Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  They landed and stood in arrowhead formation. Their point man, standing at the tip of the arrow, peeled off his face mask that the others chose to leave on, and approached Sonny. It was Xenon behind the face stocking.

  “Leon believes Schopenhauer’s gambit will end in peace throughout the Menagerie, and that in turn will bring The Collectors, usually content to stand at the sidelines, into the fray to stir things up again, likely by blasting the Gypsy Galaxy to hell and back. We’ve also ascertained that Leon is hoping to get his people to buy him enough time—prior to The Collectors arrival—with a distraction—a space battle—so he can affect his prison escape.”

  Sonny smiled. “So, he’s making his move. I think it’s time we made ours.”

  “It’s the perfect time to turn the tables on him.”

  “Yes, we’ll always have the excuse that we were simply coming to his rescue, doing as asked. And if we succeed, by the time he realizes it, it will be too late. We’ll be free of The Collectors, and I’ll be in charge of the Gypsy Galaxy, and there will be precious little he can do about it.” Sonny’s eyes regained focus, aimed straight at Xenon. “I gather you’re telling me, the clone, rather than Sonny, the original, because you don’t want the Blue overhearing. Smart thinking.”

  “There are still the Creams to worry about, Farsi in particular.”

  “Yes, but there are ways to deal with them.”

  “How?” Xenon sounded more impatient for his marching orders than incredulous.

  “First, we put the Special Forces unit into play. We’ll need them to sabotage the most advanced tech any and all potential allies of the Gypsy Galaxy have at their disposal. That way, when and if they do come to his aid with this fake diversionary battle, they won’t have much aid to offer.”

  Xenon gestured to the Special Forces unit, listening closely, and they were off, jumping on their air bikes and heading back to their cloaked ship hanging in the air above.

  Returning his attention to Sonny, Xenon said, “I imagine the sabotage will make it a little harder for Farsi to influence the ones on the fence still deciding whether or not to join Leon’s cause.”

  “Yes, but we’ll have to do more to overload her. It’s time to activate all our Shadow Warriors with a single purpose: helping the galactic empires with no desire to join Leon to overcome whatever resistance they have to throwing everything they have at him. Whether holding back out of fear, or waiting for the other empires to do all the hard work for them so all they have to do is swoop in and enjoy the spoils…”

  Xenon nodded. “The Shadow Warriors have the numbers that our Special Forces don’t. And that gene pool is diversified enough to more readily find out what forms of arm twisting will work and what won’t, and get to arm twisting.”

  He let his eyes drift off Sonny to run with the other ramifications. “No way Farsi and the other Cream Umbrage can put out all those fires at once. And no matter what difficult choices they make, it will be too little too late to turn the Titanic.”

  Sonny’s drool was increasing. “Best of all, whichever way this insurrection goes, win or lose, we end up stronger and Leon ends up weaker. You gotta love a plan with nothing but upside.”

  They shared a laugh.

  But then Xenon sobered. “We will win this,” he said, donning his mask.

  As someone who belonged to both Sonny’s inner circle and his Special Forces, Sonny knew that come time to influence the riffraff, the Special Forces outfit meant that anything Xenon had to say would meet with a lot less resistance.

  Xenon hopped on his air bike and headed toward the larger ship left behind by the Special Forces unit, who had made their exit via the smaller ships shooting to various destinations in The Collectors’ Menagerie, where they could do the most damage in the least time.

  Sonny howled across the savannah, recalling both packs.

  Their blood lust was so worked up by then, that when they neared, they were ready to feast on him; they were snarling, barking, posturing about him, their bodies poised to lunge. He’d robbed them of their prize. But now was no time to have his numbers decimated and the survivors licking their wounds. They were all part of how the psychic amplifying world of Origine worked its magic. And that magic today would have to be at full power.

