“You’re thinking what’s going on in other timelines could well bleed into this one, so you need to keep an eye on things going on there as well,” the ambassador said.
“Yes,” Leon confessed. “Depending on which version or versions of parallel universe theory you subscribe to, bleed over is inevitable. Imagine mind-viruses or reality-devouring viruses able to bleed from one alternate reality to another. We have to know what to inoculate ourselves against and how to rescue the other timelines which may no longer be able to rescue themselves because they’re already infected badly enough to not have the mind power they need to come up with their own inoculations.”
The ambassador smiled. “I see why Natty chose you to lead the special forces teams. You’re kind of a militarized version of him, the pragmatic counterbalance to his idealism.”
Leon smiled ruefully. “You’re not the first to come to that conclusion, but thank you. Carry on, ambassador.”
The ambassador turned to leave. They’d never exchanged names, but Leon figured if the Nautilus hadn’t given the ambassador’s name to him, that maybe they were graduating beyond the need for them, as part of the fourth brain effect, becoming more like voices in one another’s heads.
Leon’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. It was a secure line unhackable by anything but the Nautilus’s supersentiences. It also doubled as a form of communication when one or another crewmate’s anxiety level was starting to block out the direct transmissions into their brain from the Nautilus by way of the nanites percolating in their heads.
Leon answered the phone. It was Sonny, a.k.a. Dog Face, from the seedy underworld of genetic rejects discarded by the Nautilus that Leon had stumbled on to some time back. “I have a saboteur in my midst. We’ve been ‘talking to him.’”
Leon understood immediately that Sonny meant they’d been torturing the poor bastard. Just great, he thought, another innocent ambassador being wrongly accused. Still, Sonny had a better nose for these things than either Cassandra or Leon. And he had good reason to supply valid information to Leon—it was the only way to get leverage on Leon that he desperately needed for God knows what. “I’m on my way….” He nearly said, “I’m on my way, Sonny,” before he caught himself, remembering how the gangster hated to be called Sonny.
***
Leon was having trouble locating Sonny’s seedy underground sector of the city located somewhere on deck three of the Nautilus, as memory served. How the customary deck spacing could be warped in his region of the ship to accommodate a city was something Leon had long since stopped questioning; when a supersentience was involved, it just wasn’t worth burning out the few brain cells he had trying to figure out how it did things.
Exasperated, Leon flipped open his cell. “Where the hell are you?”
Sonny chuckled. “And you’re our great military leader?”
“Don’t go there, just don’t.”
Sonny reprised his laughter before bringing himself under control. “Well, I suppose I might have taken precautions after the last time you stumbled in here. Clearly the Nautilus can’t be entirely relied on for our security. Continue down the hall you’re on and take your first right.”
Leon closed the phone and did as instructed.
Once back in Sonny’s sector of the city, he made his own way to Sonny’s club, though Leon partly regretted not summoning the taxi driver that ferried him where he needed to go last time. Interacting with the guy’s offbeat persona qualified as a potent form of R&R, which regrettably Leon didn’t have time for right now, ironically; since they were between missions and he ought to be as free as a predatory bird at the top of the food chain.
A few minutes later he’d made it to Sonny’s interrogation room with the help of one of the bouncers at the door. This time, Leon didn’t even bother pretending to be blind to not offend the club clientele and bouncers. After surviving the star gate, it was fairly safe to say they were all beyond petty prejudices; if they’d learned one thing it was that they needed one another to last a minute longer in outer space, so no one likely gave a damn about their dislike of one another at this point.
The suspect was strapped to a chair. It was honestly hard for Leon to tell if the guy looked this bad because they’d beaten the crap out of him, or if he just came that way. “For Techa’s sake, Sonny, you couldn’t have gotten your people to pace themselves a little better?” Leon cast an accusative glance at the goons standing guard in the room.
