Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  Panno’s headgear trafficked his coaching instructions to the dinosaurs in the ring with him as much as it did his instructions to the natives being broken to the ways of the Ubuku. He was coaching both teams, playing both sides off the other. He wasn’t playing favorites. Those who listened the closest, did as he said, providing he was the strategist he thought he was, usually won their conflicts. The ones still smarting at his incessant barking of orders, willfully opposing him with minds of their own and strategies of their own were usually punished with death. There was no need to administer pain to get his subjects to listen to him. The opposing side dished that out well enough if they were proving victorious. If the victor won because of a strategy of his own that was better than Panno’s, once again he was not punished. Victory was valued above all. And so the animals were learning when to think for themselves and when to take their cues from Panno. So long as the goal of victory was achieved, no harm, no foul. Pain by way of the headgear would only come should the animals or the humans choose a course that had nothing to do with victory. Say, making a panicked dash for the gates or the walls in an effort to flee the arena. Occasionally animals and humans both tried that. And each time they found out pretty quickly that the pain of escape was far worse than anything the other combatants in the arena could do to them.

  The native currently behind the gate was chanting and jumping up and down. His eyes rolled to the back of his head. A knife in each hand. His war paint, breaking up the pattern of his body, hiding him from most everyone—all but the dinosaur who kept his eyes firmly fixed on him.

  The gate rose and the tribesman ran out with a terrible scream meant to terrify his opponent. He skidded to a stop with his bare feet against the dusty dirt floor. Opened his eyes, or rather, lowered his eyeballs, at the dinosaur staring back at him unmoved, except for a gentle snort. The native screamed again, this time as he sprinted back for the gate. But it closed ahead of him. The man took one look back at the dinosaur and started climbing the stucco wall rimming the giant oval like a gecko lizard. Like rock climbers only dreamed of doing. The dinosaur, for his part, roared and chased after him, his teeth scraping against the wall like a blade against a piece of flint, his mouth opened, prepared to scoop the native up. But the fleeing tribesman was too fast for him.

  Up and over the wall the human went, and up the stairs. The pain from his headgear set in. He buckled at his knees, his anguished screams louder than ever, until he rolled back towards the wall he’d left behind him, all balled up like a pill bug at the first sign of danger. Every time he peeled himself off the ground to run up the bleachers, the pain grew worse with each step. Finally he learned the logic of the device. The center of the ring, where he was standing initially, was the place where there was no such pain. It was looking a lot more inviting. Suddenly courage made more sense than fear.

  He jumped back over the wall and headed for the center of the ring. For right now at least, it was also the furthest point away from the dinosaur. It gave him a chance to collect himself, to juggle his knives from hand to hand menacingly as he debated his next move. Panno must have been feeding it to him, because the lights on his headgear were flashing as they were flashing on Panno’s. The native, bitter and resentful, just sneered at him. Apparently he was working off of his own logic for now.

  The dinosaur charged him, bringing his wide-open mouth down to his level, like a tractor preparing to scoop up dirt in its scoop. That was about all the dinosaur got for his efforts. The native had done a back flip to land on the creature’s head and drive both knives into its eyes. The animal screamed to high heaven. Panno just nodded, pleased. Surprised the panicked, idiot native could come up with that on his own, but pleased.

  With the animal thrashing and flailing at his now invisible enemy, the native ran back to the wall, to the area which had a variety of weapons to select from. Picked one. Fired it up. And went after the dinosaur. This time with the chain saw blade spinning not just at the end of the chainsaw but at the end of the stick on which the chainsaw was mounted. He proceeded to slice the animal down the middle along the soft underbelly that was not protected by the tougher scales of the rest of the hide. Each time the animal snapped blindly at him he backed off. And each time it lost its fix on him he closed back in until he had the creature’s entire insides hanging out, effectively gutting the giant lizard alive. Again Panno nodded approvingly, a big smile on his face.

  When the creature collapsed, he signaled his people to drag it off. They came in with giant tow trucks usually used to drag semi-trailers off the freeway. Hooked the creature up by a series of chains, pulled it up on the flatbed, and drove off with it.

  Laney noticed the other dinosaurs watching very keenly everything that was going on in the dirt oval from their cages rimming the arena, occupying most of the inner wall space. It was as if they were studying everything that was going on. Learning from the mistakes of the fellow members of their brood.

  Their voices were getting inside her head. “Mother, how do we defend against the knives? “Mother how do we defend against the chain saw?” “Mother, how do we resist the pain?” It took her a while to realize it was she who they were referring to as “mother.” Her eyes watered. The animals apparently had a very strong psychic connection to one another, and they assumed because they found it even easier to get inside her head that she was their mother. That chip on her forehead was the gateway to this brave new world in more ways than one.

  She wasted no time wondering about her psychic connection to them or their psychic connection to one another. Or their unfathomable ability to communicate with her in English. Instead she applied herself to answering their questions. She went inside the heads of Panno and Mudra to answer the sentient serpents’ questions about better defending against their attackers, to borrow from the expertise of trained warriors. But as to the questions about how the sentient serpents could genetically modify themselves on the fly to resist knives and rotating saw blades, that was within her bailiwick. She visualized the cellular transformations that would need to take place. The chip on her forehead allowing her to power through options and apply multiple genetic mutations at once in virtual space, where she had far more mind power to carry out these thought experiments than she ever had back in the real world.

