But there was a new player in their midst.
The Gypsy Galaxy.
Rumor was rapidly spreading that Leon DiSanti might be the one with the military acumen to actually break free of The Collectors—and he was looking for allies.
The Testerns were going to break free of The Collectors at all costs, and if that meant making friends with the Gypsy Galaxy, well, as it turned out, no one in the Menagerie did that better than them.
Of course, the Gypsy Galaxy would have to earn such loyalty, prove to the one galactic civilization in the Menagerie not to be outdone for tech that they could be outdone.
And so it was that Simul, the Testerns’ supreme military strategist, had come to venture into the Gypsy Galaxy with a small complement of asteroid ships. Currently cloaked. Not that anyone would suspect they were anything more than space debris if they weren’t cloaked.
“Did you miss the part where they neutralized a Galactic Disruptor!” Ossi blared.
Simul’s Vibran counterpart, confidant, and coconspirator, always by his side, sported a mercurial personality.
“No, I did not!” Simul snapped back in what for him was a rare display of emotion. But he had just been bested for the first time. In a singular move of unsurpassed genius designed by him to get the enemy to surrender without a single shot being fired…well, Simul was right about one thing…the enemy had surrendered without a shot being fired, only it was the Testerns and the Vibrans in their unholy alliance that had done the surrendering.
“No one is better than we Vibrans at moving planets and suns at will!” the geyser that was Ossi spewed. “No one! And we were just beaten at our own game!”
“Personally, I think your people think far too highly of themselves. You were just one prong of a multi-pronged attack. The other inroads we’ve made into the Gypsy Galaxy have the potential to be no less crippling. Have some faith in our friends.”
“Our friends? We’ve interrupted killing one another temporarily to dispatch these upstarts. Mostly because we hate anyone coming between us killing one another. And you want to know why I’m coming up short in the trust department!”
“I suggest you get back to doing what you do best, improving your game of cosmic billiards, and leave us Testerns to do what we do best, suss out the enemy for obvious avenues of exploitation.”
Ossi snorted. “What you do best?” he said mockingly. “What you Testerns do best is test the prototype weapons for a lot of galaxies that don’t have the stomach for all-out confrontation, but want to make sure they can defend themselves. You take our prototypes, perfect them, mass-produce them, and then when you’re done testing them on your own people, you test them on potential enemies. And if you manage to piss them off enough so they come after you, you offer them the same sweet deal, to get you off the hook. If it weren’t for the fact that you have more galactic real estate than most, of no good use other than for war games, and a people whose genius is entirely defensive, making taking you over nigh on impossible, even as it makes you useless for taking over anybody else…” Ossi, seeming like he was running out of steam, instead let it all out at once in a primal scream. “You out-snake the rest of us snakes by having more warrens of a more defensible nature to slither into!”
“If you’re done complimenting me, I have work to do.”
“Complimenting you! Why, you insufferable, doltron-headed, sartan-necked, gooker-kneed…”
Simul had had enough. He used his species’ ability to close their ears, tuning Ossi out entirely.
A short while later, Ossi finally ceased his tirade, which he realized Simul was now deaf too anyway, the realization perhaps helping to calm him some. He approached the terminal to get a better look at the screens.
The storm of words over, Simul opened his ears.
Focused on the task at hand a while longer than Ossi, and on the large multi-screen display in front of him, Simul realized only one of the remaining devices released into the Gypsy Galaxy was in the best position to be deployed for maximum effect. So it was a no brainer to give the go ahead for that weapon’s test.
He pressed the keyboard opening the COMMS to the device’s operator. “You are free to engage,” Simul said.
“Engage!” Ossi blurted. “Are you mad?”
“You heard their supersentience. The Gypsy Galaxy has given us the go ahead to test their offensive and defensive capabilities. There’s nothing we Testerns love to do more.”
“Seriously? Can you not tell a rhetorical, sarcastic, condescending remark when you hear one?! Personally, I use them all the time.”
