The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  Trying her trampoline trick yet again, Cassandra launched herself from the deck she was on, straight at the sphere, getting rebounded this time straight up—to land on the back of a dragon soaring overhead. Okay, what for this move? But she couldn’t deny the strategic advantage of being able to take in the battlefield entirely at once from the back of the enraged dragon, its blood up, shrieking in anger at having its territory encroached upon. Then it occurred to Cassandra why she might have been planted there, not to play lookout but…

  Cassandra rested her hand on the dragon’s back and opened the floodgates for her nanites to pour from her body into the dragon. She was sending the nanites straight to the dragon’s salivary ducts specializing in secreting the chemicals it could then use to spit flames out with. When Cassandra’s nanites were finished making over those salivary ducts, the dragon’s flames would use the nanites expectorated with the flames to do the heavy lifting of killing its prey.

  She had to be careful to make the Theta Team operatives immune for such a broad stroke brush she was taking to this canvas, or she’d end up taking out as many of the good guys as the bad. And for those kinds of calculations, she needed the sphere that had held her prisoner. But they were on rather good speaking terms at this point being as its ability to read Cassandra’s mind was a big part of its ability to counter her every move, allowing the supersentience collective to keep Cassandra prisoner. Now it was going to protect Theta Team from her even as she swooped down, blasting anything that moved.

  The instant the flames contacted the enemy, the flames themselves doing nothing, and the dragon had flown on, the nanites left behind started doing their thing. The nanites peeled the latest adversaries down to their metallic bones, devouring their smoky-quartz-crystal-like “flesh.” The ones being eaten alive as if by invisible termites communicated no shortage of discomfort and pain through their strange, haunting shrieks, but their outcries were stifled in order that the noise not become so deafening that the Theta Team operatives couldn’t concentrate on their work; and the enemies’ staggering before they collapsed were steered so they couldn’t fall headlong into the otherwise preoccupied Theta Team reassembling the ship. It had taken the interdimensional sphere to coordinate all that, needless to say.

  Cassandra shifted her attention to the latest drama playing out.

  The crystal and metal humanoids—they may have been little more than avatars for the alien supersentience trying to breach the Nautilus, as opposed to actual lifeforms—were making a play for the light sphere at the center of the ship. Cassandra tried to get her mind around the insanity of this move, since the multi-dimensional entity would be only too happy to imprison them forever. They jumped into the light as if they were desperate to sacrifice themselves. But when they landed they glommed on to the surface of the light sphere as if it were a solid surface instead of pure energy. So, the alien supersentience had divined how to “walk on water” or transdimensional energy long enough to what, hack the light sphere? Cassandra wasn’t waiting around to find out. If the crystal-metal humanoids managed to take out the equivalent of a war god that was at the Nautilus’s disposal, this fight was going to be over in a hurry.

  Cassandra redirected the dragon she was mounted on with a thought, and together they took their first pass over the sphere. The lasers the beast emitted from its eyes simply passed through the crystal warriors without harming them. If the nanites inside them had trapped the heat from the lasers enough for Solo’s maneuver to combust them before, the supersentience had evidently since tweaked the avatars. The dragon, at Cassandra’s beckoning, fired off the next round from its eyes as boluses of energy as opposed to lasers. The plasma energy boluses would continue to collect up mass on their way to their targets until the proton torpedoes bowled over the humanoids determined to play gecko crawling over the surface of “Mars” –their war god.

  The dragon could only take out two at a time with this method. Cassandra aided its efforts with a nanite whip she synthesized from her own body’s nanites on the fly. Each flick of that whip connected with a neck, and each retraction severed a head. The nanites left behind where the whip made the cut, continued to do their work, migrating through the heads and bodies and ultimately combusting, as they turned themselves into high explosives as their final act of morphing.

  Warfare had finally reached the point where imagination was the real limiting factor; the nanites needed some sort of leadership, some inspiration beyond what their own hive minds could conjure on autopilot.

