The Star Gate Read online

  The roving fossil leaped toward Leon just as Leon was getting ready to jump high enough to drive his Bowie knife—the size of a small sword—into its carotid artery.

  But the creature had gotten far higher than Leon could jump—all apparently so he could catch a ball the size of a small house. It screeched with delight as it sunk its fangs around it, landed, sliding across the metal-composite floor until it could get enough traction to come to a stop with its talons, scarring the flooring further in the process.

  The dinosaur bounded back toward the one throwing the ball, right over Leon’s and Laney’s heads; Leon wasn’t even sure it had noticed them.

  Leon shifted his vexed gaze toward the guy playing fetch with the dinosaur. He was using a cannon mounted on a half-track, a toy nearly the size of a full-sized tank, but without any of the protective housing.

  “Is that— It can’t be,” Leon exclaimed.

  “That was my surprise, which of course, he had to go and spoil.” Laney crossed her arms in mock protest to go with the mock glare she was giving Crumley.

  Crumley was waiting for the dinosaur to stuff the ball back in the cannon; it made a hell of a hole in one with a slapping action of its forepaw that would have impressed Michael Jordan. The cannon reloaded, and Crumley redirected the reptile down another corridor by swiveling the cannon on its turret and firing.

  Crumley dismounted the ball launcher and kneeled down as if before a scrimmage line. Leon smiled, aped his actions, and with them both in ready position, Laney’s high-pitched sigh served as the referee’s whistle. The two men charged one another. Crumley was the only one on the Omega Force team who could rival Leon for sheer girth and size. He looked like the aging silverback gorilla coming after the younger alpha.

  The two collided on the floor, their tackling one another and their laughter morphing quickly into a wrestling match.

  Both men were rudely interrupted by another roar. They looked up at the gorilla. “Now, we’ve done it,” Crumley said. “It wants to join in the play.”

  The gorilla was on the move before the men could even prepare themselves for the onslaught. “Don’t you dare hurt that thing,” Crumley said. “It’s another of Natty’s pets.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. Missed my gym workout today. Better late than never.”

  The gorilla had reached them. It tossed Crumley with one hand against the nearest wall. Leon heard metal buckling. Or possibly that was Crumley’s reinforced spine pleading for another upgrade.

  Either way, Leon was too busy playing grab-ass with the gorilla to pay much attention. Not hurting the creature and keeping himself from not getting hurt were mutually antagonistic objectives that for the time being he had no idea how to reconcile.

  Leon tried a sleeper hold, choking the creature by the neck with both arms to apply the necessary pressure. It was a great idea in theory. The gorilla peeled Leon off his back and tossed him as readily as it had Crumley. Leon landed on the grumbling Crumley.

  “I am not your spotter!” Crumley balked, pushing Leon off him. The gorilla was taking a moment to beat his chest.

  “I can see why Natty likes him,” Leon said, gasping. “They’re both equally full of themselves.”

  “The gorilla is easier to get along with.”

  “Yeah, sure he is.” Leon lunged toward the gorilla’s midsection. It rolled backwards with Leon’s momentum like a real pro, rather than trying to absorb the blow. And sprang up on both legs with a hand on Leon’s foot. He then proceeded to take a page from the Flintstones, thinking he was Bam Bam, slamming Leon to the floor once, twice, three times. Leon had his forearms up to his face as a shield to keep his skull from cracking against the floor. He then got tossed back onto Crumley.

  “Is that gorilla actually going easy on me, using you as a shock-absorber?” Leon growled defiantly.

  “Duh. The thing isn’t stupid. It has a 150 IQ. I’ve yet to win a debate with him on the finer points of Plato’s Dialogues.”

  Leon glared at Crumley, not appreciating the weak attempt at humor.

  “Does this mean the ball game is over?”

  Leon craned his head toward the talking dinosaur, looking very disappointed over by the ball tossing machine. “I hate that monkey,” the dinosaur mumbled, tromping off, its talons digging into the hi-tech tarmac with each step. Leon only now noticed that the ground beneath them was self-healing—probably like every other surface on the ship. Practical, he supposed, considering that in space a speck of dust hurtling toward you at two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand miles an hour impacted a ship’s hull like a rail gun. Perhaps he could be forgiven not noticing the self-mending feature earlier in light of the Dr. Dolittle menagerie!

