A number of Cassandra clones from various Nautili were on the ground as well. The nun and Cassandra were the only two action figure dolls in Natty’s menagerie aboard the Nautilus that would have any chance of keeping Theta Team off of one another, while not hurting them.
Meanwhile, Solo—no doubt present here in clone form also; Solo was not one to leave the Nautilus in person, not ever—he considered himself the Captain Nemo of the Nautilus—the one person who, if the Nautilus’s supersentience failed, could theoretically build a better one for her. Not even Natty could do that. Natty’s father, who had developed the original Nautilus beneath the ocean of Europa back when the Earth’s solar system was the center of everything, for the sake of privacy… even he had merely grown Mother from seed algorithms, hoping for the best. He himself likely couldn’t reproduce the million to one shot that she was, if he were alive. But Nemo, or rather Solo could—or at least Leon suspected. No one fully understood how his alien mind worked. And Solo was definitely not the tell-all type.
Solo orbited the crystal sphere at the center of the cylinder, spinning like a disco ball at a discothèque, defying gravity. Solo himself was defying gravity with the aid of his rocket boots. He had his cane in his hand as always—the crystal ball of his cane a 10-dimensional intelligence he offloaded his lesser thinking to, to free up his mind.
Nemo, not surprisingly, appeared unaffected by the crystal sphere rotating gently in an anticlockwise direction.
Laser blasts shot out of his cane periodically at the various nuns and Cassandras doing their best to contain the situation on the ground. Apparently they needed the booster shots from his cane to keep from turning on one another and on Theta Team for real, no longer containing them, but dispatching them.
“What is Solo up to?” Leon mumbled, talking more to himself.
“Unknown,” Ria replied. “I cannot provide data on Nemo’s multidimensional mind. Scanning it is impossible with my current technology.”
Even the AIs referred to Solo as Nemo, Leon thought.
Finally, Solo appeared to have sussed out the device. He aimed the ball of his cane at it, pulsed the giant crystal sphere with light from the head of his cane—that light no doubt carrying quite the data feed of a 10-dimensional mind—and shut down the sphere’s operation. The sphere slowed to a stop.
Peace had been restored on the ground.
Leon craned his head to Cassandra in the pilot’s seat and nodded. She took the craft down. It hovered just off the ground, the door opening by virtue of the hull melting in that area, forming a hole, and using the “melted metal” to form stepping stones to the ground that hovered some distance from one another, like pebbles in a stream.
By the time Leon was on the ground, Solo was there to greet him.
“Well?” Leon realized he might have started with “Hello,” and “thanks.” But fighting an intergalactic war with Mother Nature on a celestial scale and the Kang, both for which they were ill-prepared, had made him terser than ever.
“It appears the Ethereals who gifted us their Dead Zone technology weren’t always so enlightened. That crystal computer is the equivalent of a mind ray, the kind the US military developed on Earth to use on the enemy to get them to turn on one another, or to suicide, just to escape the tsunami of negative emotions sweeping over them, and/or to surrender, feeling overcome with defeatism. Only this thing works on a galactic scale.”
“Shit!” Leon stared in his increasingly all-too familiar hang-jawed method at the crystal. “Any chance that thing is affecting the Kang?”
“No, they’re immune to it. Then again, what can you do to those guys to make them any more sour tempered than they already are?” Solo had turned away from Leon to take in the crystal and was leaning on his cane, massaging the ball of his hand with the crystal geodesic dome that was its handle. “It is a marvel, isn’t it?”
“And if you get it to turn in the other direction?” Leon goaded.
“You guessed it. It puts out a feel-good vibe. It’s quite a peacekeeper all on its own, whichever way you turn it.”
Leon thought at once of the Raj and their planet, Mirage. Now Leon had two ways to affect psyches at a distance, one using chi energy, another, a form of energy that might work when chi was in short supply.
