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Copyright Page
To all the usual folks: Mom, Sally, Nik, Russell, the DFWWW, my agent, my editor, Orbit Books, the people who buy the books, Optimus Prime, and the rest. You’re still just as important as you ever were and this is a lot easier because of you.
To Atomic Robo, for keeping my love of comic books alive and well.
And to Victor Von Doom.
1
There’s no sound in space, but my saucer cannons simulated a shriek with every blast. A swoosh followed every barrel roll. And when my autogunner scored a hit, a sophisticated program supplied the appropriate level of response, ranging from a simple ping to a full-fledged explosion. I could have programmed it to provide an explosion every time, but that would’ve cheapened the experience.
The atmosphere burst with color as the cannons belched their staccato rhythm. My ship blasted the enemy fighters to scrap, but an impressive fleet stood between my target and me. The shields were holding, but I had only a few moments before I was disabled.
I’d gone over my exo options before mission. Neptunons might have been the smartest race in the galaxy, but outside of our exoskeletons, we couldn’t do much more than flop around. We could drag ourselves across the floor, a means of mobility both embarrassing and ineffective. Our brains had grown too fast, and we just hadn’t possessed the patience to wait around for nature to bestow what we could give ourselves. Over the centuries, we’d only grown smarter and squishier.
The obvious choice for an exo on this mission would’ve been a big, burly combative model. But I’d opted for stealth, taking a modified Ninja-3 prototype. It stood barely five feet tall and space limitations meant it didn’t pack much weaponry. But I wasn’t planning on fighting every soldier on the station. It sounded like a laugh, but time was a factor. Terra was a little over six minutes from total subjugation.
I slipped into my exo, loaded myself into the launch tube, and prepared to fire.
“It was a pleasure serving with you, sir,” said the craft’s computer.
“Likewise.”
I ejected, rocketing through space in a jet-black torpedo that was practically invisible in the darkness of space. A stray plasma blast could’ve gotten lucky and struck the torpedo. If it didn’t destroy me outright, it would knock the torpedo off course, either sending me spinning into the void of space or plummeting to Terra. But I’d done the math and decided to take my chances.
The torpedo breached the station’s hull. I kicked open the torpedo’s door and exited. There were no guards. Only a couple of technicians gasping for air. The artificial gravity held them in place, but the decompression had taken all the oxygen.
A security team stormed the room. I vaulted over their heads before they got off a shot. A few punches from my exo’s four arms knocked them all senseless before they could even realize I was behind them. The Ninja-3 had several built-in blades, but I tried not to kill people just for annoying me.
I took a second to grab the emergency oxygen masks off the wall and toss them to the technicians.
Then I was on my way. My exo’s camouflage feature allowed me to avoid guards. I slipped through the security net without much trouble, though it took a few minutes. By the time I reached the device, I was running short on time.
The immense orb hovered in a containment field. Hundreds of lights, purely ornamental, blinked across its surface. Its ultrasonic hum filled the chamber. Only a Neptunon could hear the sound without having their brain melt.
I blasted the device. It shattered into a thousand little pieces. There was nothing inside. Just a ceramic mock-up of a doomsday weapon.
A door opened, and a Neptunon in a hulking exoskeleton marched into the chamber. He banged his hands together. Their metallic clapping echoed.
“You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?” he asked.
All Neptunons look alike. We even have trouble telling each other apart. It wasn’t surprising that this one looked like me, but the resemblance went deeper.
The clone had been a mistake. I don’t often make mistakes, but I own up to them when they happen.
“A decoy,” I said.
Emperor Mollusk, Mark Two, laughed maniacally. Had I really sounded like that? The clone carried a set of memories minus a few years of experience and the personality to match. Looking at yourself, at who you used to be, wasn’t pretty.
“You should see the look on your face,” he said. “How does it feel to be outwitted?”
“Someone was going to do it eventually,” I replied. “At least I can take some small comfort that I outmaneuvered myself.”
“Yes, if anyone could do it…” He raised an eye ridge in a pompous, self-satisfied manner. We don’t have eyebrows.
“The fleet, the personnel, the space station,” I said. “This must have cost you a small fortune.”
“Ah, but it was necessary, wasn’t it? I knew that only one being in this system had the knowledge and ability to pose any significant risk to my plan. I couldn’t hide an operation like this without something to distract you. So I devised a small game for your amusement. Little clues leading to a fun diversion then a full-blown operation that was every bit as involved and complex as the real thing. But at the heart of it…nothing.”
I said, “Meanwhile, you build your weapon somewhere else, somewhere unimportant, somewhere unnoticed. It was exactly what I would’ve done.”
“And now nothing can stop me. In three minutes, Terra shall be mine.”
“You don’t want it.”
He chuckled, but one look at my face told him I was serious. Neptunons might not have the most expressive features, but we get by.
“Having billions of dominated souls chant your name in unison can be great for the self-esteem. Although, really, self-esteem was never our problem, was it?” I asked.
Mark Two studied me skeptically. He suspected a trap, trying to figure out my angle. There was no angle. Just a lesson learned.
