Leon had heard such bravado coming from his Omega Forces before they encountered the Sentient Serpents in the Amazon—built up as that bluster was on a long chain of successful encounters before the ultimate test. In narrative terms, he believed it was referred to as a “false high.” They had then proceeded to get torn apart and dismantled by a far superior enemy that made the unstoppable Omega Force look like little more than crash dummies. Of course, Leon hadn’t taken them seriously then either; in fact he’d warned them to check their egos.
But they’d done all they could do. So Natty may as well hold on to his euphoria while it lasted. “In just the last two hours alone—” Natty professed.
“Just press the damn button, Natty.” Leon said soberly.
“Yeah, okay.” Natty brought his fist down on the red button the size of an old-fashioned silver dollar, but looking more like the head of a red mushroom.
Leon grabbed his hand before he made contact. “You remembered to stick the bone in its slot on the star gate?”
“No, but the Nautilus is coordinating all the regions of this magic carpet, making sure they’re properly stitched together, and everything is where it should be for us to fly across the threshold.”
Leon nodded warily but before he released Natty’s hand, he had one more question. “How is this perfect storm of genius insights coming from each of us playing with my original theory, Natty, that we need five suns to go supernova at the right moment to power up the star gate?” Leon asked.
Natty was playing with his terminal with his free hand to find him an answer. “I’m ashamed to say that when you gave me the two-hour timeframe to work with, I didn’t even stop to consider that it might be linked to your sixth sense of when these suns were going to collapse in on themselves, and the resulting black holes that would eject a laser beam straight at the star gate.”
“The suns have already exploded,” Solo said. “I can feel the synchronicity, just like I can feel the supersentience driving the reaction.”
Everyone stared at Solo. “Yoda has nothing on you,” Leon said, sounding bitchy. He realized the shock of what Solo could do was eliciting a defensive reaction in him when it should be eliciting truckloads of gratitude. He hoped Solo could read his defensive reaction as well as Leon could and didn’t hold it against him. He didn’t see why not, considering how in tune Solo was right now with “the force.”
Solo wasn’t the only thing creeping Leon out right now. The clock on the wall said zero seconds to go, reminding Leon that the last 59 seconds into which they’d managed to squeeze weeks of drama was actually playing out in singularity time. That, more than anything else, had Leon feeling like he did not truly exist; he was just one of the images captured on film that could be freeze-framed, or fast-forwarded through the projector, at will.
Leon turned his head back to the viewport in time to see all five laser beams impacting the star gate’s edges, the pentagram shape not only lighting up, but the void in the center of the pentagram opening like the iris of a camera.
Leon released Natty’s hand.
This time Natty drove the fist-punch home, initiating the launch.
The center of the star gate, which had opened like the iris of a camera, was now at maximum dilation. The Nautilus shot through the portal as if sucked in by a wind tunnel so powerful it needn’t bother engaging its engines. Whether it had or not would be something to be discovered later when reviewing the tapes.
It was a minor point at best.
The major consideration before them now was the fact that the ship no sooner passed through the gate than it was floundering.
No doubt the last ship to pass through thought it had factored in all the variables, too, to make this equation work.
Cassandra, acting with reflexes faster than anyone else’s in the room, shoved them all out of the way, sending bodies skidding across the floor, and plotted a star chart for them. At their current trajectory they’d miss the nearest planet to the star gate on this side. But they wouldn’t miss the second one. And at their present velocity, despite Cassandra kicking all engines into a hard-reverse, Leon wondered if even the Nautilus would survive the impact.
ACT FOUR
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
THETA
THIRTY-ONE
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Natty woke up rubbing the bump on his head and noticing that he had fallen off the mattress—strange, but it wouldn’t be the first time. He tossed and turned enough in his sleep that his wife often threw him out of bed.
He gazed up at the viewport and noticed the psychedelically hued jungle scene. “Personally I preferred the soothing aquarium-fish screensaver, but I’m feeling amenable to most things this morning.”
He pulled himself to vertical by grabbing hold of the bed frame. Laney had allowed him to take a piece of home with them by allowing him to craft their bedroom like the inside of a ship, with every inch of space doing double and triple duty, from the drawers that pulled out of the walls, from under the bed, from the side tables and over the bedrest. No wasted space. His bedroom back home had been designed this way to help him store his numerous inventions not yet ready for prime time.
“I need my socks for sliding across the floors!” Namely for breaking after running, he thought, completing the image in his head. He pulled one of the drawers open expecting to find an array of socks. Instead he found an artificial black hole that sucked his shirt right off him and ripped the quilt off the bed as well. He slammed the drawer shut. “I can make do without the socks.”
Continuing to mumble reminders to himself, he tried another drawer, grabbing hold of the handle, “Comfort teddy bear for trying situations like this.” He yanked on the drawer. A volcano, miles below, erupted inside and nearly took his head off, were it not for his agile reflexes. He slammed the drawer shut.
He gazed back at the viewport. “I suppose there’s no denying the truth any longer. That image out the window is not a screensaver.”
