to level two,” Satellite interjected. “It’s weird, it’s like level two is overlaid over this one, occupying the same space, just on a different frequency.”

  Starhawk stepped over to Satellite and stared at his screen. He nodded. “Cool. That gives me an idea.” He stowed his own device, hanging it off a belt, and pulled another one out of another cargo pants pocket, played with tuning it.

  “Sir, do you read me?” Satellite said.

  “We’re reading you,” Leon’s voice came back. Patent sighed so loudly he would have blown up the three Alpha Unit cadets’ skirts if they were in the Scottish army. But then he noted the panting, wincing, moaning and ungodly screeches on the other end of the line.

  Patent grabbed Satellite’s device. “Give us a second, Leon. We’re right behind you. We’re exploring another way in, now that the alignment has passed.” They were getting blasted by all three suns all of a sudden as if on cue.

  “Got it,” Starhawk said. “I’m beaming the algorithms to your AR goggles. Just lower them over your eyes to replace sensory access to this world with sensory access to Level two. Your in-body nanites should tune in the rest of your senses momentarily.”

  Patent, Satellite, and Ariel did as instructed. “Fuck me,” Patent said.

  “Nice,” Ariel added.

  “Sweet,” Satellite chimed in.

  Starhawk was the last to lower his helmet goggles into place. “Shit! Really should have anticipated this. Sorry, guys, my bad.”

  “What are you sorry for?” Patent asked. His comment was followed abruptly by another, “Shit!”

  THIRTY-NINE

  THE UNCHARTED PLANET, AGEMIR

  Leon never had a chance to raise his rifle. The first creature came at him before he could react. He had to peel the vampire monkey with the canines of a saber tooth tiger off his neck by grabbing its throat with his hand and flinging the animal so hard he shattered its skull against a stone tree in this petrified forest he found himself in.

  The baboon-like beasts were coming at Omega Force in record numbers, moving through the trees so fast and in such a coordinated fashion that they were like birds heeding a migration call.

  The others in his unit were using the modified assault rifles that Corin had gifted them. At setting two, they were disintegrating the zombie-like creatures so they couldn’t get up again as rapidly as you killed them. Leon wasn’t so lucky. If he couldn’t get to his weapons, he had to deal with the born-again evangelist monkeys, seeing him in a new light with each rebirth—one in which they grew increasingly furious at his attempts to stymie their desire to suck his blood.

  One such skull-bashed monkey opened its eyes and without even attempting to heal itself, came at Leon as ferociously as before. By then Leon was a bit distracted peeling the others off him that tackled him before his hands could reach either his Bowie knife or his assault rifle.

  Until Leon could get to his weapons, he used some workarounds. The canines that had dug into his jugulars were causing him to spurt blood more predictably than Old Faithful at Yellowstone. He made sure the nanites in that spray infected the vampire-monkeys, and gave them something to think about. Without the technology that was in the guns, it wouldn’t kill the creatures, but it might slow them down a little. He did the same for the other leaks he’d sprung courtesy of the vampire-monkeys tearing at him wherever they could get their fangs or claws into. He stemmed the tide of blood as he peeled off his attackers, but not completely, making sure to continue to mist his adversaries like a good gardener of the soul.

  It was just
a matter of time before the rest of Omega Force weren’t going to be able to fire their weapons fast enough; already each of the operatives were firing with both hands, using a pistol and an assault rifle to keep the blood suckers off them. Corin’s assault rifle was a one-shot-and-done deal, but the pistols just slowed the monkeys down by knocking them off balance.

  Cronos, swinging that damn broad sword, amazingly enough, wasn’t making out any worse than the rest of them. Score one for religious zeal and the raw fury of the self-righteous.

  As each of his people became overwhelmed in turn, they had no choice but to do as Leon was doing, using arms, legs, teeth, elbows, forehead, whatever part of their bodies were closest that they could turn into a weapon.