Sonny glared at him for daring to use his name, but apparently they were bonded now—two fellow masterminds determined to survive no matter what it took; so Leon got to be the exception that proved the rule; Techa help anyone else trying to call him by his real name. “For your information,” Sonny said, “my people haven’t laid a finger on him. This lifeform oozes blood and pus and breaks their own bones as some kind of adaptive response.”
Leon nodded. “He’s what passes for an alien zombie, these days,” Leon explained, getting the scoop from the Nautilus now that he’d calmed down enough to receive it. “Being a part of the walking dead gives him cover on the battlefield, where he’ll more likely be left for dead; and it also opens up communiqués with the spirit world, as he literally lives on the threshold of this world and the next. Interesting adaptation, I must say.”
Sonny nodded. “Nice; I might have to recruit this guy.”
“You can have him. If it turns out you’re right, you’re better equipped to keep him in line than I am.” Leon shifted his attention to the guy in the chair, or was that a woman looking back at him with such hard eyes? The body was quite unisex. Leon was going to have to get better at sexing aliens if he expected to elicit better cooperation from them if he didn’t have an ambassador by his side. “Spill, my friend, before I have the Nautilus’s supersentience go to work on you. You think you can get around us, you try to get around that bitch.”
“You don’t have any such access!” the alien blurted, rattled at the suggestion.
“You forget, we’re between missions,” Leon explained. “Outside of a mission-critical state I have the kind of access that even I wish I didn’t. Talk fast, lady, because you’re cutting into my downtime, which puts us all at jeopardy. If I’m not a hundred percent the next time out…”
“You’re bluffing.”
“I assure you, I’m not. I trust Sonny’s nose for treachery. And I trust the Nautilus to do what I can’t. And you can trust me when I say that, even in my downtime, I already have a to-do list that would humble a Starfleet commander.”
Zombie-Chic seemed to read his face and then emitted a look of surrender. That meant she was likely one of the ambassadors, who alone would be skilled enough to read alien faces that well.
He could read her because the Nautilus hadn’t broken its link with his mind. And he’d guessed right about her sex, that or she had a really thick skin when it came to being accused of being another sex.
“I’m a carrier of every plague virus known in the Universe,” she said—“the ones that are known to wipe out entire worlds. The idea was to infect everyone aboard ship, and possibly, with any luck, the supersentience watching over all of you as well.”
Leon’s entire body clenched as if he’d just tried to hoist a free weight off the ground in the gym. He took a couple deep breaths which he snorted out like an irritated dragon. This is why you have a supersentience policing things aboard ship, Leon, for all the off-the-wall vectors for attack you can’t possibly anticipate, and all the ones you can that you just don’t have the mental energy or resources to chase down. “Keep talking,” he said. “Wherefrom the animosity? Do we have history?”
The creature squirmed against the restraints, uttered a few expletives, presumably, and groaned hard enough for the acoustic blast to push back the hound-like goons in the room with sensitive hearing. Leon couldn’t imagine what the alien could be holding back from saying now after leading off with a pronouncement like she just did.
“We received a communiqué f
rom the Nautilus that she was temporarily open for attack. She wanted to see if her defenses could be hacked,” the alien explained, oozing pus and blood out its mouth as it talked.
Leon and Sonny threw a glance at one another. It troubled Leon that Sonny hadn’t already backhanded her because if his nose had detected any b.s. that’s exactly what he would have done. Leon’s eyes turned down and to the side to give his imagination a temporary blank slate to write on without any other distractions in the room pulling focus. Techa help him, this relationship with the supersentience was turning into a love-hate one, just like his relationship with Facebook—which could only be beat out by the NSA for having its head so far up your ass you couldn’t shit properly.
He returned his eyes to the oozing plague carrier. “Anything else? Don’t make me come back here again. And if Sonny finds out you have watered down his intel, Techa help you with his countermeasures.”
“That’s it, I swear.”
