The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  It might not matter for his mission objective though how many Eresdrans converted to using the fighter planes for the hunt; his goal was to trigger enough past life memories in the youth to mine for intel that would facilitate passage across the star gate.

  Such intel was coming in on Ariel’s monitors now, relayed to them by the nanites occupying the minds of the Eresdran youth. Their bodies had been invaded by atmospheric nanites released onto the planet via probes launched from the Nautilus. The atmospheric nanites had been designed to hack their way into the minds of all Eresdrans with the hopes of enticing more past life memories to the surface. Over time, the nanites would get ever better at their jobs. The question was, would they drive psychotic breaks in the locals considering all their tribal law forbidding delving too deeply into those memories, and using them as anything but warnings to stay the path of their simpler, current day lifestyle? With all that was at stake, if Leon’s theory was correct that it was only with better integration of past life memories that these Nouveau Vikings were ever to be prepared for the return of the master race that had decimated them once before—then there was no other way to save the race and the planet. Some eggs might well get broken to cook that omelet.

  The Alpha Unit cadets, manning many of the jet fighters in the air, were doing their part to buy the Eresdrans time to bring down their kill without losing too many of their own numbers in the process. The Alpha Unit cadets, better at working the jet fighters, also role modeled for the Eresdran teens how to take their fighting up to Ace-fighter-pilot levels; all they had to do was watch and emulate.

  “It’s working,” Ariel said. “The younger ones can actually access more past life memories than the older ones because their tribal lore hasn’t overridden their natural instincts enough yet. They just needed a little coaxing.” The mix of fighting on dragon back and with the jet fighters, of the old and new technologies employed alongside one another, was actually what was stirring up the past life memories in greater numbers.

  Those recollections coming to the surface were driving the latest rush of images to the monitors.

  And eye-popping they were. Just when Patent thought views of the take down of TG and M couldn’t get any more surreal. Those images were rapidly replaced with ones far more shocking still.

  Apparently, for thousands of years, during the great transition between the pre-conquered civilization of Eresdrans and the post-conquered civilization, that was entirely how their ancestors had fought—mixing old and new technologies such as the dragons and the jet fighters.

  The techno-wizards that had fabricated the weapons of the elders, combining elemental wizard magic with scientific tools—had made these weapons precisely to prevent infighting amongst their own people at a time when they needed everyone focused on defeating the enemy. There was much animosity at the time between the elemental wizards and the scientists who did not believe the old wizards’ magic was worth a damn as to how to best defeat the master race that had descended on them from the stars. The Eresdran elemental wizards that had forged those weapons had done so as much to forge a peace between factions of Eresdrans as to defeat the enemy. That part of the backstory was coming out now in the form of the memories being captured on Ariel’s monitors, snatched out of the minds of several of the Eresdran youth combatants.

  The cities that once existed on Eresdra, Patent thought, watching them come to life before his eyes on the monitor, were something else. He whistled like a balloon in a balloon twister’s hand who was letting the air escape to keep the balloon from popping.

  The “skyscrapers” were giant robots that came to life when the cities were initially under attack to fight off the first wave of alien invaders. Patent only now realized that those giant robots that millions of people lived inside of must have been inspired by the star gate in the sky—if it, too, enclosed a society of robots focused on its maintenance.

  As the giant robots roamed their territory protectively, they clapped their hands together and stomped the earth with feet raised a little too high off the ground with each step. It was like watching a bizarre, slow-motion dance performed to summon the gods’ help in fighting off their attackers.

  But as it turned out, the surfaces along the bottom of the feet and the insides of the hands were magnetized—or they had technology that allowed them to collapse space-time in the vicinity.

  However the trick was done, the enemy’s large supply ships got sucked in and exploded violently between the clapping hands and hammering feet.

  Those explosions should have been the last thing the giant robots wanted to trigger—they were technically more than enough to take out the giant robo-skyscrapers.

  But the shrapnel never penetrated what looked to Patent like glass-panes, as one would expect, providing views to the tenants inside any skyscraper. It was Patent’s guess that those windows had been fashioned from “Mothra’s” wings, in turn hardened on thousands of years of fending off dragons.

  The locals had a method to their madness; taking out the supply ships that were dumping armies of droids on the grounds to be used against the Eresdrans meant many conflicts could be avoided before they even got started.

  The Eresdrans, what’s more, who had built a society in homage to the godlike race in the sky, worked as cohesive teams inside each skyscraper to provide the giant robots with an endless supply of weapons and battle tactics and strategies.

  Patent noticed also that the skyscrapers were roving factories as much as armadas on the move across the landscape, each one able to deploy battle groups analogous perhaps to aircraft carriers in a space navy.

  ***

  OVER A HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS PRIOR

  Hakon gazed out of the viewport on his floor of the Skyscraper god at the robot insects—each one to two meters long—crawling about on the ground menacing their warriors, who did not have the good fortune of living and fighting inside a Skyscraper-god.

