The Star Gate

by Dean C. Moore

  The nun manifested a syringe in her hand, held it out in front of Cassandra until Cassandra could focus her eyes again, drawing them to the needle. “These are the latest nanites that Laney and Natty have procured. It is more advanced still than any infecting Theta, Alpha, or Omega groups. Natty and Laney wish to use you as the guinea pig. This could kill you, and most likely will. It is highly doubtful that the first generation formula is not without flaws. But this is the final key to the star gate. Someone has to be living proof that all the countermeasures taken to this point amount to a hill of beans. Or, to put it in my language, you are the cross on this rosary of prayer beads they’ve managed to string together.”

  Cassandra smiled. “That’s sacrilege.”

  “Yes, worshipping false gods is never a good idea, but honestly, I don’t like you. So I don’t mind playing the part of the devil, teasing you with the injection. The sooner you’re dispatched to hell for your sins the better.”

  “My sins?”

  “So long as you refuse to question the anger and rage boiling inside you, you are the devil’s tool. You can be of no use to us here.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Cassandra grabbed the syringe out of the nun’s hand and jabbed herself in her shoulder with the needle. The whole time the fluid was pushing ahead of the plunger into her, the nun was smiling. Cassandra would not have thought it possible to cram so much menace into a smile until now. All the gossip going on aboard the ship about a possible Dr. Smith type—a figure from the TV series Lost in Space—being aboard the Nautilus—a second-to-none saboteur—and all the finger pointing at who or what it might be—well, Cassandra was betting on the nun. Just what had Laney and Natty let out when they uncorked this genie’s bottle?

  Cassandra tossed the empty syringe. Without missing a beat, the Theta Team operatives manning the ship took a collective step back, sliding back into the illuminated display boxes out of which they’d come.

  All of those display cases had long unfolded like those fold-out homes that came on the backs of flatbed trucks the instant they were no longer needed as cryogenic units. It was back into those expanded spaces now that the Theta Team crawled—they were not putting themselves back into deep freeze; they were returning to their work, safely away from Cassandra’s shenanigans—provided the transparent metal-glass walls leading to their private workstations held. Many had not returned to their duties, but were instead monitoring the outcome of Cassandra’s little experiment on herself from a safer perspective.

  Cassandra took such a coordinated retreat to mean that for whatever else she could expect, the formulation she’d just injected herself with was fast-acting. The Nautilus had wasted no time protecting its assets from her, overriding their own autonomy to get them to safety, even as most of them were still wondering what was going on.

  In the spirit of the occasion, Cassandra backhanded the nun against one of the glass display cases so hard, she heard the bones in the nun’s body breaking in countless places at once. The nun slid down the cracked display case metal-glass—already rushing to heal itself—looking like a broken marionette.

  The marionette had barely hit the floor before the eyes blinked open and the bones pushing through the skin started to push back in. The nun rose with a look in her eyes that gave Cassandra pause. “Don’t look now, nun, but I think you’re confused as to who is the devil’s play thing.”

  The nun came at her as if possessed. She drove her hand through Cassandra’s chest, the fingers splayed like a pitchfork. And when she pulled her hand back out, she was holding Cassandra’s still-beating heart.

  Cassandra, a bit weirded out, gazed down at the gaping hole in her chest, watching it reseal itself. She ordered her disembodied heart to disintegrate with a wireless pulsed signal from her nanites to the ones making up the heart. The heart degraded as if she was watching a flower unfold and whither in time-lapse photography. The nanite army set loose from the once beating heart swarmed over the nun, eating her alive from the surface down.

  The nun screamed and hissed and mumbled curses in Latin that sounded suspiciously like The Exorcist might have been her favorite film as a teen. Cassandra had to remind herself that the analogy really didn’t hold because this chick was literally born yesterday.

  After playing anatomy doll for a class of med students, exposing one layer of her anatomy after another, the nun was reduced to red dust on the floor that crawled back toward Cassandra to form back up with her body.

