The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  They weren’t kidding.

  Take wrestling with this giant alien spider, for instance. Or his next stunt: he fired off the rockets in the NAR’s jet boots, headed straight for the outer hull of the ship—the metal-glass viewport with the commanding view of the stars—were it not for the all-out alien invasion of the Nautilus’s interiors. He hit the viewport so hard he crushed the spider on impact. “This game is so banging!” he screamed. But now he was sticking out the viewport, half in, half out. And the ship had to deprioritize keeping him alive with all that it had to fend off. It healed the metal-glass viewport by slicing right through him. The top half of him drifted into space. That in itself wasn’t an interminable situation; he was still ensconced in the cockpit of the Goliath Bot, like a baby unwilling to come out of its mother’s womb. The problem was that the Goliath Bot’s head had taken the brunt of the impact with the Nautilus’s hull. And it stood to reason the tech used to protect the inside of the ship was made better than the tech used to house him inside the Goliath Bot’s cockpit. It was something he should have thought about when he decided to act on impulse.

  As damaged as the head of the Goliath Bot was, all was still not lost. It wasn’t like his upgraded body wasn’t upgraded to withstand exposure to the vacuum of space—solar radiation, extreme cold, the whole nine yards. But the Goliath Bot’s head had short-circuited, causing it to revert to its primary function as the brains of the Goliath Bot, not as a place for giving humans a ride. Being crushed by the shape-shifting cabin… Well, maybe he could have survived that too so long as his nanite hive minds remained intact with enough brainpower to sustain him in a crushed state indefinitely. But the electrical surges coursing through him from the short-circuited Goliath Bot brain made it damned difficult for the hive mind-arrayed nanites to perform their higher brain functions. And the nuclear powered energy pack still attached could perpetuate the lightning storm coursing through the head indefinitely. All things considered, maybe that was for the best. Did he really want to spend eternity as sentient goop?

  Yeah, sure, if he wanted to be an asshole about it, he’d point out that the Nautilus was still technically crashed on Agemir—not soaring through deep space. But with her systems failing, tell that to the timelines getting twisted up around her. Sigh. Was it really so bad to want more than to stare at corn the livelong day back home?

  ***

  The Alpha Unit cadet had one of the Balloon Heads by the throat, in the right hand of the Goliath Bot and was squeezing tight. But that didn’t stop the head from snapping at him; neither did his punching it in the face repeatedly with the Goliath Bot’s left hand. They hadn’t nicknamed this cadet “Face” for nothing. He’d gotten quite the reputation in his boxing days for remodeling the faces of many a middle-weight fighter; even if his face remained undamaged, save for the cabbaged ears for getting them boxed too hard, too often. But to be truthful, he was never much of a south paw. This was his non-dominant hand; he’d made the mistake of grabbing the Balloon Head with the wrong hand. And now he was paying for it each time the Balloon Head sunk its fangs into the Goliath Bot’s head.

  Each time the teeth on the T-Rex-like head penetrated the glass-metal housing protecting Face, they got stuck where they were. That, of course, didn’t stop the Balloon Head from growing new teeth, as rapidly as it lost them. “Can we spell cray-cray!” Face blurted, driving a quick double tap of his left fist to the Big Head. And then the Big Head stopped snapping at him. At first Face thought he might finally have won this slug fest. But the “smile” on the T-Rex’s mouth—in so much as they smiled—separated the jaw just enough so lightning could bubble up from the individual teeth, as if each were a lightning rod for transmitting electricity, as opposed to grounding it. Those teeth then beamed those charges to the pulled teeth which conveyed the lightning strikes into the cabin where Face was trying to hold on to his fragile existence.

