The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  She grabbed Freja by the neck with one hand, and with the other hand, yanked off Freja’s right arm. Black Bird fired “trained light” at her wound, stemming the blood, before repeating the ritual with the other arm.

  Freja watched her two arms fall to the ground below; they never made it all the way; there were other things in the air besides dragons, all too happy to take the free offering of food.

  Freja didn’t much mind the loss of her arms. That seemed to catch Black Bird by surprise. Freja thought she’d be kind enough to show her why she didn’t much care about the loss of the two limbs. She kicked Black Bird with such force that Black Bird became impaled against the thorny ridge of the dragon’s spine. Freja then began to kick hard to Black Bird’s body. At first the skeleton merely dented and deformed, looking increasingly arthritic as Black Bird attempted to free herself from her impalement. But Freja upped the ante by retreating to one end of the dragon—to the very tip of the tail—then charging and either head-butting the part of Black Bird impaled at an angle, the doll’s upper back caught against the arch of the dragon’s neck, or somersaulting to drive her head with added momentum into Black Bird’s midsection.

  Black Bird was now so deformed she could no longer even squirm effectively. Freja kicked off all four of Black Bird’s limbs, then kicked the head free of the torso, and finally kicked what remained to the ground below.

  “Pity. These dolls would make good play things for the children,” she said, watching the pieces fall to the ground.

  ***

  Hertha, having witnessed the fight between Freja and Black Bird, now that it was over, shifted her attention to Dag. The old man had fought ably on the back of his dragon, repeatedly locking swords with one of the head-feathers of Brown Bird, which Brown Bird wielded like a sword in her hand. The two went back and forth above the moving stage. The dragon had not slowed its soaring on account of them, any more than Freja’s dragon had curtailed its airborne antics to accommodate the two riders on its back.

  But finally, Dag was too weary to even lift his sword. Brown Bird could have played with her food, tormented her enemy. Hertha’s own people were not beyond humiliating their adversaries in such a way. But as soon as Brown Bird sensed the battle was over, she made a clean kill, separating Dag’s head from the rest of him with a sweep of the blade, which she then returned to her head feathers.

  Hertha’s roar—conveyed as a defiant battle cry—trumpeted Dag’s death.

  Her lungs were still too depleted to repeat the outcry as she saw Gosta fall next. He was the youngest of the elder males, save for Asger, but his obesity meant he had to fight himself as much as the enemy. Hertha had warned him countless times not to let himself go like that, but he had remained able enough with his sword to keep the younger alphas in their place, and he could not weather Eresdra’s nights without his fat to insulate him. Some of their kind occasionally let themselves go soft, too, as a way of loving themselves when no one else would.

  Hertha shifted her focus to Eira, who was holding her own. So, they were down to just the three women. Not good, but not an entirely hopeless situation either. Their females could self-impregnate in the absence of men, even the most barren of them; arguably they were most fertile then. The tribe would survive—if they ended this battle now. The contest had been engaging enough, but beyond the sheer tease of exhilaration, there was no longer any point to it.

  Hertha’s dragon emitted the shriek which would communicate as much to Freja and Eira. Freja nodded, fleeing her latest doll warrior attackers and taking them away from Hertha’s two children which had had the sense to stay out of the action. That couldn’t have been easy for them, not with seeing what was happening to the elders.

  Eira, however, refused to back down. Their women did not play well with others, especially the other women. It was how they were made. It was why and how the tribes grew to a point where they splintered. The women carried with them the authority and the leadership and the free will to drive their species forward. They ruled the clans, by and large. Asger was the exception. And he only ruled all the clans by convincing the female leaders of the other tribes time and time again that his ancient wisdom was worth heeding.

  That said, Eira took her hard-headedness too far. She would take any dare, no matter how senseless, no matter how impossible, only to prove that nothing could kill her. She was of that age to think that nothing could. Hertha’s people were young and foolish for their first few thousand years.

  Perhaps Eira would mellow in her next thousand—if she lived so long.

  Hertha, lacking the patience to watch Eira’s fight continue against the Green and Yellow Bird Man whom she was fighting on the back of her dragon, let loose her boomerang.

  The weapon made an agonized squeal as it cut through the air—loud enough to shatter the bone that enclosed the true weapon inside, which flew with bright flickering lights and with an intelligence all its own, course correcting for the error in Hertha’s judgement as she’d flung the weapon. It wasn’t like she’d used it to hunt game from such a distance before. That would be little more than a sneak attack, which her people would have considered cowardly.

  The boomerang was meant for the neck of the Green and Yellow bird man. But instead, it fired “trained light” from its edges in bursts that took out all the bird men and women closing in on Eira from all sides now that their adversaries were diminishing in number. Hertha wasn’t sure how many doll warriors there were, only that as Hertha’s people killed them off, more took their place; it was as if they could keep themselves invisible until they wished to step onto the battlefield.

