Thor beheld the head still rolling on the floor, blood hemorrhaging out of it in firehose-like squirts. “Cool,” he said. “Better, you know, if his head was only half-chewed off and he was walking around with it lolling to the side, fighting away unperturbed. You need a creative director, Frog Doll. Are we a fated union, or what?”
Frog Doll rolled his eyes. “Kids grow up way too fast these days. I guess the shark’s teeth you’re sporting should have been your first clue.” Frog Doll sighed, less on account of his self-berating remark and more on account of this was a distinct failure of his mentoring programming; he’d likely be swapped out by Thor’s mother for an absentee-parent guidance-goldfish that farted bubbles out its mouth while speaking in ten commandment-like aphorisms. Frog Doll shook from the shiver sprinting up his spine.
Thor scrutinized the battlefield more closely. “Well, the whole mass slaughter thing is kind of being done to death, isn’t it? We can come up with a better value-add than that, surely. I’m thinking the one stratagem on which the entire battle turns. If we can save everyone, I’ll be finally free from the tyrannical reign of my parents; and promoted to Omega Force, where I’ll only have to listen to a commander even more crazed than I am for jumping headlong into impossible situations.”
Thor thwacked Frog Doll with the butt of his rifle. “Well, any ideas?”
“I’m sorry if that last psychotic episode left me speechless.”
“This is not the humor-relief section of our programming, you twit. This is the tense, unfolding battle. So let’s get to tensing.”
“I think you have to talk to the glow ball at the center of the ship.”
Thor craned his neck toward him and grimaced. “Hey, for the record, I’m the crazy-sounding one around here.”
They both shifted their attention to the light sphere. “It does kind of look like a modern-day take on the burning bush,” Thor admitted. “What, do we make like sacrifices to it first, get down on our knees?”
Thor gave him a hard look. “I see you’re determined to regain the high ground as the King of Crazy.” Then he adjusted his focus back to the sphere. “Suppose it can’t hurt.”
They proceeded to pile decapitated heads, severed limbs, and entrails—Thor had to fight off the latter like boa constrictors when he got tangled up in the mess—at the orb’s base—or rather the edge of the deck, which just appeared to be the base of the orb from this level unless they stared too far over the edge of the railing. Then they got down on their knees and Thor made the sign of the cross over himself.
“Wrong god, ninny.”
“Oh, yeah.” Shifting into his more beguiling tone, Thor said, “Oh great warrior god, please bestow upon us the one strategy we need to win this war—and, you know, steal the glory away from everyone else.”
“I would just request one suppository, please,” Frog Doll interceded. “Eating aliens clearly doesn’t agree with me.”
“Will you stop, already! You’re going to spoil the whole ambiance of the sacrifice.”
Frog Doll groaned audibly. “Hey, glowing light thingy, could you hurry this along? In case you haven’t noticed, we’re sitting ducks out here.”
They both heard the voice of the light god speaking to them inside their heads. “Jump into the light.”
“No way,” Thor said. “That thing kept Cassandra prisoner.” Thor saw something move out of the corner of his eye, and panned right.
Frog Doll bitched, “Can’t you see we need a moment?” He leaped at the latest swelled-head creature—Thor was sensing a theme—and this time just gnashed its jugulars. The creature lumbered off squirting blood both directions as its head slowly deflated.
Thor nodded approvingly. “Nice. Five stars for grisly. Not to mention the free Slip N Slide from the trail of blood its leaving. Love the whole thinking-two-steps-ahead thing.”
His work done, Frog Doll, leaped back to Thor’s side to resume his kneeling position. Thor too was on his knees, and quite frankly they were getting a little sore.
“That was most disrespectful,” Thor said, continuing to take in the fate of the creature staggering away that had the audacity to interrupt the worshipping of their war god. “Now, where were we?”
“We were busy being disrespectful. Remind me to insert a couple seminars in my tutelage, one on irony and one on logical inconsistencies, when we get some downtime again.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Thor said remembering. “Ah, glowing light god, I would feel better if…”
“Jump now!” the supersentience blared inside their heads.