  Repeated lightning strikes, as it turned out, if one found the correct frequency, pitch, and intensity, were the perfect thing for shorting out the nanite hive minds in Face’s body. Without access to that higher intelligence they couldn’t coordinate their defense. The individual nanites didn’t have enough brain power by themselves to know what to do absent their general, save put out the individual fires as best they could with individual damaged cells in Face’s body as they found them. That seemed only to heighten that tingling sensation throughout his person—that had already grown to feel as if each tingle was another nuclear bomb going off inside him; it appeared that those nanites could still transmit pain like never before. And the repeated lightning strikes—well, they were bringing him back from the dead when his own nanites no longer could; it was as if the hive-mind of the Balloon Head was giving them new instructions at Face’s expense.

  But that couldn’t be, could it?

  Checking into the veracity of this latest revelation was going to be a real bitch.

  ***

  Seated snugly inside his Goliath Bot’s cockpit, the Alpha Unit cadet Gutsy sprinted after the jumping spider-bot. He managed to jump on his latest “ride” before the spider could get to the next deck down. As the spider landed on the railing of the deck below, even before it could scamper onto the deck, Gutsy was driving a feather from the NAR’s headdress into the head of the spider. It cut better than a nano-edged knife. Gutsy, by the way, had gotten his nickname by forever prying things open to look at the “guts” inside—the finer workings of ham radios, stereos, robots, you name it; he had to know how things were put together, just had to.

  To his surprise, the insides of the spider bot revealed a sight so strange that Gutsy’s engineering aptitudes could do little in the face of the mystery. Gutsy’s facade, usually neutral, passive, and unreadable, a quality echoed in his unremarkable features, suddenly took on emotional expressiveness and contour to make a sketch artist blush; he could feel it taking shape from the muscles still tensing under the skin. “Off da hook!” Inside the spider was nothing but deep space. It was like a stage magician’s illusion. There before him were suns, even a supernova in the distance. He got sucked through into the abyss even as the spider bot resealed its thorax. So far so good, as Gutsy was still within the protective housing of the Goliath Bot which was rated for deep space, as was Gutsy’s body, should he lose the Goliath Bot’s protective outer housing.

  However, Gutsy was smart enough to realize his predicament was far worse. If the Nautilus was still crashed back on Agemir, then he’d fallen into another timeline, one of many twisting about the ship in flux as its overloaded systems could no longer tell the timelines apart. That in itself wasn’t necessarily the end. But while the Nautilus coexisted in numerous timelines at once—it didn’t exist in all of them. In all likelihood it didn’t exist in even one percent of them. So the chances of getting back aboard any version of the Nautilus in any time line was remarkably thin—less than one percent. In an infinity of parallel universes, it was likely less than one percent of one percent of one percent of… He might well have little to do other than torture himself counting sheep in this manner until the end of time—because he wasn’t just any upgraded human floating about in deep space in a Goliath Bot. He was technically an immortal. What would he have to say when it was all over, he wondered, the cosmos, everything—to God, he meant? To be honest, he’d probably punch the guy out. But, considering his luck, the guy didn’t exist and he’d never get the satisfaction.

  ***

  Cabbage Head ran as fast as he could, peeling off a leaf of his head with every few strides that floated behind him until it caught up with the Medusa giving chase. Each time one of those cabbage leaves grabbed hold of one of the snakes it mummified the snake, trapping it inside the leaf, and preventing the Medusa from simply growing another snake to replace it.

  But Cabbage Head couldn’t turn down adjacent halls on the Nautilus fast enough, and he was running out of leaves to shed. His head was growing smaller and smaller and soon he’d be out of higher brain function entirely.
Would he have the last snake on that Medusa’s head shrink-wrapped by then?

  Cabbage Head had taken to using his praying mantis body more, and hopping from metal-glass door to metal-glass door sealing the rest of Theta Team as protectively as possible inside their private research chambers. As he lost more of his head, the smarts distributed throughout his praying mantis-body was taking over, and his personality shifting accordingly; he was sinking into the subhuman realm that all warriors were forced to sink to sooner or later.

  Finally, he had no more leaves to shed the Medusa’s way. The Medusa stopped just short of where the praying mantis was perched on the metal-glass wall. It had no more snakes to sic at him. But the ex-Cabbage Head had one more trick up his sleeve.