Leon smiled, responding to Solo’s comment a bit off cue. “Yes, it is. It will come in handy when I’ve finished morphing The Milky Way Galaxy into the Gypsy Galaxy, teleporting it from one hotspot in the multiverse to another. It will be fully militarized by then—the entire galaxy—and we will be the peacekeepers for the multiverse.”
Solo turned back to him and smiled that reptilian smile of his which was easy to misread. “Easy, Leon, I like where your head’s at. But first we have to finish prying these galaxies apart, not to mention escaping the Kang. To say nothing of The Collectors’ Menagerie. Though, I suppose if we can escape The Collectors, your Gypsy Galaxy will have earned its name.
“Wherever you teleport us to, whether you succeed in your larger mission or not, I don’t think anyone will be holding your galaxy captive ever again. Something tells me no one beats The Collectors at that game.”
“Something?” Leon knew Solo was being coy. If Leon had a gut check that made him borderline psychic, it was so right most of the time, Solo really could see across time and space—and dimensions. Still, Solo was right. Escaping The Collectors was one more test, one more lesson to master to graduate them up to Gypsy Galaxy status.
Another trial to overcome would be Leon continuing to practice his politicking with the various civilizations they were encountering in the Milky Way Galaxy, in order to graduate up to where he might have more success with the other galactic civilizations held captive by The Collectors. They might well have resources and intel he could use that would fill in the missing puzzle pieces on how the hell to get them out of Dodge—whether or not they were aware of having those puzzle pieces in hand.
And if he succeeded with all that, then he might well have graduated to where he could negotiate their freedom with TGCs and TGEs that might help him out of the Collectors’ grip. They would all have to do a lot of maturing along the way.
And as Solo so rightfully pointed out, one step at a time.
They were still inventorying the technological bounty that had fallen into their hands, not just from the Ethereals of the Dead Zone, but from other alien civilizations belonging to the Milky Way Galaxy, and the alien civilizations to either fall to the Kang Dynasty once upon a time, or to have simply surrendered the fight with them once they understood their real common enemy, The Collectors, leaving their legacy tech behind in the Kang Galaxy. Yet other alien civilizations may have escaped The Collectors once upon a time to God knows where—such as the The Space-Time Alchemists, whose ships had been discovered in the Kang Dynasty. All this and more had to be data mined for the keys that might open the doors on their prison.
So much work to do on Leon’s way to the dream of a lifetime.
Leon had been excited enough to play Space Cowboys, once upon a time. The idea of protecting Earth from space against potential aggressive alien civilizations seemed like enough. In very short order, mission creep had set in, and now he’d redefined his life mission as protecting all life—everywhere. Earth seemed but just one of many jewels in his menagerie now. If anything, The Collectors thought on too small a canvas. And their approach was all wrong. You didn’t attract more bees with bitterness, by building better traps for them, but with honey. Love, not fear, was the glue holding the cosmos together. And he’d soon set it right once again.
Techa, he’d gotten full of himself.
But the truth was he’d never felt more alive. And neither had anyone else on the Nautilus.
Leon brought his mind back to earth and glanced around. Theta Team was already back to work tearing the place apart—proverbially speaking this time—to find out how it worked. The other Cassandras and nuns had already beamed out, no doubt following Mother’s lead, the same wa
y he had, getting here.
“Why so many Theta Team operatives for one vessel?” Leon asked.
Solo smiled in his typically cagey manner. “Think it through, Leon. For that crystal to do what it does, it has to get inside a lot of alien minds which are wired entirely differently from one another, hack their minds, bodies, and spirits, do so even sight unseen, having never encountered the many ways minds can be constructed. If Theta Team can master how it does that…”
“They can proliferate their numbers to fill even more niches in the cosmos,” Leon said, running with the ramifications, “to infiltrate those areas more rapidly, implicate themselves in the evolution of those lifeforms and those civilizations, fulfilling their mandate to better unite each with the Gaia-planetary consciousness of each world.”
It didn’t take Leon long to flip the coin over in his head. “If this thing could be turned against our own supersentiences…”
Solo sighed. “I see we share the same love of horror. I’d keep that thought to yourself for now. There are likely to be spies everywhere.”
