The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  Starhawk, Ariel, and Satellite hunkered down in the woods just to the edge of the clearing he was standing in, not sure what was the more horrific sight, the relentless attack on Patent, or Patent doing his one-man-army thing with a despicably cruel efficiency.

  The air snakes came at Patent looking remarkably like those dragon floats parade-marchers carried overhead on Chinese New Year. They moved like sidewinding snakes through the air with fins like fish for cutting through the water; the air was like a water medium to them because of their air bladders. They were largely see-through despite their bright colors designating just how dangerous they were—like all brightly colored animal and insect life in the forest—their high visibility a warning to stay away. Until they got a lock on Patent, they were picking off vampire tree-monkeys and other life in the jungle’s upper stories as they snaked between the ever-purples and ever-oranges. The air snakes’ dragon-like heads made for even more impressive open-mouthed devouring than boa constrictors that could similarly unhinge their jaws.

  They could pick up speed through the air in a short space to soar at you like a blow dart. Patent kept turning on himself three hundred and sixty degrees with an eye to all elevations to thwart all sneak attacks. If he got off a shell too late, he weathered the blowback with barely a grimace as his nanites healed him from the ugliness of chemical burns caused by the snakes’ venom—shot out their mouths in the manner of spitting mambas—and the flesh wounds caused by the shells’ own shrapnel, or perhaps the shrapnel of disintegrating dragon snakes.

  When the air snakes found their colors no longer intimidated, they switched to stealth mode, becoming nearly invisible. When that didn’t slow Patent down or affect his accuracy in the least, they went totally invisible. Patent then used the disturbance in air currents he could feel or see by the way of disturbed particles in the air to get a lock on his targets.

  It didn’t matter if a dragon snake bit down on his arm and whisked off with it. He just grew a new one, often with barely a wince, sometimes with a loud roar that was hard to interpret; did it indicate excruciating pain, or redoubled fury? He compensated for the loss of an arm or rebalanced on one leg until the limb regrew. When he lost his head, he continued fighting headless until he could regrow a head, switching to auto-targeting mode on the hand-held rocket launcher with a flick of the button by his thumb on the grip the instant before he lost his head. As soon as he had his head back, he switched back over to manual targeting.

  When he was out of shells, finally, he dropped the rocket launcher and just switched to a cutlass; you’d think he was gutting an exotic variety of electric eels in a fish factory. When he lost the hand holding the long knife to a snake bite, he used the one remaining hand to catch the next incoming snake at the snout, peeled back the top of the head with the hand, and pried open the jaw with his mouth until he ripped the head apart. It was like watching Kong do his thing in King Kong, only missing an arm.

  When the snakes finally retreated, Patent wiped the goop off himself, which included the top half of a dragon’s head that had landed on top of his bald pate like one of those Native American headdresses. He waited, not exactly patiently, for his hand to grow back.

  Then he surveyed the carnage. Fortunately for him, the battlefield was still largely clear, as the dragon snakes had deflated upon being burst like so many balloons. What few weren’t laying virtually level with the ground were the ones with still undigested animals inside them, mostly from the tree monkeys they’d swallowed whole.

  Anticipating another wave of attacks, Patent hunkered down behind the natural fortifications or “false walls” of the undigested animals, some stacked two or three high, depending on how the snake had collapsed in meeting its death. He whistled for his pet Dung Beetle to wheel itself over, and selected something from the a la carte menu as he noticed the next batch of assailants moving toward him.

  Patent’s attention kept shifting from the latest incoming wave of bushwhackers and the fact that his body wasn’t healing as rapidly as before. Though the hand had grown back, it had taken far longer to regenerate this time, even without his body having to first regrow an entire arm. The scarred tissue remained on the surface. Evidently, the nanites still functional in his body couldn’t be bothered with minor cosmetic repair with all they had to attend to.

  “Why is he taking longer to mend?” Ariel asked from the sidelines, observing everything that was going on.

