The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  The cabins had room enough for two, her and her lover. As a rule, Eresdrans didn’t take lovers; just mates through which young could be procured. But after over a thousand years of battle, to keep morale up, the pairs locked inside cabins did more than have sex routinely to get their minds off of the ceaseless war. They spun dramas about one another, hacked their way into one another’s minds via their nanites for the expressed purpose of putting themselves somewhere else; in a world where one could take a break from war, and indulge in activities of the heart.

  At first they’d all resisted this meddling from the cultural affairs’ officers demanding as much. But the savants that led the Eresdrans had refused to reconsider the matter. And over time, the warriors had indeed become better fighters, ironically on account of making love as often as they made war. Her and her lover had long since learned to mount one another while the other continued firing with his laser cannon. Meanwhile the unmanned laser cannon was put through a series of automated moves, so it too wasn’t quiet. She would go back to her laser cannon before the vulnerability could be detected by an AI that would learn to get around the so-called “random” patterns of fire of the cannon’s AI.

  It was a bleak existence as romanticized for what it was as it was endured. What choice had they really?

  A full shift later, when Gunnhild exited the chamber, the techno-wizards were visible on the ground below tending their gardens. They had perfected the combination of magic and technology necessary to keep the dome’s transparent metallic-glass panels from ever being breached a while back. They’d done this by finding ways to array the countless nanites infusing the panels with a phenomenal reproductive ability, allowing them to repair the panels as rapidly as they were damaged. Those growth spurts were informed by some of Eresdra’s plant extracts—their genetics long understood by her people’s wizards. As they were also scientists, the wizards had taken the nature magic and built on it.

  But now they faced a new challenge. The food was dying beneath the dome. Though originally exposed to all the light the plants needed, the nanites inside the dome’s panels were forced to proliferate and mutate so rapidly that the light that reached the plants below could no longer be relied on; which meant the plants couldn’t genetically alter themselves to respond favorably to one or another wavelength which would be enough to supply it with its growth needs.

  It did no good to hang growth lights over the plants to give them what they needed—because over such vast fields those wavelengths would be identified by the enemy. And they would adjust their weapons accordingly to starve the plants of what they required.

  So the techno-wizards had resorted to tweaking the genes of the plants yet again to flourish under any bandwidth of light along the entire spectrum. It was but the latest of a long succession of miracles pulled off by the techno-wizards regarding the plant life. As Eresdrans did not do well on a vegetarian diet—the plants contained compounds that drugged them and dulled their senses—the plants themselves had to be turned into insects and animals that fed directly off the light, while remaining rooted in place to get what else they needed from the soil. Turning insects and animals into plants was no small bioengineering trick. The work had gone on for hundreds of years during the days of the Skyscraper gods—when they battled on the behalf of the Eresdrans as mobile, bipedal robots. How Gunnhild wished she’d lived in those days. She hated living under these domes, felt imprisoned by them. Her people were meant to roam over the land; they remained hunter gatherers at heart, even with hi-tech and magic saturating their lives in every possible way.

  When she reached her home, Gunnhild climbed to the roof of the building. She decided she would help the techno-wizards tending the garden as she had helped the pilots in her days spent as a child. She started casting the runes she hadn’t thrown in hundreds of years.

  Maybe she, too, would grow into a techno-wizard, leave the soldiering to others for a while, if only to end this war that much faster, so she could get out from under this dome; anything to get out from under.

  ***

  PRESENT TIME

  The geodesic dome fortifications extended the fight for hundreds of years to follow—during which time the Eresdran robots continued to tunnel beneath the ground, carving out elaborate mazes that stood to the present day. Patent kept swallowing hard at the proof on Ariel’s monitors of the genius exemplified by the Eresdrans to continue to hold off a far superior enemy despite all odds, seemingly indefinitely.

  Those highways of tunnels that intersected and opened out into giant underground caverns then became the breeding grounds for a different kind of giant. These giants were the ancestors of TG and M—genetically-created monsters altered from life on Eresdra to battle the enemy and feed on the carnage of their robotic armies.

  ***

  OVER ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS PRIOR

  Arne listened to the rumble of his metal beast, as he switched gears, before it returned to roaring along the subterranean tunnels running under the geodesic domes overhead.

  He was his people’s principal tunnel engineer. Reports had reached him of troubles with the caverns that had been carved out to house the new critter that had been bioengineered to replace the Skyscraper gods, who could no longer protect them on the battlefield from an enemy from the stars that simply refused to stop harrying them.

  What now? he thought. A tunnel’s engineer’s life was never dull even without worrying about meddlesome underground beasts; there were constant cave-ins to be contended with, people getting lost in the mazes—even his seasoned tunnel engineers. And then there were the impediments foiling his borers from chewing through anymore earth. Those “impediments” were seldom so kind to be merely rocks resistant to drill bits; often they were critters that lived deep in the soil, as fierce and as predatory as anything that lived on the surface. The Eresdran armed services kept MASH units down here staffed with hundreds of well-trained medics, all necessary to put the tunnel engineers back together again after a close encounter with the locals of the non-humanoid variety. Even Eresdran medical nanites were no match for the chemical secretions and pincers of these never-before-encountered beasts.

