“Can you imagine just how awful the biospheres were in the Dead Zone once upon a time to scar the psyches of a Galactic Civilization enough to get them to cannibalize their own worlds just to be free of them?”
Ariel grunted. “Sounds like another job for Psi Force, sucking any psychic impressions they left behind for more clues about them. I’ve heard thoughts linger like a snail’s slime trail for eternity.” She stuttered a bit with filtering timelines for more Nautili with Mars war gods to tap, before bringing herself back to her and Theseus’s “jazz number,” playing their minds off one another.
“Help is on the way, Theseus,” Ariel assured him. “That’s why I’m fishing the timelines now for the other Nautili. Even the ones without Mars war gods can help you with bioprinting enough new Theta Team operatives specialized for each of those space stations.”
“As soon as they arrive on site, I’ll get my people to move on to the next one to procure the intel Mother needs to adapt us to the latest habitats.”
“Help is on the way with that, too,” Ariel said. “I’ve designed modified probes for reaching into each of the worlds and the space habitats in the Gypsy Galaxy and scooping up the necessary intel the Nautili will need to work their magic. The probes will double as space mines to provide extra protection, locally, should you need it.”
“You mean, should we be in the middle of all this rehab work when we get beamed across the barrier—right into the Kang dynasty, and right into galactic war.”
“Yes, well, assuming Murphy’s Law still holds…” Ariel said, her eyes on her monitor, and her mind still only absently on her and Theseus’s conversation.
“Thanks, Ariel. I’ll handle my end. You handle yours.” Theseus signed off the line.
Ariel was missing him already. She hated to say it but she might be attracted to the guy. She wasn’t even sure if coupling with him was biologically possible, considering the amount of differences in their humanoid designs.
Ariel could hear from Theseus’s voice before he signed off that “his end of things” included a lot of tasks he didn’t want to weigh her down with.
Just what the hell was going on over there?
Ariel felt that much guiltier for entertaining her divergent thinking at the expense of the war effort and at Theseus’s expense. Then again, she was in Singularity Time, linked with Mother, as Theseus was. So if Ariel’s little digressions had been okayed by Mother, one and all, it was likely because Mother’s parallel-processing mind was pursuing all these possible paths to the future and more simultaneously in preparation for a fate no one could have imagined.
The day was likely coming soon when galaxies would collide.
That meant a war with innumerable front lines just to protect what they could of the Gypsy Galaxy—even before the Kang were factored into the equation.
Maybe such a day would never come, but Mother wasn’t taking any chances.
She must have been an even bigger fan of Murphy’s Law than the humanoids in her protective embrace.
THIRTY-THREE
EARTH
THE HAARP COMPOUND IN ALASKA
OMEGA FORCE AND ALPHA UNIT, CLONE TEAM TWO
WITH DOPPELGANGERS OF LANEY AND NATTY IN TOW
“Shit, I forgot I was supposed to be helping Skyhawk get a lock on more than just the Earth. That moon artifact is going to have to help with teleporting an entire galaxy.” Ariel had no choice. She moved her COMMS work, fishing the timelines for other Nautili that weren’t currently in crisis mode to help with the pending crisis in this timeline of overlapping galaxies, to her mindchip.
And she queued up what the Nautilus’s brain trust in this timeline had so far on the artifact on her holographic display, so she could think through that problem better with her hands.
“I suppose it would just be needy to ask Mother to clone another one of you for local use,” she mumbled, “considering all the bioprinters employed right now. Damn, damn, damn.” Then she noticed something out of the corner of her eye on her holographic display summoned out of the void, again with the help of her mindchip. “Hello. What the hell is this?”
Ariel continued to investigate. “Someone has hacked their way into Omega Force’s COMMS, and ours, for that matter.”
Satellite’s ears pricked and he closed the distance between them. “No way.”
“Look for yourself,” she said, pointing to the malware scrolling before her eyes.
