Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

And she hit the virtual button on the UFO’s dashboard monitor before all humor in this situation was just gone.

  The destruction of the legions of Kang on the ground below from the nanite black hole bombs was total.

  What’s more, the fruit-fly nanites, sniffing the singularity the Kang army was pouring out of, devoured them before they could even finish materializing.

  The Kang had been effectively checked.

  For now.

  It was too late for either Natty or Laney to derive much satisfaction from the temporary victory. Perhaps because they realized how temporary it was likely to be.

  Mother broke their concentration, and the overlapping feelings of triumph and being sickened by the slaughter. “The Collectors cometh,” her voice said in their heads.

  In all their heads—every one of the Nautilus’s crew.

  Like a death knoll.

  In Singularity State, seconds meant a lot.

  That may be all they had now.

  Nauti would have to sustain her connection with her humanoid brain trust for them to accomplish what they needed to in the split second they had remaining—if they had even less time than they thought.

  TWENTY-NINE

  EARTH

  THE ALASKAN OUTBACK

  THE HAARP INSTALLATION

  For a second, Ariel thought she’d traveled back through time, to a point before the Earth’s energy shield had been bolstered, to a time before Laney had found a way to dispatch Kang troops instantly with her nanite black hole bombs, and close any wormhole they were pouring out of.

  Ariel should have known things were going a little too much their way.

  However the Kang had hit the reset button, they were back in force.

  The first thing Ariel noted from a vantage point a little too close for comfort was just how immune the Kang were to cold. As always, they wore no clothes. Of course, with bodies habituated for the ravages of deep space, which included extremes of temperature impossible to find inside of a biosphere, this should have come as no surprise to her. But it was still something to behold. A form of psyops warfare, stunning the enemy just long enough to get the advantage on them.

  As if the innumerable marching foot soldiers on the ground appearing out of nowhere wasn’t daunting enough…

  The HAARP compound’s automated defenses had kicked in and started firing high into the air at seemingly nothing, rattling Ariel further. That “nothing” turned out to be a cloaked Kang bird of prey. The dragon ship, only now visible—its outline highlighted by the explosions—high in the sky, was still dropping her “babies”—the smaller ships identical to the bigger one, just a bit bigger than jet fighters. Each Kang fighter jet, made of the same dense, rock-like material of the Kang themselves, was too heavy to simply glide in the air. They had to move and move fast to maintain lift. That lent a certain harrying nature to their already plague numbers.

  As to worrying about hitting their own troops on the ground, they couldn’t be bothered. Their ground troops were immune to their own incendiaries, as one would expect from a dragon’s young. Maybe the Kang did more than worship dragons and pay homage to them in the designs of their craft; maybe they had evolved from them, or represented another branch on the evolutionary tree.

  To make the situation of all those located at the HAARP compound all the more desperate, the self-rotating-auto-firing cannons could not target the fighter jets for Omega Force, to help with dispatching them. As fast as those cannons could swivel, they couldn’t move that fast. Though hitting one Kang jet sent it careening into about a dozen others. But short of interrupting their targeting and firing, the fighter jets and the pilots both emerged just fine from the shelling as well as the ricocheting of their own planes against one another, once the pilots regained control of their craft.

  Ariel’s mind raced for some explanation as to how they could have taken one step forward and two steps back. Maybe Natty was right, the bolstered HAARP compound energy shield could keep out asteroids now but not dragon ships, nor could it do anything about wormholes. Maybe Laney’s nanite black hole bombs, wandering about looking for targets…maybe they didn’t work against these drones because they had lived longer, had developed immunities to more nanite infections. They did look older and bigger than the perhaps more juvenile ones that had preceded them. Hell of a strategy for longevity, sacrifice the kids to save the elders. She supposed on Earth political figures had done the same for generations to preserve their own hides.