  The tunnel he was transgressing finally opened into the cavern he was attempting to reach. Now that part one of his mission was accomplished—merely making it to the scene of the crime alive—past all the insects with a knack for tunneling into previously excavated tunnels—he wondered if part two of his plan was a complete non-starter.

  The offending bioengineered creature—the hope of the future—had decided the cavern in which it found itself would make a good egg-laying chamber. He supposed he couldn’t blame the thing for being no less enterprising than any other Eresdran. Arne sighed. The problem with this scenario was the mother—which was built like a caterpillar that gave birth to the giant dragonflies that menaced the surface of this world to this day—was genetically designed to drop her eggs on the surface, in the darkness of night, which on Eresdra lasted just a few minutes. It was a time during which even the enemy took a break. Why design tech specifically to make war at night when night was so brief on Eresdra? The “caterpillar” would lay its eggs that would feast on the enemy’s fallen, cleaning up the battlefield enough so the Eresdran soldiers could do more damage in it. Considering the numbers of these newly bioengineered critters, the brief night period would quite suffice. And by light of day they could have tunneled back underground where they’d be safe again.

  Arne got on his COMMS device and relayed the nature of the problem to the bioengineers. They had better solve the challenge they were faced with in a hibernating Vetra’s heartbeat, because otherwise these things were going to gum up the entire underground network. And that could be a real problem. There was no way the population on the surface, beneath the dome, could be supported without what was grown and cultivated and manufactured down here. Their population would incur a dieback unknown to any species on Eresdra—even during their last ice age.

  ***

/>   PRESENT TIME

  Patent couldn’t believe what he was seeing on the monitors. The excrement of those dinosaurs created to replace the Skyscraper gods was reclaimed by a new generation of bioengineered scavengers living under the ground.

  The scavengers had been genetically altered in turn to procure a next-generation offspring that could reproduce a mile a minute using any foodstuff—dirt, sand, biomass, even noxious gases and pollutants found on a battlefield secondary to spent arsenal.

  When the offspring made their way to the surface, and started devouring everything in sight, they proved even more effective against the enemy, killing them off in ever greater numbers; meaning the Eresdrans now had the raw material to beef up their ranks at faster and faster rates.

  ***

  OVER ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS AGO

  Gunnhild stood beside her laser cannon feeling as if she was betraying her own cause. But the truth was, there was little for her to fire at anymore. The new breed of devourers were too good at their jobs. The instant Gunnhild blew up one of the supply ships in the atmosphere, spilling its guts all over the ground, its crew of robot droids barely had time to mobilize on the ground, before the devourers got them. There was a time when if there weren’t enough supply ships to target, she could turn her laser cannon to the ground to assist the ground troops with curtailing the number of enemy droids. But since the devourers came, there hadn’t been any need for her to reinforce the Eresdran fighters. Most of the ground troops were hunting for something, anything to kill, but the devourers had all but retired them, too.

  And now, this latest turn of events…. While the devourers got picked off by an ever-exuberant enemy, they simply repopulated too fast to exterminate entirely. And the devourers that lived long enough, got even larger and more impossible to kill. And now, some of them roamed the land as big as the Skyscraper gods belonging to ages long past. And it was these giants picking the supply ships out of the air for Gunnhild. They could punch them out of the sky, or shoot them with lasers from their own eyes or eject torrents of fire from their mouths if the supply ships were too high up to be grabbed. Those flames burned hot enough to melt anything but the shields covering the domes.

  Gunnhild’s mate crawled into her chamber, arriving with recharged batteries to keep the laser cannons running. “Don’t bother,” she said. “They’ll likely be drained before we can fire another shot, unless the techno-wizards have figured out how to get them to hold their charge indefinitely.”

  Her mate gazed out the window at the same sight she was staring at; the giant devourers laying claim to the land. “We can’t live like this,” he said. “We’re a warrior people. We can’t stand by and watch others do our fighting for us; it’s not in our makeup.”

  Gunnhild hardly needed to be told that. If the enemy was smart, they’d hang back and just let the Eresdrans turn on one another. A few years of nothing and no one to fight would be all it would take; if that.

  The devourers had already reshaped much of the land into a world of fjords. The steep canyons contained valleys so low that different species of birds had evolved to live at various altitudes, not daring to complete a full descent to the valley floor below. That much hang time—with the devourers out there—was sheer suicide. What animals and insects and plant life that remained had evolved to taste bad to the devourers, which, because they could live off of anything—including the dirt they devoured to form the steep canyons—simply moved on to something that tasted better.

  The techno-wizards had been smart enough to make the geodesic domes, as well as the Eresdran humanoids, unpalatable to them. Even so… The devourers worked with a terrifying and cruel efficiency that made their enemies look good. At least their enemies lived to make war; that any true Eresdran could appreciate. The devourers simply lived to eat.