“Shit, you’re right. I’ll get on it and close that backdoor.”
“Wait! No!” Ariel exclaimed. “Whoever it is, she’s done much of my work for me. I was supposed to build on Skyhawk’s hack of the moon artifact to make sure it could get a lock on a lot more than just Earth. Like try an entire galaxy of worlds and artificial habitats both. Let’s find out who this is, where they’re at, and find a way to bring them into the fold.”
Satellite had been working the whole time they were talking. “She’s on Earth. She’s a kid. Like an eleven year old.” Satellite and Ariel took a beat to stare at one another dumbly, before that started turning each of them on, and they broke eye contact. He was simply embarrassed. She’d forgotten he had a thing for her, and well, she for him, too, in those spare moments when she had a chance to think about it. The truth was, she had been thinking about it; it was seeping between the cracks of her multi-tasking, slowing the functions she was carrying out on each of the channels of her mind, worse than malware corrupting and slowing her mindchip. Still, they drew strength from one another, and seemed to be more turned on by each other under stress, when they were both working their magic, than afterwards, when the magic and the moment was gone. So what were a couple of hot-blooded teens to do? Never mind her latest tryst on the singularity phone with Theseus had just raised the heat on those copper wires in her brain all the more.
In the time Ariel had spent digressing on this point, Satellite had queued up an image of the girl—and her family, a dad, a mom, and a dog, all heading north in a convertible.
“Is that a black 1971 Ford LTD?” Ariel mumbled, making an ugly face.
“Well, if we’re worried about Leon onboarding these people, I think we have our in. That guy lives for classic cars, I mean, when he’s not going to war with all of creation.”
“Don’t be a drama queen. To date, Leon’s just in command of an entire galaxy. Not sure what kind of general they call that exactly. We might have to figure out a new term.” Ariel was talking absently, her mind very much focused on the curiosity of the family determined to make it down windy roads in Harding County, New Mexico that a car of that length should have had no reason being on. A roadster maybe, but not that battleship on wheels. It suddenly dawned on her what didn’t fit right. They were heading away from Los Alamos Labs. “Shit, I think they’re headed to one of the black sites, which I guess makes sense if they’re looking for help hacking the moon artifact.”
Satellite nodded and Ariel glared at him, wondering why. “I just hacked my way into her car’s AI,” he said. Her name’s Hailey, by the way.”
“The car’s AI?”
“No, the brainiac girl’s. She doesn’t even have mind upgrades. And get this, the father is even smarter. He appears to be working on his laptop to figure out how to teleport the Gypsy Galaxy—as we’re now calling the Milky Way—out of the clutches of The Collectors, and how to cloak it as well.”
Satellite and Ariel took another beat to stare in shock into one another’s eyes. This time they didn’t try to dodge the cresting wave of infatuation that the act triggered, kissing one another. The sparks that flew between them seemed to not just snap them back into the moment, but energized and focused their minds in turn. As focused as they were, the sustained concentration for this long had caused the lens to get out of focus, if just by a hair. The kiss helped to calibrate their lenses again.
“I suppose we leave them where they are for now,” Ariel said. “We can always beam them up to the Nautilus later.”
“Hailey’s all for it,
” Satellite said, his eyes going back to his monitor; he was listening to their conversations in the car as well on his in-ear COMMS. “But the rest of the family isn’t exactly on board with that idea.”
“We’ll bunk them in a suite next to DeWitt, the wife, and the kid. Corin can help the rest of the family make the adjustment, as she had to.”
“Yeah, about that…” Satellite said, lowering his eyes from her.
“What about it?”
“Hailey wants to marry Thor, to carry on the family tradition of a genius marrying a moron. The father wants her to marry Skyhawk; says they need to improve the blood line, not water it down further.”
Ariel bit her lip, trying to chew off the smile.
