The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  “You and me both, darling,” Crumley said. “With my arthritis, I asked the writer to kill me off in act two, but the sadistic bastard being what he is…”

  “About the darlings and the girls and the honeys…I know you’re old….”

  Crumley sighed. “I’m dying, Ariel, so I think I’m taking my outdated way of dealing with the world with me.”

  She gave him a second look and realized he was as blue as any blue boy she’d seen at a recent rock revival. “Lucky you.”

  The sight of Crumley’s passing caused Ariel to freeze up.

  “Jump in, Ariel!” Leon ordered as he saw the latest monsters catching the scent and renewing their determination to mate with Ariel—the way black widow spiders mated—by biting off the head of their lovers. She snapped out of her daze, and jumped in the back seat. Leon floored it before the latest charging pack could reach them.

  His eyes suddenly popping open, throwing a look over his shoulder, Crumley asked, “You have any more of those car rockets to fire?”

  Ariel noticed Crumley wasn’t breathing between mouthing the words, and he was bluer than ever. She swallowed hard as she caught on to what was going on; he was in some kind of nanite backup mode, like downshifting a car to get it into zombie gear. Without air from his lungs to power the words, the nanites in his throat must have taken over the job.

  “Of course not. What’s the first rule of action thrillers?” Leon asked, keeping his eye in front of him and on his rearview mirror at the same time, looking for a way out.

  “Never use the same device twice to get out of a thorny situation. Remind me to stop watching those movies, will ya? It’s really cramping my style.” Crumley fired his grenade launcher and Leon reached over, grabbed his weapon, and threw it out of the racing car.

  Crumley stared at him hang-jawed. “I get the whole artistic license thing, I do, but seriously?”

  “You’ll thank me later.” Leon pressed another button on his steering wheel, hitting the posse of head-inflaters on their tails with an oil slick and sending their enlarged snapping mouths at one another. The monsters lost their footing and bit off one another’s heads before they could regroup.

  “Nice,” Crumley commented, surveying the spectacle.

  “I told you, you can be creative and deadly at the same time. Old age is making you lazy.”

  Crumley put one hand against his chest as he responded to the pain he was feeling there, and stared at his other arm, locking up, his palm up and his fingers frozen into a tiger-claw formation. “Honest to God, I thought I’d died already.” Moments after his body had locked up on him he was dead. Leon threw him a concerned glance despite all the bravado earlier. But now that Crumley was on the other side of death, the nanites powering him even in death as ably as they did in life, he had an idea. Maybe now that he’d downshifted further to zombie-2 gear, with even less options at his disposal, this one would do the trick. Crumley kept staring at his upturned palm until he conjured a ball of energy and fired it at the latest posse on their tail.

  The explosion took them out, no problem.

  But the EMP also shorted out the car. They were rolling to a stop.

  “Shit!” Leon said. “We’re sitting ducks.”

  “Relax, death is quite liberating. Soon you’ll be dead like me, and no more worries.” Crumley smiled at him.

  Leon gave him a dirty look. It was all he had time to give him. Three of those Big Heads were coming down on the three passengers in the car. Forget the Mustang’s shorted-out headlamps; it was lights out for real.

  ***

  The three gaping mouths closing in on Leon, Crumley, and Ariel were suddenly ripped away—and squished like bugs between two squeezing fingers. Actually, that was not an analogy. The Goliath Bots then ripped the humans out of the car and threw them into their cockpits—the Goliath Bots’ heads now reverted to cockpit status. The three humans were now relating to the Native-American-looking Robots, or NARs, the other name the goliath bots went by, as they did before they realized the NARs were sentient beings, and not simply giant robo-suits for using as forklifts for heavy-duty construction work.

  Crumley’s voice came over the speakers in Leon’s cockpit. “Is the NARs’ intervening in our little drama the supersentient sphere admitting it no longer has enough mind power to cover our butts while fending off her nemesis?”

  “Is that question rhetorical?” Leon asked, communicating by way of the speaker systems. “Because if it’s not, dying has done nothing to make your mind any sharper.”

  “If it’s a dull blade it’s because stabbing you to death with a sharp one would be far too merciful,” Crumley quipped back as he watched the normally-AI-in-charge cockpit inject him with some back-from-the-dead serum. Feeling the stiffness dissipating, Crumley took charge of the controls and stomped the Big Heads that were plaguing them earlier. Clapping the NAR’s hands together worked well to put a quick end to the Big Heads as well.

  All he could think right now was that Natty and Laney better come up with something fast, before these next invaders coming over the walls of their fortress were even deadlier than the last wave.

  FORTY-FOUR

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  “All right, that’s it, I’m getting seasick.” Natty gripped his flotation device as he tried his best to ride out the latest cresting wave in the swimming pool. The entire room was fighting to contain the ocean that could not be kept in a bottle—not with this kind of violent agitation. “I’m calling an end to movie time.”

  The battles happening throughout the Nautilus—projected on the big screens about the pool that Theseus had been so kind to leave behind before departing weren’t relaying any information either Natty or Laney particularly wanted to see anyway. One more reason to cut and run as far as Natty was concerned.