  She could feel the lizards taking their cues from her, adjusting their cellular biology accordingly, on the fly. She wasn’t sure how they could do that. She thought at first that maybe she might be able to get them to pass these traits on to their children, using the genetic adaptability and mutability Truman had talked of earlier. But if she was inside their minds and bodies, they were inside hers. They had already hacked their way to a solution for how to not only pass these traits on to their children, but how to apply the attributes to themselves. Like any reptile that could regrow its own tale, their stem cells were far more responsive to begin with than a human’s. As it turned out they could turn any adult cell in their body into a stem cell, to morph the organ or tissue in question to what they needed. They just needed a blueprint to work off of, which they got from her mind readily enough.

  The creatures were actually helping her to get in better touch with her own unconscious mind, the source of much of her creative ideas, as she was helping them to get more in touch with theirs. She could sense Natty’s handiwork here. She just couldn’t pin it down. No way these were just dinosaurs brought back from the grave by filling in some missing gene pieces with frogs and lizard genes and other creatures from the current world. If Truman had gotten inspired by using ancient dinosaurs as soldiers and run to Natty with the idea, then Natty had carried the thinking further.

  Maybe she was giving Natty too much credit.

  Maybe that’s what the army of scientists on the spaceship was for. To take his sketched-in ideas and finish coloring in the rest of the picture.

  Panno signaled the gate to rise so the triumphant native could exit to rest up for his next match. There was no effort to discipline him for d
isobeying orders. He’d merely improvised to better carry out those orders. Instead the crowd greeted his departure with deafening applause and shouts, which was but a second crescendo coming in short order after the first one, at the moment he’d slain the beast.

  Laney understood that by the time these natives were fully indoctrinated into the ways of the Ubuku, the headgear would no longer be needed. By the time they were ready for Mudra, to fight in her gladiatorial arena, they would have enough sense of how to work with the dinosaurs uncoached, or they would die trying.

  The victor had no sooner left the arena than the next dinosaur was let in. It trotted in, running the outer limits of the perimeter. Its tail flicking through the crowd in the front-most seating area. The ones who couldn’t lean back in time found themselves whipped into the ring where they were quickly gobbled up by the clearly underfed monster. Laney noticed that the PhDs hung back in the farthest bleachers away from the ring, in the cheap seats. It was just the low level techies who were allowed to sit that close. The upside for them was a better show. The downside was, it might also be a shorter one.

  Panno redirected the dinosaur from feasting on the audience directly, pruning its lower bleachers like plucking low-hanging fruit from a tree. The creature’s headgear would flash whenever he tried that. The animal would scream and back off, just like a dog from an electric fence. If the “dog” in this case chose to ignore the pain, Panno dialed it up until he got its attention. The few spectators to be sacrificed to the fine-tuning of the headgear were to be expected, apparently.

  Once the training of these primeval beasts was complete, Laney realized, all that would be needed to keep them on mission once released into the amazon would be a few simple images of Leon and his entourage so they knew who to eliminate to ameliorate the pain in their heads.

  A bunch of natives were let into the arena this time. Panno, apparently, was wise to the fact that the lizards learned from the mistakes of their fallen brethren from the sidelines, and from the humans both. So he upped the game with each iteration. The natives entering the ring were clearly more seasoned fighters, the best of the imports, even if they had yet to rise to the standards of the Ubuku. It was all over their faces, which showed no fear, no desire to look away from their opponent as with the former contestant, and it showed with their body language, studying their prey from the moment they entered the arena instead of running away from it. The new human arrivals came in armed to the teeth, as well.

  The native with knives in both hands tried the same trick as the former contestant. He waited for the animal to charge, jumping up at the precise moment he needed to, to prevent himself from becoming string meat stuck between its teeth. He landed on the dinosaur’s head, and jabbed his knives into each of the eyes. The knife blades broke on contact. Panno just smiled and nodded his head from the sidelines, very pleased. Considering he was standing in the same ring as the contestants, Laney thought he might show a little more fear each time the creatures turned the tables on the humans, but he never did.

  Instead, he let a few more of the creatures into the arena. There were now three of them going at the bushel of humans. The crowd exploded with cheers which could only be drowned out by the roaring of the animals themselves.

  One of the creatures that came at one of the contestants, mouth agape, got a grenade launched down its gullet for its troubles. It roared at her as the female warrior who’d tossed the grenade rolled out of the way. The creature, unable to correct its course just yet, stomped past. Just as he managed to turn himself around to come at her for another pass, his stomach exploded. The creature keeled over, mortally wounded.

  “Mother, help me,” Laney heard in her head. She thought he was past helping, but she set about doing her triage work all the same via the psychic channel they and they alone shared, advancing psychobiology on the fly in real time, courtesy of the lizards’ mutability and psychic impressionability.

