Theseus’s slowly vacating power breath would have put an outboard motor on a powerboat to shame. “I will personally recommend that he ask Solo to design a torture chamber for you to keep you alive for all eternity while dialing up the setting daily.”
“Okay! Okay! Christ everyone around here is a friggin’ drama queen. Honestly, I think there’s enough drama already,” Talius said walking off. He continued mumbling to himself, “Personally, I think it could do with an edit while in virtual space, clean up the environment, the politics…I could turn the whole place into paradise. But no, they want this museum to man’s stupidity preserved as is forever.”
“We have minutes to solve this problem, Talius!”
“Damn drama queens will be the end of me.” He didn’t bother to turn around, just exaggerated his marching stride in mock deference to Theseus’s nagging.
Talius was an obese humanoid with all his extra weight centered at his waist. Maybe the doctor had ordered that he just not stress if he wished to keep on living and abusing that body Mother gave him.
Theseus returned his eyes to the port window.
Surprion approached Theseus next. “You know this big-ass planet is more than a wrecking ball. Wherever it’s from, it must have resided in a goldilocks zone, because it’s ripe for colonization.”
“So you want to save it, too?”
Surprion shoved the data screen in his hands so he could judge for himself. Not that that stopped Surprion from piling on. “We could keep this Dead Zone station in orbit around it to facilitate its uplifting. Or hell as a space port so we can use the planet as a vacation getaway. Beats the hell out of the Nautilus’s central courtyard for decompressing. Not to mention a 7x Earth-size planet can accommodate a lot more people taking a breather from the madness Leon has a way of magnetizing to him.”
“Earth remains the priority. But if you can figure out how to save both worlds, save them. Better catch up to Talius fast. See he doesn’t give you any lip about it. Seems like even in Leon’s ranks there are a few slackers.”
Surprion gazed out the space port, flushed green. “I told him to teleport Earth out of the way nearly an hour ago!”
“Probably just pissed you made him figure out the controls on his own.”
Surprion stormed Talius’s direction, shouting, “You better hope Earth doesn’t scar my paradise planet you prickly pissant!”
Theseus shook his head. Seemed no one on Theta Team quite got the sense of urgency around saving Earth, peculiar for biosphere-loving scientist soldiers.
Surprion was a humanoid head out of which sprang spider-legs giving him his ability to ambulate. The legs could sprout smaller digits at the end to allow him to manipulate things as readily as if they were hands. He kept one of those hands held high with his data screen as he scurried after Talius.
Theseus returned his eyes to the wraparound port and gasped.
A meteor shower that was sure to take out both planets and the Dead Zone habitat he was currently occupying was upon them. “Ah, guys!” he shouted. “Now would be a good time.”
Theseus’s teleporting organ in the center of his forehead flared reflexively. He did not want to be the sole survivor to tell this tale. But that organ’s own survival instincts was overriding any suicidal desires he had right now.
As the first flaming meteors fell on the Shadow Star, so named because it could cloak itself but not enough to keep from casting a shadow before the star behind it, Talius must have flipped the right switch. Because they were out of there. A last second save? And he wants to call everyone else a drama queen?
FORTY-FOUR
THE CYLINDER WORLD, GALYPTO—A PLANET EATER
“Theseus? We have a problem,” Parnassus croaked.
Theseus finished addressing Sliver, whose job it was to relay his messages to Theta Team when Theseus was too busy to do so himself. Usually Theseus’s teleporting third-eye fast-tracked any message dissemination, but today, even that wasn’t fast enough. Sliver had the quirky ability to be in countless places at once—by jettisoning ever-thinner slices of himself to a new location, where he would appear, looking much like a hologram. Theta Team understood that if Sliver was talking to them, it was with the authority of Theseus and under his orders only.
Theseus’s orders, for right now, were to relay back to him what parts of what Dead Zone artificial worlds Theta Team had managed to activate, what exactly those Dead Zone habitats could currently do, and what they might be able to do once other functions were activated, station by station.