  Right before his eyes, those insects unfolded wings—he didn’t know they had—and flew toward the Skyscraper gods en masse. The wings—they were vibrating at a pitch that hurt Hakon’s ears. The vibration sent a chill up his spine; he did not feel that those insects were sending out mating calls.

  As it turned out, he was both right and wrong on that score. The vibrations had been calibrated to shatter the viewports once within range. They would then fly through the openings they’d created and explode inside the Skyscraper god, taking out everyone and everything on that floor within its blast radius.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, the same vibrations caused the male insect bots to mount them. The progeny procured in those matings wasted no time maturing themselves to combat readiness. The insect droids could now fly at the Skyscraper gods in even greater number, with each generation, to burrow through the Skyscraper god’s surface, and explode inside, until they weakened the scaffolding that kept the Skyscraper gods from falling enough to bring them down.

  Hakon shouted on his secure line to the engineers—who were kept away from the periphery of the Skyscraper gods to ensure they could manufacture new weapons safely and in time to keep the Skyscraper gods fortified, and so might not be privy to what was now going on—everything he was seeing.

  Within minutes the engineers released the next wave of defensive weapons. The unmanned droid ships, which were too small to house an actual Eresdran, shot out of the ejection bays that spanned the surface of each Skyscraper god. They used sound-cancelling technology to kill both the mating cry of the enemy insect bots and their ability to shatter the viewports of the Skyscraper gods. Even better—they sent those insect bots at the enemy’s own numbers, devastating the bots still on the ground.

  But those smaller ground bots were easily replaced by the enemy, and the Skyscraper gods were not so readily brought into existence. And the Eresdrans had lost two in the short time it had taken to fabricate the counteroffensive. Three more were sufficiently damaged that their war-making ability would be curtailed for some time, assuming the e
nemy didn’t capitalize on their weakened state to bring them down before they could be repaired.

  ***

  PRESENT TIME

  Patent’s jaw dropped at the latest reveal on Ariel’s monitors still being fed by the awakening memories shaken out of the Eresdran youths in battle.

  The fact that these “skyscrapers,” or giant robots, could fly and take to the sky—well outside of the planet’s atmosphere—assured that they indeed would be used in this capacity.

  ***

  OVER ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS AGO

  Geir gazed out his viewport from inside the Skyscraper god. Now that they were beyond the reach of the planet’s upper atmosphere, in low orbit, the true face of their enemy could be seen. It was a sight he wished he had not been cursed with.

  The ships were so numberless they blacked out the stars in the heavens—even from up here. And their vast scale—each ship made a Skyscraper god look like a small unmanned droid by comparison—like those insect droids on the planet—was the most disheartening thing about them.

  Geir tried to keep his mind from freezing up. He had never known fear; there was barely a word for it in the Eresdran vocabulary. The closest matching word was, Kefir, which translated to “he who does not think.” His people could only understand the moment of mental paralysis, that Geir now understood as fear, as a form of meditation. He decided that the misunderstanding of the true state might serve him well here. Maybe if he just let his mind go blank for a while, the Skyscraper god would fill his head with what he needed to know to defeat his enemy.

  And that’s exactly what happened. He got on his COMMS and broadcast to every Skyscraper god that had taken to the stars. “This battle is pointless. From their perspective, it’s already won. They are testing our mettle to see that we are worthy to stand among them in the stars. So long as we do not surrender, and only grow bolder and more enterprising, they will one day go away and leave us alone.”

  Slowly the chatter that came back on the COMMS took the form of grunts and the verbal equivalent of head nods. “Yes, what else could it mean?” “Geir is wise.” “Geir has been blessed by the gift of understanding bestowed by the Skyscraper gods.” His people were using their signs of acknowledgement, Geir suspected, to break through their own mental paralysis. Even if Geir had not been blessed by wisdom but only folly, his words might well help them turn the tide against such an overwhelming enemy. Though Geir doubted that tide change would come today.

  ***

  Sigrid held her breath as her Skyscraper god flew through the invisible shield protecting the enemy’s starship. The shield fluoresced on their passing through it, but it did not destroy the Skyscraper god’s flock. The Skyscraper god’s surface had been fabricated from the hides of Eresdra’s insects, which weren’t much impressed by most any assault upon them. And the surfaces of the Skyscraper gods, moreover, had been blessed by the Eresdran techno-wizards, that had painted an invisible substance on their surface as part of the sacrament of birth of the Skyscraper god.

  And now Sigrid’s Skyscraper god, at the behest of the Eresdrans, was flying toward a perceived point of vulnerability on the ship that Sigrid had identified. As an engineer—one of many who had been responsible for procuring the Skyscraper gods—it was her job to ascertain such vulnerabilities. But what if she was wrong? They could not afford to lose a Skyscraper god to a careless mistake. By rights, if she was wrong, it was her responsibility to take her own life; it was a matter of honor. But in a battle such as this, where every soldier was needed, she doubted the ancient rites would be observed. Her punishment instead would be to live on and to know that she had had a hand in the extermination of her own species.

