Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  “Maybe trying to make you more literary by exposing you to Lord of the Flies was just a really really bad idea,” Frog Doll said, getting pushed by the blast wave at their backs past the entrance to the airplane hangar that was once Building 13-A.

  TWELVE

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  “Thor!” Corin hollered. She’d been screaming his name so long she was going hoarse.

  And now she was lost somewhere on the Nautilus, contact with the Nautilus supersentiences sabotaged by her own stress levels. If she didn’t stay calm, the nanites inside her could not traffic the information back and forth between the ship’s various AIs and her mind.

  Even the Star Trek-like communicator on her jersey, which those aboard the Nautilus typically tapped when they were in her state, namely unable to access their nanite COMMS for whatever reason, was proving hopeless.

  No one would answer her.

  The devices weren’t just for communicating verbally. They could put through requests to be teleported anywhere aboard ship.

  Well, that assist was down as well.

  Short of hopping a dragon, or one of the air taxi-cars, or other forms of transport—she’d be old and gray before she got from one end of the ship to another.

  The dragons refused to fly overhead in this sector of the city.

  There were no shortage of air taxis zooming overhead, however, but none of them would respond to her. No doubt the drivers were responding to requests for their services based on criteria she could scarcely imagine.

  She was stuck in a particularly evil take of Blade Runner. As if Hollywood had kept remaking the film, getting the holograms ever more realistic, upping the danger of the city with each iteration.

  The ship had many hallways circling the inner courtyard like the layers of an onion. But each of the hallways themselves… She was in just one section of one of the halls about three rinds out from the center of the ship—big enough to make her feel as if she were in downtown Shanghai.

  The city at night glowed in neon, every imaginable color. It would be quite beautiful if not for the sordidness. She definitely wouldn’t let her kid come here, which is why she figured she’d start here. Like his father, as soon as you told Thor not to do something, it moved to the number one spot on his to-do list.

  The assassins crossing the street flashed proof of their kills and evidence of their skills in taking down their marks on their bulletproof billboard trench coats, made of flexible smart screens that had been tailored to shape, or they projected the images on the dome-shaped energy shields they kept about them. Some merely ran the screensavers on their wrap around shades reminiscent of the polarizing lenses skiers wore. Mercenary killers advertising their work-for-hire status so brazenly told her she didn’t belong here any more than her son did.

  “You won’t find Thor here,” the voice said from behind her.

  Corin swirled about. “How do you know?” Corin realized her voice was less than appreciative, testy, argumentative, to be more precise.

  “Because I’m the mob boss for this district. Nothing goes on here that I don’t know about. Nothing goes on anywhere on this ship I don’t know about. And I’m afraid Thor is no longer on the Nautilus.”

  Corin gasped, her hand going to her mouth reflexively. She was already tearing up.

  “Save the waterworks for the park,” the mobster said. “I’m not here on a goodwill mission. I can help you find your son, but it’s going to cost you.”

  “Cost me what?”

  “You’re one of the ship’s two most imminent bioengineers, not so much second to Laney, as specializing in adaptations more meaningful to me.”

  “Let me guess,” Corin said acidly, “the man into superman scenarios.”

  “What can I say? I’m a fan of Nietzsche.”

  She had been fighting all this time to ignore his evident genetic crossbreeding with canines, to not recoil in shock and horror, ending whatever goodwill he had to throw her way. She needn’t have bothered. He was clearly proud of his genetic heritage. His elongated nose, the deceptively friendly face and loyal eyes…like man’s best friend. More like man’s worst enemy, Corin thought. The piercing, all knowing eyes, one bright blue, one bright yellow, the short-haired fur coat covering all of his body, albeit, mostly hidden under a trench coat and the Sam Spade hat. She wouldn’t be surprised if the trench coat were meant to hide his double-jointed knees and his ability to run on all fours as easily as on his hind legs. In another universe they might well be husband and wife; they said opposites attract. She gave new meaning to “plain Jane” down to her suburban wife getup, her soccer mom demeanor, and the too dull face to be all that attractive, framed by the salad-bowl-cut blond hair and green eyes with gold flecks. She didn’t have a bad bone in her body; he likely didn’t have a good one. She couldn’t deny being turned on, right in the middle of being in a dreadful panic over the fate of her son. Maybe it was the pheromones he gave off; part of the hybridization package.

  “Fine,” she said, “whatever you want. Just get me my son!”

  “Remember your promise when I pay you a visit next, or I may be forced to remind you,” he said with no shortage of innuendo.

  “Fine! I said.” She had become absolutely hysterical waiting for him to get to the punchline.

  “He’s on Earth,” the mobster informed her flatly.

  Just when she thought she had no more air to be stolen from her lungs, she gasped yet again. “The earth is under sustained asteroid bombardment,” she said, as if the man who knew everything didn’t know that. She was hardly speaking for educational purposes. She was merely voicing her concerns to get her own mind around the truth.

  “And he’s headed straight for the installations being targeted for destruction by those asteroids. I’m afraid your son has a real knack for jumping from the fire into the frying pan.”

  “Tell me about it,” Corin mumbled, her mind already reeling out on the implications.