  The first generation side effects the nun had spoken of… Was Cassandra experiencing one of them now? She was responding lightning fast to the nun’s morphing, which struck Cassandra as a stunning success regarding the latest generation of nanites percolating through her. But she was no longer questioning what she was doing, or understanding how she was pulling off her “magic,” and no longer consciously directing the changes/adaptations to counter the nun’s latest moves. It was as if she had been taken over by her own higher power or higher self. Was that a good thing or not? It could also mean that the Nautilus’s supersentience was now able to hack her during times when even her upgraded mind, with the latest generation of nanites, wasn’t enough to keep up; a thought that made Cassandra’s blood boil. But if that was the case, then the implications were even darker. If an alien supersentience managed to hack Cassandra, in a moment of weakness—say when the Nautilus’s supersentience was off-line—the superweapon that was Cassandra could be turned against the Nautilus and its crew.

  A charming thought.

  The jungle at the center of the ship had morphed into the supersentient light sphere that generated the forest when it was in rest mode the instant Cassandra gave herself the injection.

  That supersentience specialized in war games.

  Cassandra broadcast her concern to the supersentient light sphere at the center of the ship, at the DNA-soup that was the Nautilus’s backup brain, at the Nautilus’s chief supersentience itself, and at Natty, Laney, Solo, and Leon, in the hopes that one or more of the parties could close any backdoors to such a hack. For now, she passed off the problem to them. She had her hands full staying alive in the moment to be too bothered to hack her own mind to such a degree.

  She might be concerned for no good reason. Solo had contained the alien nanites that had found their way aboard ship in a multidimensional prison; maybe he could do the same with her. For Cassandra’s worst fears to come true—the enemy would have to take Solo out before her.

  ***

  Sitting in the front row at the “movie theater,” DeWitt took the straw out of his mouth, after sipping from his twenty-ounce cup. The viewport which ordinarily showed the star gate was currently running the flick of the nun and Cassandra going at it. “God, this is better than chicks mud wrestling.”

  “Stow it, you sexist pig,” Crumley reprimanded him. He, Cronos, and Ajax were all seated in the front row of the theater with him—their backs to the Omega Force barracks’ bunks lower-bunk-bed framing. “You’re next in command when Leon isn’t around, you’re supposed to set an example. I, on the other hand, am free of such burdensome responsibilities. Someone please pass the popcorn and turn up the volume. I like hearing that bitch scream.”

  “Which one? The nun?” Cronos asked.

  “No, you religious bigot,” Crumley complained, shoving his hand into the popcorn bucket someone was kind enough to hand him—he couldn’t be bothered to look away from the screen to see who. “What are you, anyway, Muslim?”

  “I converted when I was in Syria. If you’ll recall that’s where you found me just prior to the Amazon mission. Of course, that was before I had a Syrian soldier shit in my mouth and cut off my dick to feast on like a hotdog. Now, I’m Jewish. And the idea of Christ strikes us as a bit silly. At least the nun screaming saves me from screaming listening to that prattle she’s spewing.”

  Crumley shook his head. Cronos’s dunderheaded comment went straight to Crumley’s reason for being: enlightening lesser minds on philosophical ideas and spir
itual truths that transcended any religion, politics, and cultural programming or dogma. But that enlightenment could wait. The nun had been reborn—with help from the Nautilus, which could keep spitting out clones of her until the sun didn’t shine. And this one was making a good show for herself. Genetically altered into the form of a vampire, she flew down on her batwings to lift Cassandra off the ground and suck her blood by driving her fangs into her neck. Though it was Crumley’s thinking that the fangs were actually being used to inject venom into Cassandra to compromise her own nanites’ functioning.