Frog Doll grabbed Thor by the arm and leaped. Thor didn’t appreciate him taking his instructions from a higher authority; the whole thing reminded him way too much of his totally fun-less parents.
But they were inside the glowing sphere now and what was done was done.
“I feel weird,” Thor confessed.
“I think we’ve been digitized,” Frog Doll said.
“I feel like a total air head.”
“That would be the extra self-consciousness you’ve been gifted with.” When delivering that line, Frog Doll managed to scrape just a shovelful of sarcasm off the top of the bottomless pile he was working off of.
“Whoa!” Thor exclaimed.
“Yeah, that is pretty cool.”
“What is that?”
“I believe we’re entering the mind of the enemy supersentience. Our warrior AI must have found some mission for us to fulfill in keeping with your dictates, which I guess makes it pretty smart. I mean who else could balance pandering to your lunacy while saving the rest of the crew and the ship simultaneously?”
“Now that I’m upgraded,” Thor said, “I can tell that was a dig, and I don’t appreciate it.”
“Finally, my insults can start earning dividends. I’d all but given up hope.”
The next moment that followed was a silence-is-golden moment. It was followed by: “You think we really could be the heroes of this story?”
“According to the Tibetan Buddhists, we are all the center of the universe,” Frog Doll explained. “Of course, if you had to beg for a bowl of rice, you’d say any crazy-ass thing to get someone to throw a few pennies in the coffers.”
“Listen, you two.” It was the voice of the glowing sphere again. “I am opening a channel to the alien supersentience so it can hear your prattle. With any luck, it’ll drive it insane, and you will be back in time for lunch.”
Thor and Frog Doll thought about this, and then said, in perfect sync, “Genius.”
FORTY-THREE
THE UNCHARTED PLANET, AGEMIR
In his peripheral vision, Leon caught sight of a boulder bouncing towards him like a tennis ball about to lose its final dribble before rolling flat on the forest floor. In those bounces, when it was briefly off the ground—just beyond—was a cherry red color. Of all the colors this strange psychedelically-hued planet had to throw at him, cherry red was not on the menu. Could it be?
He didn’t dare fire at the boulder to keep it off him, not and risk the shrapnel taking out his very objective, so he kangaroo-hopped over it and kept going.
“Is it me,” Ajax asked, “or does this avalanche seem to defy basic physics? I swear items that should be bouncing over our heads aren’t, and things not even in our path, are coming at us from the sides, and from below as well.”
“We were warned not to eat the food.” Crumley leveled his grenade launcher at the giant petrified tree rolling toward him looking to do more than make him more level-headed. “Up until now it hasn’t had any apparent effect. But what if it’s helping to magnetize the downward deluge toward us?”
“You people picked the damnedest times to get speculative,” DeWitt interjected. “We’ve already got four eyes each on the situation. What more can we do?”
Crumley looked over his shoulder and there was a void where a mountain of a man used to be. “Where’s Leon?” he shouted over the COMMS and the avalanche that refused to run out of steam.
<
br /> “I told him to lay off the Sam’s Club rotisserie chickens,” DeWitt replied. “Who eats an entire chicken in one sitting, anyway? It’s not normal. Of course he’s going to vomit it up running up an avalanche. Maybe next time he’ll try a different setting on his food replicator.”
DeWitt, Cronos, Ajax, Crumley—they were all checking over their shoulders for Leon. Luckily, they still had two heads facing opposite directions to make the job easier; but still no Leon. They had maintained their bodies in a morphed state with the extra pair of arms also holding extra grenade-launching rifles so they could continue to bolster the protective bubble around Alpha Unit coming up behind them. Alpha Unit’s reflexes still weren’t fast enough to dodge what the avalanche was throwing their way without some kind of help. As for Omega Force’s original heads and arms—facing forward—well, they were needed to continue to blast their path free in front of them of the latest incoming projectiles. This was no time for Leon to go AWOL.
“I don’t believe it,” DeWitt said. “Bastard. He found his Mustang. He better offer us a lift.” DeWitt grew another arm for the expressed purpose of holding out his hitchhiking thumb.