  Cassandra had bought “Mars” enough time; the light sphere had now counter-hacked the avatars attacking it, swallowing them up on contact; they could no longer sustain their act of walking on light-beams.

  Cassandra turned her attention to the mano-a-mano battles happening across the decks of the ship. Until “Mars” could be contended with, there was always the possibility of making one of the crew talk as to where the Nautilus’s supersentience could most easily be taken out. The few trying to squeeze that information out of their captives now were getting a rude awakening regarding Theta Team’s resolve to protect the Nautilus; finding out the hard way that even reluctant soldiers could be quite formidable, given those kind of genetic modifications.

  As to the ones still too ensconced at their work stations to be bothered with the fighting going on, the metal-crystal warriors had already tried to ghost-walk through the metal-glass walls and doors to the habitat worlds that Theta Team occupied aboard the ship. But ghost walking through the Nautilus’s internal barriers was proving a great deal different than ghost-walking through the hull of the ship. Apparently the Nautilus had her own mind made up about just how much breeching of her perimeter she’d permit in order to study her enemy, but past that, forget it. The metal-crystal avatars found their ghostly forms trapped in the panes of metal-glass as if they were 2-D prisons, and the avatars were little more than screensavers. They became like animated scarecrows to keep trespassers away, a function the Theta Team operatives were no doubt delighted to have them fulfill, considering how they felt about having their ongoing researches interrupted.

  Cassandra realized even the DNA-soup backup brain was holding up to the assault for now. It and “Mars” would buy the Nautilus’s chief supersentience what time they could, but would it be enough, with the alien supersentience knocking on the door upping its game with each round as if it were the wolf knocking on the doors of the three pigs in one of Grimm’s fairytales?

  Cassandra’s work done here—the upgraded dragon set to autopilot now to rely on its instincts that hardly needed cuing from Cassandra—she jumped off the dragon’s back, diving into the energy sphere in the courtyard.

  She had no idea where she was headed, but wherever that was, it was going to be another humbling journey. Already she realized that she could no longer do her job without being married to a supersentience—for all her superior nextgen nanites relative to the rest of the Nautilus’s crew.

  ***

  Cassandra surfed her way down from one of the upper decks of the Nautilus to the deck below along a stream of nanites jettisoned from her own body. They were spread thin like tossed grains of sand, but each of those “grains” came with miniaturized jet propulsion. By the time she landed at her target, the elongated and barely-drawn-in path she’d followed had coalesced beneath her feet into a small hoverboard whose edging was every bit as lethal as the rim of a sword. A fact ably demonstrated by virtue of how the tip of the hoverboard had sliced off the head of her latest nemesis. That Medusa-like head with hair follicles in the form of metallic snakes had already lashed out at Cassandra, but the snakes missed sinking their fangs into her as the lobbed-off head rolled back; instead the fangs of the snakes caught the railing, keeping it from sailing into the oblivion of the light orb supersentience acting both as war counsel and ready disposal for any enemy foolish enough to get tossed into it. The severed head entirely content to continue fighting, despite Cassandra’s best efforts to end her enemy, was something
she had to admit she found entirely disheartening. Cassandra really didn’t have the time to kill these things more than once. The fierce look of determination in the severed alien’s face, the eyes like cold, hard steel…and, of course, with those semi-sentient hair follicles, she could move almost more ably than she could when the head was attached to her body, if a bit more in an octopus-like fashion now. The head continued to crawl and then hop like a jumping spider at Cassandra.

  But Cassandra was already off on her new hoverboard. Were it not for the atmospheric nanites’ ability to multiply themselves with the aerosolized blood and alien goop floating about in the air, they could not have pulled of the conjuring trick of the hoverboard itself, not without robbing Cassandra’s body of far too many other nanites she needed for far more creative purposes. Taking advantage of the largesse, Cassandra had since recalled the nanites she’d originally used to create the hoverboard to her body.

  All the while, the decapitated yet fully alive Medusa head haunted Cassandra; had the supersentience upped the survival ability of its avatars yet again, or was this an ability exclusive to the Medusas?

