“Hailey, honey,” her dad said from the car, “if you’re looking to marry that boy, I think you’re going to find that the cross you bear is a blessing in disguise. Hopefully it’s a really big cross. Though you may have to show a lot of patience. Boys don’t mature as fast as girls.”
“Look on the bright side, darling,” her mom piped up. “We kept you on organic foods all your life, or you’d have hit puberty at eight.”
Hailey stomped back toward the car. “To hell with this. I’m tweaking the KiSS1 gene.”
Her father nodded, still keeping his eyes on his dog manual. “You’re thinking of arresting puberty indefinitely. I’m telling you there’s such a thing as being too smart for your own good, especially if you want to marry that boy. You’re better off tweaking his genes so you don’t have to wait forever for him to catch up with you.”
“Will you stop enabling her?” Rose shouted.
Her father turned another page in the dog manual while still addressing Hailey. “Of course, all this is theoretical. As soon as you’re asleep, I’m throwing you in the trunk, locking it, and keeping you there until you’re twenty-five.”
“I’m giving you your new coordinates,” Hailey said to the car AI, using her father’s laptop to key in the GPS coordinates.
“I want to apologize for your mother’s and my role in all this,” her father said, continuing to scrutinize his dog manual as if he couldn’t memorize the entire thing at a glance. “Stress can cause early onset puberty. If everything you say is true, you might want to stop at a hospital to pick up a few liters of blood to transfuse yourself with to keep up with the blood-letting.”
Hailey craned her head toward her father and glared. “Really, Dad?”
“Someone has to be the pragmatist in this family. Your mother is all about racking up points killing aliens.”
“Speaking of, here’s our chance!” Rose said from the backseat.
Hailey and Dillon shifted their focus to the side of the road, where a contingent of Kang drones were coming up the impossible incline of the mountain road that would give Billy goats a bad name. The first of the aliens had already hit the lip of the road.
“Floor it!” Rose commanded the car AI, which didn’t hesitate. Rose was already standing up in the backseat letting go on the shotgun with the nextgen solid-shot shells.
As the car flew past the first row of Kang drones to make it to the top, the force of the shells knocked them back. Hailey could see them bouncing off the hard rock surfaces, hitting boulder after boulder, falling far enough and hard enough to have broken every bone in their bodies several times over.
Instead, they just got back up and rock-climbed back up the mountain at a runner’s pace, good and pissed.
Hailey was tempted to try her necklace beads, but if they were as good as the old man had let on, she didn’t want the Kang getting excited enough to chase after them, being as she was now well aware, after tapping Omega Force’s COMMS, how hot to trot the Kang were for tech that could take their war-gaming to the next level. Even if they really didn’t need to do so to dispatch a planetful of humans; there was always the next vicious battle they were looking forward to.
Now that the rest of the path was clear along the winding road, her mom collapsed back into her seat. “I really should have considered augmented reality role play a lot sooner. I’m really cut out for it. These are the best smart-contacts ever.”
Hailey and her dad stared at one another. “Glad you like them, Rose,” he said. “They were your daughter’s idea.”
“Figures. We’re going to make a fortune selling this prototype to the military, sweetheart,” Rose said, reloading her shotgun.
“The coordinates?” Dillon asked Hailey. “Where are you taking us?”
“Dad, look to the sky,” she said impatiently.
Dillon gazed heavenwards. It took him a second. “The asteroid bombardment… It’s different.” He lowered his eyes and took on a pensive look. Then he looked up, his eyes focusing on the road again. “They’ve switched targets. They’re bombing installations that aren’t supposed to exist. They must have gotten the intel they needed from NORAD.”
“Who says rereading dog manuals doesn’t work wonders on the mind?” Hailey said, punching away at the laptop.
Her father studied her face; she could feel his glare like a sunlamp on her right cheek. “You’re going to where that boy is. And he’s headed toward one of these black sites. If he isn’t there already.”
