Leon was getting ready to release another bomb in the room, as if they all didn’t feel psychically concussed enough already. “If we’re right about them, the sudden cessation of conflict will starve them. A species at the brink of death is the most dangerous. We should not anticipate that the ensuing peace will be their death blow. Instead…”
“We should anticipate blowback of the worst kind,” Crumley said.
“However much time Schopenhauer can buy us, Leon,” Solo said, “it won’t be enough.” The bands in the irises of his eyes were still twirling as if he were still running the calculations. “The ensuing peace will be shattered long before I can find my way into this Lagrange point holding The Collectors’ Menagerie together by The Collectors sending in their trump card ships. The severe backlash you’re already expecting from The Collectors…you must find a way to keep the Gypsy Galaxy from being annihilated long enough for me to do my work.”
The rotating pinwheels in Solo’s eyes settled down, and he focused them on Leon. “You will have to assume command, with the knowledge gleaned from other timelines to do what the other Leon clones cannot: buy us more time.”
Leon nodded. “It’s why I picked now to awaken.”
“Out of curiosity,” Solo said, “in any of these other timelines…?”
“None that I found, no. You, we, the Gypsy Galaxy as a whole, is destroyed in all of them. But if I have one takeaway for you…”
Solo, his head bowing under the weight of the news, perked up to meet Leon’s eyes again.
“It’s this,” Leon said. “Look to the Creams of your species.”
Solo gasped. But he nodded as the sense of it dawned on him. “They are to alternate timelines what I am to alternate dimensions. And your clones were smart enough to recruit them and the galaxies they oversee one and all into the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping.” Solo leaned on his cane to bring his reasoning to a terminus. “It seems once again I must get over myself and embrace Natty’s fourth brain effect. I, Dillon, and the Creams will attempt to procure a solution for you. Buy us all the time you can, Leon.”
“Consider it done.” Leon turned to exit, Crumley in tow.
***
Once in the hall outside Solo’s chambers Crumley permitted himself the barrage of questions he was itching to ask back there. “You realize this prison break may be in keeping with the Chinese curse, ‘May you get everything you wish for.’ If we succeed, we’ll be hunted, we now know, by civilizations quite well equipped to hunt us down, disable our abilities to escape again, and if they don’t vaporize us entirely, return us to prison.”
“I have some ideas about that, Crumley, but one challenge at a time. I don’t have the luxury for that kind of divergent thinking right now.”
They were walking fast to nowhere in particular. It occurred to Crumley that Leon might just be exercising himself after a prolonged stay in the tank to make sure he could still get the blood he needed to his brain to think with.
“Well,” Crumley asked, “you have a bird of prey of choice? Personally, I think Schopenhauer had the right idea when he picked a Peacekeeper.”
“I’ll stay aboard the Nautilus,” Leon said. “Natty’s point about the fourth brain, I don’t think it’s worth abandoning now. Mother has gotten better at promoting chance interactions between her crewmates that spark the flashes of insight we all need to do our work.
“Besides, she has Natty aboard, and what of Natty’s father’s essence is written into her algorithms. And they both excel at teasing insights out of the Akashic records.”
“Ervin Lazlo…The fancy term he gave for the memory of God, or in our more modern day parlance,” Crumley said, “Techa.”
“That’s as much of an ace in the hole as anything I can bring to the table plying my trade of advancing war gaming.”
EIGHTY-FOUR
ABOARD THE FELICE GALACTIC CRUISER
REPRESENTING THE BORNAR GALAXY
Responding to absolutely nothing on the screen but stars, Orville swiveled toward his captain. “They have a Peacekeeper.” It didn’t matter that Orville couldn’t see it; their ship’s AI had detected its signature.
“Bring it.” Captain Puoy strapped himself into his command chair, stared at the space port looming over the bridge of his ship. “We’ve come up against one of these things before and lived to tell the tale. This time we have a few surprises in store for them. Take us to Singularity Time, Orville.”