Crumley and the rest of the posse’s backwards facing heads watched hang-jawed as Leon cranked that clutch and worked the power hydraulic lifts under the car to skip from the tops of downhill bouncing boulders to the tops of rolling tree trunks back to the tops of bouncing boulders. “He’s even got the Speed Racer lifts. He didn’t tell me he had that thing tricked out!”
“Screw the Speed Racer mods—where are the James Bond torpedo launchers?” DeWitt asked. “That’s what we need right now.”
Leon sent a couple rockets on their way out of the dropped down tail lights to help save Satellite and Starhawk in Alpha Unit; the two teens still overly preoccupied with their devices to sufficiently keep an eye on the obstacles flying their way. “Okay, now I’m satisfied,” DeWitt said.
***
“Got a lock on the broadband!” Starhawk shouted from his reclined position in the crook of Patent’s weapon-toting arms.
Patent reinforced the laser blasts he was shooting from his nanite-infused eyes with a blast from his grenade launcher when the boulder coming Starhawk’s way was taking a little too long to blow apart. Then Patent sighed and shouted, “About friggin’ time!”
“Hey, if Satellite could have gotten us that COMM link sooner…” Starhawk bitched.
“I’m doing pretty good for a guy who’s taken enough rocks to the head to qualify as a punching bag,” Satellite bitched back over the COMMS.
Patent stopped the latest boulder from bowling them all over with a head butt, then tapped his reinforced skull. “You should all just try being more hard-headed, like me.”
Now that Satellite had established the COMMS link and Starhawk had convinced the Nautilus’s backup brain to devote more mind power to them, they were beaming aboard the Nautilus.
“Out of the frying pan,” Starhawk mumbled with a matching grimace.
***
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
“Did we actually miss the battle?” DeWitt said, nonplused, looking about the ship, the moment Omega Force finished materializing aboard the Nautilus. The scene before him was calmer than a day on the Caribbean sea in winter.
No sign of enemy intrusion. None.
DeWitt actually broke into a sweat. “Oh my God, we’re never going to live this down. We’re Omega Force, not the Dipshit Doo Da Collective.”
“Let’s not put the words in their mouths,” Crumley advised, refusing to drop his guard. So far, no one had lowered their weapons.
When they finally did, the only thing that could be heard over their panting was Leon grinding that clutch and burning rubber in that Mustang. “Okay, now he’s just being ridiculous,” DeWitt said.
Leon brought the car around, and idled the engine. “You think that maybe I could take her out for a spin, now that it’s the only thing likely to get a rise out of me for miles,” Crumley said.
In the next instant the mirage collapsed like a psychotic break folding before a dose of Thorazine. The place was complete chaos.
“Psych!” Ajax shouted as he raised his weapon just in time to blast whatever it was headed toward him; it was moving too fast to be any more than a blur.
Leon floored the Mustang, but not before Crumley jumped in. “If I can’t drive this thing, at least I can ride shotgun.”
Leon saw the rest of his Omega Force team in the rearview mirror getting knocked hard enough to go airborne by whatever had tackled them, still moving too fast for any of his special forces guys to get a read on. Not his problem. They were big boys; they could take care of themselves.
“I’m guessing it took this long for the supersentience in that energy sphere to hack its way past the enemy’s supersentience that was blinding us to what was going on in here,” Leon said, clutching.
“That energy sphere is a supersentience? Why don’t I ever get the memos around here?” Crumley bitched, discharging his rocket launcher after loading another shell from his belt. They had all made the mistake of morphing back into their old bodies before crossing the threshold of the ship’s hull, meaning no more heads looking in opposite directions at once, no more extra arms. It was going to take a while to adjust to moving a bit more slowly even as the tempo picked up around them.
At least the shells he discharged grew back in a flash, like watching a mango tree fruit in time-lapse photography, courtesy of his latest-generation nanite upgrades. Considering the moles he had on his body with age, he was all too happy to grow something for a change that was actually useful.
