“Who else? We’re all here!” Patent blared.
“The kid, Thor, sir.”
Patent sighed. “Small mercies.” Finally the obvious dawned on him, despite the distraction of blasting boulders coming their way. “And how long does it take to beam up one little kid!”
“Too long, sir,” Satellite informed him.
***
“Duck!” Leon screamed as a rhinoceros-like creature—the size of a blimp filled with cement—came rolling down the hill, having lost its footing. The entire Omega Force team ducked in time to see the wall of kicking, stampeding flesh—the hooves running on air as the thing rolled on to its back—miss their heads by a couple of inches.
“Where the hell is my comic relief?” DeWitt barked, using his modified sniper rifle to take careful aim with the scope—all while running atop a downward sliding tree that would have fit fine inside a five-hundred year old redwood forest; it was big enough to drive a car through at the base. No one had time to check over their shoulder to see if Ajax hadn’t ducked in time. DeWitt fired. The “modified” sniper rifle—one of Patent’s toys—fired a superball-like shell that calculated on the fly just how much force it needed to shatter its target while absorbing the force it needed to rebound toward its next target. It was like hitting a steel ball in a pinball game just so with one of the paddles that you racked up a ton of dings and bells and whistles and set off a lot of flashing lights before the ball settled into the gravity well at the bottom. The AI-onboard pellet, the size of one of those wooden bowling balls that you also found in arcades, had cleared the field ahead of them up the mountain of no less than twelve pieces of incoming obstacles caught up in the avalanche, freeing up the other Omega Force shooters to handle what was left. DeWitt was continuing to do most of the heavy-lifting in this manner. “Seriously, man, you know what it takes to maintain that kind of aim over this kind of terrain—while on the move? Where the hell is my comic relief!”
“What does one lesbian vampire say to the other?” Ajax’s voice spat over the COMMS, coming in late on cue. “Same time next month?”
DeWitt relaxed back into the zone after missing the last shot, laughing, and taking another shot that did the trick.
“Why does the average woman reportedly want beauty more than brains?” Ajax asked the group. “Because the average man can see so much better than he thinks.”
DeWitt glanced back at Cronos. He had used his catapult weapon to lasso the local equivalent of a horse. It had a rhino-like horn and Clydesdale-like hooves. And upon that horse he was now charging up hill. To be more precise, he was galloping up a petrified tree that was sliding downhill in the direction opposite to where Cronos wanted to go. And in Cronos’s hands was a makeshift lance fashioned from a branch of one of the petrified trees. It was a scene right out of a Medieval festival put on for a king where knights charged one another on horseback with their lances. Only Cronos was spearing boulders heading his way, cracking them in two. And if any animals were foolhardy enough to come at him, they got skewered on that lance briefly before he flung them off. Each time he made contact with the tip of the lance, he shouted, “By the power of God!” “The Lord is my God and I shall not want!” “Feel the brunt of the Almighty!” or some such nonsense, making sure to mix up the epithets.
All in all, DeWitt was relieved he had some comic relief by way of Cronos in case Ajax came up short on jokes. What a madman!
FORTY-ONE
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
When the enemy came in through the walls, as if the ship’s hull weren’t solid, Solo figured he was the man for the job. But he couldn’t keep this up for long. He wasn’t sure what about his genetic alterations that when mated with his nanites gave him access to multidimensional space, but he knew it required energy expenditure which was exhaustible, and he was depleting his reserves fast. Cassandra, still trapped in the interdimensional sphere in the center of the ship, was watching him with growing amusement, realizing her moment had come.
These weren’t the dumb animals outside the ship that had chosen to invade. These were humanoids, genetically altered like the Theta Team crew, and designed to rapidly accommodate to other worlds and to go where no man had gone before. That was the problem; it made them hard to put down.
Their numbers were legion; Theta Team was outnumbered four to one. And they had more to do than just fight off their attackers; they had to get the ship up and running again if they were ever to get the hell out of here in time—invaders or no.
Solo held his cane out in front of him; he fired the lasers from his eyes straight into it and let the crystal head of the cane prism his laser beams to scores of attackers at once, boring through their heads, their chests where their hearts ought to be—if he guessed right. The facets of the crystal were aiming themselves to make sure they hit the marks Solo intended, and not Theta Team, or Solo, for that matter. There was more intelligence in each facet of that crystal geodesic dome than there was inside a hundred unupgraded human minds. To add insult to injury, Solo started spinning the head of the cane like a disco ball in a nightclub so he could take out more targets with a single sustained blast from his eyes. But he was quickly finding out that it wasn’t enough to bore a hole straight through these bastards; even if he achieved brain death and stopped their hearts, proverbially speaking; they, too, were loaded down with so many nanites they were still quite lethal fighting on in a zombie-like state. For the sole purpose of killing, how much brain power did that honestly require? Hardly enough to tax the nanites in their systems, apparently.
To make matters worse, the invaders had crystalline bodies of their own. That meant Solo’s lasers directed at them could not disintegrate them instantly. The fact that the interlopers’ bodies were disintegrating at all as opposed to allowing the lasers to pass through them harmlessly was on account of the nearly-invisible nanites within their crystal bodies absorbing the heat from the lasers.
