Leon continued down his decision tree, trying to trim off as many WTF questions buzzing about in his head as he could. “And how did we come to be here?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. The Nautilus might have beamed us to a safe distance seconds before crashing to save us taking a hit like that. Damn nice of her, considering she values herself more highly than she values the rest of us.”
Crumley must have noticed Leon trying to take in the big picture from a more settled state. “This world is known as Agemir,” Crumley explained, spitting out the latest rejected item from the possible list of eatables he was adding to. “At least that’s the name the clam ship AI gave it as the alien vessel transited through this region, cataloguing everything for their civilization’s star maps. Or so Satellite informs me.”
“Agemir…” Leon said, rolling the word off his tongue. “So far the name is the only thing I like about it.” Another second for the still stuttering synapses to fire up again, and he asked, “Is that all we got on the planet from the clam ship?”
Crumley nodded.
“That’s some pretty half-assed cataloguing.”
“Much of the ship was fried passing through the gate, as you know.”
Leon brought his mind back to that priority list of concerns in his mind, which he was still assembling on the fly. “And Natty and Laney, the two lovebirds who got us into this fine mess?”
“Right now, I’d say their love for one another is about as endangered as everything else around here. And trust me, you don’t want to know what they’re up to.”
***
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
“I wonder how much extra we have to pay for this view high up the mountain over the ones trying to get by in the valley down below.” Natty surveilled the planet from the viewport of his and Laney’s private suite aboard the Nautilus. There was no blue sky overhead and nothing green growing on the ground below. The plant life seemed spectacularly rich in every other color, just no green. As for the sky, was that magenta or cyan? Maybe if he’d ever had a day job selling paint to homeowners he’d have a better leg up on the situation. Another world shone in the daytime sky not much bigger than Earth’s moon. It had blues and greens; it looked a lot more Earth-like. Right now it was little more than a tease. And he wasn’t being glib earlier regarding the steep cost of the rich-bitch view from up on high. Despite worrying about Omega Force, Alpha Unit, and Theta Team dealing with the planet they’d crash-landed on in a far more up-and-personal fashion, he was less concerned about their fate than his and Laney’s right now.
When his wife didn’t answer him, he turned to find her on their king-size bed. As far as he knew it had yet to be used for lovemaking, but he couldn’t be sure, being as he was hallucinating making love with her a lot these days to fill the void. And, well, with as many nanites as he had swimming about in his head, telling the real apart from the virtual was no easy matter. Inside his head, dreams really did come true.
She was keying away at her ruggedized laptop with her back against the bed board; definitely a picture from the past, if ever there were one. But old habits die hard, especially when the nanites circulating in one’s head couldn’t establish a connection with the Nautilus.
She was ignoring him as usual, but things could be worse. She could have been typing on the ceiling. Considering the aberrant angle the ship had crashed at, the “floor” should have been a relative term. The rooms and labs throughout the Nautilus were all gyroscopically stabilized and should have realigned themselves accordingly. But until repairs were complete, it was anybody’s guess if the entire ship was being so accommodating. Natty had seen schematics of the Nautilus, but that didn’t mean much. You could spend years studying the ship, and still never fathom all its secrets, being as it was constantly redesigning itself. The lifeforms aboard were more like a flu virus infecting her that she couldn’t bother to shake, just tolerated, so they should be happy that many of the ship’s functions were still understandable to them—at least for now.
“What are you up to?” he asked Laney.
“I’m attempting to establish a link with the Nautilus in one of the other timelines—to see if someone already has a fix for our problem.”
“I’m sorry, but which of the innumerable problems besetting us are you referring to?”
“The one where we all make it out of here alive.”
Natty snorted. “Can’t fault your sense of priorities. Wait, hacking other timelines… Shouldn’t that be something for me? That’s more in keeping with my specialties than yours.”
“Ordinarily that would be true, but the Nautilus is running off a backup brain currently that is DNA-based.”
“DNA-based? DNA is a cool storage matrix. You could fit the library of congress on a pin-point-sized-drop of solution it would take one very powerful microscope to even detect. But as an artificial brain? Way to slow for her purposes.”
“Desperate times.”
“How much DNA solution are we talking?”
“Originally, a few Olympic-size swimming pools full,” she said. Natty gulped. “Theta Team sealed off a section of the ship and has been feeding the stock solution. So now the volume is closer to the size of a hollowed-out aircraft carrier.”
This time Natty swallowed, there was just no saliva left in his throat for the gesture to be anything but pointless. “For any other starship that might be damn impressive but… Is that enough to even power the lights around here?”
“Theta Team has that whole Gaia-Gestalt thing going for them; as it turns out, they can interface with a DNA-based brain even better than they might her other matrices. So, yeah, it might be enough for them to get systems up and running again.”
“Still don’t see how you could…” The lights went on in back of his head. “Ah, tracking you now. You’re using our breakthrough prior to slipping through the gate, getting your nanites and mine to play nice with one another—to tunnel your way through to the quantum brain underlying the DNA-based brain.”
“Glad to see you’re finally awake.”