“Just what is the protocol for eleven-year-olds carrying on outside of international jurisdictions—in the depths of space—when they’re genetically modified and chip upgraded and, well, prodigal?” Satellite asked.
“If their parents have anything to say about it, it’ll be exactly the same as it was in Victorian England, circa 1850.” Ariel returned her eyes to her screen and to her problems at hand. “Let Hailey know I’m on the line and we’ll be working on this problem together from here on out, to fast-track things.”
“Oh, she already knows. Nothing slow about that girl,” Satellite said.
“Should I be jealous?”
“In about seven years.”
“What a relief, since surviving the next seven minutes should be enough of a challenge.”
Satellite traced the course Hailey and her family was taking on his monitor. “You sure we want to let them continue to the black site without some kind of chaperone? They’re headed into Kang-occupied territory, for Techa’s sake.”
Ariel thought about it, but only for a second. “If we swarm them with a detail of droids or robots, that’ll just draw more attention to them. Their best chance, I’m afraid, to slip in undetected, is unaided. And if they are detected, their best chance of survival is to simply be a non-threat, which I’m guessing they are.”
“Yeah, well, not with that kid in the car. Father seems to be a bit out to lunch, one of those that regresses under conditions of extreme stress. But she’s working to bring him back on line.”
“Then it’s one more thing for you to monitor, Satellite. Keeping an eye on them is more in your bailiwick. And bring Mother into the loop, in case we have to beam them off of Earth in a hurry. We can’t afford to lose them.”
“But you’ll need me to parse Nautili with and without Mars war gods in alternative timelines.”
“Get used to being down a well-deserved clone or two,” Ariel said. “Populating a galaxy overnight and getting it ready to go on the road, has everyone stretched a bit thin—and in an increasing number of timelines.”
Satellite gave her one last look for good measure, mostly for the sake of his hard-on, before returning to multitasking his various chores.
THIRTY-FOUR
EARTH’S MOON
THE ARTIFACT CHAMBER
Skyhawk came out of his catatonia like someone had breathed life into one of those terracotta soldiers they dug up in China. He was nearly as covered in dust. Nearly as stiff, any chance of fluid movement still a long way off.
He stared dumbly at the moon artifact. “I did it. I think.”
“You got this thing to beam us the hell out of here?” Patent asked, checking the cavern for any remaining Kang caste members still on the move.
“And back to the Milky Way Galaxy.” Skyhawk gazed at Patent, an even dumber smile on his face. “Ariel helped me think through the problem, as did this eleven-year-old girl in New Mexico who hacked into our COMMS. She’s bitching about her training bra.”
“Uh, huh. Why does being saved by an eleven-year-old girl seem the least strange thing about this entire affair? Well, come on, kid. I’m from the seeing-is-believing caste of humans. Let’s go up top and take a look at the stars.”
Before Skyhawk could take a step, Patent sniffed the air and tensed. “Shush,” he said, grabbing Skyhawk, throwing him over his shoulders, and ducking for cover under a pile of Kang bodies from the Giants caste.
A split-second later two figures materialized in the cave.
Patent was worried the more inexperienced Skyhawk would give away their position, but the kid had slipped back into a catatonic state after just getting one look at these guys.
The two elongated figures, maybe nine-feet-tall each, were extremely slender and clad in vibrantly-colored robes. They looked more like high priests than museum curators. Maybe the rumors about them percolating through the Nautilus and the clone teams, in near constant communications with one another, had run afield of the truth.
The hairless figures looked desiccated or perhaps evolved from some desert species, from reptilian precursors. Their skin was rugged and grey. The sunken parts of their faces were covered in darkened mesh patterns, perhaps serving some sensing function. Their large bulbous, mushroom-shaped heads had no brainpan. The exposed organ flexed, as if it was part of how they communicated psychically, or simply in response to thought.
The beings beamed lasers from their eyes at the artifact—different colored lasers. The rainbow of light followed one band at a time, as if they were downloading different data along different frequencies to the artifact.