  “Will you look at that bitch go,” Ajax said, his fist colliding with Crumley’s over the popcorn bucket as both men kept their eyes to the screen. Ajax decided it was time for one of his inappropriate jokes; for him, it was always the time. Why seeing the two women go at it would cause him stress he needed to deflect through the inappropriate use of humor was anyone’s guess, but Crumley imagined it had something to do with the outcome of this fight. Whichever way it went, Ajax would have to live with the consequences, and he likely wasn’t comfortable with either outcome. Aping a girly voice, Ajax said: “Girls are better than boys.”

  Then, doing the matching young boy’s voice, he said: “Then why did God make boys first?”

  He switched back to doing the young girl’s voice: “Duh, you have to have a rough draft before the final copy.”

  Everyone was too engrossed with the fighting to much process what he was saying. Crumley had no doubt Ajax’s joke was every bit as telling as what was going on before his eyes.

  ***

  Cassandra felt the drug taking hold of her as the vampire version of the nun sank her fangs into her neck. High enough off the ground now to have just parachuted out of a plane for the sake of parasailing, Cassandra nonetheless pulled the nun’s head back by the hair, drove her fist into her mouth, collapsing her teeth; before ripping her thorax out and continuing to dismember her “fly” by tearing apart the wings—with no thought given at all to whether or not she could survive the impact to the floor below. She was that pissed.

  As it turned out, Cassandra wasn’t going to get a chance to see if the nun was going to survive the crash landing. The Nautilus was no longer throwing just one nun at her at a time.

  Several clones of the nun on the various decks above fired on her with hand weapons built right into their bodies. The nun, much like Cassandra, was a shape shifter.

  The first shell to impact Cassandra exploded her into a nanite dust cloud. The second shell to impact in her vicinity released a nanite swarm whose job it was to gobble up Cassandra’s nanites that had survived the initial explosion. The third weapon fired at her discharged a pellet that turned out to be a well-trained black hole, sucking in every nanite that might even consider surviving the other assaults into another universe—with no way back to this one.

  The nanite hive mind infesting Cassandra’s body shut down the nanites generating the black hole as ably as it neutralized the tech of the other weapons.

  It was the first time a victory had ever caused Cassandra that much concern. Was she her own person anymore, or just one of the Nautilus’s playthings—the father’s desire to make the ship a toy chest for his son, Natty, as alive and well in the Nautilus’s supersentience as ever, branding its consciousness, informing its decisions?

  ***

  The battle between Cassandra and the nun had waged on in what would have taken hours in real time, but as it turned out, the contest was part of the 59 second countdown, squeezed in between the 58th and 57th second. The crew’s capacity to watch it unfold in real time as if the fight were indeed dragging on for hours was due to having their minds linked to the Nautilus’s supersentience. The entire crew was allowed to bear witness to the battle going on inside the ship—in what otherwise couldn’t possibly occur anywhere but in VR. The Nautilus had made that decision presumably to prepare them mentally and emotionally for the jump across the star gate. If so, she had miscalculated.

  Crumley was the first to withdraw from his front row seat in Omega Force’s barracks overlooking the action. He crawled into his bunk, pulled the sheet over himself, and trembled.

  The younger ones, who lived perhaps still for the action more than for the moments of reflection that came in the aftermath of battle were slower to retreat from the viewport, but they too had pulled back having seen enough, climbing into their bunks. Ajax was the last to withdraw to his bed to regroup, his humor wearing thin as a defensive shield after a while, especially with no one to listen to and lambast him for the politically incorrect jokes.

  None of them wanted any part of what was going on beyond that window. That wasn’t nextgen fighting the nun and Cassandra were demonstrating—that was something else.

  If Cassandra survived all her trials set for her by the Nautilus, they would soon all be like her. Maybe not the same accomplished fighter she was; she would remain Omega Force’s most deadly weapon. But each man and woman on Omega, Alpha, and Theta teams would be upgraded in keeping with their own personalities, preferences, and predilections for performing in this or that arena of expertise. Were they all ready to be as gods, or at least as demi-gods? Crumley didn’t think so. Of all of them on Omega Force, perhaps on all three units, he was the one who enjoyed fitting a big picture understanding of life into his head more than most, and was best qualified to do it. Solo alone, with his multidimensional mind could theoretically accommodate more expansiveness than Crumley was typically given to, but who knew if he even used it to such ends? He did not strike Crumley as a philosopher king—even if he was something every bit as troubling, just different.