When she didn’t answer him, he didn’t press for validation; he must have just known he was right. Instead he pressed her for what she was up to. “That coding you’re doing…”
“Skyhawk has hacked his way into the artifact on the moon enough for me to get a sense of how it works. I’m helping him write the next sequence in the coding he needs.”
“And what’s that?”
“A way for that artifact to get a lock on the entire Milky Way galaxy and the Dead Zone space stations that will allow us to populate the Milky Way at the same time that we return to it with those artificial habitats. Sorry, forgot to tell you about the Dead Zone. Basically it’s full of alien legacy technology left over from a galactic civilization that simply disappeared.
“Once we’ve used the Dead Zone space stations and the bioprinters from the various Nautili—for sure Leon is going to have to commandeer all of the bioprinters to print up enough humanoids to populate his galaxy and those space stations in no time at all—we’ll have the galaxy fully weaponized. The Gypsy Galaxy, as it will then be known, will be like Have Gun Will Travel—only on a somewhat bigger scale.”
Dillon was tearing up and staring blankly at the side of the road facing the mountain—not the valley, where it was now too dark to really see anything. Obviously, he was processing. He hadn’t jumped out of the car and off the cliff, so obviously Dillon 2.0—the upgrade still downloading—was doing better than she’d hoped.
“You’re doing great, Dad, really,” Hailey said without looking up from her laptop.
“How old is this Skyhawk guy?” he asked.
“Eighteen,” Hailey said, not slowing from her typing or looking up from her laptop screen.
“Maybe you should marry him. We could stand to take the genetics in the family tree to the next level, especially if I’m not hallucinating all this.”
“He’s not my type.”
“I’m sorry, hon, but I think it’s two big steps into the future, and one big step back to fixed marriages, if I have anything to say about it.”
“You know,” Hailey said, trying to redirect him, multitasking her coding with “dad control”—nothing new there—“haven’t you done work on Professor Erik Verlinde’s grand unified theory, to iron out the kinks? Alpha Unit, and particularly Skyhawk, is already trying to figure out how TGCs and TGEs can cloak themselves, and how the Gypsy Galaxy can teleport itself, or simply sail like a ship across space-time… These are all very pressing, unresolved issues that need to be addressed like yesterday. We could really use your mind back on line right now—all the way.”
Her father stared blankly ahead of them, then sunk into his seat and buried his head in his dog manual.
“If you think about it,” Hailey goaded, “teaching mom dog tricks is going to help her cope. But when are you more relaxed than when you’re writing equations like the ones we need you to write? Up until today they’d just have sat at the bottom of a closet somewhere, so you weren’t dismissed as the laughing stock of the planet.”
Her father continued to stare at his manual, but it was in the nature of his fixed gaze that Hailey perceived hope.
TWENTY-FIVE
EARTH’S MOON
OMEGA FORCE AND ALPHA UNIT, CLONE TEAM ONE –
CHARGED WITH OVERSEEING EARTH’S FORBIDDEN ZONES
“Patent, I don’t have to tell you, no one and nothing gets near the kid,” Leon said.
They both glanced at Skyhawk, busy hacking the artifact, as Patent finished loading
his weapon. “I’m delighted to hear that. I’ve been dying to test drive my latest toys,” Patent said. The cave was littered with his own inventions.
“If anyone else were telling me they were defending the galactic treasure that is that kid’s mind with untested tech, I’d shoot ’em.”
“You’re welcome.” Patent continued taking stock of his inventory, and deciding where best to situate everything in anticipation of the Kang rushing the cave.
The artifact—which looked like a giant steel smith’s anvil—was a monolith big enough to be nicknamed The Colossus. It might offer some protection when the shooting started, but it also created a hell of a lot of blind spots.
Leon sighed, figuring the rest was Patent’s problem.
Outside the cave, Leon and the rest of Omega Force would be positioned to make sure the Kang never made it this far.