And then they were gone.
Patent stood up, surveyed the cavern with the two latest intruders now gone; it was littered with at least three castes of Kang. For anyone not bothering to make a closer inspection it would be easy to believe that the Kang had indeed escaped their chicken coop with one of their planets and its orbiting moon.
If that moon artifact Patent was staring at truly was keyed now to the entire Milky Way Galaxy, not just to the Earth, he didn’t like the way things portended.
Leon’s gut instincts were proving to be dead on, as usual.
“Wake up, kid!” He shook Skyhawk. “The Milky Way Galaxy isn’t long for this quadrant of the universe. Soon we’re going to be crashing into the Kang Galaxy, and that most definitely will trigger an intergalactic war with them.” He was still shaking Skyhawk hard as he continued relaying the facts of life to him. Skyhawk probably thought he was a car dashboard’s bobble head figure. “And if you think you’re taking a nap through all of that, you’re sadly mistaken. Eleven-year-old savior and future queen of the galaxy or not. You. Are. Going. To. Do. Your. Part!”
Skyhawk snapped to on a dime. “Wait, you’re going to marry me off to an eleven-year-old? Since I’m the rightful king of the galaxy, that’s the only thing that makes any sense. And I did not come this far to be married off to a woman in a training bra! I just won’t have it.”
Patent grabbed him again, threw him over his shoulder, and ran with him up to the surface of the moon.
There he stood and stared, waiting for the all-too-familiar stars to change. Soaking in The Big Dipper, and the Sagittarius constellation, possibly for the last time. Before the double-exposure effect of being overlaid with the Kang Galaxy just made a blurry mess of his favorite constellations, turning, who knows, a horse and his mounted archer into a hippo in a tutu. The Gemini constellation depicting the twins might soon be depicting triplets or quadruplets. As if Patent’s sense of reality weren’t muddied enough with recent events.
Still, the sigh of relief for now emanating from Patent’s lips, from being among familiar sights, was palpable. The thought of his anchoring being snatched away from him again, had tears flowing down his eyes.
And there it was.
Double-exposure of the “negative.”
The muddiness may have confused Patent’s orientation in the heavens.
But there was no confusing what was going on.
Planets were already colliding into one another.
The hellacious explosions but the latest fireworks in the sky.
Even before the Kang could fire off a shot—all hell was breaking loose. This was going to get even uglier f.a.s.t.
Patent though
t of Skyhawk still slumped over his shoulder that he’d forgotten to set down. “Maybe it’s just as well you keep your eyes focused on my ass, Skyhawk. The view of the stars right now isn’t any more settling. Though if I shit in your face, it’s nothing personal. Just me reacting to the view.”
THIRTY-FIVE
EARTH
CIMARRON, NEW MEXICO
The Cimarron outback looked like much of New Mexico, a combination of stark and jaw-dropping. Dusk just pointed up the jaw-dropping part, including the snow-capped mountain in the distance. Even the stark part, vast, endless ranchlands no one could bother to fence because that was what cowboys were for, impressed. In twilight’s last gleaming, even the grasslands were an undulating shag carpet of shimmering gold. The sky verging on purple.
“We’re here,” Hailey said. “The place that officially isn’t here. One of our government’s precious black sites.”
Her father looked out the window. “It’s a field of buffalo, kiddo.”
“My theory is this. This will be the last place on earth anyone would think to bomb. Well, far down the bottom of the list anyway. And the buffalo, at the very least, provide ready access to red meat. Would-be survivalists ought to know enough to be vegetarians, considering what a hazard to the environment cattle of any kind are. But maybe the eco-consciousness thing is a tough sell in a post-apocalyptic world after everything is irradiated anyway.”
Her comments were met with dumb silence.
And then…
“Yeah, I’m sold,” her father said.
“Yeah, it’s kind of obvious when you put it that way,” Rose replied. “How many points do we get for finding this thing?”
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