  “I’ve got to get down there!” she screamed finally. “And you’ve got to help me!”

  He shook his head. “When you speak to Leon, tell him Sonny sent you, and he can thank me later, in his own way.”

  “Why can’t I find someone to fly in the face of our supreme military leader?!” she hollered and sobbed simultaneously like the out-of-control woman she was.

  Sonny smiled smugly. “If you want to give your son the best chance of survival, I’d suggest you heed Leon’s direction. We are what we are in the end, aren’t we? And no more.”

  Sonny turned his back on her and disappeared into the riot of life that was his sector of the city. Corin tracked him for as long as she could with her eyes, half of a mind to chase after him, tackle him to the ground and beat his face in until he saw reason. She certainly couldn’t do more to that face than nature had already done. He was a genetic freak, one of the worst she’d ever encountered. There were rumors flying about the ship of Mother’s early experiments, before she perfected her gene mixing to procure Theta Team. She couldn’t discard her genetic rejects because she loved them no less.

  The genetic rejects had been forced to fend for themselves, to find their niche, like everyone else aboard the Nautilus. Corin could guess as to what that niche was. But she could only entertain so many horrors in her mind at once. And right now, her son took precedence.

  With no idea how she was going to find her way out of the city she started running anyway. She had to find Leon, somehow, someway.

  One of the air taxis dropped out of the air and she ran headlong into it.

  “Courtesy of Sonny,” the taxi driver said. “Though please don’t mention that I spoke his name. He’s very sensitive about that. Few are even allowed to know of it. Fewer are allowed to speak his name and live.”

  She thought about that. Was that Sonny’s way of cuing her that he felt a similar attraction to her? “Get your mind under control, you silly woman!” she blared in her head.

  Corin hopped in the airtaxi, caring
nothing for the lore of this district, or the rules of how to live within it, including, for now, how to best survive Sonny’s wrath. “Take me to Leon now!” she barked, realizing she sounded even more like a rabid dog in that moment than Sonny did.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the driver said.

  ***

  “Leon!” Corin screeched, jumping out of the air taxi before it had finished setting down and nearly landing on her face. The driver saluted Leon, who smiled back, and nodded. Evidently they had history. Leon shifted his eyes back to the woman determined to tackle him to the ground, as the taxi took off.

  She reached him in time to start beating her fists against his chest, as if knocking on a castle door determined to get the attention of the resident ensconced deep inside—past all Leon’s emotional filters and deadeners only trained military men possessed. She needed him a bit more exposed right now so he could feel what a mother felt.

  “Thor is down on the planet!” she screeched.

  “What? Impossible. There’s no way the Nautilus would sanction that.”

  “Sonny said you could thank him for the information later.”

  She could read faces well enough to know that he was taking her more seriously now.

  Leon sighed. “Even if it’s true, Corin, I can’t sanction a search party right now. In case you haven’t noticed this war we find ourselves in is an all-hands-on-deck situation. And if I know your son, he’s one of the hands on deck, helping out in his own inimical fashion. You should be proud of that kid. I’ve got trained Special Ops soldiers looking to run and hide right now, or at least wishing they could.”

  “Don’t give me that heroic crap. Save it for the funeral. And by God if I have anything to say about it, it’ll be yours, not my son’s!”

  “I need a way forward, Corin. Without more intel, I’m in a holding pattern. I need to know more from my troops on the ground on Earth.

  “When last I was unable to move forward, as I recall, you were one of the people who brought me the missing piece I needed to mobilize my people. Maybe you should focus on being that person again.”

  Corin screamed like only a banshee could scream. She didn’t want to hear reason right now. But Leon was right. He was fighting to save the planet, and everyone aboard this ship. And she was insisting he risk everyone else to save her kid. He didn’t have the luxury to indulge his feelings as she did.

  He was also right about how she could best save herself from going insane and best help her son. She would retreat to her lab. The supermen of yesterday, bioengineered in part by her, to survive the challenges of the Star Gate, were the ordinary men of today. They would need to be turned into supermen yet again, relative to what they were now, to come up against this new enemy.

  She should be grateful for the all-hands-on-deck situation they were in now, or she’d be caught in a need-to-know position, sidelined, and she might never know the truth about her son, or what actions if any were being taken on his behalf.

  She had been looking into Leon’s eyes to help steady her, to help her see reason, to find her way past the storm clouds of emotions sweeping over her now. As soon as the sky cleared, however briefly, she wiped her tears, and said, “I’ll be in my lab.”

  She heard his voice at her back as she padded off. “Find me a way forward, Corin.”

  ACT TWO

  THE WAY FORWARD

  THIRTEEN

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  Leon stared at the holographic projection of the barrier, the latest stress ball in his hand, and the bowl of stress balls on the situation room table all but empty now. The shrapnel from the exploded balls littered the floor. Ordinarily, the self-healing, self-cleaning floor would have absorbed the detritus into itself, recombining the molecules, reinforcing itself with them. But some of the Nautilus’s functions were down, a sign of just how much mind power she was throwing at the war effort, in a joint effort with the humanoids that made her, to get around a Stage Three civilization.