Ossi relented when he realized that Simul had once again chosen to ignore him.
Simul caught Ossi mumbling, “If this works, possibly we can use it to retune the Galactic Disruptor, or at the very least modify one or more of our smaller devices. Size isn’t everything, you know?” He was talking to himself.
***
ABOARD A PEACEKEEPER WARBIRD
THE GYPSY GALAXY
Sitting in the captain’s swivel chair, mid-bridge, staring at the viewport, Thor asked, “What is that thing?”
Frog Doll, propped up on a stool beside him, replied, “I feel it in your best interests not to answer that, but instead to give you a reality check. You’ve gone into battle with a chief advisor who was formerly a hand puppet. Though rather upgraded from who I was in my former life, I am in no way qualified to keep you from getting blown to smithereens. Not that that, or any amount of common sense dumped on your head, has ever slowed you down before.”
“Yeah, well, relax. I looked up the specs on this Peacekeeper on my video game console, and let me just say I’m prepared to give people some serious attitude.”
“Words of warning to the perpetually stupid: if you inflame tensions between the Gypsy Galaxy and its soon-to-be allies, leading to deaths in numbers not even I can count, I will disavow all knowledge of this conversation, as well as any recollection of being here, and hang you out to dry with unhackable 3D holovision testimony as to your war crimes, all gathered, allegedly, I might add, by your Goldfish, who I must confess a certain frustration with now that I can no longer taunt her with my shark’s teeth looming over her fishbowl. Revenge is best served cold, especially when I can kill two birds with one stone. And screw the mixed metaphors.”
“Could someone actually prattle something meaningful at me!” Thor shouted to his bridge crew, a bunch of androids done up as seriously strange humanoids, who he hoped actually answered to him. Because if not, this situation, which already sucked, was about to get a lot suckier.
“That creature that is zipping about at speeds the Peacekeeper can barely keep pace with is shredding the fabric of space-time, exposing us to the underlying void. And it appears the void, of which little is truly known, has more layers to it than we formerly thought. Because the properties we’re being subjected to are unknown, even by the people who built the Peacekeeper. The Peacekeeper’s scanners are being rapidly recalibrated by the AI that evolves the scanning technology on the fly.”
“That thing is a bug?” Thor sounded incredulous staring at the port screen because he was. As for the guy giving him the information, if that was a guy, he was chartreuse, built like a crayon with two arms and two legs. And he hovered over the floor, without need of a chair, due to the retrorockets built into his ass, firing bursts of Techa knows what. And yet, he, too, was only part machine. As to eyes, ear canals and mouths, they spanned his periphery, so he hardly had to turn to address Thor. Thor figured, in retrospect, if this crewmate could be alive, then that thing out the spaceport could be too.
Thor sighed.
The “bug” out the viewport was hundreds of miles long, and had long tentacles coming out its length, like a millipede. Only this thing glowed in the blackness of space—a wicked electric-blue color—perhaps like those deep sea jellyfish, signaling “pretty means dangerous. Stay away!” Thor hadn’t gotten Crayola’s name yet, so until then, he would be known as Crayon. A bit on the nose,
but Thor’s genius wasn’t for nomenclature.
“Why haven’t we fired anything at it?” Thor asked anyone who could possibly have the answer, not really sure what the different members of his bridge crew did.
“We don’t dare get within firing range, sir, and risk getting sucked into the void.” That humanoid looked like he should make sense, being as he was essentially one giant black squid with white spots, that is to say, all giant head—thus a really big brain—and tentacles aplenty, which he used to work his control panel, doing the work of about six officers, judging from the reach of his tentacles and the unoccupied seats to either side of him.
Thor sighed. We’ll call him Squid Face. Thor chewed on his fingernails. Slumped back in his chair. All before bolting upward dramatically. “Wait! That thing is an insect of some kind, right? So why don’t we feed it. For all we know the particles he’s feeding on now out of the void isn’t his preferred diet. He’s just starved and making do.”