  The boomerang continued its spiraling flight about the dragon and the two on its back that were continuing to fight each other, emitting a strange sound that Hertha realized was a summoning song her people used to use. Hertha remembered little from their ancestral past as Asger did, but she had a thing for the summoning songs; she only had to hear one once to remember the tune forever. This one she hadn’t heard before. She was quite keen on seeing what creature it brought forth. It might be something they could fall back on to foster their retreat from the battlefield, allowing Hertha to reclaim her kids without leading the enemy straight toward them.

  Eira was using a chain with a hook at the end of it, which she wielded rather well, swirling it above her head before letting loose with the hook. But once the hook caught some part of Green and Yellow Bird doll, it was a matter of who was going to toss who against the spikes along the dragon’s back and neck the fastest and the hardest, as either side fought for advantage and leverage. A dangerous game to play and not a weapon to employ in such a situation, Hertha thought; and likely a long way from how it was meant to be properly used. But Eira’s ancestral memory took the longest to engage of all of them, and this battle hadn’t gone on nearly long enough for that.

  Finally. There it was. More mistake on Eira’s part and good luck than finding a portal to her past. The chain caught her up, wrapping around her until every inch of her body was covered, and then she just wasn’t there anymore. She had moved behind her enemy when a moment ago she was in front. Asger had explained these “jumpers” to Hertha from his ancestral memory, and those who wielded them which could defy natural laws to leave one place and pop into another.

  And now that Eira had finally gotten a taste of how to use the weapon properly, she was using it with gusto, twisting up the chain about her to disappear and unleashing it as she popped to another location, sending the harrying hook into Green and Yellow Bird Man, pruning him of his feathers—and his armaments—one at a time.

  The boomerang swirling about them, meanwhile, had finished its song. The creature to appear out of the nothing—the place Hertha believed all these creatures came from—swallowed up Green and Yellow Bird Man in one gulp. It appeared a kind of fish that ballooned up with air the instant it had its food in its mouth so it could float into the upper atmosphere to digest its prey in peace, away from predators who couldn’t fly so high. T
he creature was almost pure energy; if it reminded Hertha of anything, it was also like the jellyfish of their rivers that were nearly as see-through and which stung to paralyze their prey before engulfing it.

  No matter how hard Green and Yellow Bird Man tried, he couldn’t pierce the energy wall of the air bladder taking him up, up and away. Before he could get out of range, he ignited the box inside him. The blinding light destroyed him and the Balloon Fish—and Eira and her dragon.

  Observing from a distance how Eira had been taken out, Hertha sighed. Whoever this enemy was, they had more in common with Hertha and her people than they knew. Never defeated, not even in death; it was something Hertha and all the mothers taught their children, singing the words in a song before they were even out of the womb.

  Asger had explained such weapons from their past to Hertha as well. Had Green and Yellow Bird Man waited until he was farther away, the death ray would still have reached Eira, but it would not have killed her in an instant. It would have taken years to do so. In his own way, Green and Yellow Bird Man fought honorably even when all was lost, and not with viciousness or loss of emotional control.

  All in all, the doll warriors would have been excellent stand-in parents for their tribe’s children which seldom received all the parenting they needed. Mostly, the children raised themselves. It was also part of the traditions of Hertha and her people, which were big on independence and self-motivation. But this battle that had gone on already— What if the doll warriors could engage their children like this the live-long day? How much sooner would they mature their fighting skills and how much better fighters would they be as adults? And they would know love and nurturing that all mothers wanted to give their children—tribal traditions or no. It would be the best of both worlds: both loving and harsh, turning coddling into a strange form of tough-love that led to superior warriors even more battle-hardened than the ones that had known too little love growing up.

  Freja’s headband lit up as Hertha flew toward her on her dragon. The two dragons settled into formation next to one another. Freja’s headband masked their retreat from the battlefield, making both the riders and the dragons invisible. So, it was a cloaking device! Interesting. Suddenly, Hertha envied Asger’s superior access to ancestral memory. What powers they wielded that they knew not!

  Freja’s face, as she realized what was going on with her head band, communicated all Hertha needed to know, as Freja turned her burning eyes toward the enemy.

  “Don’t!” Hertha ordered. “If it weren’t for them, we would never have been able to take our fighting to new heights. Such enemies are worth more than friends, and they may yet become both, considering we have more in common than either side would care to admit.”

  Freja screamed her frustration, but stood down, turning to face forward again on the dragon and forgetting for now of the ones that had cost them so much.

  ***

  “How’s that for a first impression?” Patent said, sidling up to Leon, taking his cigar out of his mouth to exhale and “steam” in the fine odors of the cigar.

  Prior to battle, Patent preferred the bitter chew of his tobaccos. But when basking in the afterglow of a good encounter, his aromatic cigars were the order of the day. They were standing on a battlefield still heavily strewn with NARs reduced to LEGO pieces that might or might not be put back together again like so many Humpty Dumptys, looking up at the sky and the retreat of the dragon riders. The Eresdrans were not as invisible as they thought they were, at least not to Leon and Patent, wearing their Augmented Reality visors like a pair of fashionable shades, which allowed them to see along a broader swath of the EMF spectrum, among other things.

  “I think it went well,” Leon said.

  “You can thank my boys and girls for the giant robots. Natty’s father may have designed them, but it was Alpha Unit that figured out how to use them for more than body suits.”