Leon nodded. “Yes, Sonny will want to keep an eye on our progress. But there could be any number of lifeforms here blending all too readily with Theta Team, where they would go unnoticed, from civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy and in The Collectors’ Menagerie who got wind of us long before we got wind of them.”
Leon massaged his scalp again, the migraine triggered this time by the realization that no matter how many brilliant insights he had in however short a time, how many tech toys he was empowered with, like earning magical talisman for trials passed in some fantasy virtual reality game—all to help him keep better control over things—it was never enough. If anything, he felt he was trying to build a sustainable future out of ever more combustible material.
He was becoming nearly as religious as Cronos of late, like keeping his fingers crossed, hoping he did have his own personal gods looking out after him. Was it Mother that had truly led Leon to Mirage, and the Raj, and the scale-tipping technology they provided, or did his Gypsy Galaxy come with a troupe of guardian angels as well, another Special Forces unit of which none of them were aware, but might soon have its own name? He smiled at his own silliness and wishful thinking and brought his mind back to Solo.
“We need to lock down these assets, Solo, lest they’re taken away from us as rapidly as we find them. It’s not just the Kang on our heels, it’s the saboteurs from Techa knows where, as you say.”
“Yes, I’m well aware of your alliance with the Raj. That’s quite a coup. Your idea for how to defend it should work well enough for all these other assets, as well. But we don’t yet have the technology to cloak entire worlds. And we’ve only recently gained the ability to teleport them, borrowing largely on Dead Zone tech. Going through Mother to teleport these worlds also creates a vulnerability. Her supersentience might be down or too multitasked with other crises to work the magic in time.”
“And your solution is?” Leon asked with a smile.
“I will give these ‘assets’ an artificial moon, if you will, which will appear to anyone else as a natural phenomenon. Most planets have them, after all. But they will be supersentiences in disguise, combining our Mars war god technology, with planet-cloaking technology I will devise. And these supersentiences will be massive enough to have one more trick up their sleeve. They’ll come with ZPE technology, so they can fabricate warships on the fly, which the Mars War god specializing in asset protection will be able to synthesize with the necessary upgrades they need when encountering enemies with varying technologies. The cloaked birds of prey already in orbit about the assets will buy the Mars War God time to send out reinforcements. The artificial moons will be largely hollow as the Mars War god doesn’t need raw matter to do its work; it’s an energy being. That means the hollow of the moon can store an entire space fleet.”
Leon nodded, pleased. “Excellent.”
It dawned on Leon to ask. “The moons, won’t they be bigger than some of these artificial habitats that they’ll be protecting?”
“In which case the assets themselves can be hidden within the artificial moon itself, making it even less of a target.”
Leon nodded once more, starting to feel full of himself again.
Solo must have read his mind. “Leon, you have a gift for readying for war—even on this scale. You’re getting all your ducks in a row to fight a war with anybody, anytime, anywhere. But remember, while you do seem to live a charmed life, considering how much technology we’ve been able to commandeer from The Collectors right under their noses, even without straying too far into their domain, you have to remember that feeling your oats is fatal in this business. You’re still infants in the cosmic scheme of things. I still have no idea how you plan to mix it up with civilizations billions of years more advanced than us, and that is what you’re talking of doing if you want to play peacekeeper for the multiverse.”
“Charmed life, ha?” Leon smiled. “I was thinking I had a pack of guardian angels riding my ass; that it was the only explanation for how we’ve come so far so soon. Maybe we should assign them a Special Forces name, too? I rather like Nu, as in the guardians of new beginnings.”
Solo smiled ruefully, or at least Leon thought that’s what that smile inferred. “Irrigators channel waters; fletchers straighten arrows; carpenters bend wood; the wise master themselves.”
Leave it to Solo to quote the Buddha. Maybe that was his original incarnation on Earth.
“Your focus is best kept there,” Solo continued, with his cautionary tale, “in case those angels standing on your shoulder are no angels at all; they have merely found themselves a puppet on a string, their designs unknown and perhaps unknowable to us.”