  Crumley lifted Leon up as the gorilla gestured with both hands. “So are we doing this or not?”

  Leon just shook his head in disbelief. “Later, big fella. I think you cracked my back enough for one morning. Appreciate the free chiropractic reset.”

  The gorilla waved him off dismissively. “No worries.” He shifted his attention to Crumley. “And you, I hope your take on the Phaedrus is a tad less sorry when we meet up for our pinochle game this evening.”

  Crumley made a sour face. “No more playing to your strong points, you testy gorilla. Tonight we discuss Hegel’s phenomenology.”

  The gorilla roared his disapproval as he lumbered off. “Ridiculous optimist, despite predicting the likes of me.”

  Laney approached the two oversized men from the sidelines now that it was safe again to do so, looking like the queen of the Lilliputians, giving the giant humans the grand tour. She was coughing. “Sorry,” she said in response to their concerned looks, “I’m gagging on the testosterone.”

  The two men smiled at her without saying anything; they figured they deserved the tongue lashing.

  “Where is the queen of the Lilliputians taking us now?” Crumley asked, as if reading Leon’s mind. It wouldn’t be the first time. The two men usually weren’t this in sync though except when in battle.

  “I wish I could tell you it was to give you the grand tour, but you could spend the rest of your lives exploring this ship and never see it all. Just making room for the latest zoo additions—”

  “Latest zoo additions?” Leon interrupted.

  Natty’s avatar, materializing out of nowhere, joined the posse that was on the move again to explain. “One of my many strokes of genius is using the ship itself as a kind of fourth brain. You’re aware that you have three brains, right? The reptile brain is the most primitive. The mammalian brain that evolved later, growing over it, remains intact. But it is informed in the modern day by the frontal lobes, or higher brain. But inside my ship,” Natty gestured broadly toward his darling, “you’re inside the fourth brain. A society of mind, if you will. Between the AIs—that’s short for artificial intelligences, for you throwbacks—and other advanced lifeforms the Nautilus has either engineered in tandem with me, or it has collected in its travels through space-time, all aboard can share expertise, skills, aptitudes, outlooks on the world that would be impossible from any number of provincial human perspectives.”

  “There are actual aliens aboard this craft?” Leon realized his voice had cracked despite his military training, which included knowing how to never let intel slip to the enemy.

  “Presumably. Though I’ve yet to meet any,” the Natty avatar replied. “It stands to reason one of the versions of the ship existing in parallel universes has, and has managed to get willing subjects to partake of the federation of planets and alien civilizations we’re attempting to forge, which I guess would mean this ship serves in one of its many capacities as a multiverse embassy of sorts.”

  “How do we tell them apart from the rest of your doll collection?” Leon asked, processing a little better now the humanoids encased in cryopreservation display cases to either side of them.

  “Easy,” the Natty avatar replied. “All the lying, backstabbing, ship-sabotaging, and typical political maneuvering that goes along
with any ambassador.”

  “Lovely. Possible saboteurs aboard? As if we don’t have our hands full enough.” Leon rubbed his temples and then pinched the pressure points where his nose met his forehead. “You’re giving me a headache again, kid.”

  “Sorry.” The Natty avatar politely bleeped out.

  Leon hadn’t missed Natty’s casual mention of the craft’s name earlier. He wondered, why the Nautilus? But they were getting ready to take a deep dive into daunting dimensions of reality few would dare to delve into.

  “Relax, big guy,” Laney said, patting Leon’s upper arm. “The nanites in your head, which connect you to the rest of the ship… They’ll start filtering that intel to you when the ship deems fit. That’s when the real nightmares begin. It’s been my experience that the first communiqués come in the middle of the night when you’re dreaming. I guess it figures you’re more pliable then.”

  “Wonderful.”

  Laney stifled a laugh; she was holding back tears of joy as well. “You’re such an easy mark, Leon. Try and be less of a luddite.”

