The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  And that might well be enough of an edge to give the Nautilus room to navigate around her.

  Cassandra couldn’t believe this insight had come from a couple Theta Team operatives, Scoop and Narco, who couldn’t even be bothered to share their intel for fear that they were attempting to think above their paygrade. Cassandra would have a nice little talk with them later. Lucky for her, the data dump Leon ordered be transferred to Cassandra, included all communications, coded and encoded, between Theta Team members, even the ones shared by just small subgroupings of them, or not shared at all, merely ideas circulating in the minds of individual Theta Team operatives.

  Cassandra, choosing not to make the same mistake, forwarded her conclusions to all of the Nautilus’s supersentiences, including the one still in a coma.

  ***

  It was as Omega Force had feared, the latest wave through the wall was comprised of enemy combatants bigger and badder than the wave before. Ensconced within the cockpit of the NAR, at least Leon was the right size to contend with them. He couldn’t say as much for anyone still working at human scale. But all of those must have been in hiding.

  The giants were built like prehistoric land crabs, owing to their metallic exoskeletons, but they moved like jumping spiders, ably navigating the Nautilus’s various decks as they sprang from one to the other.

  That didn’t stop the Alpha Unit teens from playing their game of “crab fest” from inside the NARs, pulling off the crab legs and stacking them for the big meal, or grappling with the claws with their own pincer movements, their hands serving like vice grips with enough crushing capacity to double as sheers.

  Then, for absolutely no good reason, the latest wave of attackers just fell off. Never mind that they had the best chance of any of succeeding thus far. Leon didn’t take that as a particularly good omen. It was his experience that good luck never followed you around on the battlefield; it went into hiding along with everything else.

  The sounds of the battle subsiding, the only noises Leon heard were coming from other NARs being piloted by the rest of Omega Force and Alpha Unit—all of Alpha Unit, not just Patent’s inner circle. The second and third strings that had been benched all this time, itching to jump into the action, had gotten their chance running the field for the final touchdown.

  The last two minutes of their lives were either the longest of their lives or the most fun they’d ever had; probably the latter, knowing Alpha Unit.

  Even the giant upgraded T-Rex-like caste of Nomads that had been brought aboard from Omega Force’s and Alpha Unit’s last encounter with them in the Amazon rainforest had gotten into the action, now that their scale was more of a help than a hindrance to the soldiers fighting on the ground. They gladly hopped off the railings at each deck level to chase after the jumping spider-crabs. Their shrieks at getting nipped by the spider-crabs’ claws alternated with the car-crusher sounds of the Nomads’ jaws closing down on those crab shells.

  As the last of the noises quieted down with the last enemy to fall, Leon considered the implications.

  The rest of Omega Force was already gathering around him. “Did we actually win this?” DeWitt asked.

  Leon thought about it. Why would the alien supersentience send the latest wave of attackers, even more deadly than before, only to abort the attack prematurely? Then it dawned on him; with this last wave, the good guys had shown enough of their hand for their enemy to know exactly what assets were being held in reserve until they were needed. She now knew exactly what she was up against. “No, it’s the calm before the storm,” Leon said.

  “Why do you always have to be like that?” DeWitt whined. “Can’t you just let me be right for once? I’m your second in command. If you fall, I’m supposed to be the one with the big ideas. How am I supposed to build my confidence in this climate?”

  “With better ideas,” Leon said dryly, his guard still up, as he continued to survey the ship. If anything, his anxiety level had only gone up.

  ***

  Patent was the only one standing still, merely swiveling his NAR at the hip. The rest of Alpha Unit was on mop up, checking that the enemy’s dead were really dead, and if not, finishing them off. This wasn’t exactly a take-any-prisoners kind of deal. The Alpha Unit teens pursued this part of the “game” with the same level of gusto, still trying to outplay one another for points.

  “I think I killed this one like thirty-two times already,” shouted one cadet over his COMMS. “That’s gotta be some kind of record. That’s like thirty-two points with a bonus, right?”

  “No, nimrod. It just counts as one point,” came the reply from another cadet.