  Leon was the first for whom it occurred to be a bit more creative. He belched noxious gas about himself, taking out the monkeys in large numbers; the nanites in his body modifying his exhales for him on the fly into poisonous fumes that he himself was immune to. With his farts added to the mix, propelled by sentient hive-mind bacteria lining his gut only too happy to be recruited into the action, the sphere of protection around him expanded further. He released another herd of nanites by way of his sweat, evaporating off of him and swarming to create a tornado effect that was sweeping the forest for him, pushing back the vampire monkeys even further.

  Leon had preempted all of his creative actions by advising his body’s nanite hive minds to use his aura—generated by his energy body—to scan Corin’s rifle pressed against him that he still couldn’t get to; and to use the findings to ensure their ability to stop the zombie-monkeys’ capacity to come back from the dead was included in any nanite warfare solution—including his nanite-enriched belches, farts, and sweat. As to how the hell his aura could be set to “scan”—well, he left that up to the nanite hive minds to figure out; he had his hands full with other matters.

  Crumley, catching on to what Leon was up to ahead of the others, started hurling loogies. His spit bombs exploded better than napalm incendiaries.

  The vampire-monkeys were no mere rabid animals. They pulled back just enough to regroup, and seconds later they started hurling weapons of their own, shafts broken off of the petrified trees that made for excellent knives, lances, and Ninja-like shuriken. Leon’s men were picking the “splinters” out of themselves the size of walrus-teeth as if they’d walked into the wrong end of a giant rotary saw in action.

  Cronos was the first to think of altering the magnetic field about his body. Of course, he had a chrome plate for a forehead skull-bone, so he was used to setting off metal detectors. The reverse magnetic field pushed the petrified tree shards back at the monkeys at velocities much greater than at which they’d been hurled. In theory, the trick shouldn’t have worked at all, but the earth that had seeped into the trees must have had a high metal content. The nanite hive minds inside Cronos would have had to figure out how to use that high metal content to first magnetize the shards, and then create the field that would repel them. No small feat of organized nano-scale computing power focused and directed on the fly. And to do that, they’d have had to run scans by way of Cronos’s aura as well, as the shards were coming at him to figure out a workaround. That meant learning the language of the energy body, and then how to tweak the energy body to get the aura to do something that it either didn’t ordinarily do, or that the human mind typically couldn’t pick up on: scan the vicinity to pull in data as a way of protecting the physical body.

  This time the monkeys had no choice but to pull back. Too many Omega Force operatives were figuring out on their own how to get around them. The vampire-monkeys were no longer coming back from the dead because Leon’s operatives were now also infecting their weapons—their knives, grenades, pistols—with nanites with back-from-the-dead neutralizing tech, that for now, was better than what the enemy had. But this was just level two of this Augmented-Reality planet, which was accessed much like a video game.

  If level two was this difficult…

  “I guess now we know why there were no predators on level one,” Leon said, panting, “to get us to drop our guard.”

  “So much for selling the film rights to pay for these star gate adventures,” DeWitt said. “The animal-rights people will eat us alive for depicting things as they actually went down.” When DeWitt wasn’t trying to out-strategize Leon, he was trying to commercialize his ability to look at the big picture; well, he had a son to think about, and they weren’t cheap to raise on a soldier’s salary, so Leon couldn’t exactly blame the guy.

  They were all groaning, wincing, and panting as Omega Force huddled together, walking backwards, and keeping their backs to one another even as they closed the circle. No one was taking their eyes off their outer perimeter just yet.

  “This didn’t happen just by chance,” Leon said. “They ambushed us, which meant they knew we were coming.”

  “How? There’s no way, I tell you.” DeWitt said, frustrated he wasn’t seeing the big picture, and if he couldn’t see it then surely Leon couldn’t see it either, because that would mean accepting his position as second fiddle, which he could do some days but not others; this must have been one of the bad days.

  “The same way that the game designer who built this video game world built it to learn how we think and what our limitations were, the players at each level above us can do the same. That would be one explanation for the monkeys,” Leon said. “It makes more sense that the predators at each level would also be smarter, so I’m guessing the humanoid antagonists come next.”

