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

by Dean C. Moore

  “Maybe you can’t save the world with the imagination of a child, no matter how powerful it is,” she said. “Not unless it somehow reveals the truth about who we’re meant to be.”

  “I think Leon and I need to find our higher truth in one another the way you and I need to. We bring out the best in each other. What do you think of a ménage-à-trois, huh?”

  She smiled. “I think if you’re drawing people to you who are a more accurate reflection of who you are, and what you wish to become, that’s a good beginning. Means you’re on the right path. But you still need to walk it.”

  He stopped in his tracks, still holding her hand, “On that note, I better get headed up that mountain. If the lizard people are running perimeter defense for Truman, my guess is that’s where Leon is headed. To slay the dragon you have to enter its cave. And Leon is definitely the dragon slayer among us.” He kissed her just long enough to forget she was a hologram, squeezing her towards him at the waist, only to realize she’d faded from view.

  Natty gasped, and rubbed his eyes. He seemed stronger, clearer, and more centered after his encounter with phantom Laney.

  He pulled out the compass and held it up. Studying it, he walked in the direction the needle was pointing, towards the mountain. “Thanks, Laney, for helping me to see what was right in front of my face. And I don’t mean that mountain.”

  ***

  Natty finally found his way to a stream, following the clouds of flies and the direction they were buzzing loudest from. “Just like the survival book says,” he said, dipping his filter pump into the stream to extract the water for his canteen. Leon had outfitted each member of his posse with a filter, civilians included, in case anyone got separated. There were probably enough bacteria and microbials per centiliter in that water to kill a herd of elephants. “You can discover a love for technology in the most damnable of places,” he mumbled.

  The canteen full, he pulled it toward his mouth, only to spill half of it as he fell back staring into the face of what was glaring back at him. “God, it’s like seeing a white buffalo.” Before his very eyes was a white Indian. White as in snow white. He’d read the legends. White men gone native? Vikings whose ships had crashed ashore long ago? Though likely not in the case of this man, not with such dark hair. They were heavily sought out for genetic testing to settle the mystery.

  The native handed him a bone. Natty took his eyes off the Indian long enough to realize it was a fragment of a human rib. One of the floating ribs to be more specific.

  The Indian stood back and sneered at him. But he seemed to mean no harm.

  Realizing his bottle was bleeding out on the ground, Natty reached for it. By the time he raised his eyes again, the white Indian was gone. Like a bad omen. He had had no bird man markings. Somehow they’d failed to assimilate him. If OMEGA FORCE could get their hands on him, he might have answers to give up of a far more pertinent nature to the quest at hand of survival. Natty didn’t hold his breath that was actually going to happen. If the bird men couldn’t capture him…

  FORTY-THREE

  Cassandra stalked the human in the lizard suit; it was easy to think of him that way from this distance. If he was something out of a low budget 1950s horror movie, he was less of a threat, moreover. She vaulted from branch to branch and from tree to tree like a monkey where the branches grew too thickly together to do much else. Whenever the lizard man looked back at her to track the rustling of the leaves, what he saw was a very hairy monkey-like woman that could have been a missing link on the evolutionary chain. When she had greater distances to cover, she jumped from branch to branch more like a flying squirrel, extending her skin flaps also the way some parachutists wore wing suits to increase their hang time. The lizard man looked impressed at the monkey-lady’s adaptations whenever he looked back in time to catch her soaring through the air.

  Now that the Nano Wars were long over, she was bending the rules again. But the nano-involvement, to her thinking, was just another good skin job. The kind a theatrical supply shop could have provided. No super powers implied.

  The lizard man returned his attention to his sampling. He’d been going from shrub to shrub and tree to tree and plant to plant, tasting anything that looked promising. Taking a bite out of a leaf or a piece of bark or a fruit before spitting it back out. Cassandra could tell even from this distance that his headgear was causing him great pain. He kept trying to peel it off but that anguish was even worse than tolerating the throbbing pain the device generated. He would scream and stagger and collapse periodically from the agony it was causing him. Only his relentless determination to sample the plants… Of course! He wasn’t hungry; he was looking for something to ameliorate the pain.