Several members of the crew regarded one another, possibly conferring telepathically or mindchip to mindchip or neuroweb-nanococktail to neuroweb-nanococktail—he should really have spent more time getting the lowdown on the crew that went with this ship from his VR gaming console, which, needless to say, was no longer a VR console, but had been upgraded to handle actual wargames within the Haught Galaxy.
Of course, they weren’t exactly in the Haught Galaxy; they were just using it as a staging area. They were in the Gypsy Galaxy dealing with the latest threat to it. Never mind how Thor and Frog Doll and Hailey and General Schopenhauer had inherited a galaxy in The Collectors Menagerie that had also been abandoned, as with The Dead Zone…That was a mystery begging to be solved if Thor was ever in a Nancy Drew mode, or maybe wanted to go all mashup like Space Opera meets Sci-Fi Mystery. He despaired over his digressing mind, as he awaited a crew mate to rescue him from it.
“That might actually work, sir, if we can guess right about what it feeds on.” The one addressing Thor this time was a giant sea urchin that up until now Thor thought was a footrest, some strange ottoman that gave you a reflexology treatment every time you rested your legs on it like those weird sandals people walked on with thousands of little rubber needles shooting into your feet. Sea Urchin Guy/Gal, whatever, thought by sending electrical discharges from one pair of needles to another. And his voice, was actually transmitted through the ship’s speakers, which someone had thought to make sensaround, so it was a little like the urchin was everywhere and nowhere, sort of like a ship’s chief AI.
“Well, hurry up, already!” Thor blurted. “Before any more suns and worlds slip through the cracks in space-time!” Thor felt somewhat ashamed of himself for acting so emotionally as captain. What would Hailey say? She was such a bleeding heart. She’d probably think it was not cool to antagonize the dolls in his action-figure collection, or even to think of the androids that way. The very thought made him sigh. It was true what they said about women: total buzz kills.
“Ah, the Peacekeeper’s chief super-sentience is already working on cracking the formula for the food that the bug might actually prefer,” another disembodied voice said, which clearly was not the Urchin’s, as his needles weren’t sparking.
“Um, and which disembodied voice are you?” Thor asked.
“Sorry, sir.” The shadow on the floor, which Thor had taken for a giant carpet stain, slid up the wall, and saluted him. “Stain, at your service, sir!”
“Okay, so we have Stain, Crayon, Ink, Urchin,” Thor said pointing to the shadow, the glowing Chartreuse crayon-looking guy, the squid, and the ottoman-looking one in turn. He decided last second that “Ink” sounded less condescending than Squid Face—trying to rack up points with Hailey in advance. “Anyone else on this bridge who would like to make his presence known?”
“The ship’s chief AI goes by CIA—pronounced ‘Kaya’—Ink informed him. “Oh, and by the way, I really am called Ink, only it’s spelled INC.—a play on words because I squirt ink, and I oversee about four hundred corporations, all virtual, of course, until I can get one of these military leaders or Mother to sign off on me introducing them to the real world.”
“Huh. Well, nice to meet all of you, and especially happy you accepted what names I gave you to shallow my learning curve. And this is Frog Doll, my XO. Should I become incapacitated for any reason, you’ll accept his orders as if they were gospel.”
“Um, you might want to reword that, pal,” Frog Doll interjected. “Being as you’re always incapacitated, I think that de facto puts me in charge twenty-four seven. And I’m really not up to it. Especially now that you’ve got me thinking about Cher. Only Cher could convincingly command a crew like this, from underneath one of her spectacular wigs, well, outside of Looney Tunes.”
“Isn’t she like ninety now?”
“And sexier than ever!” Frog Doll had nearly leaped off the stool in retaliatory defense.
“Whatever,” Thor said impatiently. “Now, as for the small matter of saving the universe, I suggest we beam every subatomic particle we can think of at the millipede in quantity, and when it comes toward us, make sure to fire whatever lure worked at it with bomb-like intensity. It might take that kind of explosive force to satiate it, um, before it eats us, not to put too fine a point on it.”