Solo upped his game, freeing the nanites in the crystal dome of his cane a few at a time, beaming them from the cane straight into the bodies of his targets, giving them just enough of a hive-mind intelligence to act on their orders—which was to devour their victims from the inside out. After being imprisoned in the multidimensional field of his crystal for so long, they were more muscular and athletic for all the time and energy expended trying to get out. Their morphing ability was simply better than the competition’s, and so the enemy started disappearing into them as if they were miniature black holes, which they were not. They were more like atomizers, breaking down the alien bodies to base atoms that might actually freshen the air inside the Nautilus.
But no sooner had Solo cleared the field so the Theta Team could continue their repairs on the ship unimpeded than more of the enemy passed through the walls, their numbers showing no signs of diminishing.
He might be able to sustain this a while longer, Solo thought, but to what end? He still couldn’t manage to check all the ones coming through the walls, and all it took was for one to harm a Theta Team member beyond his self-mending abilities, and this ship might well not be going anywhere. They were all one-of-a-kind lifeforms with one-of-a-kind expertise in areas in all likelihood no one else understood half as well. If they were irreplaceable, then unleashing Cassandra was now the lesser of the two evils.
Solo directed the cane at the containment field holding her. He was using the various AI intelligences imprisoned within each of the planes that described the facets of the crystal dome itself—much of their mind power encoded holographically in order to fit more algorithms in less space—to communicate with the larger containment field holding Cassandra.
Once the dome’s communiqué was received, Cassandra was released. Cassandra took to the opened door like any prisoner with the jailor’s back turned.
Solo had one set of final instructions for the containment field—whose supersentience was magnitudes of order larger than what was in his cane. He directed it toward curtailing the numbers entering the shi
p. Otherwise, not even Cassandra was going to put a stop to this.
For every four humanoids passing through the hull of the ship now—long since sealed, for what good it did—only one was holding on to physical form. The containment field that had held Cassandra was now moderating the supersentience trying to force its way into the ship to cripple the Nautilus’s brain—a brain that was quite literally everywhere, and so easy enough to get to.
As to how the supersentience of Solo’s containment field worked, not even he was entirely sure. If the Nautilus’s intelligence was distributed throughout the ship, then Solo’s containment field’s intelligence was distributed across ten dimensions—each one of those dimensions had laws governing the nature of how intelligence worked, or how it might be possible for it to work. Due to Solo’s unique mind with its ability to see into and access these different dimensions, he’d been able to, via trial and error, seed gestating intelligences in each dimension—and then grow them and train them to coordinate their efforts. This was a work in progress, and not unlike playing with fire. He was trying to raise sentient lifeforms potentially a lot smarter than he was without being able to entirely influence their maturation process; meaning they could well turn into bigger monsters than anything they had to face here. But what was the point of destroying anything, really? If it was destroyed you then couldn’t learn from it, even if its initial value eluded you. Ask anyone who was late to the party discovering what a single insect in the amazon could do to cure cancer, or any number of other diseases. He had to hope the supersentiences he was giving birth to were given to a similar transcendental logic. All considerations which pointed Solo in his next direction.
Whatever was behind this attack, it itself was likely being used as a tool. Someone had to have convinced it or coerced it against its will to do evil—because according to transcendental logic—the kind presumably a supersentience of this caliber would be prone to—such actions were nonsensical. You can’t learn from what you’ve destroyed.
Solo exited the battlefield, even if finding a way off the stage wasn’t all that easy with combat going on everywhere, on every level and deck of the ship. The fact was, he needed to gestate another multidimensional intelligence—this time to figure out what the hell was driving all this. He was encroaching on Natty’s, Laney’s, and Leon’s territory now. The ultimate in big picture scenarios was kind of their gig; if they didn’t contemplate the kinds of adversaries that could ensnare them in dramas without their realizing, toward ends they couldn’t fully understand—then they’d end up where they were now—because they didn’t think to look, or missed something that it took the attack itself to draw their attention to.
But Natty, Laney, and Leon might not have the tools they needed to answer their own questions. And even if they did, they might not have the weapons they needed to fight off a supersentience that could see any move they were going to make many moves ahead.
It was time to give them better tools to work with. It was time to give the Nautilus another lobe to her brain in addition to her autonomic systems and her frontal and parietal lobes, to put it in terms analogous to the human brain’s topography. Solo had one ace up his sleeve that even a far superior mind might well not have. No matter how long that foreign intelligence had been around, it may well not have perfected thinking and computing in multiple dimensions at once, because, ordinarily, none of those other dimensions affected what the hell went on in this one. So why waste the mental energy? It was still a bit of a Hail Mary, but he figured he needed to do something besides rely on others to fight the rest of this war for him.
He retreated to his private chambers. It was time to meditate on the problem—and to confer with the crystal multidimensional intelligence in the dome of his cane. It was just possible there weren’t ten dimensions but eleven, as some string theorists had argued. And the only thing better than one ace up his sleeve, was two.