He turned his back on Leon as he walked away, raising his voice, “That means no delusions of grandeur, Leon!”
Leon recalled another of the Buddha’s chestnuts. “No matter how high you ascend, you are always at the foot of the mountain relative to where you need to go.”
Solo vaporized, as if he’d been an apparition all along. Perhaps Mother had summoned him, too, to another location.
FORTY-NINE
CASSANDRA AND LEON OF CLONE TEAM ONE
CYLINDER WORLD KNOWN AS
THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE
Leon had barely had the time to take his eyes off the still evaporating Solo. He was a bit surprised to find himself addressing Sliver, materializing in Solo’s wake. He’d only heard about this guy. A member of Theta Team, who had the remarkable ability to teleport just one-percent of his atomic structure at a time—sort of a human Xerox machine running out of ink—allowing him to be in multiple locations at once, but only as a hologram, owing to the lack of atomic density.
“Ah, sir, I’d like to congratulate you on your recent success negotiating a peace with The Rile.”
Leon and Cassandra had been putting out so many fires with indignant Gypsy Galaxy civilizations on any number of worlds trying to suffer through the When Galaxies Collide era that Leon needed a beat to remind himself who the Rile were, and if it was him or one of his clones who had negotiated the peace. It was indeed one of his clones, but Mother had synced the info between Leons. “I’d hardly call it a peace, more like a postponement of mutual annihilation. That’s one fragile detente looking to explode into all-out war at the worst possible time. They can’t wait to see us on our backs.”
“Um, yes, well, ah, we’re good for now though, right?”
“What is it, Sliver?” Leon asked measuredly, not caring for Sliver’s facial expressions or his body language.
“Um, we’d like you to come broker a peace for us, sir, if that wouldn’t be too much to ask?”
Leon and Cassandra bounced their concerned looks over one another. Leon turned to Sliver. “What are you talking about?”
“Um, sir, ah, we might have, well, kind of, ah, gobbled up a world we didn’t mean to with sentient life on it. Another Stage One civilization, sir.”
“Yo
u did what!” Leon barked. Cassandra just repressed a smile.
“Yes, well, as you know, we can’t exactly control every world that comes colliding into us,” Sliver explained, “and this one had the poor fortune to collide with a Planet Eater—that’s what we’re calling these particular cylinder worlds from the Dead Zone, sir—”
“Spare me the nomenclature!” Leon snapped.
“Well, ah, sir, um, the good news is we did manage to digitize them first, upload them I mean to the cylinder’s library, for future replanetization—um, that’s what we call rebuilding planets we should never have dismantled—only that technology isn’t exactly working yet, or we haven’t exactly figured out how to access it. But we’re thinking, sir, that the longer they’re in the virtual realm, the testier they’re likely to get.”
“Good call.” For all the gravel in Leon’s voice, his mouth may as well have been a Gatling gun specializing in shooting the granite pellets.
“Um, is that sarcasm, sir? I’m not exactly fluent in all the tonalities you humanoid primitives layer speech with.”
Leon huffed. Cassandra repressed another smile. “And just what do you expect me to do about this while those people are in virtual reality?” Leon asked, with a bit too much attitude lacing his voice for a commander who was known for his unflappable nature.
“Oh, we’re quite prepared to send you in there, sir, to negotiate on our behalf. Of course, um, there is the matter, of, um, well, getting you out again. But it’s not like we can’t print up more of you.”
Leon furrowed his eyebrows. “You need to work on coming up to speed on empathy that we ‘humanoid primitives’ use.”
“Um, yes, ah, no doubt, sir.”
“And why didn’t Theseus relay this message to me? He’s the liaison between Theta Team and the other Special Forces units.”
“Um, he thought you might be, ah, inclined to hit the person delivering the message, sir. And, ah, well you can’t very well hit a hologram, sir. And Theseus was afraid you’d hurt yourself hitting him.”
Moving Earth Page 40