  Satellite was already scanning Patent, looking for an answer to the same question. “His nanite hive mind appears to be smarter than he is,” he said, regarding the device’s output. “It’s no longer interested in hacking the alien nanites ability to heal faster than Patent. It’s decided there’s nothing new to be learned at this level, and if Patent is going to stay here and play war games happily until the end of time, he can do so without it, as it presses on to level three.”

  “No way you got all that off of that screen,” Ariel said, radiating her disbelief from her glaring eyes straight at Satellite.

  “I admit, some of it is creative extrapolation,” Satellite confessed, “until I can come up with a better explanation.”

  They both looked back at Patent. He hurled some smoke bombs that compromised anyone’s ability to see anything. But when the smoke cleared, the enemy was attacking themselves. The giant spiders—colored much like Costa Rican rainforest frogs in gleaming patterns unique to each—which had piranha-like teeth inside of snapping mouths on their heads, but also on the tips of their feet attached to their eight legs, started eating themselves.

  The problem was that Patent had caught a whiff of his own poisonous gas, and was now trying to bite off his grenade-launching hand despite clearly fighting the impulse to do so, frustrated by his lack of discipline on the matter.

  Satellite and Ariel, prepared to run to his rescue, threw a weapon into Starhawk’s hands. Starhawk threw down the assault rifle. He had seen enough. “Oh, no. I’m not getting caught up in some pointless battle just because this is Omega Force’s idea of Jazzercise.”

  Satellite, possessing no more desire to go out there, sighed. “Just this one time, Starhawk, please get with the program, for Patent’s sake.”

  “Wait, I think I might have an idea,” Ariel interjected into the stare down going on between Satellite and Starhawk.

  She used the device in her hands to hack the Dung Beetle. The thing stood up on two legs and morphed into a soldier-bot whose shell was suddenly an armored backpack from which it could extract weapons at will simply by magnetizing one or another of them to its hands, or “telekinetically” sending them flying in a desired direction with a wireless radio transmission.

  The soldier-bot’s first act of order was to send contraptions flying Patent’s way. One small robot clamped on to Patent’s hand, encasing it so Patent couldn’t chew through it, no matter how hard he tried, and he was trying damned hard. Another fist-size robot flew out of the dung beetle shell to land on Patent’s mouth, unfolding itself to put Patent’s mouth in bondage, the legs wrapping around the back of his head; he had been effectively ball-gagged. He was starting to look like some S&M master’s bitch.

  The next weapon to come flying out of the armored backpack was a firehose attached to a compressed gas tank. It was summarily used by the robot on the third wave—an invading army of leaf-carrying ants that used the leaves as both shields and sharpened blades; the metallic leaves acting admirably well in both capacities. The leaves also deflected the lasers coming from Patent’s eyes as he continued to battle his enemy. Apparently, he hadn’t lost full control of all the nanites in his body; there were multiple hive minds in there and they weren’t all rebelling; some of them were allowing him to re-task them.

  But the leaf-cutter ants were swarming all over him and slicing into him with those metallic leaves, and he just wasn’t healing like before with the bulk of his most advanced nanites off-line. The rebel nanites were all too happy to embrace the added exposure to the surface the leaf-cutter ants
were creating with each swipe of their makeshift blades, allowing the nanites in Patent’s body to march out and to coalesce in a growing cloud determined to hack the portal to level three all on their own.

  Droid Dung Beetle Soldier turned away from the leaf-cutter ants swarming the clearing from all directions—where the ejected spray from his weapon had rusted the insects on contact, turning them into iron sculptures reminiscent of the Terra Cota Army dug up in China—and aimed the nozzle at Patent. One blast rusted up his attackers. Patent promptly rolled over the suddenly static army, crushing the now brittle ants and leaves they were carrying underneath to rid himself of the last of the pests.

  “How did you know that Dung Beetle could morph into a soldier bot?” Satellite asked Ariel from the sidelines, sounding impressed.

  “I didn’t, but this is Patent we’re talking about. You need to think with an extra measure of crazy.”