  “Sorry to spoil your fun, folks. But you can fill your stomachs with soul food, did you know that?” He laughed. No one wanted to do anything yet but rip his head off. “Relax!” he said in a more commanding tone. “I’ll see your bellies get filled with a prayer to our Guardian race, The Zalics Crystals,” he said, mocking the rainbow colored Umbrage running the full spectrum of colors. “We will be redeploying Origine and her clone worlds to hotspots throughout The Menagerie that we are about to create ourselves.”

  In response to their clueless faces, their bloodlust still too activated to make much sense of what he was saying, he sighed. Then, more emphatically than ever, “Our time has come! Today we begin the assault on the Castle. When we’re done, the Gypsy Galaxy will be ours!”

  That snapped them out of their delirium. Their eyes cleared. Their bloodlust subsiding, their breathing normalizing, they finally relaxed out of their poised-to-strike postures.

  They regarded one another, then, another moment for it to sink in, aided by Sonny’s, “Did you hear what I just said?” And the outburst of cheers and jumping up and down and hugging one another began.

  ACT SIX

  THE GREAT ESCAPE

  EIGHTY-SEVEN

  ISOLA

  A MOON OCCUPIED BY THE COLLECTORS

  LOCATED AT THE LAGRANGE POINT FOR THE ARTIFICIAL MULTIVERSE KNOWN AS

  THE MENAGERIE

  JUST PRIOR TO THE FIRST ALL-OUT ASSAULT OF THE GYPSY GALAXY BY GALACTIC FEDERATIONS WITHIN THE MENAGERIE…

  Blaxus beheld the heavily cratered moon that had become their home, their prison.

  Some of the smaller craters were being utilized expediently as mass graves, holding the bodies of his people too weak to continue. They laid in the pits, squirming, crying out, dying. It took his people so damnably long to die. They were built for space. No atmosphere was needed to sustain their bodies. Their breathing apparatuses, membranes marring their faces and bodies, were not designed to bring life giving gases to their cells but to filter space dust and cosmic radiation. That in itself was a backup form of food. But it was not enough to sustain them.

  Nor was the dark chi energy flowing through The Menagerie. Their people were energy vampires; the dark chi was their primary source of sustenance. But this region did not supply it in quantities vital for The Collectors.

  Their only recourse was to fan hatred, anxiety, stress, every negative emotion they could to push the other prisoners in the Menagerie toward war. War bred hatred and more hatred, left emotional scars that persisted for generations, and which could be trusted to erupt into further wars even without provocation from The Collectors.

  But their job had grown harder since being imprisoned in The Menagerie for war crimes—for essentially pursuing their own agenda, off the leash of their masters.

  The Menagerie had no shortage of war-mongering empires and hot-headed peoples easy to provoke into battle in the name of honor, revenge, sport… The Collectors didn’t need much to work with; most anything would serve as an in.

  But The Menagerie also included a fair share of peace-preferring galaxies, hard to provoke to war, and quick to do what was necessary to end it to return to a status quo they preferred, well apart from the toxic relationships upon which The Collectors required to thrive.

  In The Collectors’ defense, The Collectors were bioengineered this way, once a tool of the master races. Now abandoned to make their own way.

  The audience was gathering in one of the larger craters being used now as an amphitheater. Blaxus made his way there past his fallen comrades, the trail of bodies pointing the way to the meeting should he forget. They had been on their way, too; they just hadn’t made it.

  No one reached down to lend supp
ort to the writhing wretched that might well be dying for millennia more to come. He wasn’t even sure his kind could die entirely. But as they approached a forced hibernation there would be more of what little dark energy permeated The Menagerie for the others. They grew weaker so the rest could grow stronger. It might even be a species adaptation bioengineered into his kind, for all he knew.

  Onyxi joined him the rest of the way to the stadium. Onyxi was coming to make sure Blaxus didn’t hold too much sway over the others. They seldom agreed on anything, and Onyxi was every bit the public speaker he was. It would be another knockdown drag out match for which neither of them truly had the energy anymore.