Natty approached the viewport and pulled a Macaulay Culkin; his mouth going wide, he grabbed the sides of his face. “You know what, you’re surrounded by supersentiences, an army of bright minds and superpowered studs. I say you go back to bed and wake up when this is all over.” He promptly jumped into bed and pulled up the sheets, fighting with the quilt that had gotten caught in a corner of the drawer with the miniature black hole inside; he pulled it free of the devouring monster at last. Once he pulled it up and over his head, with years of practice, it was lights out in under ten seconds.
***
Laney was back in her and Natty’s private chambers, in the main living area, evidently beamed there by the Nautilus at the supersentience’s own recognizance. The ship had crash-landed at an angle, but the gyros had stabilized her room enough that it was hard to tell; the décor had shuffled itself back into position owing to smart-flooring and smart-furniture communicating with one another. Of course, she was at the periphery of the ship; there was no telling how much the gyros were able to correct for further toward the Nautilus’s core.
Laney stared out the viewport at the star gate. From the ship’s current position and vantage point on it, its monolithic aspects almost blotted out any idea of it being a conveyance device. Or, rather, that interpretation easily got lost in the inexhaustible fathomlessness of its true nature.
When Laney hit her head against the viewport, she realized then that something was off with her depth perception. When she checked her reflection in the glass, she realized one of her eyes was hanging out of the socket. She pushed it back in. From the horror of the image before her, it was clear that a large swath of her hair had torn as well from her scalp, possibly getting caught up in the shifting furniture of the room with the crash landing. She must have been in shock still for the pain not to fully register. The nanites were evidently coming out of their own fog, perhaps secondary to losing their connection with the Nautilus, and were only now rushing to regrow her hair. Within seconds her hair returne
d to normal. She made the last of repairs to her person, pushing a broken bone in her left forearm back into place. It was just as well the shock had numbed her to all of it. Her humanity was coming back on line now as the nanites rushed to flush the biochemical associated with shock out of her system. Laney fought back tears associated with a source or sources she still couldn’t pinpoint.
Natty? Where the hell was Natty and was he alive? Her nanites informed her he was sleeping blissfully in the adjoining room. Just as well. Parenting her man-child husband through this emotional ordeal was low down on her totem pole of things to do right now. Her brain seemed to register some relief at knowing he was A-Okay beneath her eternal exasperation with him.
Behind her, the doors parted and closed in a flurry of air that had all the drama of a cape swirling behind a determined protagonist chasing down her quarry. The woman that came in to stand at attention beside Laney was from Theta Team. “You asked for me?” she said, staring in wonder at the monolith.
Laney had put in the request to see her prior to the ship moving through the portal. Forget her tardiness on arrival; going by her demeanor, you’d think nothing had happened to them. If Laney was the people person around here, she really needed to adjust her yardstick for measuring what was normal—at least with Theta Team operatives.
Maybe if they were still stuffing hours into seconds, running in Singularity time, she’d have time to psych this chick out, but, sadly, with the connection to the Nautilus’s supersentience down, they were going to have to ride out this latest ordeal in real time—God forbid. How quickly Laney had gotten used to having her mind supersized like an order at a nextgen Starbucks store.
The special forces officer’s entire body appeared to be hewn from ivory, and the carvings on that ivory—yes, carvings; those sure as hell weren’t tattoos; they dug too deeply into her—looked every bit as obtuse and indecipherable as the ones adorning the monolith outside the viewport. Laney had no idea how a body made of solid ivory—or was that some kind of metal-infused stone or simply white-metal alloy—could be made supple enough to move, but that wasn’t her concern today.
“I thought you might be able to help me with the carvings on the star gate,” Laney said. “That is your specialty, isn’t it? You’re an archeologist of some kind?”
The woman tensed. “The nature of my specialties in alien linguistics and cultures would take an hour or more to recite. So you’ll have to settle for yes, I’m a good person to ask about them.” She hadn’t turned away from her meditation on the monolith.
Laney felt like correcting her. Surely she was referring to theoretical alien linguistics and cultures—as the Nouveau Vikings were the first aliens anyone from earth had actually encountered. Then she remembered that the Nautilus was quite able to generate any number of alien cultures and languages that would bedevil anyone from earth without the proper neural pathways and genetics and nanite upgrades to do anything with them. For that matter, the Nautilus’s supersentiences could both pose problems and derive answers to its own queries regarding the nature of alien lifeforms that even upgraded humanoids would have trouble with comprehending; they’d struggle to understand the questions every bit as much as the answers. And there was every reason to believe that these “alien encounters” would be far better preparation than anything a human mind could design in VR, and even better than actual alien confrontations.
“As far as I can tell,” the Theta Team operative said, “The cuneiform inscribed on the monolith— It’s a series of mathematical equations. They’re like the tumblers in a combination lock. Each equation can generate an infinite number of answers depending on what is plugged into the variables in the equation itself; these equations thus generate what are known as closed infinities. No matter what the answer, they still fit within a given universe of possibilities. But when the equations are factored in correlation to one another, it’s possible the various sequences lead not just to other parallel universes, but other parallel multiverses.”
“But you can’t be sure.”