  Sigrid continuing observing, a casual bystander now to a drama she herself set in motion, as the Skyscraper god peeled back the outer hull of the Mother ship, and burrowed its way inside.

  Once in the engineering bay, it was now no longer the insect-like droid buzzing about the Mother ship; it was once again a giant, and could easily dispatch the enemy. The invading aliens’ engineers were as cloaked as soldiers and impossible to perceive beneath their stealth, flexible body armoring. There was barely room for the Skyscraper god to navigate; it had little choice but to take out the engineers with its own droids, currently leaving the dispatching bays in numbers. Every skyscraper god engineer had to be dispatched in short order before the enemy could alert the rest of the ship, far less the rest of the fleet.

  The Skyscraper god, trusting the droids to do their work, contented itself instead with hacking the enemy fleet’s AIs. If it could work fast enough to decode the alien’s programming languages, it could set the fleet to devour itself, turning Mother ship against Mother ship. The AIs would be able to think and react far faster than the humanoids infesting the ships. So by the time they wrested control back from the AIs, the damage would be done—in theory. When coming up against an enemy that was this much of an unknown, Sigrid realized, theory had an ugly way of never matching up with reality.

  At moments like this, the Skyscraper god could synchronize every one of the Eresdran crew by hacking the microscopically small robots percolating through each of their minds, numbering in the trillions per infected mind. The Skyscraper god could also reinforce its thinking with the networked computers in each suite within the city of Eresdrans that lived inside the Skyscraper god. Last but not least, a decentralized brain had been built for the Skyscraper god with computer banks built into the sixteen-inch-thick walls giving shape to each living quarters like so much insulation; those computers were stacked so heavily the crops of them constituted “farms” far bigger than any Eresdrans actually tended on the ground. With so much intelligence now recruited to one purpose, Sigrid had to believe the mission could be pulled off without a hitch.

  And so it was.

  Within seconds, the enemy fleet’s ships started igniting in such number that the stars they were obscuring were becoming visible again.

  But as brief as any fireworks display her people were so fond of putting on during their full moon festivals—the madness of her people at an all-time high it was believed on account of the pull of four moons on the waters of their bodies—the show was over.

  The fleet’s AIs evidently had a way of parallel-arraying themselves in such situations to counter such an attack. Sigrid had anticipated as much. She had just hoped beyond hope that it would take longer for the reaction to kick in.

  Yes, the blow had been catastrophic to the enemy. But they could easily have digested several more such catastrophic attacks and still been more than a match for Sigrid’s people.

  Time alone would tell if what Sigrid had done today had enabled her people, or stacked one more boulder on each of their graves. After all, if the enemy now understood how the Skyscraper gods worked their magic…

  ***

  For hundreds of years the war had waged on in orbit above Eresdra between the giant Eresdran robots and the enemy ships precisely to protect the planet’s surface and keep it from being reduced to a wasteland of radioactive mud which could not support life.

  But the fertility of these “false gods” that had been erected to emulate the “real” ones of the star gate was never great enough to deter the master race that had gotten them on their radar.

  And sadly, the Star Gate never came to the Eresdrans’ defense; perhaps their homage to them had never been great enough in the minds of the creators.

  Over time, the giant robots could not repair or replenish themselves fast enough, and so watched their numbers wither.

  As the robot army in low orbit about the planet continued to hold off the interlopers as best they could, the ones remaining on the ground attempted to shield their people under giant impenetrable domes that were laserproof and bombproof, and under which entire ecosystems could be sustained for when the planet did become a wasteland secondary to the fight migrating to the surface.

  ***

  Gunnhild peered through the transparent panels of the geodesic d
ome enclosing them at the battle waging in the sky. It was more of a constant than the suns and moons visible beyond the planet’s atmosphere; more enduring even than the stars. From a little child she would watch the battles wage from the flat rooftop of her building. She and her friends would play divination games, attempting to affect the outcome of those battles by tossing runes and reading the forecasts. Before each toss a prayer would be said to the Star Gate and to the dome itself, which was seen as the Skyscraper god in repose, hunched over them in protection.

  The eyes of her people had evolved over time to be immune to the bright lights that came with each explosion. Even lasers that might catch one of them directly in the eye—fired from an enemy ship or one of their own flying above—could do no serious damage—not anymore.

  She was an adult now, so her role in her planet’s affairs and in the protection of their people had changed. So it was that she made her way up the scaffolding of the dome, climbing it like a beast that lived high among the trees on their world, specialized in scaling the trunks and branches to reach its favorite foods.

  Once at her station, she crawled through the trap door in the floor to man her star cannon. Each panel of the dome housed one of these weapons, or some other form of death-dealing wizard-blessed hi-tech.

  Once inside the triangular box that formed the intersecting panels of the dome itself, she was invisible both to the enemy and to her own people. The light-bended around the occupants of the cabin as if they simply weren’t there; a trick of the wizard-blessed nanites infusing the chamber. That trick was one of many they’d pull off as needed; another function being to heal the warriors if they ever did take a hit.