Orville sighed. Their captain was a proud linguist, fluent in thirty-seven languages. Curious about the rumors spreading about the Gypsy Galaxy and its supreme commander, Leon DiSanti, Puoy had brought himself up to speed on Americanized English. The more adages he could throw into his parlance the better. Orville would spend the next week trying to figure out what the hell “bring it” and “lived to tell the tale” even meant, providing he survived that long.
If it weren’t for Sonny and his Shadow Warriors, Puoy would never have gotten his hands on the Earth people’s language, or the mindchips that allowed Puoy’s bridge crew to communicate with Puoy in Earth speak. Puoy was currently experimenting with speaking the language of the enemy while in battle to help him get inside their heads. In short, curse Sonny and whatever supernova he rode in on.
“Yes, sir.” Orville suppressed a groan as he pulled up short of carrying out the command to switch them to Singularity Time. “Hurry up and wait? That’s the strategy? You realize once we’re running at those clock speeds, the few seconds it’ll take for that ship to get here will seem like eternities to us, long enough to drive us stark raving mad.” Right back at you with the adages, you prick.
“Considering our enemy, you don’t think that’s a good thing?” Puoy replied. “Nobody takes on an entire invading intergalactic force with one ship, not even a Peacekeeper. Maybe we’ll be mad enough by the time they get here to stand a chance.”
Orville nodded. “The brilliance of your strategy is coming through loud and clear now.” Orville got on the pike to the rest of the crew. “We’re moving to Singularity Time. Prepare yourselves. On my mark. Three. Two.” Veras help me, let’s hope I can still count when this is all over. “One.”
The Bornar were often mistaken for robots, due to their silicon-based bodies, which were actually far more closely related to insects from which they’d evolved. Of course, they didn’t call them insects on their world, and they had no word for robots, for that matter, but these humans did, from what the Bornar had gleaned with the help of Sonny’s mindchips.
One advantage of a Bornar body though, it could mate with Singularity State for far longer than most humanoids. That might serve them well here. Then again, this skirmish was likely to be over in a flash.
The Felice’s chief-AI was already firing on the Peacekeeper when it came into view, using a battery of new weapons their best people assured them would work against the Peacekeepers, with intelligence gathered from their last encounter with one.
None of the firing options made it to the ship.
They were destroyed by the Peacekeeper en route.
So the Bornar would never know for certain one way or the other.
Moral of this story: never trust corporate scientists motivated by profit over truth.
The Peacekeeper’s first salvo had completely demolished Felice’s energy shields. Any further hits would destroy the ship.
The Peacekeeper’s AI came over their COMMS. It had been nothing for her to infiltrate the ship’s coded channels, and to speak to them in their language. “You’re clear to return home. We mean free-thinking societies no harm, whether or not you choose to join us. And your willingness to test our defenses is always welcome.”
The Peacekeeper disappeared from view.
“Did our scanners pick up anything?” Captain Puoy asked.
“Just enough to confirm what she was saying,” Fabricani, another of Orville’s bridge crewmates, replied. “The galactic empires which do not permit free thought are not being treated so kindly.”
<
br /> Fabricani was a female of another “insect” class, which meant she was considerably larger than most of the male crew on the bridge and throughout the ship, large enough to pass for an egg-laying queen, which was actually not the case. That didn’t stop every male on the crew, whatever their “insect” class from wanting to hump her. The pheromones she gave off were virtually maddening. They were all lucky to remember their names right now, far less attend to their crew duties.
“So,” Puoy said, thinking it through, “If DiSanti depletes the warships of the galactic empires that treat their people like slaves, if the oligarchs send more, they could bankrupt themselves, destabilizing the legitimacy of their regimes and opening themselves to coups, which they can no longer fight off. It appears the Gypsy Galaxy has an interesting way of promoting open-mindedness throughout the heavens.”