  “The alien supersentience has found its way to us,” Laney said, looking up from her 8” x 10” iPad, her eyes going from wall to wall, not sure where the incursion was going to come from.

  As it turned out, it came from everywhere. All four sides of the chamber were punctured like rice paper walls in a traditional Japanese home.

  The Balloon Heads were lapping up the Trinidadian-style “Callaloo soup” of algae that was the backup brain for the Nautilus. The giant heads could suck in a lot of liquid; they fed like wolves, inhaling their food rather than lapping it up. And as they did so, the rest of their bodies filled out.

  “Screw you,” Laney said, and pressed enter on her iPad. The algae that had been gulped down congealed into humanoid forms that tore their way out of the bodies that had gulped them down. And once free, they were forces to be reckoned with. They didn’t even bother turning on the Balloon Heads, all too happy to have them create more superior nextgen warriors for the Nautilus’s supersentience.

  The Algae People that had taken shape shifted their attention instead to the rest of the ship. They dashed out of the chamber one and all.

  Through one of the holes in the walls, Natty saw one dissolve herself again against the hull of the Nautilus, spreading into a thin coat that covered the entire surface and stopped the supersentience attacking them from sending in any more warriors. Several more Algae People reinforced what she was doing, adding their bodies to the covering being painted along the outer walls throughout the ship before the first one got spread too thin. As it was, that protective layer of DNA molecules was unlikely to be any more than a single strand thick, leaving Natty to wonder how it expected to work its magic.

  The Balloon Heads lapping up the pool’s contents started backing off. Suddenly, they weren’t so keen on feeding. The ones that had already gorged themselves burst as the latest Algae People tore their way out of them.

  “Did we just turn the tide?” Laney asked. Her questions was based on the rapidly diminishing sounds of combat beyond their chamber’s walls.

  Natty thought about it. “No. Hurry, we’ve got to get to the Nautilus’s higher brain fast. If I’m right, then—”


  “This is just the calm before the storm. Her nemesis can relax because she’s convinced there’s nothing more we can do to stop her,” Laney said, finishing his thought for him. “Certainly, nothing the DNA-soup can do, now that she’s tasted it.”

  “And I don’t fancy being stuck in this video game made real forever.” Natty was already running to the chamber walls against which hung the scuba suits.

  “Not a chance,” Laney said, interpreting his actions just fine. She was marching out of the chamber, to pursue her own last-ditch strategy. He tried to read her mind, but he was too bent out of shape with frustration at her abandonment, now of all times. All the same, he groaned and chased after his wife, trying to talk some sense into her.

  Natty might well have been trailing her for no better reason that once they were running and pumping more blood to their brains, they might well both come up with a better idea. But until then…

  ***

  “This is all your fault” Natty said, marching behind his wife, trying to keep up. All around them the battle waged. It had either resumed with a renewed fervor, or “things quieting down” was a very relative term. He had to alternate between boring proverbial holes into her back with his eyes and looking at his feet to make sure he didn’t trip over any dead bodies. “If we’d donned scuba gear and plunged deeper into the DNA soup to mind-meld with the thing—”

  “Wake up, Natty! We’ve obviously exceeded the soup’s limits. It would likely mistake the incursion as an attack.” She was gesturing broadly and speaking emphatically, but none of that, rage included, could get her to turn around and look him in the eyes. “And in case you haven’t noticed, now is hardly the time to nag. We could get our heads cut off at any moment.”

  “And interrupt this tongue lashing I’m giving you? You clearly have no sense of divine justice!”

  She groaned and the disgorging of air soon erupted into an all-out roar. “The only thing protecting you right now is the enemy understands that there’s nothing worse than a woman spurned.”

  And so probably thinks you’re out to exact revenge on me, not it. Natty snorted and just barely avoided tripping over the nearest dead body, and ducking out of the way of the vaulting Medusa-headed chick hell-bent on getting at a Theta Team engineer working at a substation. It was like once they locked on to a target, they didn’t let anything else get in their way, and since Natty and Laney weren’t exactly trying to get in their way… He shifted his attention back to Laney, and sighed. “There’s no denying that logic!” he shouted back at her in response to her “woman spurned” comment. It wasn’t exactly a concession; it was just his latest dig, which seemed to fly right over her head. Evidently high blood pressure from the blood boiling over in rage did things to the hearing, which in her case, was probably fortunate.

  “You know what, to hell with you,” he declared. “I’m going back to try my mind-meld idea. I should have known to keep the faith in myself all along and not let you wheedle your way into my head like some brain-burrowing termite.” He turned about on himself and headed back whence he came. The path was strewn with body parts flying at him from all directions. In quick succession he got slapped in the face by a flying arm, kicked in the face by a flying severed leg, and punched in the gut by a severed head impacting him like a cannon ball. “Techa, damn it! Can’t you see I’m trying to think!” he yelled at no one in particular, since he had no idea of who was doing the killing in his proximity. He mumbled, more to himself, “The fact that the DNA soup is so taxed right now is why she might pick up the electrical impulses in my brain the instant I’m beneath the surface in that scuba suit that she won’t pick up from the PDA.” He glanced at his wrist at the flexiscreen wrapped around it like one of those arm bands a Roman gladiator might have once worn for protection. “Did you consider that!” he realized he was still arguing with Laney although she was long gone in the direction she needed to in order to pursue her own idea. Somehow her reasoning had long since been transmitted to him from her nanites to his, despite the shield of anger currently separating them. What was the crux of her thinking again? Oh, yeah, she wanted to study the DNA soup that had spread itself along the periphery of the ship from the inside, where it was closest to the enemy infiltration—hoping it could shed more light on the nature of the supersentience trying to take them out. He supposed the idea made a crazy sort of sense, but he’d be damned if he’d admit that now, not after how she’d carried on about his idea.