  The second creature came at one of the contestants who was attempting to reprise the former contestant’s stunt with the tree trimmer, the chainsaw at the end of a long stick. The chainsaw just bounced off the dinosaur’s “soft” underbelly, sparking like crazy as if it were trying to cut through burnished steel. Panno nodded and beamed one of his toothy smiles, pleased as always by every triumph either side achieved.

  The overgrown lizard grabbed the stick away from the man and used the saw at the end of it on him. The top half of the man did several somersaults in the air before landing, owing to the force of the swiping blade in the dinosaur’s hand.

  The third dinosaur, one of the two still standing, enjoyed using its tail as a weapon, flicking it against gaggles of human contestants at a time. Most of the tribesmen did their best to duck the tail by hitting the deck, jumping it like a child’s jump rope, or holding on for dear life, hoping they’d survive being flicked off the tail. One, however, ran up the tail, digging knives in underneath the scales as he went. Laney could tell from the smile on Panno’s face, he was doing it at Panno’s suggestion. But she was also tapping the data transmissions going from his headset to the contestants.

  The knives must have been planted at pressure points along the creature’s body, because the giant lizard locked up, frozen in place, as if taxidermied alive.

  “Mother, I can’t move. They did something to me.” Before Laney could even address the issues surrounding another one of “her kids,” several of the other contestants were attempting to roast the petrified lizard alive with flame throwers, obtained from the cache of armaments kept against the wall. When they could get no purchase against the creature’s tough hide, they continued to adjust the admixtures of chemicals in the flame throwers to get the fire to burn hotter. “I’m starting to feel the heat, mother. They’re doing something to the flames to get them to burn hotter. Mother, help me!”

  “Working on it, dear.”

  “Can you do anything about the pain?”

  “Only my husband can.” She broadcasted an image of Natty into each of the lizards’ heads. “If you survive the arena to be let loose in the jungle, whatever you do, don’t harm him. They are preventing me from linking my mind to his, otherwise I would draw from it what I need to help you even more. Until I can find a way around the communications barrier you will just have to hold on. And keep him safe.”

  The one with its belly blown open earlier, lying half dead on the ground, had rebounded now, with Laney’s help. His abdomen had sealed itself up, with his guts back intact. Mercifully the hole blown in his belly had not been large enough to evacuate the bulk of his intestines. They remained inside and so within range of the white blood cells and the RNA-strands attending the rapid wound-healing. Ordinarily, this kind of speedy recovery wouldn’t be possible without nanococktails saturating the animal’s system. But Truman was right; the lizards’ mutative abilities were off the charts. She wished she’d spent more time studying them on the way to earning her many degrees.

  Back on its feet, Cast Iron Belly tried out his flame throwing on the human flame throwers bothering its sibling. The bolus of fire coming out its mouth fried each of his brother’s tormentors. The tanks of fuel the natives were wearing exploded, making brief but spectacular fireworks out of them. Blasting several into the crowd where their flaming bodies landed like large Molotov cocktails. The crowd, every bit as impartial to who won as Panno himself, cheered the turnabout. Even the ones pushing the flambéed natives off them. Panno, for his part, keeping to his subdued nodding and smiling.

  Cast Iron Belly, a.k.a. Fire Breather, set about using his long talons like fingernails to extract the knives locking up the body of his sibling.

  Meanwhile, the other dinosaur, Tool Wielder, had decided to try one of the other tools against the wall for himself, after having such luck with the Tree Trimmer. He picked up the net and went chasing after the humans in the arena with it. Every time he netted a half dozen or so, he picked up his net, took it over to the boulder inside the stadium, rising up out of the ground as
if most of the stone were still submerged. Tool Wielder swung the net at the rock repeatedly until the humans inside could no long be kept inside the net. Their blood and their bashed body parts escaping through the holes in the weave. The crowd clapped approvingly.

  Tool Wielder then went after some more humans. He’d received some of his inspiration for the net gag from Panno, as before, when he’d picked up the Tree Trimmer. Once again, Laney could tell between the coordination of flashing lights on both their headgear, but also because she was tapping the information on the line between them.

  Panno gestured for another of the gates to be raised and for more natives to be sent in. Thirty or so rushed in this time, no less determined to fight than the ones before them. The crowd wailed with glee. They stomped their feet in rhythm alongside their cheers in homage to the stomping feet of the dinosaurs, which shook the auditorium. Despite the ephemeral nature of the avatar, Laney could feel the pulses moving through her body, disturbing her sense of balance, making her giddy. It was like trying to walk, run, or dance on a ship tossed by a violent sea, and concentrate past the rising nausea to attend to the task at hand. Suddenly she had a lot more respect for the bird men’s ability to overcome obstacles far less obvious than the ones before them. Even the dust kicked up in the arena choked the lungs and robbed the body of life at the moment it needed it most to deal with the demands of battle.

  No sooner had Flame Thrower gotten The Petrified Lizard moving than the latter was ganged up on once again by the bulk of inrushing humans to the stadium. It was possible they felt they had enough to contend with with the two creatures who had found their calling in life, Fire Breather and Tool Wielder. And they didn’t want this one discovering what his special niche was.