  Leon did a double take in his direction. “Natty said he was responsible for the big reveal.”

  “Yeah, well, the teens filled me in later. I can’t believe he’d steal our thunder like that. As if the guy doesn’t have enough of his own ideas he can take credit for.” Patent let out another puff on his cigar, pleased by the progress Alpha Unit was making reassembling the NARs; they were crawling over them like beetles on human corpses.

  “We’ll leave a few NARs behind as gifts to cement the friendship,” Leon said. “They’ll make great play things. They can fight tirelessly the livelong day; the perfect toys for Viking children. Well, Nouveau Vikings, since this race does seem to be the same, with some important differences. No doubt their elders came to the same conclusion before I did.” Leon took the cigar out of Patent’s mouth, and puffed on it. “I should have brought my pipe. Forgot how pleasant an after-battle-smoke could be.”

  Patent made a sour face at him.

  Ariel ran up to the two men, young and full of energy and enthusiasm; panting as much from that as the exertion of double-timing it to their location. Alpha Unit was spread out across the battlefield; the young techies were not supposed to be anywhere near the battlefield, but as it turned out, fighting with dragons tended to expand the zone of engagement a great deal. “I’ve got us our in. The female Hertha wants the NARs as dolls for her kids, as surrogate parents, that—”

  “Yes, yes,” Patent said. “We got you. Excellent work, Ariel. And, of course, they can have as many as they like.”

  “Satellite’s gnat-sized droids were able to get close enough to her to read her thoughts in the heat of battle. You should really thank him.”

  “Pass our thanks along to the entire unit,” Patent said. Ariel nodded and ran back in the direction she’d come. Patent turned to Leon. “No point in letting them know we came to the same conclusion ahead of them; they feel like second-class citizens enough as it is. Best to bolster their self-esteem.”

  “You don’t need to explain yourself to me, Patent. Ever.” Leon patted him on the back, handed the cigar back before Patent got overly sour about the whole affair of the ruined post-battle smoke. “Come on. We need to bring their dead back to life to soften Hertha and the other one up further. If these clans are matriarchal as our studies suggest, they’re going be the tough ones to win over.”

  Patent nodded. “I’ll follow you in a minute or two.”

  That was his way of telling Leon, “You came between me and my cigar, now I come between you and your plans. Consider yourself lucky.”

  Leon smiled, grunted and nodded, then headed down the hill toward Alpha Unit, who’d be the ones pulling off the Nouveau Viking back-from-the-dead acts with their cutting edge technologies. This far from the Nautilus, the methods would likely be a bit more make-do, but the Vikings were tough enough to handle much of the resuscitation magic on their own, if Alpha Unit’s tech toys fell short.

  TWELVE

  IN PROXIMITY OF THE NAUTILUS

  Cassandra had had enough. Whatever additional secrets the star gate held, they would have to wait until she was back on the ship. Her nanites were committing suicide in droves, taxed well past their tolerances. She was in the vacuum of deep space, for Techa’s sake, with no space suit, no breathable atmosphere; to say nothing of the solar radiation, and the perpetual bombardment of dust particles from a starry nebula nearby which’d had the audacity to go supernova less than a thousand years ago and was still spitting debris her way. Not to mention the strange effects of the gate itself. Her skin was crawling.

  There was really no reason for her to be out here. The Nautilus would have had scanners up to the task of penetrating the obelisk’s secrets, far in excess of what she could do up close. It would also have had probes, from nanite-size droids to droids the size of a basketball, that it could have deployed, and some of those droids would have had the mechanical arms with extensions to poke and prod away as she was doing.

  All she had to offer was what, exactly?

  At the end of the day she trusted her gut more than she trusted the Nautilus’s
probes and all the supersentience its AIs could have thrown at the star gate to decode its symbols, its purpose, and how it worked. And for her gut check to be complete, she needed to be up close and personal.

  Her gut told her this thing was going to be trouble even before they fired it up and stepped through it.

  On a lark, she made a tennis-ball-sized sphere in the palm of her right hand with a rapid proliferation of skin-nanites. She cocked her arm to throw the ball through the portal to confirm that it was indeed inactive, but she never got the chance. The Nautilus fired photon torpedoes, which she watched pass harmlessly through the portal to the other side—no space warping effects detected.

  She reabsorbed the nanites back into herself, and pushed away from the pentagram shape framing the void that was the inactive portal at its center using all the souped-up strength of her legs, headed back toward the Nautilus.

  Her nanites would continue to manufacture oxygen for her until she was back aboard ship by splitting apart hydrocarbons—either drawing on their own food stock in her digestive tract, or happily eating away at her body when those stores ran out. They would also keep her lungs properly pressurized in a vacuum, coat her eyes and the rest of her body in a microscopically thin layer that was fairly impenetrable to bombardment. With even one percent of her nanites remaining operable, she was also immune to the solar radiation.

  The window of her cabin that she’d jumped out of had since been sealed by the Nautilus’s self-mending technology. Cassandra elected to drift through the landing bay designed for smaller crafts, be they self-piloted droids or ships designed to be flown by riders.

  ***