  ***

  Somehow Starhawk’s dragon that had beamed aboard the Nautilus as they were departing the Nouveau Vikings planet found him. The damn thing must come with LIDAR for humans. He took one look at her landing, expecting to be ridden and so getting into mounting position, and went on a roll.

  “I don’t do reluctant hero dramas! I don’t do any hero dramas, really. Banish the word hero from your vocabulary entirely.” He was walking away from Unas, giving her the lecture with his back to her and gesturing all the while. And then he was doing a triple backward somersault through the air through no effort of his own—to land in the dragon’s saddle. “Unas! Who’s in charge, me or you?”

  “You, or course; except for when you let your fears speak for you and I must take it upon myself to reunite you with your higher self and your greatest destiny.”

  She took to the air before he could give any more rebuttal; not that he was prepared to be silent on the matter. “Reunions are another thing I don’t do!”

  He gaped at the canvas of war stretching beneath him as the dragon reached soaring height. He only meant to think it but ended up mumbling instead, “Well, on the plus side, no need to worry about survivor’s guilt, as there’s no way you’re surviving this.”

  ***

  Unas dove down to Starhawk’s staunch objections, which ran something like, “What are you doing? Are you out of your mind? It’s not scary enough looking on from a distance?”

  The dragon’s shrieks were ones he hadn’t heard her make before. As soon as she got close enough, they shattered the metallic crystal warriors within earshot like perfectly calibrated acoustic bombs, which he supposed they were. “Nice. You could warn me next time though. My hearing’s bad enough from years of heavy metal speakers beside my bed at night, which I used in lieu of fans to cool me in the sweltering summer heat. You know what kind of volume you have to be cranking on your speakers to get them to compete with a fan boat hightailing it across the Florida everglades to catch drug smugglers?

  “In my defense, I tried rimming the bed with blenders first. You may not realize it but a blender set to crush ice for smoothies puts out a hell of a lot of air at its base. It’s possible you also don’t know that if the lids come unglued on those morning smoothies you’re whipping up in advance before you unplug the machines that… well, let’s just say, Jackson Pollock, I’m not.”

  ***

  When Cassandra had originally received the data dump from Theta Team regarding how this planet’s lifeforms were put together and how they interrelated to one another, she was still trapped in Solo’s interdimensional prison. And so she was too worked up to process the information. But now, from the heat of battle, where she was typically at her calmest and most centered, the relevant information was more accessible to her. And her nanite hive minds could filter the massive data pool for her and percolate up to her conscious attention what she needed to know. That humble brag concerned how well she fought from a meditative state, in which her mind was clear of noise and thought enough to receive the communiqués both from her higher self and from her nanite hive minds, which also interfaced with one another better now than ever.

  The Crystalline Warriors—with their chrome fittings that had more to do with weaponized attachments than with chic attire… They were stronger after they’d been blasted into oblivion than before. Cassandra finally realized why. Their crystalline bodies were holographic computers. The smallest fragment would have far more mind power than it needed for the severed body part to carry on the fight.
The adaptation had been borrowed from another lifeform on another planet somewhere in the cosmos owing to the communication between this AI-world and all others; Agemir was designed, it would seem, to do little but sponge off of the evolutionary largesse, the imagination of Gaia on other worlds. But like all crystal computers—they required light to operate. Cassandra signaled the supersentience dedicated to warfare that Solo had created in the center of the ship as to what was what; got it to agree to kill the lights—and the moment it did, to suck this iteration of enemy combatants into itself. The Nautilus’s ventilation systems would be recruited to provide the necessary air currents to blast the crystalline warriors off their feet; and from an enervated state, they could provide little resistance. The light coming from the energy ball in the center of the ship would reanimate the crystalline people, but they could be locked away in other dimensions from which there was no escape.

  The supersentience responded to Cassandra’s request without hesitation.

  Killing the lights aboard the ship.

  In the next moment the crystal people were gone.

  With turning the lights back on in the ship a moment later, came new problems.

  All the same, Cassandra had the glimmer of hope she was looking for. If Agemir’s supersentience was devoted to sponging up the evolutionary zeitgeist from all other worlds in the cosmos, and tapping the imaginative powerhouses of the other Gaia-supersentiences out there, it meant that Agemir didn’t have too much mind power dedicated to its own creativity or self-evolution. Despite being a far older supersentience than any aboard the Nautilus, and far more powerful—the range of its power was narrow.