  “I’ll have you know, young lady, that my Omega Force team uses the most advanced weapons on Earth. And Alpha Unit’s sole purpose is to supply us with even more bleeding-edge tech they invent in the field—on the fly, mind you—when the stuff out of the factory comes up short where the rubber meets the off-road terrain.”

  She tried to check her condescension. “Yes, well, I suppose it’s all relative. All the same, sweet dreams.”

  He didn’t appreciate the teasing. “Where are you headed?” he asked as she started to pull away from their little stroll through la-la land.

  “You mean where are we headed? Playtime’s over, boys. You’re about to be debriefed on what we’re up against.”

  As the two fell into lock-step behind the roving Laney, Crumley leaned into Leon and mumbled, “Something tells me this whole ‘fourth brain’ thing”—his eyes went to the ship, the deck after deck rising above as if in an Escher painting, each surrounding a central courtyard, which, much like Central Park in New York, contained a jungle; only this one was wild—absolutely wild—“is going to feel like a pretty feeble coping mechanism before that meeting is through.”

  As they’d been hiking the ship, they’d passed any number of Natty’s “toys” yet to be taken out of their toy boxes, unlike the T-Rex of a dinosaur and the gorilla; humanoids, alien looking in the extreme—all of them. They continued to pull focus even now. “Hooya!” Leon exclaimed without taking his eyes off them.

  THREE

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  The sliding doors hadn’t finished closing behind Leon to the chamber that he, Crumley, and Laney had just entered, and his eyes were already watering. It was their old team, the same players he’d assembled on their first adventure with Natty in the depths of the Amazon jungle, that mission file entitled, Sentient Serpents. There should have been a few seats left empty out of respect for the fallen, but the missing Omega Force members were in attendance—reanimated, or brought back from the dead thanks to Natty’s technology.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but aren’t you supposed to be dead?” DeWitt said before jumping off his swivel chair at the conference table and hugging Crumley.

  “Right back at you, pal,” Crumley released his friend from his hug so he could breathe. DeWitt may have been a poster boy for Fireman’s Quarterly once, but his well-sculpted body was no match for the gorilla-sized Crumley’s crushing embrace. “I heard you were prettier dead than I was alive,” Crumley remarked. “Don’t think that doesn’t burn my balls.”

  “Most peaceful sleep I ever had. I’m thinking of dying more often.”

  “With your second-rate fighting skills, I don’t see destiny arguing the point.” Crumley slapped him playfully across the back, nearly sending DeWitt’s face into the Cypress table top. Natty and the wife were tree huggers, so the exotic forest hardwood was no doubt grown aboard ship, or genetically cooked up in a lab and grown in one very big petri dish.

  Leon made his way to Cassandra, Laney’s identical twin. Though the two women couldn’t be more different if they tried, which put a serious crimp in the results of all those twin studies to date. Cassandra was standing at attention at the head of the table waiting for the group to settle down. From her uptight posture and bearing, it was Leon’s guess they had another couple of seconds to pull themselves together before she went into attack mode. So long as she was in the chamber, Leon was actually the second-most lethal person in attendance.

  Cassandra’s genetically modified body was largely naked—her baseline; her nanites migrated to her crotch and her breasts to provide the scantest of coverage. Though the undergarments were painted in a camouflage pattern, same as her skin; the nanites could do a lot more than change her skin color. She was camouflaged in the woodgrain patterns of the room, making it hard to see her except for the trained eye. She had no reason to be masked; Leon presumed she hoped it would signal the troops to forestall the meet and greet, or at least cut it short, and now, seeing that wasn’t working, her body temp was rising, overcoming her camouflage and making her stand out more with each degree climb in body temp.

  “Just give them another minute or so to entertain their humanity, Cassandra,” Leon said, chiding more than chastising her. “We’re not all as evolved as you.”

  She refused to relax out of position or even turn her head to acknowledge him. He hugged her all the same. When he finally released her, she said, “You’ve gotten soft.”

  “I’m still 236 pounds of solid muscle, thank you very much, with less than five percent body fat.”