“Are you from our timeline?” Leon asked. “Why did you take it upon yourself to…”
“I’ve dropped all my mind filters and done a data dump straight into the Nautilus supersentience. If you don’t know by now, it’s because she doesn’t think the matter warrants further investigation at this time.”
Leon took another deep breath to power his take on that response. When he breathed it out he did so in Sonny’s direction. “She’s all yours. What do I owe you for the intel?”
Sonny smiled. “I’ll get back to you.”
***
Walking the Nautilus’s labyrinth of halls to clear his head must have been paying off, as there was one more forgotten piece of business Leon had failed to attend to. He remembered it now only with the vessel of his mind empty enough to accommodate it.
Leon pulled out his cell, pressed the button to engage the singularity phone function—to place a call across the far reaches of space-time along a phone line that was technically a pinpoint singularity along which analog and digital signals could pass. On the other end of the line was a Nouveau Viking with a Singularity phone of her own that Leon had left her.
The phone connected after a bit. “How’s my woman?” he said cheekily, thinking of Hertha. “Never did ask you how you feel about these long-distance relationships?”
She chuckled at the other end. “Can’t be worse than how I feel about the ‘up-close and personal’ ones.” She was showing off her quick mastery of English idioms.
Leon gave himself a second to sink into his rueful feelings regarding their respective plights. By the time he surfaced again, he was gasping for air. “We went through the star gate, but we ultimately had to turn back,” he confessed. “For now at least, it remains an unresolved mystery. We believe we understand now some of its functions, but not all. We had to evolve better technology on the fly just to survive on the other side as long as we did.
“We did manage to keep an adversary from coming through the gate more formidable than the one that defeated your people so very long ago.
“And we cloned our entire team—and the ship. It’ll be their job to pursue what else lies beyond the gate from now on, and what additional dangers it poses.
“But the Leon that’s talking to you now is on the ship that’s moving on to see what else is out there in the cosmos that needs people like you and I to keep in check.”
This time the silence on the line was driven by Hertha. She was no doubt processing what he just told her. “You won’t find all the answers out there, Leon. You must learn to do as my people do, and look to the past. With a little practice, you can see through time better than your spacecraft can cut through it. Who knows how long either of us has truly been around? How many times we’ve chosen to be born into this realm or some other? If we are ever to see the big picture, we must see from the perspective of the soul—across all lifetimes. Otherwise we risk getting caught up in a web of someone else’s weaving, and plots that might well extend back countless millennia, perhaps even millions and billions of years. Speaking as someone from one of these longer-lived species, I can tell you, time hides many secrets. And some of those can kill.”
Leon took a moment to rebound from that psychic blow, feeling as if he had to peel himself off the mat in a boxing ring. Perhaps if her words didn’t ring so true with him… “Maybe we should talk from time to time. To keep each other from becoming truly lost. Sometimes no enemy is necessary for that but ourselves.”
Hertha huffed. “True that.”
Leon chuckled. “You’ve mastered Earth slang already? Though that expression may have gone out a while ago.”
“The NARs are absolutely hysterical to interact with. The kinds of things locked in those dolls’ heads are invitation enough to explore the mysteries of the universe.”
Leon smiled. “Good bye, Hertha.”
She mumbled something in her Nouveau Viking brogue that Leon didn’t catch, and the Nautilus didn’t bother to translate for him, before the line went dead. Perhaps Nauti had decided it would be rude to interrupt his and Hertha’s moment and that Leon could read the subtext just fine for himself—language barrier or no.
***
Natty had joined Laney for a moment of star gazing by the wrap-around viewport circling the outer perimeter of the Nautilus’s saucer section, slipping his hand around her waist. After a while, Laney sighed. “You think we’ll finally get a moment to ourselves.”
“Don’t know, but we’ll always have Bear Lake,” Natty said.
She giggled, remembering the bear that had thrown Natty high into a tree, leaving him no choice but to tight rope walk over a lake and deal with his fear of heights.
“Yes, we will.”