  They were likely all curled up in bed in a fetal position as Crumley was, suitably, he might add, in preparation for their rebirth on the other side of that star gate—if they made it.

  Perhaps the Nautilus meant to trigger the PTSD. If they hadn’t crawled back into the womb, figuratively speaking, she might not be able to finish reprogramming them to survive the passage across the gate.

  Crumley didn’t take the hissing coming from the vents in the room as a good omen. It could only mean one thing. The Nautilus chief supersentience was releasing the latest generation of nanites into the atmosphere and into them. Cassandra had demonstrated proof of concept with the prototype she had become.

  THIRTY

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  Leon gazed up at the graphic on the wall monitor—the last piece in the puzzle was flashing before it finally filled in. Cassandra’s passing her trials was the last test.

  They were ready to cross the star gate.

  Or were they?

  Leon still knew too little about his assets, both the minor ensemble players and the major ensemble players. He had one more move to make on the chessboard if he hoped to secure a checkmate—and to avoid being mated himself.

  ***

  Leon decided it was time to do some recon on his own. He set out to explore the Nautilus. Enough with the tour guide approach already. Natty’s and Laney’s ideas of how to get the most out of the ship would always be filtered through their own biases. And besides, when it came to exploring uncharted jungle, that was his specialty. And this place was nothing if not wild and unexplored.

  It was weird. Now that the “dolls” had all been taken out of their display boxes and brought to life, it seemed to be only so they could play within doll houses designed just for them. No two labs on the ship were the same, and each Theta Team operative presided over a domain that likely only he or she understood. It wasn’t entirely clear, moreover, that these were laboratories, exactly. Only the intense nature of the work being conducted inside the “doll houses” suggested some form of scientific experiments were underway; the combination of looking through scanners, microscopes, and furious notetaking on virtual keyboards or sketchpads.

  Leon decided to step inside one of the doll houses to glean a better sense of what was going on.

  He gasped the instant he was on the other side of the see-through sliding doors. From
this side of the chamber, there was no indication he wasn’t on another planet entirely. When he looked back the way he’d came he saw only more of the “planet” he was inhabiting. He could only imagine the combination of AR and VR it took to procure the illusion. The Augmented Reality components had to do with the experiments being conducted on real soil samples, plants, and habitat elements. The VR components likely had to do more with the faux depth of field that made a more reasonably-sized compartment seem like it extended to the farthest horizon; to say nothing of the sunrise, and the planetoids orbiting the sky above.

  Leon stalked his quarry like only a special forces operative could, but every time he got close the Theta Team member vanished. Leon would see him materialize a short while later somewhere else on the landscape with something new in hand. Finally, he got his hands on him and squeezed just gruffly enough for the guy to think Leon was likely making an arrest. “Where do you keep getting off to?” Maybe he should have started with, “Hello, I’m Leon, the guy in charge of everything around here.”

  Or better yet, “You can talk, can’t you?” The Theta Team operative, like all the others, was sufficiently alien to leave Leon wondering if the guy even had a voice box. The creature with the head of a cabbage and the body of a praying mantis pressed the Nautilus insignia on his uniform vest. The whole thing was very Star Trek-like. Apparently he was engaging his universal translator. “The Nautilus is far too big to simply walk around, as you must know. We teleport where we need to. The insignia we tap to facilitate communications we also tap to teleport. We have to generate the right brainwave pattern so it knows we’re not simply losing focus and recalling another teleporting incident, but that we really do want to go where we’re picturing in our minds.” The Theta Team operative averted his eyes. “Sorry, I don’t mean to talk down to you, it’s just that I’m very busy and I would have assumed you knew these things.”