  She sniffed the air as the wind changed direction so she could lock on to his scent, then she was off on a mission of her own, moving far more rapidly through the forest than the lizard man could with her transformed body. This was another reason she preferred to work alone. Working in close with Leon’s men, she’d have to downplay her morphing abilities so as not to spook them too much. Plus, the price she paid for her shapeshifting was a very high metabolism. The nanites in her body demanded building materials with which to work, otherwise they’d cannibalize her own cells to procure the transformation for her that she was visualizing in her head. And there was nothing like a ravenous woman who couldn’t stop eating to spook even professional soldiers. Especially once they got wind of what the increased appetite was for.

  Still, her rationales for her isolationism were growing thin. By her own admission she could feed her body’s cells directly off of chi energy, if only she could hold on to the meditative state. Even if she couldn’t always do it, there was now Natty’s latest generation of nano circulating inside her, which very possibly had resolved this issue, putting an end to the constant ravenousness. She hadn’t exactly had a chance to play with the latest upgrades, holding the nanites in a dormant state for now. But sooner rather than later, she was going to have to own up to whatever sense of shame made it impossible for her to be around people for too long.

  Cassandra slithered down from the branches to the forest floor when she spotted what she was looking for. Peeled the bark off the trumpet tree. She was about to head up into the trees again when she drew the attention of a gorilla. The animal had decided it fancied her. She rolled her eyes and groaned. Just so long as she didn’t purse her lips and sustain eye contact, which he would take as acceptance of his advances.

  He touched her and emitted a train grunt vocalization to emphasize his interest in sexual courtship. When she refused to take a hint, the gorilla proceeded to put on a display of manliness. Between his breast beating and charging and fending off the other gorilla arriving late to the scene for her affection she was actually quite impressed. It was more than most men had done for her. “You draw the line at beating up on defenseless animals, Cassandra.”

  She climbed back up into the trees, figured she could outrun them long enough for the gorillas to lose interest. They did their best to follow her on the forest floor, but they were too big to climb anything but the sturdiest trees and certainly too heavy to jump from tree to tree. As she expected, they started to fall back and were out of the picture by the time she made it back to the lizard man.

  Once again, she dropped out of the trees, this time to hand him the harvest of Lapacho. Despite his startled response—he’d shifted his weight into a fighting stance—and his hesitation to take anything from her, his eyes went repeatedly from her hand to her eyes each time she gestured with the proverbial olive leaf. He appeared to be acquiescing. His desire to bolt must have been intense; the trail through the forest just ahead of him called him repeatedly as if it had a voice all its own. Finally, he ran up to her, grabbed the bark out of her hand, and sprinted some distance away while he sampled it. As soon as he did he made a sound of approval; maybe she had more faith in her lizard-man vocabulary of sounds than she should have.

  He then grabbed a piece of fr
uit and ate it, and another. Suddenly she understood what he was up to. He’s like you, Cassandra. He needs raw materials to build the new components with. But he’s not nano-infused or your own nano would sense it and be hacking his neural net already. So what then? A living CRISPR-unit? The cells in his mouth acting like DNA sequence analyzers? Other cells further down his GI tract, his villi, acting as the CRISPR units to procure the new substances he needed, or possibly like MAGE and CAGE genome assemblers to alter his own DNA to include potent pain blockers? In this case, manufacturing pain killers aplenty? Might he even be improving on the pain-killer, concentrating it, amplifying it, once his physiology got a sense of how it interacted with the drug?

  “Yes,” he said.