  They drifted over the ground a foot or more above. His kind was genetically engineered with anti-gravity cells, necessary to expanding their effectiveness in space. If impervious to gravity wells they could more easily defend the worlds in their charge against ships of any size invading their space. They could more easily move about without creating gravity ripples which could be traced, or emitting thrust of any kind which could be just as easily tracked.

  Any invading force would magnetize the energy vampires toward them, drawn by a psychic connection to their enemies’ own evil, to feed off of it. Once drained dry, any thoughts the invaders had of war would be gone, and they would be ripe for takeover by the very people they came to conquer.

  Needless to say, Blaxus and his kind could not invade the atmospheres of artificial or natural worlds, which would just threaten the control of their masters. And artificial habits under their masters’ control in space were warded against them, with psychic amplifiers on the outside that promulgated positive chi, an impenetrable shield for Blaxus’s people; never mind those shields had no such effect on the peoples inside who were carefully controlled by an interplay of positive and negative emotions calibrated just so, to keep them forever enslaved.

  “We must stop Leon DiSanti before this goes any further!” Onyxi spoke with her usual authoritarian tone meant to convey unwavering confidence and certainty paired with the wisdom of the gods. She was a complete fool. But their people were so energy starved, fools with a plan may as well be opening a vein directly into the wellspring of all dark chi.

  The unintentional metaphor triggered memories for Blaxus. The dark chi empires were immense, even if geographically confined to the dark chi regions coursing through the cosmos. They were largely maintained by his kind, or more accurately speaking, by their descendants whose ongoing genetic modifications kept them forever in the service of their masters, and ensured they would never buck their place in the order of things.

  Their former masters had gotten so good at their game that they were now exporting that quality of mind control of entire species of wildly different genetic makeups, from a wide variety of worlds. Transgalactic empires were no longer the ones solely buying their products. Transgalactic civilizations with less hierarchical control were interested as well. Apparently the problem with egalitarianism and democracy was that it gave everyone an equal vote, fools and geniuses alike, natural born leaders and natural born deviants, and the former were always outnumbered by the latter.

  Only one thing stood to check the growing power of their former masters: the fact that leadership needed more and more geniuses and radical thinkers by the day and less and less mindless sheep which could be controlled. Otherwise the TGCs and TGEs couldn’t sustain their singularity waves, which meant they couldn’t grow their economies at the pace needed to keep up with their rivals. And that meant they were living on borrowed time until they were taken over, by peaceful or not so peaceful means.

  In an energy depleted state, Blaxus realized he was digressing far too much, and with a speech to give, that would hardly serve him.

  “Save it for the arena, Onyxi,” Blaxus said. “Neither of us has the energy to debate here and once more before the crowd.”

  Moments later, they were at the stadium, finally, descending toward the pit of the crater. The crater was nearly filled with spectators, here as much to feed off the froth of negative energy Onyxi and Blaxus gave off gnashing and tearing at one another, however metaphorically. They were beyond reason, in truth, his people; they only cared about results, and didn’t much mind which madman delivered them up. And surely, any sane person, if such a one remained, could agree that in such an energy deprived state, they were all mad.

  Onyxi did not waste any time. They had barely arrived in the bottommost region of the pit before she spewed. Her secret weapon: her ability to fire up the crowd just so she could feed off their negativity. “We must crush Leon DiSanti before the plague of peace he’s spreading kills every last one of us. Every skirmish he squelches, it’s more of our people who pay the price with their lives!”

  “As usual, Onyxi and I are on the opposite side of things. I say we let him gather up what galaxies are inclined more to peace than war and let him take them with him, purging the Menagerie of their foul energies which were killing us long before he got here. He’s the solution, not the problem.”

  “We can outsmart and outplay these more primitive races that we were bred to control,” Onyxi blared. “We can use the extra kindling of the other galaxies, including the Gypsy Galaxy, to fan the flames of war to new levels never before seen within The Menagerie. With so little kindling with which to make a fire, we can hardly afford to let this Leon character denude our forests!”