Theta Team could transmit this dense bandwidth information via complex vocalizations, disguised as animal cries. Their bodies’ nano encoded and parallel-transmitted the detailed engineering information needed for Theta Team operatives to do their work. Their signaling worked well within enclosed ecosystems. But world to world like this? Mother had engineered each Theta Team member with Singularity phone technology built right into their genome—a complex silicon, carbon, gallium matrix, much like a mindchip, that was lodged in their brains. That meant Theta Team could stay in touch across worlds, even solar systems and galaxies—in theory.
But some transmissions weren’t getting through. It might be the stress of working under conditions of two colliding galaxies. It might be a property of the Dead Zone habitats, their tech somehow blocking Theta Team’s COMMS channels. It might be something the Kang were up to—thwarting the communiqués with appropriated Dead Zone technology they had figured out how to use ahead of Theta Team. Hell, any number of these unique worlds belonging either to the Kang Galaxy or the Milky Way Galaxy might be to blame. Possibly some of them were built up out of exotic materials that played hell with singularity phone transmissions.
It was even possible that Theta Team’s COMMS were down entirely, and the only transmissions making it through were the ones Mother’s multi-tasking supersentience could route for them—in between her cagillion other functions involved with keeping two colliding galaxies from annihilating one another—or at least, from annihilating Team Good Guys.
“Theseus!” Parnassus had raised his voice another octave. “Did you not hear me? We have a problem, I said.”
Theseus turned from Sliver, the peculiar naked humanoid in pin-stripe gold, copper, silver, platinum, and a million other metallic hues—not unlike the thin slices of himself he sent hither and yon, to face Parnassus, the one addressing him, who looked like a creature who crawled out of a swamp in a low budget B-movie. Parnassus, to Theseus’s horror, was dripping foul smelling fluid from his every pore onto sensitive, hi-tech, alien equipment.
In his peripheral vision, Theseus could make out Sliver losing corporealness as more and more slices of him went hither and yon to carry out Theseus’s orders.
“What, Parnassus?” Theseus snapped back. He hadn’t even realized his nerves were that stretched; he felt currently, paradoxically, quite under control. Maybe he was faking it until he could truly feel that way, and had gotten lost in character—just not lost enough.
Parnassus pointed to the mouth of the cylinder, currently fully dilated.
“Wait,” Theseus remarked, “isn’t that one of our Milky Way Galaxy worlds?”
“Yep, and it’s coming straight for us. This cylinder believes it needs to dismantle it for raw materials to build another cylinder right now. Perhaps it’s on a time clock.”
“There’s no reverse gear on this thing? No way to turn us around or at least get out us out of the way in time?”
Parnassus froze and then sighed. “Not that we’ve found.”
Trying to calm himself with power breaths, Theseus ended up panting up a storm, sounding like a lion racing to close the gap on his prey. “We haven’t even had time to scan that world! There could be advanced sentience on it. That’s all we need is to start a war among our own ranks. Whoever’s on that world may well have friends on other planets.”
“Like I need you to tell me that. What I do need you tell me is what in the hell are we going to do!”
“Okay, calm down,” Theseus said, amazingly enough, finding that calm voice in himself, as he sunk back into character again as the person who could actually keep pace with all this madness. “Here’s what we’ll do. This cylinder world has got to have a scanning function so it can rebuild what it tears apart, just in case it makes this kind of mistake. Just like Mother can reprint our bodies and download our last recorded memories to them if they’re destroyed. It’s what I would have done when I engineered this thing, if I had engineered it. And these guys are more evolved than us, so in theory…”
“That’s all I need is to play another game of Hide And Seek right now with the hidden functionality of this cylinder world. I have several hundred Theta Team operatives focused on unmasking those secrets right now.”
“Yeah, but now they’re prioritizing the search for this one item.”
“And if we can’t find it in time?” Parnassus asked.
“Then we become a destroyer of worlds.”