FIFTY-THREE
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Natty pulled up a seat alongside Leon who was enjoying his stool and his view of the stars, leaning over the counter. Leon gave him a curious look and said, “The only thing this place is missing is a bar. Can’t believe I have to go to Sonny’s end of town to get good and plastered.” Natty didn’t quite catch the Sonny reference, but realized Leon had a life away from him.
The bartender—and the bar—materialized in front of Leon; the holo was dense enough and opaque enough to pass for real. The typical picture hanging behind the bar in this case was replaced by the window to the stars streaking by, considering their current cruising speed of Warp Factor 20. It might have been Star Trek parlance, but rest assured, dilithium crystals were not driving the Nautilus. She warped space about her in a manner closer to how a black hole did it—using one artificially generated, small, but very well-behaved black hole. “What can I do you for?” the bartender asked.
“Techa!” Leon gasped, leaning back from the bartender. The poor chap did have the most horrific countenance in all the universe; at least that anyone had seen so far.
The bartender held up his hands arrestingly. “I find that one look at me and most people need a drink—usually the whole bottle. It’s good for business.” The fellow had long hair and a beard, both running down to the middle of his chest. But each “hair” on his head and on his beard was a snake—and the snake heads themselves—well, they were small, ghoulish, lascivious humanoid females flicking their tongues at Leon as if he was the sexiest thing alive.
“Remind me to upgrade my opinion of the devil,” Leon said, making sure to stay out of range of the snakes.
If Leon had startled initially, he regrouped fast. “You have any off-world selections yet?”
“But, of course. We had some connection with the Nautilus in other timelines before it went down. So I haven’t been able to expand on the choices for a while, but what I have…”
“Let’s just start with the A’s and work our way through to the Z’s, shall we?”
The bartender smiled. “My kind of customer.”
“What shall I pay you with?”
“A clone copy of your Mustang, of course.”
The words pushed their way out eventually past the shocked silence, up through Leon’
s throat, like a long dormant volcano picking now to go active and spew its guts. “You that good of a bartender?”
“Consider me plenty motivated to put all my talents on display.” He leaned in to Leon to give him the skinny on the down low. “I plan to drive drunk through the ship, crashing into every car I can in hopes of inspiring a decent Demolition Derby. You think I can get Omega Force to help me out with that?”
Leon lobbed another shocked smile. “I can pretty much guarantee it.”
The bartender stood back up and smiled. “In that case, I had really better outdo myself.” He poured Leon something from a swanky-shaped purple bottle behind the bar on the shelves.
Leon took a sip, coughed, and nodded. “You’re off to an excellent start.”
The bartender smiled, bowed, and promptly disappeared, leaving Leon with his unimpeded view of the stars—and, of course, the bottle.
“You realize that’s kind of pointless, with this generation of nanites?” Natty said. “Hell, with the last hundred or so generations.”
The truth was, Leon’s body wasn’t entirely free of nanites, just the latest generations of them employed for the star gate mission. “I got a hall pass from Mother,” Leon said, thumbing skywards, referring mockingly to the Nautilus’s supersentience. “She promises shades of drunkenness unlike any mankind has ever seen before.”
Natty made a sour face. “Surprised the rest of Omega Force isn’t already here.”
“Oh, they’re here. But I told them I could use some privacy.” He leaned toward Natty. Taking full advantage of his restored connection to the Nautilus’s supersentience, he said, “This bar—it wraps around the entire ship. If there’s anyone running this ship at this point, I’m guessing it’s the supersentiences, who genuinely are beyond such things.”
Natty shook his head slowly and stifled his condescending smirk as best he could. “I thought you said you were going to give your undivided attention to Cassandra?”
“The Nautilus was kind enough to slip an avatar in for me, so I can sneak away from time to time. Or am I the avatar?” He held up the glass in his hand and stared at it. “Just one sip of this, and I forget.”
The Star Gate Page 58