  Cassandra gulped and stepped back. “A psychic lizard man? Without nano? Impossible.” With nanonets and mindchips to navigate hacking and entering one another’s minds, psychic abilities were no more than radio communications between individuals without the more primitive intervening cell phones. But she didn’t believe in the other kind of psychic, the one that peered into a crystal ball or turned over tarot cards. Never mind her own psychic connection to her sister suggested some of these abilities might also be explained biologically. Unless there really was another explanation…

  Were they born chi adepts? The chi masters who had real juice in this area were the Teslas of Energy Medicine, moving enough chi through their systems to perform any number of miracles. It was a rare day she could match their feats. Maybe there was something else going on here.

  The EMF waves emitted by her mind? Could he entrain with them at this distance? Read them? Like one of those skull caps you could put on that would translate the propagating waves into images and thoughts? The tech was still too primitive for anyone to do much with besides Natty. Unless he’d done the work already and that was one of the things Truman needed Laney for, to translate that tech savvy into genetic alterations to the lizard man’s senses.

  “Yes,” he said, cuing her that she’d finally put all the pieces together. “My mother calls us the Umbrage to distinguish us from our dinosaur cousins, which she calls the Nomads.”

  “How is it you can even talk, far less speak my language?”

  “We adapt quickly.”

  “The fruit? It isn’t just for the base hydrocarbons you can recombine into pain killers? It’s so you can morph your voice box to produce the sounds you need and change your brain chemistry to process language?”

  “Yes, but those morphing processes started long ago, in the spaceship,” he said pointing to the sky, “where I met my mother. We did it with her help. Right under the evil man’s nose. Emitting guttural war cries to help us get a lock on the vowels and consonant sounds of your speech.”

  “Long ago?”

  “A few hours ago, your time. I haven’t been alive very long, so it seems like a long time ago to me.”

  He ripped off the headgear with a scream. Put it on a boulder and went to bash it into smithereens with a smaller rock. “No!” Cassandra shouted. She whisked it away from him and retreated to a safer distance so as not to scare him.

  “You’re thinking of putting it on? You’re mad. It makes it hard to think, the pain is so intense. All you can do is listen to the voice in your head telling you what to do. It’s the only way the pain is even tolerable.”

  “Why didn’t you listen then?”

  “Because the voice inside my head was not my own.”

  “The others?”

  “Not as strong as me. They couldn’t flee the evil ones. They remain under their control.”

  “Are you the only one that broke free?” she asked.

  They heard the disturbance in the jungle. The distinctive sound of one of the dinosaurs as it made room for itself in the forest, trampling trees. “Maybe not the only one,” he said.

  “You’ve healed,” she said, startled at how quickly the gash at the side of his head from ripping the device out had mended. More than surface flesh had torn away, a fair amount of brain matter too.

  “We mend quickly.” He was continuing to devour the fruit, to feed the multiple reactions he wanted to fuel in his body. Probably choosing the fruit over the leaves and twigs because his body could process it faster.

  She noticed his rainbow colored eyes. It had only dawned on her just then that no two of the Umbrage had the same colored eyes. But the eye colors on the other ones were solid, one color or hue or another, not many, not all at once. Though she hadn’t been this close to any of them before to be entirely sure. “What shall I call you?” she said.

  “Solo. Or maybe Sage Solo, since I seem to do my best work alone. Away from the maddening crowd of psychically connected sentient serpents.”

  She smiled at him. “Nice to meet you, Sage Solo.”

  Cassandra looked down at the device in her hand. “Maybe I can hack this thing.” She turned it over in her hands. “My mindchip comes with self-evolving algorithms that I can sic on it even if my mind is too out of it from the pain. If I can do that, then…”

  It was probably best not to think about the idea too long, she thought, slipping the device on. She immediately screamed out in pain. Her knees buckled and she found herself on the ground, writhing and retching. She’d never vomited from pain before. But then again, she’d never felt pain like this either.