Parnassus took his eyes off of the planet racing toward them to glare at the even crazier phenomenon that was Theseus. “I am not ordering an extinction level event,” Parnassus barked, “unless it is to protect an entire solar system or larger from the spread of a contagion! We’re Theta Team! We’re built to facilitate life, hell, to bioengineer it to fill the void when there is none.”
“You have your orders, Parnassus. You’ll get over yourself today, same as the rest of us.”
As far as Theseus was concerned the matter was settled. So he beamed himself to the next hotspot location with the biggest fire in need of putting out.
Parnassus, who could give The Swamp Creature—the kind coming out of Louisiana Bayou swamps envisioned in those late 20th century movies—a run for his money, roared. That roar would have sent any sane creature running. But he wasn’t among other sane creatures today. He was among other Theta Team operatives, who would only care about any vital information his sounds were transmitting, hidden in Parnassus’s audible frequencies. And Parnassus had transmitted only one such message: “Find and activate the scanner that backs up all lifeforms on the world we are about to digest to digital format—now!”
Born with his peculiar, deep, hoarse, labored breathing pattern, like a COPD patient fighting for each breath of air, he seldom noticed his rasping sounds. But he noticed them now. Now they sounded just like he felt.
***
THE CYLINDER WORLD, SACRAN
Theseus teleported himself straight to Sacran to find out what the hell was going on over here.
The cylinder world wasn’t as big as Galypto, with only half the diameter, but that was still pretty damn big—enough to squeeze in a planetoid at either end.
No one so far had found out how to turn on the lights in here, evidently. Though there was plenty of spotlit illumination coming from the headlamps of the workers, and handheld torches.
Among Sacran’s peculiar properties was the fact that the cylinder was not spinning, cancelling any artificial gravity effect that it ought to have. No one had bothered to try and get the cylinder spinning again.
There was a very specific reason for that.
In the center of the cylinder floated a fleet of galactic cruisers that made the ones the Nautilus had at her disposal look like one of the poorer worlds were doing their best to contribute to the war effort for fear of being thrown out of the Earth’s newly minted galactic federation otherwise.
These galactic cruisers were about twenty times the size.
And they looked mean.
Theseus would have taken one look at them de-cloaking around his world and surrendered. Unconditionally.
The entire surface of the crafts were nothing but weapons firing solutions. What exactly came out of those countless ports was something Theta Team, assigned to this cylinder world, formerly located in the Dead Zone, were still trying to determine.
Theta Team operatives were crawling over the ships like ants at a picnic, using their rocketboots to place themselves where they needed to be for their examinations.
Lassiter rocketed himself to where Theseus was hovering. Theseus didn’t have rocket boots on. His teleporting third-eye came with gravity-canceling abilities, along with a GPS-like pinpoint stabilization.
“If you were looking to wow me, Lassiter, you succeeded.”
Lassiter waved at him dismissively. “All of the cylinder worlds are rife with gasp-appeal.”
Lassiter was a humanoid. Technically. Though he’d have a tough time proving his case in even a trans-galactic court of law. Largely a silicon lifeform, he had more tentacles than an octopus, and a brainpan—much like any octopus—that could fit several clones of Theseus inside it, and Theseus was large, even by Omega Force standards, even by Theta Team standards, for that matter.
“What is it that couldn’t wait, Lassiter?”
Lassiter used the tip of one of his many large tentacles—which could subdivide as needed into ever smaller tentacles—to project an image of the outside of Sacran.
Theseus gasped for the second time in as many minutes.
The hull was crawling with Kang, pulling apart the cylinder hull with their bare hands.
“As you know,” Lassiter said, his voice gravelly, “the Kang are a space race. They do not require an atmosphere and therefore can take as long as they like dismantling this cylinder world. As it turns out, they have no desire to take their time.”
“Why are they so interested in this cylinder world above and beyond all the others?”