  The trees were on the march now. It turned out this wasn’t a petrified forest at all so much as one dependent on soil with a very high metal content that got transferred to the branches and leaves. One of the trees had Patent pinned under one of its roots. Meanwhile, the other “pine” trees sneezed their needles at him with a cooperating gust of wind. He had been turned into a human porcupine. He roared from under the ball-gag, managing to sound only more pissed and defiant, using the pain as a high-octane additive to fuel his determination.

  Starhawk had finally succeeded in whatever he was working on since bitching about being drafted into the action. He turned the dial on his device and it emitted an eardrum-splitting sound, driving everything back, the trees, the birds in the trees, the insects.

  “Shit!” Satellite said, pressing his hands against his ears.

  “Don’t worry, I made sure we’re immune,” Starhawk informed him, his eyes still on the results of his handiwork and his smile of satisfaction his only other weapon.

  “The inoculation needs some tweaking,” Satellite bitched.

  Starhawk performed the requested adjustments, and suddenly the sound was no longer audible, but still being produced because the forest as a whole continued to retreat.

  The high metal content in all living things was causing them to vibrate like steel strings on an electric guitar. It was retreat or vibrate to the point of explosion. The ones slower on the learning curve had already disintegrated.

  “You’re using an upgrade to Corin’s and Thor’s frequency-modulating rifle,” Satellite said, putting two and two together.

  Starhawk smiled. “Yep.”

  Patent squirmed on the ground, groaning out his protests. It was everyone’s guess that he was demanding to be set free.

  Ariel sent the instructions from her improvised remote to the Dung Beetle Robot’s toys that were keeping Patent bound. Patent peeled off the self-unlatching restraints and stood. With the help of his three cadets, he managed to get the last of the petrified pine needles off him. He still wasn’t healing from his “death by a thousand cuts” and the nanite cloud that was forming about him of defectors continued to swell.

  “You have a hell of a lot of nerve coming between me and my fun,” Patent reprimanded his handpicked cadets.

  “The three of us may have just saved all of us,” Starhawk interceded. “If I’m right, the point of this game isn’t to make it through all the portals to the highest level.” Everyone’s eyes were now on him and they were frozen in waxworks poses broadcasting “Spill!”

  Starhawk explained, “We’ve got to get back to the Nautilus. She’s the one that’s really under attack. The supersentience that has neutralized us with the war games is going after the one true threat to it, the Nautilus’s supersentience.”

  “Shit!” Patent tapped his in-ear-COMMS.

  “Don’t bother,” Leon said. Patent, startled, looked up to see Omega Force encircling them. “We started running toward you the instant we saw the air snakes converging here. We heard what Starhawk just said.”

  “And?” Patent was still waiting for Leon to sign off on the idea.

  “And we better hope Theta Team can hold the fort until we get there,” Leon replied. “Time to pick up the pace, gentlemen, and my one lady.” Omega Force had already found another gear, heading uphill, not up the hill they’d come down, up the much bigger mountain that the Nautilus had crashed into.

  “Guys, sorry, but jogging was never my thing,” Starhawk confessed to Patent and the rest of Alpha Unit that still hadn’t budged.

  Patent picked him up by the collar in one hand the way a wolf mother picks up a cub in its mouth. “Hold on, big guy, we still have the problem of how to get your nanites to cooperate, or you’ll be fighting without upgrades.”

  “Figure it out on the fly.” Patent threw him over his shoulder, giving him a piggyback ride as Starhawk fought with his device to hack his way into Patent’s nanite turncoat hive mind. As for Patent, he was already double-timing it behind Leon and his people.

  Satellite panned his head to Ariel. “We have a better solution on how to get back to the Nautilus than sprinting up a mountain, right? Tell me we have a better solution than that.”

  “Actually,” she said, “it’s probably our best bet. We can still leap tall buildings in a single bound with these latest nanite upgrades. But the supersentience will be looking to hack those nanites before we can get to the ship now that its diversionary tactics are no longer working. So we don’t have time to stand around.”