  “Okay, now I’m really pissed.” Nimrod sounded it too as he drove the NAR’s fist hard into his enemy with an “Ahhh!” sound blaring into Patent’s ears. Patent waited with all the patience of a first grade teacher for the noise in his ears to settle down.

  Patent was more interested in the aftermath of battle in finally having the space in his head to think, but what he found there was even scarier than the full-on enemy assault. He switched channels on his COMMS. “Satellite? Starhawk? Ariel?” Having done the COMMS check, he waited for their responses.

  “Yes, sir,” each of them chimed in after some delay.

  “Find Natty and Laney, reinforce them. This is the calm before the storm.” Patent inhaled deeply and rapidly, sniffing the air to confirm. “That supersentience is getting ready to deliver the deathblow to the Nautilus.”

  “Shit!” came the next chorus, along with the sounds of the three of them running toward Natty and Laney.

  Patent switched back to the regular channel. “Look sharp, people. Those of you looking to make up some major points are about to get your chance.”

  “Yes!” came an out-of-sync chorus of shout whispers. No doubt those were the ones lagging behind on point totals, Patent thought.

  Leon’s voice burst in on his COMMS next, on their private line. “Patent. Don’t let the lull fool you.”

  “I know. I’ve already sent Satellite, Starhawk, and Ariel to reinforce Natty and Laney.”

  Leon sighed audibly at the other end. “We got this,” Patent said.

  Leon replied, “Maybe it’s time we had a heart to heart talk with the supersentience devoted just to war games.”

  “That energy sphere?”

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  “I forget the Nautilus has as many lobes to her brain as we do.” Patent could hear himself ambulating. What the NAR lacked in stealth it made up for in the sheer nerve-shattering quality of the sounds accompanying its slightest move. “So it’s time to build another jigsaw puzzle then, each of us laying down our own piece?”

  Leon replied, “Precisely what I was thinking.”

  ***

  “I’ve got the perfect mobile platform for initiating Project Kick Their Asses,” Starhawk informed Satellite and Ariel.

  Moments later they were flying high above the drama atop the dragon. “This doesn’t strike you as cowardly, staying this high above things?” Satellite asked, hoping to gain some hero points from Ariel; it took Starhawk being around to intimidate him into taking his game to the next level.

  “Oh, trust me,” Starhawk said, “if Unas didn’t think what we were doing warranted a time out, we’d be in the thick of things. Isn’t that right, Unas, you pantheon to fearlessness, you? I think this is the first break I’ve gotten from hell week, which by the way, is way worse than Spring Break for someone with my figure.”

  “Focus, you two,” Ariel interjected. “I need help with writing the new algorithms. It’s a fair bet that if this is the calm before the storm, it’s because there’s no slowing the next wave of attackers. The alien supersentience would have to have hacked our shield defenses to put troops inside here that will overrun us.”

  “Shit, she’s right,” Starhawk said.

  “She’s always right; that’s kind of why she’s my girlfriend,” Satellite noted defensively.

  Ariel looked up
and smiled. These poor nerds could be more adorable than stuffed animals in their social awkwardness.

  “Um, sorry,” Satellite apologized. “I forgot to tell you I sort of claimed you.”

  “She’s not a fish at a fish market you can put dibs on by pointing,” Starhawk said, not looking up from his display as he was still keenly intent on writing the algorithms they’d need in time to do a damn bit of good.

  “We’ll talk later,” Ariel said, smiling and winking at Satellite.

  “Code for: I can’t figure out a way to let you down easy and write algorithms at the same time,” Starhawk said, once again without looking away from his display.

  “It is not!” Satellite squawked. “I’ll have you know I’m the expert in communications.”

  “So get a clue.”

  “Enough, you two,” Ariel snapped. “I can’t write algorithms and play peacemaker at the same time.”

  “Yes, make war, not love. To everything there is a season, I got you,” Satellite said.

  Ariel just shook her head and kept her nose down—and buried in her display.