  “Like I said, you’ve gotten soft.”

  He checked his irritation with a smile. This was Cassandra. Who was he kidding? She was probably going easy on him.

  “I’ll lick him into shape in no time.” Patent smiled, taking his seat. He probably sensed the beat change in Cassandra every bit as well as Leon and said that to defuse her. Patent and Cassandra both sported bald heads—though she could regrow her hair back on a dime with all those nanites percolating inside her. A great many more of them were dedicated to nextgen camouflage and shapeshifting, related to her former spy work, than the ones percolating through Patent.

  Patent was every bit as balls to the wind as Leon, of similar physique, and no less the fighter. Hell, of the two of them, Patent was the crazier, heading into places where even Leon feared to tread. But he had a way with the teens, so it fell on him to train Alpha Unit, and make those eighteen and nineteen-year-old geeks battle ready. He was the only representative of Alpha Unit in the room. The kids were no doubt out enjoying the ship, taking to novelty far better than Leon and the rest of Omega Force did.

  “Enough!” Cassandra barked at the group still enjoying their reunion, finally losing it.

  Everyone quieted and looked for a swivel chair to grab as if they were all kids attending Catholic school and that was the nun speaking; you had to be crazy to cross the nun.

  The rest of Omega Force fanned out to either side of the table as Leon took his seat immediately to Cassandra’s right. Ajax, the one whose coping mechanism was no end of sick, inappropriate, extremely politically-incorrect jokes, this one aimed at Cassandra, mumbled, “Is Google male or female?” Giving it a second and then answering his own question: “Female, because it doesn’t let you finish a sentence before making a suggestion.” Ajax went to open the folder in front of him and found himself screaming aloud. Cassandra had lasered the folder with beams emitted from her eyes, scalding his hands. Ajax jumped out of the chair ready to rumble.

  Leon signaled him to sit with a hand gesture. “We’ll be sure to thank Natty for his thoughtful fireproofing of key documents,” he said, gazing wonder-eyed at the flexible sheets that bent easily in his hands like old-fashioned paper but that refused to burn.

  “I think you should thank Cassandra,” Patent said. “The only thing sexier than a loose tongue are hot hands.” The rest of the room made a half-hearted attempt
to stifle their chuckles as Ajax settled reluctantly back into his seat.

  Leon nodded at Cronos, seated opposite him; Cronos was the latest addition to the team. Leon and the rest of Omega Force had saved him in Syria before they had been pulled from assignment there for Natty’s little getaway in the Amazon jungle. Leon had tossed Cronos the first-aid kit with the nanite cocktail so Cronos could sew a substitute set of balls back on after his own had been cut off by a Syrian combatant; the latter, one seriously nasty fellow.

  Natty and Laney rounded out the rest in attendance in the room. All eyes were now on Cassandra.

  But it was Natty who took over the Power Point presentation—or what passed for it aboard ship. “Hey, wait!” Ajax protested. “I thought the bitch goddess was chairing this meeting.”

  “Oh, her?” Natty frowned. “She’s just here on high alert because she always is anyway and because, well, in case you haven’t noticed, the tamest thing aboard this vessel is the T-Rex looking to fetch a ball, who, should he miss and come sliding through that wall, can crush us all by rolling over us before we can even react. Ergo Cassandra’s presence.”

  Ajax mumbled, “What do you call a woman with PMS and ESP? A bitch who really does know everything.”

  Cassandra was at his side in a flash—catching the dagger heading for his temple. As it turned out, it was a canine—the kind typically attached to a saber-toothed tiger. Even more surprisingly, she wasn’t the one that had hurtled the makeshift weapon at him.

  “Sorry about that,” Natty said. “One of the baby dinosaurs is teething.”

  Ajax threw a glance at the hole in the wall the tooth had come sailing through then back at Cassandra. “You know I love women, right? The sexist thing is just a cover.”

  She ignored him, jabbed the tooth into the table in front of him. “Appreciate the coaster,” Ajax said, taking out a flask from under his shirt, hammering down a swig, before setting it on the “coaster.”