He threw one last look back at the monolith and at Patent. “The radiation that thing is giving off…” The monolith actually glowed, as if steel not yet cooled. Leon’s radiation meter on his wristwatch was already spiking into the red. “You won’t last long in here. Nanites or no nanites.”
“Long enough, let’s hope.” Patent shoved the latest magazine into the latest assault rifle. He’d stripped down to his black Kevlar underwear. The rest of the “clothing” amounted to munitions belts that would feed his rifles. Leon wasn’t sure if he looked more like a Roman gladiator right now, or like someone he’d meet in an S&M bar south of the Castro. Patent didn’t like his range of motion inhibited.
Never mind there was no atmosphere to breathe, far less to help him to keep warm. They were able to communicate only because their nanites cocooned them well enough to produce an atmosphere through which the sound leaving their mouths could travel. Soon, the nanites would be fighting too hard to keep Leon and the rest of them alive to condone such luxuries as verbal communication. All exchanges would be strictly mindchip to mindchip.
Leon nodded to Patent, after giving the cave one last look. The chamber was big enough thanks to the robot excavators for Patent to pile up a lot of Kang bodies for extra blinds if he needed them—thinking optimistically.
Outside the cave, the rest of Omega Force was dug in, all except for Cassandra, of course. She didn’t believe in hiding behind blinds. Techa forbid anything curtail her range of motion, far less her acrobatics. If Leon didn’t know better, he’d say she was Patent’s daughter—next generation on line.
“You should leave,” she said. “I’ve got this. Your nanites won’t keep you alive long out here.”
“Long enough, let’s hope,” Leon replied, echoing Patent’s famous last words.
“You cannot rely on the Nautilus printing you all up new bodies. She’s too over-tasked as it is.”
“Careful, Cassandra, or I’ll think you care.”
She snorted. “For a team leader, you sure don’t read people very well.”
Leon smiled. Between them, this passed for affection. Anyone who knew her would know she was making progress with her humanity, however slowly, despite that not being at all what she was built for. Leon hoped they’d have time with everything going on to have another of their sessions. He was counseling her through her sociopathy, which she used as a defense mechanism. Though, honestly, right now, he cared more about her heartless-killing-machine skills than her long-term recovery. Context is everything, as they say.
The Kang were arriving in regimental numbers. They had backed off when Omega Force had beamed in. And it wasn’t like them to back away from a fight. So, Leon had been right; they just wanted an opportunity to put an end to all of them once and for all. Hence the reinforcements.
The sky was thick with them, just hovering there in clusters, without need of a spaceship, resisting the moon’s weak gravitational field, for now. Before their appearance, there was just a rippling shimmer in countless spots overhead, as if they had been there all along, and were only decloaking now that enough of their fellow warriors had arrived.
Cassandra, not one to wait for an invitation, stepped further into the clearing—far enough from Omega Force’s position that they really couldn’t do much to help her if she got in over her head.
The Kang waited until they felt they had her good and isolated from the rest.
And opened fire.
She morphed her surface into a polished mirror, in order to refract or reflect all light, sending their lasers right back at them, and cutting down everyone who had fired.
It had proven to be an expensive opening gambit for the Kang.
But as their bodies tumbled to the ground to join the rest of the moon rocks, the Kang bodies not looking any less hard, other Kang warriors de-cloaked, others who weren’t about to make the same mistake twice.
This time they descended quickly and took up defensive positions behind the no shortage of boulders that served well as blinds. Continuing with the theme of keeping Cassandra surrounded and ignoring everyone else until they got the queen off the chessboard, they fired at her from all directions at once.
She just did her acrobatic dance about their laser beams, jumping over, diving through, and ducking under them, like some thief determined to bypass the infrared trip mechanisms in an art museum.
Leon gave the signal to his people to fire. Cassandra was keeping the Kang hypnotized for a reason. She was giving the rest of Omega Force a better opportunity to dispatch the Kang in greater numbers without drawing their fire.