“Are we retreating, sir?” Orville asked. He wanted his voice to carry the requisite sense of authority and good sense. But he was the smallest Bornar species on deck, antlike, as human analogies went. The only advantage was that should the bridge suffer a catastrophic cave in, he was likely the only one that would be crawling out from under all the debris alive. As for the captain, his Hercules Beetle-like body, again as Earth analogies went, would ensure that besides Orville, he might be the only other one to survive his one misstep that cost everyone else their lives. If the roof collapsed on his thick head, Orville doubted it would leave a dent.
Captain Puoy sighed. “Yes, we’re retreating. We can’t hurt them. The only decision now is for our superiors to decide on their next move.”
Puoy’s second-in-command, Raxnor, relayed his orders. The bridge navigator, Robothor, had already plotted the new course.
As with the rest of them, the stations Raxnor and Robothor manned had been designed to accommodate unique Bornar body designs with six, eight, or more limbs. The light level on the bridge was low and skewed toward infrared. Their many species, having evolved from insects, did their best work at night and underground. This much had never changed. The Bornar took to space well because it too was dark. Other Bornar, having evolved on other worlds within the Bornar galaxy that were less harsh, were only slowly being assimilated into Galactic Cruiser crews. It was believed these light and water lovers were soft, and less likely to survive the rigors of space. So far these stereotypes were proving true, sadly. Orville could stand to work around females that didn’t drive him into a frenzy.
“It’s possible, sir,” Orville suggested, “the Peacekeeper is using an economizing strategy. Just targeting one ship in each fleet she knows will respond to reason, saving the all-out annihilations for the other fleets. Saves on time and resources.”
Captain Puoy nodded. “It’s worth noting for the future, if we’re ever in a similar position of being this outnumbered.”
Robothor craned to the captain. “Sir, the other ships are initiating a tractor beam to tow us back.”
“What do you mean tow us back!” Puoy blurted, firing his words at Robothor the way Cruisers fired their automatic weapons.
His COMMS officer, Tatarri, swiveled toward him. “Reports are coming in from all decks, sir, major damage. Over two-hundred crew dead.”
Captain Puoy’s nostrils, looking like two more antennae jutting out of his head, flared as he fought to get calming breaths to his brain, his snorts sounding like the mating of racan on his world—the “insects” from which they’d evolved. “If that was a love tap from a Peacekeeper meaning us no harm… Remind me to retire before some fool sends me up against one again.”
Orville doubted any of them would see a Peacekeeper again. If members of their own galaxy were fighting so hard for recognition and respect aboard Bornar Galactic Cruisers, Orville couldn’t imagine that their leadership would ever condone leaving the hardening crucible of The Collectors to join a motley group of “softies,” even if they could pull off an escape from The Collectors’ Menagerie.
EIGHTY-FIVE
ABOARD THE NANORAMOS GALACTIC DESTROYER
REPRESENTING THE NANOSUN GALAXY
“Their Peacekeeper is coming, sir,” Duster informed the captain.
“Right into the trap?”
“Yes, sir.”
Captain Vorsok chuckled. “Damned accommodating of them. I love it when a plan comes together.” He rattled his fingers against his captain’s chair impatiently. “The fleet is dispersed far enough that no one strike can possibly take all the ships out?”
“Assuming such a weapon were possible, its blast radius would do more to cripple her own planets. Not to mention all the space stations in this sector of the galaxy.”
“Switch us to Singularity Time,” the captain ordered.
“With pleasure, sir.” Duster flicked the switch.
Not a moment too soon.
The Peacekeeper had arrived.
“It’s just hovering there.” Captain Vorsok was off his chair. The unexpected never sat well with him.
And then a sphere of light with the Peacekeeper at its epicenter expanded in all directions. As soon as it hit Captain Vorsok’s ship, they lost all power.
“An EMP device?” The captain could hear the incredulity in his own voice.
“Yes, sir. Um, it appears the Peacekeeper is aware of the nanites aboard the Nanoramos that are activated to consume a dead ship, lest it fall into enemy hands.”