  Blaxus sighed. “So be it. We’ll try it Onyxi’s way until you see that I’m right. And once you have, we will appeal to our former masters. If they wish us to maintain control of this prison, they will have no choice but to grant our wish. If our race perishes entirely, they will have no prison wardens, and it will be a matter of time before the galactic empires within the Menagerie will no longer be consumed by being turned against one another, but once again pose a threat to the outside galaxies.”

  Onyxi looked surprised, evidently expecting more of a fight. The truth was Blaxus was still uncertain which of their positions was the correct one. If he played his hand too soon, it could be catastrophic. Who knows, their former masters may well have better prison wardens they might be tempted to replace them with.

  Onyxi smiled with a sense of victory.

  Blaxus regarded her with the same worried look that had weighed on him for quite some time, making his face sag; ironic for a species not affected by gravity.

  “So, you will help me?” Onyxi said.

  “Of course.” Blaxus spoke in the language of their ancestors. Rhythmic, patterned pulses that were more mathematical than grammatical. Meant to lure humanoid civilizations to the “first signs of alien life” across the expanse of the heavens. Their every word pulsed across space-time. Their bodies, including the long draping capes that flowed about them, were also built as satellite antennae to ensure The Collectors never uttered a word that couldn’t be read by their former masters, to prevent collusion against them, but also to draw more flies into the web.

  The technique had been so effective that over time more and more species seeking to be uplifted further beyond what they could do with their own technologies had fallen into the trap.

  Leon was surfing a tidal wave headed the other way, he just had no idea how hopeless his mission truly was. Ironically, by now, their former masters were far more able to contain him than The Collectors.

  Sighing over his inability to stay focused, Blaxus reeled in his mind yet again to project the hologram in the hollow cavity of the arena’s pit, arising from the sparks shooting from the fingertips of his out-held hand.

  Before the crowd revolved the image of the Vibran home world, Tearo, once the place of origin for the Vibran species, and now that they’d spread out across much of that galaxy, the galactic high command center.

  Blaxus had not chosen the Vibra Galaxy at random. They made some of the most powerful and ugliest space weapons out there. They were extraordinarily crafty in this respect. But their minds were easier to toy with than most. They were essentially a race of craftsm
en not given to big ideas and big politics. So long as they were free to do what they did best, they didn’t much care who was in charge of the heavens.

  It would drain Blaxus further to mess with the minds of their leaders, but that was the assignment that had befallen him. He was essentially allowing them to fan the flames of their own anxieties and hostilities off of the negative energy he was supplying them. As he’d meditated on earlier, his people were bred to suck the evil out of invading races to ensure that they were so blissed out and passive they couldn’t even defend against a boarding party taking over their own ship. The Collectors certainly hadn’t been bred to feed negative energy to their dupes.

  Onyxi reveled in Blaxus weakening visibly before her eyes. To her mind, it all but ensured her victory if Blaxus was too weak to even defend his own arguments.

  Vibra’s United Worlds Conference, with all occupied worlds with representatives in attendance, was not taking place at one location. Each representative had sent a ship to some innocuous location in their own galaxy bearing no relation to their home world. Their ships had but one defense. At any sign of treachery or attack they would teleport back to their home world without leaving a trace as to where they’d went.

  Blaxus’s visual aid for his audience highlighted the various Vibran ships as they were dispersed throughout the Vibran galaxy for their debate on how best to handle the crisis Leon posed to the staple or their economy: the export of their weapons.

  To affect the outcome of the conference, Blaxus started broadcasting. His elaborate cape rose and shaped itself into a satellite dish, as if he were some crazy bird caught up in a mating ritual for its less dazzling female partner. The cape, of course, was an extension of his own body, made from highly specialized cells; even from birth it grew more rapidly than he did, and was once used as a swaddling cloth.

  His tail, up until now masked by the cloak, rose into position like the stamen of a flower, but was in fact the transmitting and receiving point of the satellite dish.