  The praying mantis lunged for the Medusa, and started feasting on its head. Cabbage Head was now forever lost to the world, but his new self would continue to thrive, more savage than ever before, and would likely not miss his higher brain functions one stitch.

  ***

  Mich, short for Michelin Man, the nickname that Cabbage Head had given her, had had enough of hiding inside her chambers waiting for this plague of demons to pass and for the blood painted on her metal-glass doors to protect her, as if reenactments of Biblical scenes were really her thing.

  It was time to Robby-the-Robot her way into the thick of the action, using her clumsy outer-body to foot it into the halls of the Nautilus where the enemy was swarming like an angry nest of alien bees pissed that the Nautilus had had the audacity to crash into its warren.

  She piloted her Michelin Man body from the head, or cockpit, much like the Goliath Bots were piloted. Only she was all of three inches tall, and the rest of the exoskeleton was manned by her spaceship’s crew, ensconced within separate compartments—each a different “tire” or fold of her “Michelin Man” body. Technically, she really could fly this body like a spaceship, but she didn’t like her chances with everything else in the air already—including the dragons.

  Once out in the hall, Mich opted instead for what she did best. As a Theta Team operative, her duties as captain of her body-ship included fast-tracking analysis of Biosystems, the various parts of a larger biosphere on an alien world. For right now, those smaller biosystems were going to be a little smaller than normal. She delegated command to each of her unit leaders, shouting, “Fire at will!”

  Her “population sample” before her was one of the lower castes of metal-glass warriors. Opening the eye-slit turrets from each of the tufts in her body, the various compartment commanders and sharpshooters focused their rage on the back of the warrior walking away from them; apparently Mich was not a priority; getting to the Nautilus’s supersentience was. The enemy were all of that attitude until a member of the Nautilus’s crew chose to run interference. Mich’s interference consisted of firing solid shells into the warrior’s body. They lodged there, ironically making the warrior look that much more decorated with chrome, and perhaps more like a spotted leopard. In return for their “gift” the warrior released several of the disks that collectively made up its metallic spine. Those disks flew towards Mich like ninja shuriken, slicing off the various compartments that comprised Mich’s body—all rather surgically. The still-intact segments that now lay on the floor were as functional as before, even if their range of operation had been greatly diminished.

  As to the countless “gifts” they’d deposited in the back of the tier 1 metal-crystal operative, the lowest fighting caste as regards lethality, each one of those weapons was actually unique. And they’d burrow their way out of the carrier that was now spreading the plague for Mich when the time was right; namely when the tier 1 operative neared a Medusa, or any more important target, which could include a tier one operative getting too close to the supersentience.

  All in all, the female captain of the collective known as Mich was feeling quite pleased with herself. But that didn’t last long. One of the Balloon Heads came gallivanting down the hall, lapping up her and her crew on the floor with its slurpy tongue. Mich’s body segments were being masticated in the jaws of that giant T-Rex like head like breath mints.

  It hurt to think it, but Mich admitted in her final moments, “Maybe it’s for the best. This world is getting just a little too surreal for me.”

  ***

  Renegade had gotten his nickname for venturing off on his own, not sticking with his unit, and sometimes getting in trouble for it, and, sometimes, saving everyone else’s asses on account of it. Right now, he wondered what outcome awaited him as he beheld what was in front of him. If he was reading the situation correctly, one of the metal-crystal warriors had found a way to the supersentience. Or was it just hoping to get lucky? And would Renegade trying to fight her off just draw more attention to the backdoor to the all-knowing AI on which the Nautilus depended—thus making a bad situation worse? The problem was, Renegade didn’t really know if the enemy combatant was on to something or not, and he sure as hell wasn’t waiting to find out.

  This particular caste of metal-crystal warriors weren’t quite as attention-getting as the Medusa heads; they weren’t roving battle-stations more than they were regular soldiers. But perhaps that was the genius behind the hive-mind system the enemy was using. With everyone distracted with neutralizing the Medusas—these guys were free to do their work; easily considered the lesser of the fires to put out.