“Cut me a break. What’s the oxygen level like on this planet? Maybe I’m slower than normal for good reason.”
“Wouldn’t matter if it was noxious gas spewing out of a volcano. The next-gen nanites we injected ourselves with prior to slipping through the star gate are working fine. They’re not the problem.”
“So, what is the problem?”
“We gave our people the ability to survive most anything. But that could be more curse than blessing if—”
“We can’t tell if this is a psy-ops campaign the enemy is waging against us. We could defeat enemies here until the end of time without knowing who our true enemy is, the supersentience behind it all.” Natty glanced back out the window, his hairs standing on end. Suddenly the preternatural beauty was just one more enemy mocking him, using it to make the room in hell look all the more inviting.
“Even if we get the Nautilus’s chief supersentience back on line, there’s no telling if even she can see through the ruse,” he said, “with or without the collaboration of her tier 2 supersentiences with their various specialties. Perhaps, over time, a more robust ecosystem of supersentiences, networked in turn with all of us, our minds also boosted and working in Singularity State…” Natty’s voice had trailed off with the latest consideration, indicating his lack of faith in his own idea.
“Is that you firing on all cylinders, or was that latest revelation more like a stroke, causing you to wipe out another region of your brain with the latest over-exertion?”
He smiled at her. “You’re usually just this testy right before revenge sex. We do great revenge sex, don’t we?”
“You’re the male of the species. I have to motivate you to get your head out of your ass the only way I know how, with the closest thing to pheromones, the promise of sex.”
He grimaced. “Another baited trap. At least your behavior is consistent with our current situation. When in Rome, I suppose…�
� He let go of the thought of sex with her, which was probably nothing more than an OCD-like dodge right now, in any case; seeking out comfort sex to distract from how over their heads they were. “I’ll get to work on upgrading the Nautilus’s supersentiences even as Theta Team tries to bring the ship back on line using the DNA-soup. If she can’t see her way out of this honey trap, the only people getting any joy will be Omega Force and Alpha Unit which can play wargames until hell freezes over and feel like hogs in shit. I imagine even Theta Team will exhaust all this world has to offer soon enough and want off as much as we do.”
She harrumphed. Honestly he didn’t care for the demeaning nature of the harrumph. Maybe he was reading too much into it. “I like my chances communicating across timelines by siccing RNA-viruses on the 32-stranded DNA of the Nautilus’s backup brain better than I like your chances of upgrading the Nautilus’s supersentiences. That’s like an ant trying to re-engineer a human, right?”
“I hate it when you just have to be honest to sound like a needling bitch. Makes me think all the other times you were being nasty to me you were just being honest, too.”
“I was,” she said without looking up from her laptop. “Not my fault that escape artists who want nothing to do with reality are often the only people you can turn to in situations like this.”
He grunted. “I’ll take the compliment disguised as a dig, or was that a dig disguised as a compliment?” She ignored him. He supposed that time he deserved to be ignored.
He exited their chamber in search of the Nautilus’s off-line supersentiences, or at least a portal of some kind by which he could access them.
***
The sliding doors parted for Natty leading out of his and Laney’s private suite, at least they did until they jammed. A good thing. He was hanging on to the lip of one of the doors by his fingernails. So much for the gyroscope leveling functions in the rest of the ship. The only ones unaffected were the ones using the air taxis or the dragons to get about.
One of the air taxis—a convertible job—flew in under him. The woman standing inside said, “Jump.” It was a Theta Team operative. So “female” might be a relative term. For all he knew, tits came on males on at least one or another of the one-of-a-kind designer humanoids. As a scientist he considered it his responsibility to determine just how “relative” her gender; so he jumped.
She caught him ably. Natty wasn’t sure if her flexible body armor allowed her to deal with all kinds of heavy weights readily, or if she was genetically engineered to handle them, or both. She looked rather robust whichever theory might be correct. “As a scientist I consider it my responsibility to have sex with you and with any female I encounter to spread my seed; that way I can give the next generation the best chance of surviving.”
She smiled at him. “Considering who you are that’s not a half bad pickup line. But being as you’re technically my daddy, as you’re directly or indirectly behind most of what goes on in this ship, I’ll pass.” She set him down. She stood nearly a head taller, but what did his ego matter when sex was in the offing? It could take a backseat, and it was not like he’d given up yet. “My wife is denying me sex, and if I get overly depressed on account of it, or, finding no outlet for those urges, my head explodes… Well, you can see how it could endanger us all?”
Not surprisingly, she ignored him. “Where were you headed?”
“I need a way to get a message to the Nautilus’s supersentiences.”
She made a whistling sound like a storm closing in at the Antarctic—equally cold and chilling. “It would be like talking to a coma patient. You could only hope she can hear you and that whatever you have to say might help her swim her way back to consciousness.”
“It just might.”
She gave him the once over, not sure if she was in a mood to humor him. “I’m not sure it’s worth the risk.”
“You know who I am, right? I was under the impression that our relationship had progressed at least that far.”
She frowned. “The Theta Team should be the one coaxing her back to consciousness, not you. We have the best chance for success.”