  Cassandra maneuvered her hoverboard deftly by the small thrusters beneath it, allowing her to carve through the air currents created by the Nautilus’s life support systems as if responding to incoming tidal surges, riding the next big wave coming ashore. As she spun “out of control” seemingly or tumbled head over heels after “losing her balance” she came at the numerous alien combatants from just outside of their peripheral vision, using the sharp edges of the hoverboard to slice them in half; jumping off the board and over the now severed and tumbling upper body to land on the board again on the other side as the board cut right through her enemies, wherever she made contact with them.

  The hoverboard made diamond-saw cutting sounds as its impossibly sharp edges bored through the crystal and chrome bodies of the aliens. It had taken Cassandra this long to catch on, but they were all female, chosen to take advantage of the extra suppleness of their bodies—despite being made of crystal and chrome—to stretch, arc, bend, twist, flip, and Gumby-doll their way past any projectiles shot at them or arms swinging weapons. They were impossibly nimble despite the paradoxical nature of their bodies, which were virtually impenetrable to bullets, lasers, and most conventional weapons. Or perhaps the reason for the all-female assault team lay elsewhere: say in the largely male crew that could be more easily hypnotized by them into lowering their guard.

  The supersentience had had another reason for making this wave of attackers female. Perhaps one she’d just alighted on, because Cassandra only noted this feature now, very possibly imparted to them as part of the latest upgrades piped through to the crystal-metal soldiers. They were all carrying fetuses, visible through their translucent bodies, gestating at a phenomenal rate. Soon that generation of warriors would be ready to reinforce the enemy ranks.

  Cassandra craned her head forward again after looking back to make sure these severed soldiers weren’t getting up this time. They weren’t. But that might have been on account of the hoverboard leaving a bit of its sharpened tip behind each time; the nanites lingering inside the bodies of the dead victims to make sure to counter any back-from-the-dead acts they were thinking of performing. Let’s hope they were equally effective against the babies gestating inside the mothers, which seemed quite content to continue their pregnancy inside the dead mothers.

  Cassandra looked forward just in time to see one of the frustrated, beleaguered Theta Team engineers, working to restore one of the Nautilus’s substations, tired of backhanding the enemy combatant determined to kill him, stand up, turn around, a look of rage on his face—one of those still waters run deep kind of reactions from an otherwise docile individual. The Theta Team member split open right down the middle from head to toe along a very jagged inseam that Cassandra could only describe as the jaws of death. The shark-toothed edges of that inseam chomped down on the enemy combatant the next time she lunged. The part of the enemy’s body that had not been devoured in one clump was still wriggling on the floor.

  The Theta Team member, still worked up, threw a savage glance Cassandra’s way, as if to communicate, “You want some of this?”

  Cassandra smiled back. “I bet you’re a treat in the cafeteria line.”

  Once her back was to him, Cassandra seethed as she soared off on the hoverboard in the direction of the next alien encroacher to be put down. “Admit it, Cassy, you’re just pissed because there are suddenly people who can kill with as much flair and style as you, even if they are just one-trick ponies. But no one can challenge you on sheer efficiency. You still have that going for you.”

  She made the mistake of sneaking a look at the nun coming her way from the other direction. Perhaps Cassandra had spoken too soon.

  The nun refused to take her eyes off Cassandra despite being attacked from all directions by a—for now at least—numberless enemy. Her march was relentless, her path a pure beeline. She was carrying a ruler in her hand that she was shaking at Cassandra, evidently intent on giving Cassandra a piece of her mind about something. But the meddlesome aliens trying to kill her were getting in the way of whatever tirade she was in the middle of. Refusing to be shaken from her objective, the nun head-butted the one that had come up behind her and put her in a chokehold, hoping to use her to get Cassandra to stand down. The force of that head butt must have been quite something, because the metal-glass-bodied alien with the Medusa-like metallic snakes coming out its head and the shark-tooth-like scales running along the ridge of its exposed spine shattered so completely that the shrapnel ended up taking out several more of the enemy, exploding them on contact. Had the nun calculated the trajectory of that shrapnel by how she’d delivered her kill strike? Surely not, Cassandra thought. Still, it wasn’t like the shrapnel had hit any of the good guys.