  “I guess there’s nothing to do now but emulate the devourers,” her mate said. “Live to eat and have sex and reproduce. Perhaps we can make the sex more violent than normal to compensate for a lack of worthy enemies.”

  She really wasn’t taking him on. The sight out the viewport was nothing to be made light of. And unless she missed her guess, this so-called victory would turn out to be like all the others; little more than a brief hiatus, no longer than necessary for the enemy starships’ AIs to figure out new workarounds.

  ***

  PRESENT TIME

  Thus the battle raged for another thousand years on Eresdra.

  The devourers underwent wave after wave of surges and diebacks in their population as the enemy threw new droid armies at them made of different alloys and composite materials that the devourers found unpalatable. But some devourers always survived; some always learned to accommodate to the in-delectable substances until they found them desirable. And the surge in their populations would start again.

  Even the surges constituted a kind of victory for the enemy, as the devourers, now working off an expanded palate of eatables, grew to like the taste of the geodesic domes and the humanoid Eresdrans as well; forcing the Eresdran techno-wizards to come up with genetic alterations to the nanites protecting the domes and the nanite-enhanced bodies upon which the Eresdrans relied.

  Patent observed the timeclock counting off eras in the corner of Ariel’s monitor.

  But in the end, the nanite technology of the enemy from the stars was simply superior at replacing their numbers.

  What’s more, nothing, in the final analysis, competed with tapping zero point energy for converting energy into matter—especially when you could shape that matter anyhow you liked—to fashion new soldiers, and new weapons. All that was needed were AI printers that could work the magic with AI strong enough, moreover, to continue to evolve both soldiers and weapons on the fly.

  Wait…

  Could this be, at last, the real treasure Patent was hoping to unearth?

  The counter on Ariel’s monitor had ticked off another thousand years. Against all odds, the Eresdrans had hung on long enough to…

  ***

  OVER A HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS AGO

  Alva had done it. At least she thought she had. There was only one way to be sure. If she was wrong, it would not be the enemy that destroyed her people, but her. Still, what did it matter? This device practically had “last ditch effort” inscribed on its sides.

  She pressed the button on the contraption and stood back.

  The reaction was commencing.

  The black hole—located somewhere else in space and time—was re-attuning to their world, its ejecta no longer spilling out to create a new universe in a new big bang reaction. Instead, it was feeding Alva’s energy-to-matter converter.

  The black hole spit out the smallest of sub-atomic building blocks that her converter quickly reassembled into droids that could be turned against the enemy.

  Alva rushed to make sure her calibrations were right—if the black hole was too big, if she’d snagged too large a fish—it would overload the machine, blow it and its capacity to regulate the reaction to hell, and their world would never survive the outpouring of ejecta shooting forth from the ass end of the black hole.

  But the engineering precision her class of Eresdrans was known for had served her in good stead.

  She was well on her way to feeling full of herself—she was the one of all the techno-wizards who had finally saved their people—when she felt the impact of the blow.

  She, of course, could not know that that blow had come directly from one of the starships in low orbit that had never deigned to fire on them directly before.

  The starships’ AI had detected the true nature of the threat, realized it was real enough, and eliminated it.

  ***

  PRESENT TIME

  After the long windup, Patent was finally at the pitch. The Eresdrans had held on long enough to master the zero-point energy-to-matter conversion technology. But they took their secret with them to the grave—until now—for it had arrived too late to save them.

  But now Patent and h
is people had it.

  Patent was so relieved, he felt his bowels relax so completely he shit himself. It was the opposite of an extreme fear response or of the death-reflex. New life was coursing through his veins. They had a trump card to play now if things got too nasty on the other side of that star gate.

  Ariel was making a face as she caught a whiff off him. “Sorry about that, little girl, but for that piece of intel you just brought me, it’s fair to say I’m as happy as a hog in shit right now—literally. You’ll forgive me if I gobble up every little morsel of intel on how to use the zero point energy and beam it up to Leon.”

  “Not at all, sir,” she said proudly.

  “Leave the Eresdrans an avatar of yourself, Ariel, that can walk them through how to continue to make the most of the technology we’ve gifted them, including how to continue to tap their ancestral memories to restore themselves to their former glory. And, Ariel…”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Hurry. Leon won’t wait to tolerate the kind of coddling I’m used to providing, not for Alpha Unit, not for the Eresdrans.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Finished scanning the Nouveau Viking weapons?” Patent asked Ariel.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good, we’ll see what the nun makes of them back on the ship. Just some more toys for the toy chest for right now. You can never have too many toys. If they don’t assist us in this adventure, then maybe some other.”

  “You sure you and Natty aren’t related?”

  Patent snorted. “If there’s one red corpuscle floating about that boy’s body related to soldiering, it’s in one hell of a fight for life.”

  Patent tapped his Nautilus insignia and hiked some distance from Ariel to give himself some privacy on the secure line to Leon. Leon came on the line. “Wait till you get a load of what I have for you,” Patent said with a shit-eating grin.