  Her pulse and respirations, initially racing, were falling off fast. Her muscles went from cramping up on her to heightened flaccidness. It was a good thing she’d sent the instructions to her mindchip in advance because she couldn’t tell you her own name right now. The last thing she was conscious of was of the Umbrage looking at her with wild eyes and a terrified expression before disappearing into the forest.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Cassandra awoke with her senses on fire. The noises were too loud. The light too bright. The air too stinky. Her body too sore. An overwhelming taste on her tongue of copper. It took her a second to figure out why. The warring gorillas had found her again and were fighting over her. She was being carried off by one now, who didn’t seem put off by the fact that her fur coat had morphed into something that would blend with the forest floor better.

  He threw her to the ground to wrestle another round with the gorilla he thought he’d just defeated so he could make away with his prize. It was her guess that this was not his first show of over-confidence, explaining why she was so sore. The bright light was on account of the hole in the canopy the grappling gorillas had made for themselves, either by trampling the shrubbery or uprooting the smaller trees to use as bats. The loud noises from their tussling explained why her ears had been turned up too high like hearing-aids on a hopelessly deaf person.

  She took advantage of the two gorillas being in the clinch to run off. This despite the look of betrayal the one being pinned to the ground was giving her for all the work he was putting in to champion her.

  When she checked the headgear, she realized it wasn’t that the device had fallen off or been ripped off in the gorillas’ fighting but that her self-evolving algorithms had managed to neutralize the pain, and block the signals coming from the triple threat. She continued marching in the direction of the other loud noises, the ones coming from the dinosaur.

  The Nomad, upon discovery, was rubbing his head against a tree. Like the Umbrage, Sage Solo, determined to get the head gear off, just not able to manage it on its own. She was trying to hack her way into whatever frequency this creature was on—the bad guys had had the sense to isolate a different frequency for each creature so that they couldn’t all be hacked at once—when the gorillas found her.

  The Nomad forgot its pain briefly to glare at the gorillas. One head turn and step closer and one roar from it and one of the gorillas put his hand up in a gesture of, “I’m outta here. No woman is worth this.” The other one fluffed up his chest with bravado, beat on it and roared. The dinosaur took another step towards the gorilla, and craned his neck down to snap at it. The gorilla jumped back, took one last look at Cassandra
, shook his head in disappointment, and departed.

  “Like every other man I’ve ever dated,” she mumbled. “They run at the first sign of trouble.”

  She shifted her attention back to the Nomad who sniffed the air, sensing her presence, but was unable to get a lock on her; she was too well camouflaged. So it went back to batting its head against the tree.

  With a little more effort she managed to hack her way through the Nomad’s headgear. She gestured up to the creature. She’d made a path of ever diminishing pain in the direction of her hand. The creature figured out pretty quickly that if he lowered his head to her and kept it there, the pain would go away.

  With one hand stroking the Nomad’s head to calm it and distract it, she ripped the headgear off with the other hand. The creature too sedated by the endorphins she was pumping through his body, didn’t feel the tear at the side of its skull. Giving her time to allow more of the nano to migrate from her hand to the wound. The nanites marched out of her like army ants, forming bridges with their own body in an effort to crawl inside the Nomad’s skull. Once inside they would assist with healing the creature. He might have been able to heal himself considering the recuperative powers of the Umbrage. But this creature was considerably lower functioning. For that reason, she had sent the nanites to do more than just physically heal.

  The sedation wearing off, the creature locked eyes with her for a tense moment, then nuzzled her affectionately, before melting into the forest. The vibrations from its feet causing the pod fruit overhead to rain down like carpet bombing not seen since World War II.

  She was feeling pretty good about her interspecies relations when she surrendered her tunnel vision, focused on the Nomad’s departure, to take in the bigger picture. She’d been surrounded by a contingent of three of the Nomads, mounted by three of the Umbrage. The cavalry in turn had additional ground support in the form of a couple dozen or so foot soldiers. If she could call them that; they were mostly up in the trees, camouflaged. Their weapons aimed at her. They weren’t here by chance. Evidently the triple threat had sent them to put an end to her. The three Ubuku leaders must have detected her hack of one of their headgear units.