FORTY-TWO
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
It was weird to observe the gyroscopically-corrected floors of the Nautilus fixed thanks to the ongoing efforts of Theta Team. Weird because it suggested things were “back to normal.” Only the sight before Cassandra’s eyes was far from normal. The all-out enemy invasion of the ship made the Nautilus seem more surreal than ever.
When Cassandra was ejected from the multidimensional prison she felt as if she had a tsunami powering her forward. It was pointless to resist. All she could do was take advantage of whatever enemy’s lap she was being thrown into.
She landed with a scream that reminded her of Serena Williams returning a volley across the court. That outcry, especially when combined with springing at her opponent from out of nowhere would have been enough to intimidate most enemies. But the humanoid staring back at her looked more nonplused by the fact that she’d had the nerve to come between her and the Theta Team officer she was determined to destroy. Cassandra’s adversary was female, and looked more like an Olivia de Berardinis pinup than she did, which kind of pissed Cassandra off. The alien’s body appeared as if sculpted of smoky quartz crystal to which had been attached all manner of chrome fittings—the body attachments, like the fins of a fish, a lot more than decorative.
She lunged for Cassandra, who was ready for her. But she just passed right through Cassandra heading straight for her actual target. Once she had her hands on the Theta Team operative, she plunged her hand into his lower back and ripped out his spine and his skull; never mind the guy was busy overhauling a damaged panel behind which were all manner of sensitive electronics and never even got a chance to react. But no worries there; the detached spine curled around its adversary’s arm and bit it off, using the vertebrae of the spine as teeth. It then whipped the stunned enemy across the neck, curling around the throat until it managed to take off the head in the same way a chainsaw cuts through wood.
Twice the woman tried to go all vapor on the Theta Team operative so he’d have nothing to bite down on and twice Cassandra had shot lasers from her eyes at her calibrated to short-circuit any nanites involved with the shifting from solid to ghostly form—if only temporarily.
Cassandra stood with her mouth hanging open as she watched the skull and the spine snake its way back into the dead meat suit lying on the floor. Once back in its shell, the Theta Team operative finished healing and sat up to resume his duties. He still hadn’t bothered to look around at what the hell was going on with the rest of the ship. Cassandra had no choice but to admire the man’s unwavering concentration on his duties, which was more than she could say for herself right now.
She shifted her focus to take in the larger battlefield, looking for fires to put out and trying to rank them by how out of control they were, keeping in mind now that Theta Team was a lot less defenseless than she initially feared. But if it was so hard to draw them into combat, that might be an even bigger problem.
Cassandra leaped onto the railing rimming the central courtyard where the multidimensional supersentience—glowing like a sphere of light—had replaced the jungle, now that the Nautilus was in all-out battle mode. From there, Cassandra did a somersault straight into the sphere that had held her prisoner for so long. She figured she would let the supersentience she’d felt present in the field the entire time bounce her to where she needed to go next. Since she didn’t know which of these Theta Team operatives could stand their ground long enough for her to get to them, she let the supersentience make the call for her, redirecting her momentum and angle of trajectory off its surface to where she needed to go next.
Cassandra rebounded off the sphere, landing one deck up. She felt as if she’d crashed the Theta Team operative’s private harem. There were not one, not two, but three of the alien femme fatales making out with him on the floor. The male Theta Team operative looked more drugged than into the foreplay, but whatever they were secreting from their tongues and the pores of their skin, the Theta Team operative was losing the battle; with each second he looked more into the amorousness than his ship’s repairs.
Forget that crystal humanoids shouldn’t have had supple bodies warm and inviting to the touch, and that their metallic tongues should have felt as enticing as an esophageal probe.
Grabbing the closest one by the leg, Cassandra ripped her off him and hammered her down on one of the two other females, driving the spiked-chrome headdress of the one in her hand into the one on the floor like a rake. Why bring hair into battle, which was hard to weaponize, when you could just grow metal bones out the back of your head like shark’s teeth—only unbreakable? The “shark’s teeth” bit into the other female whose milky white body and chrome fittings had softened to feel more natural rubbing up against her prey. Cassandra flicked her off the tines of the “pitch fork” straight at the multidimensional sphere, which promptly disappeared her to Techa knows where.
Taking to its new job function as a “light for attracting and zapping bugs” the sphere started vacuuming up a lot of the combatants that were playing hell with the Theta Team operatives. Inspired by Cassandra’s maneuver, it was no longer waiting for them to be hurled at it. So in addition to reducing the numbers “coming through the door” the sphere was now dispatching a fair number that were inaccessible to Cassandra. Better yet, it was specializing in the enemy’s ghosting function. The instant they went incorporeal to forestall an attack, they got sucked into the sphere. Without that trick up their sleeves, their enemy was a lot more vulnerable.
Cassandra would love to sit around and marvel at wherefrom the extra mind power the interdimensional spherical intelligence—or rather collective of intelligences—was coming from, not just to compute but to weaponize itself, but there were still a lot of enemies to put down. That and it occurred to her that whatever Solo was up to, it might be working successfully enough to free up the spherical hive intelligence to do a bit more than it was doing before.
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