  FORTY-FIVE

  When the next wave of the attack came at the Nautilus, it was merciless. All of the lifeforms that Leon and his people had managed to fight off were back in force. It was as if the alien supersentience was not the only one hitting another gear; she was responding to the Nautilus itself preparing to shake free of the death grip that it was in, and had to match it. But how could this be? Leon was aware of no such brilliant last ditch effort up his sleeve; and the Nautilus’s chief supersentience was still offline. So it had to be something else. But what? If this was just the enemy delivering its final death blow, why all the drama? Why waste the extra energy? Supersentiences were not known for waste of any kind; nothing that took away from contemplating the sublime thoughts of which they alone were capable was permitted—ever.

  Could it be some self-organizing counteroffensive coming from within Leon’s own ranks? Had the crew and the rest of the leadership team felt that it was now or never, as he had, when they were in the eye of the storm as it passed over them? He could only hope.

  ***

  Cronos had been doing too well swinging his broad sword against the snakes on the Medusa’s head, the ones coming at him from multiple directions, “crawling out” of the skull as if they were thirty-five foot reticulated pythons—just a bit thinner and built to look like the snakes plumbers used to unplug the toilet. Maybe if he hadn’t been so damned effective with the sword… Perhaps if he tired like normal people instead of being continually propped up by the nanites percolating through him… Maybe if his reflexes weren’t alarmingly fast, even for a trained martial artist, again owing to those same meddling nanites… Whatever the straw was that broke the camel’s back, this particular Medusa head was now seriously pissed. It had surrounded him in a perfect sphere of snake heads, all poised to strike at once, many regenerated from the same head he’d lobbed them off of already like a crazed barber giving a haircut to an even crazier Rastafarian customer with some rather unwieldly dreadlocks.

  Yeah, the writing was on the wall, even for him. There was no way he was stopping all those snakes if they struck at once. His enemy seemed to be sufficiently pissed off to be waiting only long enough for this fact to register in his brain; taking a moment to enjoy the exquisite psychic torture.

  And then the Medusa head struck, collapsing that sphere about him.

  Cronos’s next-generation nanites fought even more bravely than he did. But as they died, overwhelmed by all the venom racing through his system, it was like lying in one of those execution chambers, having chosen death by lethal injection. Definitely not the most humane option for dying—despite the liberal press’s reporting of the facts; or at least, certainly not humane enough.

  As the lights dimmed for Cronos, he took solace in the fact that before he died he’d gotten to see some of the brightest lights in the universe from close up.

  ***

  Ajax had reached the highest setting on his disintegrator rifle that Corin had bequeathed him. It was stopping the lesser caste of metal-crystal humanoids with just one blast. Against the Medusa heads, it took a second blast from the rifle and a lob of an acoustic grenade to sufficiently discombobulate them; only then could the follow-up acoustic grenade shatter the Medusa’s crystal body in such a way as to prevent resurrection.

  But they had tired playing with him. The Medusas appeared to be too important to spare. And if it took more than one to take him out, so be it. He was surrounded by three right now. A little voice in his head said, “You’re not getting out of this. Upload your best jokes to Nauty’s DNA-brain in the hope she has the good sense to know when to torture your teammates with them. They’ll never forget you that way, even if they wished they could.”

  He launched into what may well be his last joke; make it count, Ajax. “A young woman was taking golf lessons and had just started playing her first round of golf when she suffered a bee sting.” He fired his rifle at the highest setting at one of the three Medusas. “Her pain was so intense that she decided to return to the clubhouse for medical assistance.” Ajax fired at the second Medusa. “The golf pro saw her heading back and said, “You are back early, what’s wrong?” “I was stung by a bee!” she said. Ajax tore into the third Medusa with his frequency rifle. “Where?” he asked. “Between the first and second hole.” she replied. He nodded and said, “Your stance is far too wide.”

  Had he weakened each Medusa enough? Or was that what passed for an alien smile? All three Medusas lashed out with the snakes; the snakes each unhinged their jaws and sunk their fangs into a meaty bit of flesh and bone—and then they all pulled back at once. He actually got to enjoy the sensation of being ripped into a hundred chunks at once. Even segmented, he remained conscious. But the nanite hive mind could no longer work its magic; the individual clusters of nanites in each body portion succumbed to the venom in the snake bites.