The captain turned on him like a rabid dog. It wasn’t Duster’s fault, but Vorsok did not take bad news well either. He was strangling Duster with his bare hands when the nanites swept through the ship, exposing them both to space.
Vorsok looked up from his second-in-command’s neck to see the other Nanosun Galactic Destroyers, which had shone nearly as brightly and nearly as large as stars once. The Destroyers were largely dark now. The nanites devouring the megaships glowed briefly as if the Destroyers were massive clouds of lightning bugs.
In the next moment, it was as if the stars were crowded with colorful supernovae, as witnessed from enhanced telescopic views.
Vorsok died with that the last thing he saw. Regrettably for Vorsok, he didn’t do well with pretty sights either. His mind must have overloaded from the horror of it all.
Duster wondered if he would join him soon, but didn’t feel he had the right to take the coward’s way out. The crew of all the Nanosun Destroyers was made up of nano-people, just like him. It was all that was left of their many worlds and their many species. No one was longer much certain of how they’d come to be the way they were, if they had evolved on their own, or if they were created. But they were adapted to survive most everywhere, except perhaps within the heart of the hottest suns or a black hole.
They could hence bootstrap their species once again from nothing. Once they’d fed enough, start rebuilding their spaceships from their own excrements. And if captured by the enemy, they could suicide, or they could turn that ability to devour most anything as food against them.
Duster sent out word to the hundreds of thousands just like him to lay low, do nothing to attract attention to themselves, until this sector of space was abandoned and forgotten, the space war having moved on to another sector. The Nanosun people could decide then what their next course of action would be. If they would ultimately join up with the Gypsy Galaxy, after finding out more about them, or become its worst nightmare.
Duster was one of the few whose name recalled the things they were once called. “The Dust People.” “The Dusters.” Ironically, not holding on to their humanoid configurations was likely their best defense now and the most likely way of going undetected by scanners. So he sent that order next, to revert to their old ways, in a time when their missions were much like Sonny’s and his Shadow Warriors, to spy, to sabotage, to infiltrate, their abilities to take any form making them quite proficient in those roles.
Duster and the Nanosun had quite the score to settle with Sonny and his Shadow Warriors right now, since they had promised the Nanosun little more than a spanking for their war efforts. “Leon
would never destroy another Galactic Civilization. Merely thank them for testing the limits of the Gypsy Galaxy, and send them on their way, after shutting them down.”
Either that was an outright lie or… Once their true nature was scanned by the Peacekeeper and it was decided that the Nanosun posed too much of a threat as friend or foe, the decision had been made to eliminate them.
Duster wasn’t sure who deserved his wrath right now. But he’d find out. If it was Sonny and his Shadow Warriors, who better to replace them than the Nanosun, without anyone being any the wiser? If the decision could be traced back to Leon DiSanti, well then, who better to replace the entire Gypsy Galaxy without anyone knowing?
Duster was at heart a pacifist. Ironically so was Leon DiSanti, if the rumors could be believed. Those rumors were the only thing holding Duster’s temper in check now and quieting his homicidal rage and blood lust for revenge.
For all that remained of his people now was what was here. Now camouflaged in the form of innocuous space dust. “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes…” Maybe the human Bible had foretold of their coming long ago, and had simply been misinterpreted.
EIGHTY-SIX
THE PSYCHIC AMPLIFIER WORLD, ORIGINE
Sonny’s people were learning to play nice with Voya’s people from the looks of it. The two packs were hunting prey smarter than they were. They would need to coordinate well to succeed, to feast and party afterwards. Whatever the outcome, both packs would likely suffer heavy losses before capturing their prize. Some Origine predators would heal. Others would be allowed to die as a matter of culling the herd and eliminating the weak, as the bar for “the fittest” continued to rise.
Sonny glanced away from the hunt at the sight of his Special Forces team coming toward him on air bikes. With the flexible body armoring covering bodies highlighting their well-sculpted physiques, they looked like comic book anti-heroes come to life.
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