  No one had guessed they’d find one that hadn’t evolved beyond warmongering. The transcendental logic of more elevated minds and all that; already on Earth the majority of the population was progressing toward a mentality welcoming a more egalitarian age, in fact, screaming for it, to the consternation of the last corrupt power moguls seeing their mechanisms of control collapsing before their eyes.

  “Leon,” the Nautilus said, speaking up. He was one of the few she bothered to speak to. “Cassandra and the Nun wish to brief you. They’re pressing for an audience.”

  “Let Solo sort through that intel for right now. I’ll need him if I’m to make much sense of it.”

  “They will not listen to reason.” Leon knew by “they” Nauti was referring to Casandra and the Nun. “And they’re quite capable of dismantling the ship, piece by piece to get to you.”

  “Do what you can to stall them, Nauti. I need some room in my head to think right now without the clamoring of bickering voices.”

  “Very well.”

  The Nautilus signed off, the sharp silence punctuating her departure.

  He shifted the view on the hologram by passing his hand through it back toward Earth, and the asteroids still pelting it. “Come on, people. I need my clone teams on Earth to check in.”

  ***

  EARTH

  THE ATACAMA DESERT, CHILE

  OMEGA FORCE AND ALPHA UNIT, CLONE TEAM ONE -

  CHARGED WITH OVERSEEING EARTH’S FORBIDDEN ZONES

  The ATVs roamed over the rugged terrain they’d been built for, unimpressed by the lack of roads, or level surfaces.

  They seemed equally unimpressed by the pop-up .50 caliber machine guns to either side lighting them up that weren’t there a moment ago, hidden in underground bunkers with camouflaged tops. Even the nano-saturated tires were yawning in response to the bullet barrage.

  The gauntlet seemed to be growing worse as they went along.

  Unmanned drones had dropped out of the sky to shell them with rockets from above. The exploding shells didn’t do anything to the ATVs but they did make the terrain that much more rugged to clamber over. The surface of the desert was getting as well cratered as the moon before the drone jets backed off.

  In their place came the stealth bombers, dropping their payloads. “Those are dirty nukes,” Satellite said, interpreting his scanners. He craned toward Leon, Patent, and Crumley. “Really?”

  Satellite was met with stony expressions and three seasoned soldiers who couldn’t be bothered to respond. The continued escalation had failed to get a rise out of them.

  The overhead craft turned their laser cannons on them next. But they were no match for the nano-infused skin of the ATVs which could turn reflective on a dime and bounce those lasers right back at the droids equipped with them, taking them out instead.

  Satellite returned his attention to his scanner as a keening sound replaced the vacuum created by the vacating stealth bombers.

  According to Satellite’s read out, the last stealth bomber had left them with a special gift before departing. “That high pitched whistling sound… They just dropped the mother of all bombs on top of us.”

  Patent said, “We must be getting close.”

  The bomb hit, and their ATV and the string of others behind them went airborne. When they landed it was not necessarily in an upright position. But the ATVs were otherwise unharmed, or at least it was nothing the nanites in the shielding and the tires couldn’t repair. The robotic foldout arms also righted the vehicles without the Special Forces operatives needing to get out and play Superman. The soldiers, strapped in, had not been thrown from their seats, but they were wincing from the force of those straps digging into them during the explosion.

  “The target is within range,” Satellite said, as the convoy continued forward. “The attack on us seems to have settled down.”

  “They can’t risk further engagement this close to whatever they’re protecting,” Leon said.

  “And I’m guessing any military personnel o
n site figures the problem, whatever it was, has been handled by the impressive AI maintaining the perimeter,” Patent added.

  “Wouldn’t the AI have signaled them that it failed at its job?” Crumley asked.

  “I’m blocking their COMMS,” Satellite said matter-of-factly. “Plus these mountains screw with the sound, echoing it. They won’t know if those explosions came from a hundred miles off and another mountain range or not. And there are plenty of military exercises being conducted up here.”

  “What does it say about peacetime,” Crumley asked, “that all hell on earth can break loose and nobody notices?”

  “We are under asteroid bombardment, worldwide,” Leon explained. “And much of their heavy artillery will be aimed skyward in a futile attempt to neutralize the situation, with the aid of AI targeting. So, yeah, all in all, great time to sneak under the radar even after setting off every alarm in the house.”

  ***

  Omega Force Clone Team One had been assigned to look into Earth’s forbidden zones, the territories marked off by the military and cordoned off from civilian access entirely. These regions were typically also erased from any maps. Where there weren’t guards and barbed wire fences to point you back in the other direction, there were land mines, or pop-up .50 caliber weapons in hidden bunkers controlled by hydraulics and AI. Honestly, the visible lack of a military presence was often scarier than the sites with manned personnel. It meant no one was taking a chance on human error, and AIs were in control of the area.

  This particular hotspot in the Atacama had both AI and military to contend with. Maybe that meant it was special; maybe it meant that they’d yet to sort out how best to keep the location locked down.

  Leon spied the site in question through his binoculars with two-thousand-times digital zoom and additional visual enhancement, and facial recognition and… honestly, it had more telemetry than an Android watch, whose many options were nerve racking enough to work through.