  From her subterranean perch, which allowed just the smallest of above-ground slots, like a castle’s eyelet, for firing out of, or in her case, getting a bead on what was going on, Ariel set down her binoculars and got on her COMMS. “What the hell is going on with those retrofits?”

  Astro got back to her. “Coming on line any minute.”

  Ariel raised her binoculars to her eyes and used the digital zoom to focus in more closely on one of the cannons. She could see the Origami robot that folded out from something the size of a Rubik’s cube—for easy travel inside one of Alpha Unit’s silver suitcases—crawling over the cannon, unfolding itself as it went, inspecting the piece of equipment it was retrofitting. The robot continued unfolding its panels until it had completely covered the cannon, as slick and as smoothly as a new paint job. It then used the prize in the center of the origami cube for generating new projectiles of its own, cutting off the cannon from the underground munitions supply that was feeding it now. It would no longer need the shells that were merely playing pocket billiards with the planes.

  A similar mating of Origami Bots and auto-firing cannons was happening across the HAARP defense array.

  And as soon as that mating was complete, the Origami Bots commenced firing.

  ZPEs to be precise.

  The zero point energy weapons made short work of the dragon ship that was still dropping fighters. With no more mother ship to supply any more babies, the number of the troops Omega Force and Alpha Unit were facing at least could only diminish from here.

  The dragon ship, or babies’ mother, had the decency to fall at the edge of the field with the HAARP antenna array.

  It was quickly cannibalized by the next-generation tech being used to grow more Tesla Towers along with the coils at the top. Indafi had worked alongside Ariel in lock sync with her to modify his nanites so they could do more than protect the Tesla poles and coils from the cold. They now had what they needed to rebuild the towers if they were subject to damage—thanks to the upgrades to the nanite hive mind AI coordinating them, and they could grow “baby” towers that matured quickly in the presence of enough “fertilizer” like the dragon ship provided.

  Though it was a hell of a thing to be “farming” the ice field in the middle of an all-out battle. But it couldn’t be helped. There was no longer time to sequence things, not with The Collectors closing in on both the Kang escapees and the humans.

  The ZPE shells were powerful enough that when they made contact with a Kang fighter, they took out more than one craft at a time.

  Soon Kang air support would be entirely suppressed.

  And the automated defense system could go to work on the ground troops. Though that presented a slightly different problem. Ballistics that powerful, if they weren’t careful, would take out the compound, the Tesla Towers, and Omega Force.

  Speaking of Omega Force… What the hell were those bastards doing to contribute to the war effort?”

  ***

  Ajax saw the Kang army on the ground—thousands strong—more materializing each moment—versus the six Omega Force operatives, not exactly designed for stopping armies, and did what he did, started cracking wise—or stupid, in his case—to stay calm.

  “I was very naïve sexually. My first girlfriend asked me to do missionary and I buggered off to Africa for six months.” He had the decency to fire off a shot at the incoming Kang army before loading another joke into his mouth and firing it out his lips. “Love is like a fart. If you have to force it, it’s probably sh
it.”

  His next carefully aimed shot—he was known for his sniper abilities—took off the head of another of the Kang ground forces’ leaders. They were easy enough to tell apart. They stood a couple feet taller than the others. They were not of the caste of giants, but, presumably the caste of commanders.

  So far, Ajax was averaging one exploding leader head for each shot. Of course, he’d had the sense to switch to ZPE bullets. He didn’t know if the others in Omega Force had caught up to his way of thinking yet.

  He’d love to hit those Kang bastards with his ZPE 40mm grenade shells, but they were better saved for when he could get a position higher up and could fire further back into the enemy’s lines—and further away from the compound he was trying to protect; it was that or blow up the compound at the same time.

  He’d found himself a perch in a tree to give him the elevation he wanted. His smart clothing had matched the surroundings perfectly, and though thin and lightweight could stop most projectiles. Not that the Kang could be bothered to inquire into his presence at all, far less shoot at him.