  Renegade elected to trail her for now, hoping that he didn’t wait too long to make a move and eliminate any chance the supersentience had for a resurrection because of it.

  The enemy soldier snuck through the metal-glass doors after hacking her way past the seal and the back-up DNA brain’s efforts to keep her out, via a pop-up virtual graphic she managed to materialize. Renegade made sure to be right behind her, figuring he wasn’t going to have the same luck broaching the barrier.

  Why hadn’t the soldier detected him so far? One possibility—a disturbing one—popped into Renegade’s mind. Maybe this caste is so attuned to finding its way to the supersentience, its feelers/sensors have been dialed down everywhere else to prioritize the room in its brain for what it was designed to do. Gulp.

  The soldier looked arguably like a walking fern. It had a typical bipedal body, missing only the arms—but hair-thin extensions extended roughly three feet out from the body in all directions, and if any of them thought it sensed something, the extensions could grow longer until the body as a whole got recruited towards the new target. That was clue number two that these guys were sent here less to fight than to find. Again, not good. They no doubt had some offensive and defensive capability, but nothing too threatening to suggest they were any more than pawns.

  The hair-like feelers seemed more interested in the living things in the room than the hi-tech hardware. Could it be searching for the Theta Team operative occupying this chamber? Was that thing designed to hack the Nautilus by way of hacking the Theta Team operative’s link to the supersentience? It suddenly dawned on Renegade that “access” to the ship’s chief AI was going to be hard to shut down with this many backdoors to her.

  Renegade pulsed the realization to the rest of Alpha Unit before he was even sure he was on to something.

  But when the blind soldier that could only feel her way about sensed the Theta Team operative in the room, all the feelers went from searching omnidirectionally to targeting him. Renegade figured that was confirmation enough.

  He fired his pulse rifle at the enemy and got blown back against the metal-glass doors for his efforts. Did that thing fend him off using the Theta Team operative’s own link to the ship?

  “Funsies,” Renegade mumbled. He pulled himself off the floor and went to work on plan B. The Theta Team operative was now being held off the ground by the innumerable hair-like follicles of the soldier that had latched on to him, and the Theta Team operative was looking increasingly sedate and drugged.

  For a brief second his eyes went to one of his experimental stations. Renegade decided to take that too as a clue and dashed in
that direction.

  The rising screams of the Theta Team operative was like one of those radiation detectors going crazy the closer Renegade got to the work station. Renegade picked up the beaker and splashed the solution on the enemy combatant. Why exactly a piss-looking-yellow solution would mean a hill of beans to a metal-crystal soldier wasn’t at all clear to Renegade, but the creature simply disappeared where the solution had made contact—eaten away to nothing in that region, on contact. It released the Theta Team operative. The operative fell to the floor gasping, and crawled like a worm without much help from his legs or arms—sheer spinal contractions—moaning all the while. “Finish it,” the Theta Team operative said, “before it regenerates.”

  “How?!”

  The half-dead Theta Team operative’s eyes darted to the grenade on Renegade’s belt. “Oh, hell,” Renegade blurted before grabbing it.

  “Hurry, before it broadcasts what it knows. It didn’t get everything from me, but if the others fill in the blanks…”

  Renegade figured he could fill in the rest for himself. He took a deep breath. “It’s official now. This party’s definitely bumping.” He pulled the pin. He felt satisfied knowing that he’d learned more about the enemy than the enemy had learned about them, and he’d had time broadcast that intel, whereas the enemy hopefully had not. Not a bad day all in all—even if it ended with Renegade dying. In case the Nautilus’s chief supersentience could ever reanimate him, he put in a request for a shorter nose; time to lose the beak that would shame a raven. If that Theta Team operative were smart, he’d put in a request himself. What was that guy thinking agreeing to come into this world with an elephant trunk for a nose and the rest of the walking-upright elephant getup? The explosion ended any further rumination one way or the other on Renegade’s part on matters both grandiose and supercilious.