  Satellite and Ariel were now running behind everyone else. “So, it’s just the two of us to hold off the supersentience counterhack?” Satellite said, running and working his device in his hands at the same time, the same as Ariel.

  “Until Starhawk can save Patent from himself so he’s free to join us.”

  “So, Starhawk is lost forever, in other words.” Satellite sighed with exasperation. “Maybe if we had another set of eyes so we could watch where we were running at the same time.”

  They both grew another pair of eyes on the spot. “Cool,” Satellite said, directing one set of eyes to keeping him from tripping on what was in front of him, and the other set at his device. “Yeah, let’s figure out a way to shut this bitch down,” he said, making some adjustments to the tech toy in his hands. “I for one do not want to surrender these morphing abilities.”

  FORTY

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  “This doesn’t strike you as a bit decadent?” Laney asked, floating beside Natty on an air-mattress with a built-in recliner, in her bikini. She was basted in SP-45, considering the grow lights overhead directed not at her but at the algal soup containing the DNA-based backup brain of the Nautilus—for now contained in this Olympic-size pool—and numerous others just like it—enough, she was told, to fill the volume of an aircraft carrier.

  “Nope,” Natty answered distractedly. He was focused on interjecting additional code into the DNA-based backup brain strategically, using a less-is-more approach, the same way bacteria and viruses hacked their way into the human body. There was no way he could go toe-to-toe with a supersentience—even in this primitive substrate—but he might be able to influence the Nautilus’s thinking with a few imperatives she was happy to assimilate.

  Laney was watching what he was doing on her iPad display and adapting his code to RNA-sequencing, essentially converting his digital lingo into lingo a carbon-based lifeform could understand.

  “It’s not quite the vacation of my dreams, but I guess this qualifies as a work-vacation,” she said, leaning into him for a kiss.

  He pulled their two flotation devices together to accommodate her exploratory mission of his mouth with her tongue. Scientists had a right to collect more data, after all, using any and all means necessary; and the tongue was a hell of a sense organ.

  “There’s nothing like fighting off the end of creation to bring the two of us together,” he said. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of it sooner.”

  “You did, only back when you were working for Truman, you were the source of all ev
il in the world, and of all plans that had any chance at succeeding in ending life as we know it.”

  “I’ll let that dig go in the spirit of the occasion.” He freed his arms from her neck and returned them to his iPad. This generation iPad was little more than a virtual screen given density and physicality by atmospheric nanites that formed the necessary substrate of the screen and electronics in response to the nanites in Natty’s and Laney’s brains. A certain percentage of the atmospheric nanites aboard the Nautilus remained hackable by “lesser minds” for purposes such as this.

  The ship shuddered, the chamber they were in responding as if to an earthquake. The DNA-soup spilled out of the pool, the wave action propagating across the formerly calm surface, the waves not coordinating, some canceling one another out, others creating swells that threatened to overturn Laney’s and Natty’s air mattresses.

  Laney put her hand in the DNA-fluid. “The algal soup is heating up, Natty. That is going to affect the Nautilus’s brain activity.”

  “The pool could stand to be more like a Jacuzzi. Personally, I applaud the upgrade.”

  “You’re assuming she’ll think better with the extra kinetic activity.”

  “Maybe we should see to it that she does, you know, turn negatives into positives?” Natty urged.

  She fought the panic looking to tear its way out from behind her face like a prisoner determined to escape, and just nodded.

  Theseus entered the enclosed Olympic Pool area. “We’re under attack,” he said giving it to them straight and with a minimum of emotional embellishment. He hiked the perimeter of the pool, touching the air just out and above his head, manifesting one very large flat screen display after another, each one with enough sentience to know to cut to wherever in the action it needed to cut to for Laney’s and Natty’s scrutiny. All of the Theta Team operatives had superior hacks in place for the atmospheric nanites than even Natty and Laney could pull off.