  Continuing to force calm upon himself, and supplementing the jokes between sniper kills with whistling now, he started whistling Who Are You, from The Who. Maybe because Omega Force was fending off an enemy whose reasons for existence, far less for attacking, were still a bit unclear. Little was known about the Kang at all, after how many encounters with them?

  “My girlfriend is absolutely beautiful. Body like a Greek statue—completely pale, no arms.” BAM! Another Kang leader head gone.

  The soldiers just kept marching toward the compound, not losing a step, like they just didn’t care. They didn’t even bother to inquire into the direction the sniper shots were coming from. They were that certain of their inevitable win.

  Ajax spit out another spent shell, loaded a new one. Took aim. “My husband’s penis is like a semi-colon. I can’t remember what it’s for and I never use it anyway.” He liked to think he’d nailed the female voice the joke required perfectly, but his last shot had damaged his hearing a bit.

  He let loose the latest spent shell, loaded another. But with each leader’s head he exploded, Ajax felt less impactful in this war effort, not more. So what if the Kang had one leader for every hundred troops. What was one/one-hundredth of a galaxy full of Kang soldiers? Still too much to ever put down enough of them, that’s what.

  He fired all the same. He was getting used to flying in the face of the inevitable. Let the Leons of the world or one of the other brainiacs think of a better way out of this. This was the best he could manage for now.

  ***

  Crumley, partly exposed behind the makeshift cover he barely had time to pick out for himself before the advanced guard of the Kang ground forces started marching in from out of nowhere, surveyed the situation as best he could from his compromised vantage point, and didn’t like what he saw at all.

  The fire being shot out of the mouths of the Kang fighter jets—which really did look like baby dragons—burned so hot that it peeled away the hundreds of feet of ice in a series of flashes, exposing patches of the subterranean HAARP compound’s roof. Without the protection of that ice…

  To make matters worse, the Kang ground troops fell into the holes opened up by the jet fighters repeated fiery discharges.

  Crumley used the strength of his gorilla-like body to lob nanite bombs the size of papayas, right into the holes. The exploding nanites flash-froze the Kang at the same time they filled the holes opened up by the Kang fighter jets. The tomb of ice alone wouldn’t have been enough to hold them in check; the Kang were immune to any and all temperature extremes, as far as Omega Force knew. But the nanites reinforcing those ice blocks and keeping them from remelting at any temperatures would hold them for all eternity.

  This was the “gift” he’d stolen from Soma City. The archeologists there used the “papaya bombs” as cryo-preservatives of sorts for their more delicate finds. Museum exhibit snapshots of time could thus be salvaged even from exploding spaceships and planets.

  Crumley kept his fingers crossed that the automatic cannons would take the last of the fighter jets out of the air before Crumley ran out of “papayas” to throw. The ones he couldn’t hurl far enough, he took to tossing with an AI-enhanced mortar which did all the distance calculations and the aiming for him. Honestly, it was difficult to hold on to a sense of pride as a Special Forces officer when it seemed to Crumley that toys like this could make the most hopeless soldier into a proficient killer.

  Apparently he was not to be allowed a moment to feel sorry for himself without Mother piling on. Some small sliver of her brain must have picked up on their situation here, and she’d decided to beam in even more Omega Force clones.

  That was great in theory.

  In reality, watching his identical twins—many times over—and the numerous copies of the rest of his team, mixing it up with the Kang soldiers on the battle field, trading blows in hand-to-hand combat, and seeing Team Good Guys fall one after the other, just meant Crumley got to see himself and everyone he cared most about in the world die over and over again.

  A morale booster it wasn’t.

  For what it was worth, their copies were doing damn well against kill-proof Kang warriors. Mother had fortified Omega Force further with nanites, making them just as tough. And the nano-edged blades they wielded could be slipped between the Kang scales, and once those nanites were inside them, the Kang drones fell, to die slowly and painfully. The idea was for the remaining Kang to assess their losses and rush to their companion’s aide. So much for Kang camaraderie. They just didn’t seem to care how many of them lay on the ground squirming, screaming, and dying.