The next blurs headed Leon’s and Crumley’s direction slowed as they got within a few yards. Now that they could actually see their enemy, it was even worse than they’d imagined. “Shit,” Crumley bitched, “I miss the days when they were moving too fast to see. Those are some downright ugly bastards.” His comment accompanied another blast of his grenade launcher, turning the attacker leaping at them into splatter against Leon’s windshield. Leon was forced to use the windshield wipers and the squirt bottle for rinsing the muck off.
“It’ll take me hours to clean that goop off, Crumley! Show a little consideration!”
“Sorry for getting my priorities so out of whack, Leon. Next time I’ll just let the alien prick kill you.”
“What do I care? They can bring me back from the dead, the car on the other hand…”
Crumley didn’t have time to argue. The creatures were moving slowly enough now to kill, but he couldn’t stare at them for long, or the hypnotic effect accomplished the same sense of relative paralysis. “That light sphere must have hacked her counterpart enough to give us a fighting chance.”
“That would be my guess. I tell you, I’m getting damned tired of feeling like I’m riding a bike on training wheels because my supersentient parents are afraid I might fall.”
“Speak for yourself. Now that I can see them, I find killing these bastards damn satisfying.” Crumley launched another grenade into the face of the one about to bite down on both of them with a mouth big enough and agape enough to do the job—and chew up half the car in the process.
Their assailants, with Praying Mantis bodies that were damn hard to target because they were basically charging, running, jumping stick-figures, had heads that were every bit as unhittable until the last second—when they inflated into a T-Rex-like head and jaws, only not like any balloon inflating; this was more like origami unfolding—origami from hell.
Leon took the car up on two wheels to avoid the one sliding toward them that would have sliced through the car otherwise. While he had the car at an angle, Crumley took care of the one playing charging rhino with a blast to the still inflated head.
The instant Leon had the car back on four wheels he spun it around and accelerated over the dead alien—whose head could no longer deflate once it was dead—using it as a ramp. Crumley’s grenade launcher had blown away just enough of it and in such a way that
it made a half-decent vault. “Could we talk about this?” Crumley asked, as they sailed toward and ultimately over the lip of the deck of the ship toward the energy sphere. “Guess not.”
The energy sphere threw them out on another level of the ship. “The sphere teleports us to where we can do the most damage with our cocktail of weapons and particular skill sets,” Crumley said, catching on. He came to this conclusion when he realized he could stand up in the convertible and use his gorilla-like size and strength to fling the monsters with the inflated heads at another of their kind before it could avoid biting the other one’s head off. As soon as they peeled off Ariel to charge Crumley, moreover, he was able to turn that gangbang they were subjecting her to against them, picking the rest off by hurtling the gaping-mouth demons at their the rest of their cohorts. “How did you know?”
“You can’t hear the light sphere talking in your head?” Leon asked, refusing to take his eyes off the action.
Crumley rubbernecked his way and glared at him. “I miss the days when psychotic breaks didn’t actually enhance your chances of survival.”
“I suppose that’s why you’re turning green with jealousy over this car. Besides me, I think you’re the only one old enough to remember Speed Racer and James Bond.”
Crumley stared at his reflection in the drop down mirror as he collapsed back into the seat. “Shit, Leon, that’s not me turning green, that’s me turning blue. I think I’m having a heart attack.”
“No worries. You can fight dead. Just don’t let me forget to bring you back to life, if the nanites aren’t entirely up to the task.”
“Ordinarily I’d take your head off for the callousness,” Crumley said gasping and wincing, “but as it stands, I get that taking the time for triage just isn’t on the docket right now.” He fired his grenade launcher in time to get the latest Balloon Head trying to get at Ariel, and before his right arm went entirely rigid. “Little girl, what are you up to?”
“Um, thought I’d design a mating scent to draw these creatures away from the others. The supersentience can’t slow enough of them down in time. So, they’re picking off our Theta Team guys—you know, the ones without whom there’s no fixing this ship and no getting out of this climactic act three action sequence. Don’t mind me, but I’m seriously ready to get to the end of the story where we all hug one another and swap war stories about how the hell we made it out of here.”
The Star Gate Page 48