She wasn’t doing half bad herself in this regard, using the lasers emitted from her eyes—adjusted to the frequency of the weapon that had proven so useful against them at Los Alamos. Clone Team Two had gotten the intel through to them. Just about every kill technique that worked with the Kang had been piped through, including the child Thor’s discoveries.
Omega Force’s latest printed assault rifles now fired the radioactive shells keyed to the Kang that dropped them in numbers, whether or not they impacted any of their bodies directly. It made aiming secondary, but they couldn’t afford for the shells to go sailing into space and out of the moon’s frail gravity well either.
When Omega Force was out of these shells, they switched to the Kang-laser weapons, one of which left no light trail, making it easy to cut swaths through dozens of Kang drones at once without the sweeping beam itself giving away its trajectory and giving its targets a heads-up it was coming their way.
Things were going better than expected.
This bothered Leon to no end.
The Kang weren’t exactly pushovers.
It dawned on him that just as Cassandra was distracting the Kang, so the Kang might well be distracting Leon’s entire unit.
Patent! Shit!
Leon could already see what was going on in his mind’s eye, not because he was having a psychic moment, but because only one thing made sense. The caste of Kang giants were tunneling their way into the cave, making their own entrance.
And for all Omega Force’s and Cassandra’s killing prowess, they were pinned down on the surface by more and more arriving Kang legions, who seemed content to bury them alive with their dead bodies, happy to play an attrition game with the kind of numbers they had.
All Leon could hope for was that Patent came prepared to kill everything in sight—including prey he never expected to be aiming a weapon at.
***
Patent craned his ear toward the cave entrance.
Despite the fevered state in which Skyhawk was working, he couldn’t help but notice. “What are you listening for?” He wiped the sweat from his forehead—prickling in sub-zero temperatures; the cave was open to the outside. His virtual keyboard—painted in holographic light—danced in the air about him, getting wider with each addition of backboard scribble he was using to further his hack.
“Lots of gunfire outside,” Patent replied, “and yet, strangely, Ajax isn’t bitching and screaming bloody murder. I’d say he was dead, but that’s just wishful thinking. Things must be going so much their way, there’s no reas
on for him to whine. There’s only one reason for the Kang to give false hope like that. It’s a distraction. Breathe deep, kid. It’s about to get salty in here.
“Head on a swivel, Patent, head on a swivel.” He mumbled the last part to himself.
***
In response to the news that they were about to be breached, Skyhawk had cocooned himself in a catatonic state.
As he withdrew further into himself, blocking out more and more of the outside world, he kept a mind link open with the artifact, using the nanococktail saturating his neural synapses now to interact with it directly. The VR link to the artifact had been abandoned; it was now just one more artifact in the room representing a technological era gone by.
TWENTY-SIX
A REMOTE REGION OF ALASKA
HAARP INSTALLATION
OMEGA FORCE AND ALPHA UNIT, CLONE TEAM TWO –
CHARGED WITH OVERSEEING EARTH’S FORBIDDEN ZONES
Natty took one look at the giant antenna array, planted the way they do corn, a veritable farm full of them, laid out in a boxy grid. The tall “stalks” ran just short of a skyscraper’s length up to the sky, and perched atop of each one was a telephone pole-like cross-section of wiring—the Tesla Coils. “Techa, who could think this HAARP array was anything but a planetary shield? Are people just dumb by force of habit?”
Alpha Unit, Clone Team Two, beamed in, just behind him. “You’re telling me twenty acres of antennas is all we have to protect the Earth with?” Ariel said.
Ariel gazed heavenward with her binoculars. “Those Tesla coils are from the nineteenth century!” She squawked.
“Yeah, well, that makes them the smartest things out here.” Natty sighed. “Let’s go check on these fools, see if they’re at least smart enough to follow orders.”
“If not, I’m sure Alpha Unit can dance around them.”
Natty glared at Ariel. “You left me out here unprotected!”
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