  If the Omega Force clones mixing it up on the battlefield mano-a-mano killed four, six, eight, or more before they fell, it hardly mattered. There were just too many troops and they kept beaming in. The Omega Force clones were buying the compound time to come up with a more long-term fix for this situation. That was all.

  And this was one numbers game Mother was not going to win. Unlike the Kang who could just keep beaming in more soldiers, Mother was too multi-tasked to continue to give this one minute battlefield in a galactic civilization she was helping to birth another thought.

  Crumley, what’s wrong with you? You got the communiqué that Laney had closed whatever portal the Kang troops was coming through with her nanite black hole bombs. By rights, they should all be cooped up in their galaxy, part of The Collectors’ Menagerie of galactic civilizations. So how the hell is any of this that you’re seeing even possible?

  Responding to the aurora borealis-like light effects overhead, Crumley arched his head up.

  Natty.

  He was calibrating the Earth’s planetary defense shield.

  And he was obviously working at a quantum level.

  Because what he was doing here was also affecting the barrier field around The Collectors’ chicken coops.

  Crumley got on the COMMS to Natty. “Hey, young fella. Whatever you’re doing to mess with that energy shield above our heads—” Crumley gazed at the Tesla Towers, they were lit, suggesting they were rocking some kind of high energy output. And there were now more towers than ever—“it’s reopened the hole in the barrier field holding the Kang in that Laney closed up. That mistake could just save us from The Collectors another day, if we want to sic the Kang on them, but today, you need to fix your mistake, please. We won’t be able to buy you much more time otherwise.”

  A few seconds later, Ariel cut in on his COMMS channel. “He heard you, Crumley, even if he’s not answering. Probably too busy fixing the problem.”

  “Appreciate the peace of mind, little girl.” Crumley signed off.

  “Now, Crumley, what else can you do to make yourself useful?” he said, surveying the field. “Didn’t you appropriate one of Patent’s toys—without his permission? He’s got so many, right? Not like he can bitch too loudly about you helping yourself.”

  A short while later Crumley wa
s inside the combine, a giant Patent-designed harvester that made one of those monsters that shucked acres of corn in one pass look like the toddler in the family. Crumley was thinking it came with nanite edged blades that could cut through anything—even Kang soldiers. He fired up the engine.

  And he headed onto the battlefield.

  Yep, turned corn on the cob into pure kernels, alright, speaking in metaphorical terms for the Kang soldiers he was looking at outside his control room. So far, Patent’s combine shielding was proving fairly impervious to fire-breathing dragon jet fighters and the laser fire of Kang assault rifles as well. The damn combine’s cockpit was heated, to boot. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Crumley, for fighting a war in the lap of luxury like this. It’s just plain decadent, is what it is.”

  ***

  Leon marched out into the open in time to see the last of the Kang forces disappear the same way they had materialized.

  Natty must have made the adjustment he needed to return them to their cage.

  He gazed overhead and noticed the planetary shield was once again holding, stopping the asteroids from getting anywhere near the HAARP compound. The asteroids exploded at the edge of the outer atmosphere like the most spectacular fireworks his eyes had ever beheld. It was beyond beautiful, even if the reason for the fireworks was a bit sick.

  The last of the dragon ships caught on this side of the barrier made it further through, but the shield had thickened like a lush pie crust. By the time the dragon ships penetrated to the bottommost layer they were little more than embers spit from a fire.

  He got on his COMMS to Natty.

  And not to congratulate him.

  “You feeling good about yourself?”

  “Hell, yeah!” Natty replied.

  “Well, I got news for you, the one thing responsible for this galactic civilization we’re trying to give birth to is that artifact on the moon—assuming we can get it recalibrated in time. That makes it a more important asset right now than the Earth itself.

  “You. Have. Got. To. Get. A. Shield. Around. It. As. Well.