  “So much for getting inside their heads better than they can get inside ours, man!” Ajax sounded hysterical, the tone, pitch, pace and volume of his voice poised precariously between panic and sobbing—crying the tears of the utterly defeated.

  Crumley punched him so hard he flew into a petrified tree—and broke it; the trunk exploded like crystal exposed to just the right high-C note. Ajax seemed to appreciate the gesture. The fire in his eyes subsided. “Why don’t you tell us a joke, Ajax? Better your bad jokes than your histrionic nonsense.”

  “How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?” Ajax said, back on a roll; it was all self-stim at this point, like those kids with autism who rock back and forth to calm themselves. “None. It’s not the lightbulb that needs changing.”

  No response. The others were still on high alert, scanning the surroundings. Besides, they’d long ago learned to tune out Ajax’s motor mouth; it was that or silence him permanently. “PMS jokes are funny. Period.” Ajax continued. Leon could almost see the perforations on the page turning over in Ajax’s mind like in one of those old player pianos.

  “Ajax does kind of have a point, Leon,” Crumley whispered to Leon after getting a little closer. “We’re working at a distinct disadvantage here.”

  Leon was already working on the conundrum; he hardly needed Crumley for the coaxing, but he was prompting anyway in case the preoccupied look on Leon’s face had to do with him addressing some other problem Crumley considered less relevant. That was the problem with leading more experienced men; they often thought they could all lead better than him; at the very least, they couldn’t resist the urge to second guess him.

  “Let’s see if Alpha Unit has anything to contribute on that score,” Leon replied. “Any sign of them?”

  “No, but that could just mean they’re smarter than we are when it comes to not sticking their necks out,” DeWitt quipped. “While we’re on the subject, I’d like to put in for a demotion back to Alpha Unit. It’s exhausting trying to be more brilliant than anyone else at surviving.”

  “No fears there,” Cronos said, patting him on the back. “Let us know when that mind of yours is back from vacation.”

  DeWitt snorted. “That’s been our problem from the start, too many smart asses, not enough smarts.”

  “Stow it,” Crumley said, taking over control of the unit, presumably because he figured Leon was tired working his mouth harder than his brain. The circle had tightened enough
that they were all standing shoulder to shoulder now; the warmth and physical contact of one another’s bodies creating a palliative effect, just not a strong enough one. “I suggest we hike downhill. Alpha Unit is not in the kind of shape we’re in, save for Patent, and he wouldn’t leave them behind.” Crumley was already heading downhill. No one particularly wanted to move, too exhausted from the recent encounter with the monkeys so their eyes panned to Leon to make sure this was indeed the new directive.

  “You heard the man.” Leon broke from the circle and marched behind Crumley.

  “Maybe you could explain it to my legs,” DeWitt said. “And it’s not my mind that’s on vacation, smart ass,” he added, raising his voice to Cronos, who was tromping ahead of him. “It’s the rest of my body which stopped taking orders from me a while back. I’ll let you know when I manage to get the rebel parts to be more cooperative.”

  Ajax gave DeWitt a swift kick from behind, sending him rolling down the hill. “Anything else I can do to help you along, big guy, you just ask.”

  DeWitt managed to surpass Crumley, heading down hill, rolling head over heels. “Appreciate the gung-ho attitude, DeWitt,” Crumley shouted after him. “We could use more of that around here.”

  ***

  “Relax, kids, I got this!” Patent blared, dropping the tethers and reaching into his Dung-beetle toy chest he had been dragging behind him like a draft horse for a weapon.

  The big guy pulled out a modified rocket launcher with a gun belt trailing from it of rockets for rapid reload and discharge. The glorified bazooka could fire on automatic, like an assault rifle, and the trail of “bullets” seemed endless owing to the clown-car toy chest effect, which warped space as readily as that clam ship that crash-landed through the star gate on the other side from which they’d come. The space warping effects of the toy chest must have mitigated the effects of gravity as well or likely not even Patent could have dragged that thing uphill. Leave it to Patent to apply that technology to his toy chest with the same attitude that led to Double Mint Gum: Double your Pleasure, Double your Fun.