“The starbursts you see coming from the galactic cruisers,” Lassiter explained, “they’re not doing that to illuminate Sacran so the Theta Team engineers can do their work. Though, I must admit, it helps. Those are energy torpedoes from the one firing option we’ve managed to get to work so far. And they’re headed right through the hull straight to the Kang dragon ships, the golden dragons that birth them, and even the Kang Castle worlds. As soon as this weapon gets a lock, it fires. And it only takes one shot to totally obliterate any of those targets.”
“So these things don’t just look a lot deadlier than the Nautilus and her galactic cruisers, they are.”
“One of our Theta Team operatives was bioengineered to see past cloaking devices of all kinds, including the one used to hide this cylinder world, or we’d never have found the place, and neither would the Kang. But with the cruisers on auto-fire, it’s hard not to locate us, even if their sensors can’t detect us.”
“Surprised they just haven’t decided to destroy the cylinder.”
“Oh, they’re not that foolish. They want the cruisers. The Kang specialize in appropriating stolen legacy tech to empower the drones. And the Kang Tesla types specialize in doing what we’re attempting to do.”
“Your final assessment, Lassiter,” Theseus said sounding curter than he meant to.
“We need Gamma Group on line now. Not five minutes from now. Five minutes from now, this cylinder world will have fallen to the Kang.”
Lassiter didn’t have to say that twice.
Theseus tapped his Nautilus chest insignia and pin for good measure. But he had already opened a Singularity phone line to Mother—as she existed in all timelines. “We need Gamma Group on line now. And not just at this location, but at any Dead Zone space station on the verge of being breached by the Kang.”
Lassiter snorted. “Like I haven’t tried that already. That bitch has selective hearing. Leon might have a chance of getting through to her, but I doubt right now, with all she’s facing, if even he’d get through to her.”
“He’s not one of the chosen ones, Lassiter. As far as the Nautilus is concerned, we are her chosen; he’s just a second-class citizen, or worse, human vermin infecting her that she tolerates for the sake of a healthy and robust ecosystem.”
Lassiter smiled. It was kind of a creepy smile, exposing a light field on the other side of his lips that made Theseus think he was staring straight into the heart of a nuclear reactor.
Gamma Gro
up had already beamed to their location.
Lassiter showed him the view from the projection coming out of the tip of one of his tentacles. Gamma Group—looking like Giacometti sculptures, only with more musculature, but no more finished, ridiculously rough-edged, impossibly well-armored, as if made of metal-rich meteorite rock—fired lasers from their eyes, obliterating Kang drones on contact.
When Gamma Group had exhausted that option, they landed on the hull themselves and engaged in hand-to-hand combat.
In short order, the Kang looked the way a forest looked after a logging company had passed through. And the Kang were known for being breakproof. Not to mention laserproof.
Gamma Group’s typical opening gambit, even before engaging in fisticuffs, was to stick their talons—nano-edged blades that extended from their nailbeds like fingernails at the end of catapults—between the Kang drones’ scales. They vacuumed the energy out of the Kang on multiple wavelengths. It was as if Gamma Group were energy vampires, sucking in whatever energy was stored in the atomic bonds of the Kang bodies. Theseus could divine that much because the Kang turned to dust before his eyes, their bodies desiccated from the inside out, as the molecular bonds were torn apart for an energy source, even before Gamma Force drilled down to the atomic, and possibly, sub-atomic level.
Lassiter could read his mind easily from this close. “Your conjecture regarding what’s going on is spot on, I imagine. They must have used up their energy stores from what they’d sucked up from solar radiation firing their lasers, before recruiting additional energy sources.”
“I’d be more impressed if they could feed on zero point energy directly.”
“I’m guessing that’s the reason some of those Kang are exploding instead of turning to dust,” Lassiter replied. “The more energy depleted ones in Gamma Group aren’t wasting time with more superficial energy sources. That or it’s the more depleted ones that have to feed on the cruder energy sources until they can get to the ZPE. I’m afraid Gamma Group is as alien to us as we are to them. And Mother has downgraded briefing us on their abilities until she has the processing time to justify such wastefulness.”
Moving Earth Page 36