“You’re the tails on this coin, honey, I’m the heads. And it’s a coin toss as to which side will end up face up when the coin lands. I alone know what it’s like to be the sole supersentience on a planet full of people, at least relatively speaking. Trust me, we have more in common than Theta Team as a whole could possibly have with her.”
She studied him further, wondering how much credence to lend his rhetoric. He thought he might nudge her in the right direction. “How long has Theta Team been at it already, with the resuscitation efforts, I mean?”
“A couple days.”
“At her clock speeds, that’s like watching the universe go from the big bang to the very end of time, when the last star burns out—a couple times over. You know I’m right. If what they’ve tried hasn’t worked so far—”
“Fine. I’ll give you your shot.” She sat down in the driver’s seat and took off. She hadn’t bothered to check if he was holding on or not. He wasn’t so he went flying, and once again was dangling by his fingernails—this time like the trailer at the end of a kite. “Little help!” When she didn’t respond he tried raising his voice. “Little help!”
“Techa, that is one emotionally needy man. I don’t envy his wife,” she said without turning around.
THIRTY-FOUR
THE UNCHARTED PLANET, AGEMIR
“All right, ladies!” Patent bellowed, his voice hammering at the cold morning air like an ice pick in the hands of a crazed serial killer. “While you self-indulgent grunts were holding on to your dicks and tits on that crash landing, I took advantage of being thrown clear of the ship to do some recon.”
“Has the guy even heard of shock?” Motown mumbled to Gabrielle. “It’s like a human right, isn’t it? He can’t deny us it.” They, like everyone else in the squad, were still trying to get their bearings after waking up in the loving embrace of a tree, or upside down, their heads wedged between two boulders. Those who weren’t staggering yet because they just hadn’t graduated that far, were still lying about moaning from broken bones, or trying to pick up missing skull fragments belonging to them they found lying around all too suspiciously.
“I hear he’s been stuck in Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s anger stage of recovery for the last forty-five years,” Gabrielle mumbled back at her partner who she didn’t think was faking the shock thing. She wondered if she was suffering from it herself being as she couldn’t think any more clearly than she could see right now. At least Motown managed to make shock and awe look sexy. With a shaved head and a well-chiseled body showing through his singed and torn bodysuit—in the process of mending itself… Well, he made disheveled look good. With his mocha complexion he’d have made a good mahogany wood carving of a warrior which could also double as a talisman. She, on the other hand, couldn’t say that the disheveled look did much for her. Then again, how much damage could you do to curly hair? Even the smudges on her rounded face could double for now as camouflage.
One of the Alpha Unit members, Eagerly, had fallen hard, holding a foot up, perhaps to see if he still had range of motion in it. Both his arms were temporarily out of commission—with bones popping out of the skin. He gazed down at a piece of skull on the ground in front of him, his own.
Patent marched up to him. “Are you trying to salute me with your foot, son? I like your attitude.” He picked up the skull fragment for the teen, sprayed some nanites from a compressor can along the edges, and stuck it back into place. He sprayed the bone fragments sticking out of Eagerly’s left upper arm and his right forearm, forced both bones back into place as the youth squealed. “There, good as new,” Patent said stepping back to appraise his handiwork. “I must have been Michelangelo in a past life.”
The teen, now able to salute him properly, sprang to his feet, tightened up his formation, and did so.
Patent saluted him back. “At ease, soldier.”
<
br /> Patent tromped over to one of the soldiers mesmerized by the bone popping out of his leg, his back against a tree. He kicked him in the ribs. The teen balked, “What the hell?”
“Just like a hangover. Sometimes you just need a worse pain to help you forget about the pain everywhere else. Now, get that femur back where it belongs, soldier. I don’t have all day for you to sit around admiring yourself!”
The soldier that Patent had managed to snap out of his daze, hopped to, wincing as he slid the bone back into place. The tonic of the good swift kick to the midsection had had a sobering effect on more than just him. Gabrielle, who had accused Patent of being stuck in Kubler-Ross’s “anger” state for much of his life witnessed the ripple effect spreading through the camp as the rest of the soldiers in Alpha Unit shook off their feeling sorry for themselves. They hurriedly patched themselves, gathered up their gear and fell into formation. Well, “hurriedly” might have been too kind, but they were definitely on a mission now.
Gabrielle glanced over at Motown, a.k.a. Mr. “Shock and Awe”, still insisting on his human right to remain in shock a while longer. He was the last to get with the program, but finally he did. As soon as he could place his hands on it, he popped some tunes into his battlefield-modified ghetto-blaster, a relic from his father and wars past. He hit the play button. And suddenly the forest was alive with the sounds of Hank Williams, Senior. Motown was from Alabama and “Motown” had nothing to do with his taste in music, just his insistence on being bathed in it twenty-four seven. Motown may not have been shockproof, but he was certainly irony-proof.
Patent’s eyes went wide as he craned his neck toward the music; he was glaring at it like someone had just thrown an acoustic grenade into his defensive formation. The truth was worse than that.
“What are you looking at me like that for?” Motown said to everyone as other faces craned toward him. “Can I help it if one of you white guys can actually sing?”
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