“Once you’re crowned Warlord of Terra, you’ll see that it’s a lot more responsibility than I…we…planned.”
He scanned for any sign of deception. I had never been a very good liar. Strange, considering my hobby as a world conqueror, but it was a conscious choice. Being a skilled liar might have made the job easier, but telling the truth, with the occasional lie by omission, increased the difficulty level.
“Let me tell you how everything will go if you succeed,” I said. “You’ll become ruler of this world. You’ll hold it in your hands like a beautiful blue pearl. That’ll be enough at first. Just to have it.
“But then you’ll start tinkering. Oh, you’ll have the best of intentions. You’ll fix those little pestering problems the Terrans themselves never could. Hunger. War. Poverty. Those will be easy, a long weekend.
“After that, you’ll struggle against the relentless urges that drive you. You’ll realize, intellectually, that there’s little left to do. But you won’t be able to help yourself. Terra will become your own personal science project until your inevitable nature nearly destroys the world. Several times.
“Now, providing you manage to prevent this, you’ll learn some restraint. But it’ll always be there. That insistent desire, that nagging need. You’ll never be able to suppress it. Not completely. And you’ll find yourself wondering if tomorrow is the day you destroy it, most probably by accident.”
Mark Two said, “I’ll learn from your mistakes.”
“Or you’ll just make slightly different variations of the same ones. Regardless, the Terrans have been through enough under one warlord. They don’t need another.”
/> A klaxon blared, signaling the final countdown. I pushed a button on my exo, and the station blast shields lowered. Mark Two frowned, realizing that I’d hacked his systems.
Mark Two shook off his confusion and resumed his laughter. “I don’t know what happened to you in the time since you were me, but it doesn’t matter. Terra will be mine, and there’s not a thing you can—”
“I already stopped it. You didn’t think you could hide your operation in Minneapolis from me, did you?”
He smiled. “No, that was merely another decoy.”
“Of course, it was,” I replied. “As were your machinations in Lisbon, St. Petersburg, and Busan.”
His smile dropped.
“I’ll admit you almost had me with Melbourne,” I said. “But the decoy in Geneva was sloppy work, if I may be so bold as to offer some criticism.”
He wasn’t angered. He was curious. He was me, after all. And I was rarely frustrated by my failures. I preferred using them as learning opportunities.
I pressed another button. I kept the gravity and lights on for convenience, but everything else in the station went dead. The countdown ended. The doomsday device, the real device hidden aboard this station, wound down.
Mark Two glared. “How did you—”
“I’m you, remember. Just you with a few more years’ experience. Everything you’ve done, I’ve already thought of. Every contingency plan, every possibility, I already did five years ago before you were even hatched from your tank.”
He hid his incredulity behind a scowl, but I sensed it. If the situation were reversed, I’d have been the same. I hadn’t been one hundred percent certain that I would foil his plans. But I was a humbler guy now than I was when I had been him.
His mottled flesh darkened with rage. I could see where he was coming from. I’d failed before, but I’d never been outwitted. But I’d never had to face off against myself. Now it’d all gone freshwater for Mark Two, as the old Neptunon saying went.
His hulking exoskeleton lumbered forward. “You may have stopped me this time, but you won’t be around to stop me the next.”
He threw a clumsy punch that would’ve pulverized the Ninja-3 if I hadn’t sidestepped the blow. He followed that with a haymaker that I danced under. I glided behind him and used a microfilament blade to slice open the hydraulics behind the exo’s right knee. It wobbled but didn’t fall.
He hadn’t even bothered to change the specs. Perhaps he wasn’t a perfect clone after all.
Mark Two teetered on his damaged leg as he struggled to line me up in his sights, but it was a simple thing for me to scamper up his back. I stabbed a few vital systems along the way. The last thing I hit was the stabilizer. His powerful exo tumbled over, ten tons of scrap metal.
A hatch opened, and he ejected in a smaller exo. The clear, fluid-filled dome that held his head bubbled with his frustration. I’d never lost my temper like that, but then again, I’d never been foiled so effortlessly. Or maybe the cloning process had simply been incapable of re-creating every bit of my pragmatic genius. He must’ve known his backup was no match for my Ninja, but in his anger, he didn’t care. I dodged the blasts he sent my way and dismantled his exo with three efficient cuts. It clattered to the floor in pieces.
He flopped around, glaring daggers. Neptunons could survive out of water for extended periods, but it wasn’t comfortable.
“You can’t stop me,” he gurgled. “I’ll be back.”
“No, you won’t.”
I activated the station’s self-destruct countdown. Just a little something I’d slipped into his blueprints when he wasn’t looking.
“So that’s it?” he asked. “You’re just going to leave me here to die?”
“I’m afraid so. No hard feelings.”
Mark Two undulated in a shrug. “No, I suppose not. I’d do the same to you if the situation were reversed.”
“I guess I haven’t changed so much after all,” I replied.
We shared a laugh.
“Just tell me something. It would’ve worked, right?”
“It would have worked,” I said.
He grinned. “That’s something at least.”
“Yeah, it’s something.”
I made my escape without incident, boarding my automated rendezvous craft, and watched the station explode from a safe distance.