  With three of the enemy on the nun at once, she elbowed the one behind her, and took her ruler and drove it lance-like through an eye of the ones to the front and left of her. In the same hand motion that had begun with the elbowing earlier—she sliced off the head of the third assailant at the neck. Cassandra was getting the feeling that was no ordinary ruler.

  Cassandra gulped. Yep, no doubt about it, she no longer had the market cornered on efficient killing.

  Free to shake the ruler at Cassandra at last, the nun did so as she declared, “You think we have time for your theatrics, you self-indulgent little girl. Show me your knuckles!” Rankled by the latest interruptions to her disciplining session in progress, the nun used the ruler to give the latest Medusa-type to get near her a haircut. With one slice of the ruler, she severed the snakes close to the roots, leaving them to side-wind off in all directions. They went straight for the enemy, turning on their own kind, even more efficient killers now that they no longer owed their allegiance to any one humanoid. They slithered down the throats of some, choking them, coiled around the necks of others, cutting off their circulation and ultimately cinching down to take off their heads entirely. Others merely bound the wrists and ankles so the good guys could finish them off. Cassandra was beginning to appreciate the genius of an enemy that the more you “killed” it or at least did harm to it, the better it fought.

  She witnessed some of the babies crawling out of the wombs of their dead mothers now to fight for them, an army of midgets, even harder to target, to make Cassandra’s point for her.

  But the nun hadn’t taken her eyes off Cassandra even as Cassandra’s eyes took in the wonder of their latest adversary. “I said show me your knuckles, little girl!”

  Nonplused, Cassandra held out her knuckles and the nun promptly rapped them with the flat side—as in non-cutting side—of her ruler. “If I catch you…” She was rudely interrupted by an alien leaping off the railing of the deck it was on to pounce on her. The nun sliced out its heart—or what it was using for one, some mechanical pump—and handed it back to him. “Don’t expose your chest like that, young woman, it’ll be the death of you.” The lig
ht gone out of her combatant’s eyes, the heart sprouted legs and morphed one of its arteries formerly pumping fluid through it into a cannon’s nozzle. The nun booted the heart into the light sphere at the center of the ship before she could find out what the cannon shot exactly.

  She turned around to find Cassandra had headed off on her hoverboard to engage in her “theatrics” riding invisible wave after invisible wave of air currents coming at her from all directions to continue to confound the enemy even as she used the board’s sharp edges to commit mass murder—artistically over-stylized mass murder that galled the nun for all its flamboyance. The nun made the sign of the cross over herself. “Forgive her lord, for she knows not what she does.” The nun marched on, dispatching her enemies as curtly and as effortlessly as before.

  ***

  “I feel like Cortez, discovering the new world,” Thor said, leaning on his rifle, the barrel pointed upward, as if it were Merlin’s staff, and looking over the battlefield of the Nautilus no longer under siege but under all-out invasion by the enemy.

  Thor inhaled deeply. “Smell that, Frog Doll. That’s the smell of victory! At the rate we’re cutting down their numbers, it won’t be long now.”

  “Megalomania distorts your sense of reality,” Frog Doll warned.

  “I’ve never seen things more clearly.”

  Frog Doll leaped at the last second from Thor’s side to keep Thor from losing his head to an enemy soldier. The latest wave of strange alien combatants to slip through the hull of the ship had a tiny head up until it was ready to eat you whole, and then that head ballooned in size until it could swallow a Goodyear blimp like a weenie roast at a weekend barbeque. Frog Doll cleaved the head off the creature by biting through the neck with some rapid-jaw action and its shark’s teeth.

  He jumped back down in front of Thor. “Sorry you had to see that, wasn’t exactly G-rated.”