The crew regarded one another, muttering in their home languages which only CIA could translate in real time.
“What are they arguing over?” Thor asked.
“Probably over the impossibility of lightning striking twice,” Frog Doll said. “Who would have thought a megalomaniac eleven year old held the keys to their survival?”
“Genius, I’ll have you know, is what I do best. My father played Cher to me while I was still in the womb, on endless loop.”
“My Cher! As in Sonny and Cher?” Frog Doll asked. “Vintage 1970s variety show hosts? I only know this because I’m a connoisseur of 1970s porn, and well, I might have had a few fantasies about her, even if it meant straying from genre.”
“Duh!” Thor hit him with the pronouncement full force.
“Huh. Well if she could be married to Sonny for so long, I could see how you inherited an ability to be married to lunacy, but I still don’t get the genius part.”
“My dad used to go to war with Cher playing on his in-ear mikes,” Thor said in his defense, “not realizing the AI-onboard was synced to the head speakers attached to my mother’s womb.”
“Huh.” Frog Doll’s mouth was hanging open. “It’s like our pairing was divinely ordained. That or the fate of the universe is in the hands of Captain Strange, who I have no information on.”
Inc. interjected himself into the conversation. “It’s working,” he said. Actually Thor was starting to get the sense Inc. was female, and just speaking with a really throaty voice. “CIA, having identified the space insect’s ideal food source, is now synthesizing it in sufficient quantity from the prototype particles she was secreting to form the explosives. But that will take time as she has to scale up the apparatus.”
“Um, might I suggest she get a move on,” Thor said, eyeing the screen and the millipede squirming its ways right to them.
No response.
“Please tell me there’s someone on this crew named Scale!” Thor blurted, “And he’s really good with, you know, scaling.”
“Scale here, sir,” the latest disembodied voice came over the speakers, “on engineering deck three.” Scale looked like someone had scaled him up from “ordinary” size for a robot, and then Thor realized that Scale was in fact a mobile, humanoid-shaped, ant heap of millions of tiny bots working to procure the Golem. “The first of the bombs are underway,” Scale said.
Thor noticed the miles-long glowing millipede did indeed gobble up the bombs, using them as millipede treats. He also observed that the tears in space-time in its wake were no more. “Ah, let’s keep that thing on a long leash, have it follow behind us with a well-timed salvo of those particle bombs, at least until we can figure out what to do w
ith this thing. I’m sure General Schopenhauer would like to add it to his collection of toys, though I must say, I’m happy with the ones I’ve got.”
“Thank you, sir!” Inc. said. That was the general chorus as the other crewmates responded rapidly to the praise.
“Scale,” Thor said, taking advantage of the open COMMS, “you’re going to have to build a device we can park in space that can keep the millipede stationary, eventually. We can’t have that thing following us around everywhere, long-term.”
“Yes, Sir,” Scale said, and then killed the COMMS line to engineering deck three. Thor recalled enough of the schematics on his Peacekeeper from his VR console—now more properly an AR or Augmented Reality console, which he was going to have to take to wearing by transferring the intel to some really cool reflective shades—to know that the Peacekeeper had no less than five engineering bays, each the size of the Starship Enterprise. Apparently getting caught with their pants down with inadequate or ill-fitting technology for the task was not in the Peacekeeper’s vocabulary.
Thor relaxed back into his command chair and sighed. “Well, that crisis averted, what next?”
“There is the small matter of repairing those rifts in space-time,” Crayon replied.
“Nonsense,” Thor said. “We’ll add it to Scale’s duties—Techa, he’s like Star Trek’s Scotty, only bigger and better and more robotic—to leave some probes in the area that can both seal the rifts off from enemy scanners and continue to data-mine the breaches to expand our knowledge of the void. What decent galaxy is bereft of a few quicksand pits you can send you enemies into, I ask you?”
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