It was quite beautiful.
Then I pondered the small world below, oblivious to its own fragility.
2
I no longer held my official title of Warlord, but the Terra Sapiens, the most plentiful inhabitants of the planet, still worshipped me as a de facto god. Though they no longer made a big show of it.
In the first few years of my reign, I’d managed to solve a few of their problems.
I’d ended their wars by introducing aggression suppressants to the water supply. It didn’t make them any less disagreeable, but it kept them from rioting over the outcome of sporting events and shooting each other over imaginary lines drawn on maps.
I’d solved their energy crisis with the discovery of the molluskotrenic energy field. Its boundless energy production now supplied endless amounts of power to the people of Terra. More power, every day. I hadn’t figured a safe way to switch it off yet, and the vast abundance of the energy was beamed harmlessly into space. There was still too much, and if the engine I’d built to harness it ever suffered catastrophic failure it might very well destroy the engine. Or possibly blow a hole the size of Pluto in this world.
I had a contingency plan should that happen, an alarm that would alert me when it was time to leave the planet. In the meantime, I did my part. I kept every light in the house on and never turned off the TV.
I’d repelled the invasion of the Saturnites. Without me, the Terrans would’ve been digging their planet hollow for their Saturnite masters. The mole people of the Undersphere Empire would’ve fought back, and the whole thing could’ve been a disaster with the Terra Sapiens caught in between.
I’d sent the Saturnites scurrying off to their homeworld in such a hurry they hadn’t stopped to pick up all their soldiers, and a few thousand warriors were left on the planet. Fighting was all Saturnites knew, and you’d think rock-skinned warriors on a planet of mammals would have an easy time of it. But those aggression suppressants had been top-notch. Terrans didn’t fight wars anymore, and Saturnite soldiers were under standing orders to not cause any trouble.
Some had become police officers. Others were bodyguards. Some had taken to petty crime and leg breaking. But most of them, not truly being hostile and finding themselves stranded on an alien world, had taken up manual labor.
The Saturnite bagboy crushed my eggs.
“Oops.”
The cashier rolled her eyes. This probably happened quite often. “Cragg, what did Mr. Mooney tell you about being careful?”
Cragg frowned. “It was an accident.”
“I’m so sorry, Lord Mollusk,” said the cashier. Try as I might, I couldn’t break them from calling me Lord. “We’ll get you new eggs.”
“It’s not necessary,” I replied.
“Oh, but we insist.”
“Really, it’s fine. After I put them through the nutrient extractor, it won’t matter.”
The extractor, necessary for me to digest Terran foodstuffs, turned everything into a colorful paste. I usually dumped all my groceries into the extractor as soon as I got home and shoved the paste into the cupboard. But the cashier insisted. I was a hero of Terra, and the inhabitants liked me. They didn’t have any other choice.
All the other employees were busy at the moment, and rather than send clumsy Cragg after the eggs, the cashier decided to fetch them herself. This left me alone with him. He glared with murderous resentment but didn’t say a word.
The cashier returned with my eggs. She put them in a bag herself, loaded the bag carefully into my cart, and smiled. “Thank you, Lord Mollusk. Come again.”
Cragg trailed behind me, pushing the shopping c
art through the parking lot to my saucer. It was a compact model, but it still took up two spaces. I helped him throw the groceries into the storage compartment. He squeezed the bags a little too tight. I heard glass breaking and my bread was no doubt mutilated.
When I handed him a couple of bucks for his trouble, he growled, “You think you’re better than me?”
My first instinct was to say yes, I did, but I couldn’t kick a Saturnite when he was down.
“Hero.” He spat a few pebbles onto the concrete.
I could understand his frustration. We were both conquerors. The biggest difference between us was that I’d succeeded while he had failed. But history is written by the winners. Especially winners with access to global mind-control devices.
“If you don’t want the money—”
He snatched away the cash, glowered at it. My picture looking up at him from the bills probably didn’t help heal the wounds.
“Have a nice day,” I said.
“Screw you.” He stomped away.
I climbed into my saucer and rocketed over the city. I didn’t get very far before a Venusian scout craft appeared like a cigar-shaped bird of prey. Its shadow fell over my ship.
An all-too-familiar gray-scaled Venusian commander appeared in my monitor.
“Hello, Zala,” I said.
She snarled. If I’d been the sensitive type, I might have wondered why so few people smiled when talking to me.
“Emperor Mollusk, you are hereby ordered to land immediately.”
“Do we really have to do this now?” I asked. “I have a…thing…I have to get to.”
“Your…thing…will have to wait.” She leaned in close to the screen. “Don’t make me shoot you down.”
A cursory scan of the Venusian craft informed me that I could disable it with the push of a few buttons, but I was bored enough to see what Zala wanted from me. As if I didn’t know already.
The Venusians had had it in for me since I’d tried to conquer their planet after falling short on Neptune. I hadn’t really come close to subjugating Venus. Only claimed a couple of continents for a few weeks. No good reason they shouldn’t have been over that by now.
Emperor Mollusk Versus The Sinister Brain Page 1