“Not without more of the Nautilus’s chief supersentience at my disposal. It’s possible she might have to birth an entirely new supersentience on her level just to work the math on that monolith.”
Laney’s mouth dropped. Then again, there was no reason for her not to be shocked; whoever or whatever had created the monolith could be expected to blow their minds.
“Thank you. That’ll be all,” Laney said.
The operative turned to her before leaving, “I suppose with the men engaged in their senseless wargames, it’s up to us women to figure a way out of this trap rather than just making a home in it.”
“Men and women,” Laney reminded her, “and no shortage of transgender operatives.” They were all out there on the battlefield, too, she thought, especially on Alpha Unit, and Theta Team—even if Theta Team’s focus would be on the eco-terror aspects of this engagement as they tried to process the clues from the environment. In hopes of bridging their two viewpoints, Laney said, a bit more conciliatorily, “The soldiers will be needed to buy us deep thinkers the time we need to get us out of this, yes. This is not a trap we’ll shoot our way out of.”
The Theta Team operative bowed, almost embarrassed at her own sexism, before departing curtly. She must have read Laney’s tone and flinching body language just fine. It was just possible Laney had been hit on without realizing it, and that was more of an entreaty to implore any lesbian corpuscles circulating through her body to open up to the Theta Team operative. Perhaps the operative had been just as embarrassed or perhaps shocked to find that Laney hadn’t responded as she expected. So much for the woman’s alien-encounter algorithms. Then again, if the Nautilus’s training was any good, it made sense that the Theta Team operative would be even clumsier with humans than she might be with actual aliens.
Laney returned her attention to the viewport. Say what you want about the Nautilus, she managed to crash in a purposeful way if she couldn’t prevent it altogether. She’d kept a side of herself angled and exposed to the star gate looming in the sky, visible even by day. Some part of her must have sensed that continuing to hack away at its clues would continue to serve them well if they ever meant to get out of here.
THIRTY-TWO
THE UNCHARTED PLANET, AGEMIR
“Hey, Cabbage Head…” He could tell she meant it as something other than a term of endearment. “Or do you prefer Praying Mantis?” He did have the head of a cabbage and the body of a Praying Mantis—at least in terms of Earth analogies. “Maybe that isn’t your head so much as something the Praying Mantis is trying to eat.”
Savoy smiled. His Theta Team partner, who’d been assigned this sector of the Agemir forest to investigate was probably just trying to damage their relationship before he could, realizing that she made him look good. She was the captain of the ship she was piloting in the form of a Theta Team operative’s body. She looked a bit like The Michelin Man—again, sticking with the Earth analogies, just to be consistent. Only that was a spacesuit cum spaceship; each of the “tufts” or “Michelin tires” was a separate lab and a separate planetary explorer whose compartment could be opened up and whose crew could be sicced on the habitat being analyzed. The small people inside, manning the various decks, had a full complement of robotic cohorts; they in turn had their nanites configured to work their magic with deconstructing the aspects of the physical environment they were studying which she was most attuned to. By “she,” Cabbage Head was referring to the captain of the said vessel. She was all of three inches tall, seated in her cockpit inside the Michelin Man’s head. She’d taken to her moniker he’d given her, “Mich,” pronounced “Mitch” about as well as he’d taken to Cabbage Head; both of them adopting the nicknames because it’s what military grunts did—took these things as terms of endearment.
“What is it, Mich?”
“You picking up the same things my probes are detecting?” Her “probes” were being fired from slits cut into the “fort
ress walls” of each of the tires in her Michelin Man’s body; slits which could seal themselves so entirely the seams couldn’t be detected. The ones doing the firing were sharp-shooting humanoids—however small—inside the suit.
Cabbage Head had his own investigative methods, of course. The “leaves” of his head peeled off, one at a time, and drifted on the winds like parasails, dropping off the nanite bombs hanging on to the strands beneath the “sails” themselves. The nanite bombs were hive-array minds that disengaged if their sensors told them the sail was passing over a plant or other lifeform of interest. “Of interest” usually referred to “of high potential for chemical or biological warfare” or possibly of “advanced sentience”—either individually or when arrayed with the other life forms on the planet.
Of course Savoy’s methods for investigating this world also were tied to his interests in general, so he couldn’t be sure that what he was picking up was what she was picking up—they likely weren’t even looking for the same things.
Reading the transmissions from his probes sent wirelessly to his mind, Savoy shared with her what he’d discovered so far. He’d let her decide if any of the data meant anything to her. “The planet’s plant, animal, insect, and soil microbes have a phenomenal ability to communicate with one another. That in turn allows the various lifeforms they’ve infected to study what intel bears on their survival and how best to react. Lazlo posited something similar at work on Earth that led him to suggest Gaia was Mother Nature’s own version of supersentience that allowed her to keep the biosphere as a whole intact, balanced, and both self-perpetuating and self-healing. But he observed nothing this advanced.”
“We don’t know that. He didn’t have our tools, techniques, or aptitudes, not to mention our genetic modifications. For all we know, Earth is communicating the same intel not just among its various lifeforms but sending those transmissions regarding what she’s learned about the co-evolution of lifeforms out to other worlds.”
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