  There was just enough bandwidth between the smaller nanite clusters to transmit his final impression of life in the cosmos. “It’s friggin’ scary out here. No place for a special forces soldier, not even an upgraded one. You should have known when to retire already, Ajax.”

  ***

  When DeWitt heard the hissing snake in back of him, he knew he’d finally drawn the attention of one of the Medusas, the highest of the three classes of metal-crystal soldiers. By then, what of them remained on the decks of the Nautilus were intermixing with the Balloon Heads; the various iterations of hull-crashers were no longer coming at the crew of the Nautilus in waves but all at once, comingled.

  “Let’s hope your little ploy works, DeWitt.” He’d found a dead Theta Team member on the floor earlier, sliced him down the middle, up and along the arms and legs bilaterally, and up the neck and head. Then he’d hollowed the guy out and climbed inside his new body suit, used his own body nano to help seal the seams. War was hell, and it wasn’t uncommon to roll a dead body for whatever arsenal he had on him that could still be used against the enemy. But this was certainly taking that idea in a whole new direction.

  The snake on the Medusa’s head was tasting him with its tongue, formulating the right concoction for killing him. Once the perfect formula for extinguishing this genetic variant of Theta Team operative was perfected—what typically took a split second—the head would strike, or perhaps just hurl its digestive juices at him spitting-Mamba-style. The snake struck, and the Medusa moved on, without even waiting for him to fall, that confident in its genetically and nano-altered cocktail. It’s crystal body must have offered some hellacious holographic computing ability—distributed throughout its entire person—and not just confined to its head—which leant it a well-earned confidence rating. DeWitt wasn’t waiting any longer. He turned sharply and aimed his rifle at the back of the Medusa—and fired.

  But the rifle was knocked off target by another snake from the Medusa’s head descending on him from above—it had lingered, outside of his perip
heral vision to check the Medusa’s handiwork, if the Medusa herself couldn’t be bothered to hold up her death-dealing any further on DeWitt’s account. “You should have anticipated this, DeWitt. One damn mistake. That’s all it takes. How many times did Leon drill that into your head?”

  DeWitt collapsed to his knees. The “spitting-mamba’s” concoction must have eaten through DeWitt’s bodysuit enough to expose his true chemical signature to the air, which this snake picked up on before striking. The Nautilus’s interiors swirled as if DeWitt was on a particularly fast Merry-Go-Round. He’d always wanted to take his kid to one, but he’d never had the time, not with being sent on assignment so much. The fact that he was getting the ride of his life now that his son had been denied just made him feel that much guiltier. No doubt the god of irony wasn’t finished with him yet. Once on the other side, his true comeuppance would befall him.

  ***

  The Alpha Unit jockey saddled up in the cockpit of the Goliath Bot, A.K.A. a NAR, was arm wrestling with the latest generation of intruder—a giant spider that spanned the Goliath Bot’s height. But the cadet just had two arms to work; the spider had 8 legs—each pair of which had the coordination of a basketball players arms. Even as the Alpha Unit cadet clipped off the legs being jabbed into him with a force hard enough to splinter the metal-glass housing protecting the Goliath Bot’s body, the remaining legs hit him like battering rams, their talons occasionally getting wedged in the metal-glass housing.

  The cadet’s nickname was “Farm Fed,” an homage to his Kansas farm-boy upbringing. He had the defined jock body of a quarterback and the handsome, if un-exotic face to go with it—the kind of person everyone wanted to marry—judging by how much he got hit on—because plain features plus an eager attitude practically screamed “moldable.” Back home, the most exciting thing he saw on any regular basis was an airbus landing and taking off from the hub airport not too far from his home. His extreme sport of choice at the time included standing where the planes took off to see if he could hold on to the fence in the backwash of the giant engines firing up. In retrospect it was a stupid enough act to have ruled him out of being drafted into Alpha Unit. But no one seemed to mind; they were convinced he’d do crazier things before his tour with Alpha Unit was over.