NINETY-FOUR
CYLINDER WORLD SERVING AS
A PEACEKEEPER STORAGE ARK,
THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE
Lassiter kept one of the many eyes on his octopus head on his assistants, even as he worked to pry apart the latest Peacekeeper component, hoping to tease out its secrets. Even if he couldn’t understand how the device in his hand worked, he at least needed to understand the nature of the weapon and how best to deploy it.
It would have been a hell of a lot easier just to test-fire the various weapons solutions. But considering the distinctive signature Peacekeeper technology left behind, they’d need one very out of the way galaxy for that—doubtful a solar system would be enough, one in which they could be assured of not offending anyone by employing a weapon and asking questions later. Any one of these weapons solutions might well devour a galaxy. What he needed was a testing facility in some way designed to handle his Peacekeepers. But that was not likely to be found or fabricated for quite some time. Barring that, Mother to run thought experiments, given that she could extrapolate better than Lassiter, to better guess at what these various firing solutions did. There was no way she could afford the luxury of that computing time now, when she already knew none of them was a threat to The Collectors.
One of the newly minted Rama Rangers was going over one of the Peacekeepers’ thrusters. As with all the Peacekeepers, there were any number of fuel sources to choose from for propellants, depending on how fast you wanted the ship to go through space-time, or whether you wanted it to circumvent space-time altogether by opening wormholes or using other workarounds. Again, no one was planning to outsmart engineers from thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, if not billions of years into the future; they were just hoping to learn the nature of the various fuel sources and how best to engage them.
Mother was phasing out Theta Team operatives on the artificial habitats, for which they were poorly suited, and moving them to planets throughout the Gypsy Galaxy. She couldn’t do it fast enough for Lassiter’s purposes. He was getting tired having to micromanage them to make sure they didn’t get themselves killed.
But Lassiter was born to Theta Team and he still felt kin to them. These Rama Rangers were nearly as alien to him as the Peacekeepers. And they were reckless. The fools-rush-in-variety of scientist-soldier. They weren’t plodding and methodical, and a little too right-brained for Lassiter’s tastes, jumping from one wild idea to another for how to best unlock The Peacekeepers’ secrets.
The one he was keeping a particularly close eye on now had decided to stick his head inside the ejection port for the Peacekeeper’s left engine he was examining. When that didn’t prove eye opening enough for him, he ventured further inside. Then he summoned several more of his mates. Together they were determined to see if propellant options could be triggered from inside the engine. The idea, from what Lassiter could gather, was to make sure the Peacekeeper could not be sabotaged by probes fired up its thrusters, probes that might not be enough to blow the engines as a whole, but force them to power down at a crucial moment. It was an interesting line of investigation; Lassiter had to give them that. But really? They couldn’t employ a safer technique? Lassiter should have ordered them the hell out of there by now, but he was curious to see what tweaks Mother had made to the Rama Rangers.
The idiot in charge of his Rama Rangers squad managed to trigger one of the ejection ports from inside the engine, all right. A debris cleaner, from what Lassiter could tell, meant to keep the engine from getting gunked up with meteorite chunks, or as it turned out, enemy probes.
The Rama Rangers flew out of the engine port—in pieces.
Due to the anti-gravity fields holding the Peacekeepers in storage in the center of the twirling cylinder habitat, the Rama Ranger chunk meat looked like overdone barbecue hung up in a display store window to entice sidewalk shoppers strolling by.
Interestingly enough, Lassiter was receiving transmissions from the team; they were downloading all the intel to him that they’d gleaned from their exploratory mission. So their nanites were still intact—even after taking a hit from a Peacekeeper.
The charcoal remnants of their bodies were undoing the damage done to them and re-agglutinating. Moments later the killed Rama Rangers came back on line, gasping for air.
The Rama Rangers tested their morphing abilities to make sure they were a hundred percent back on line. Their humanoid bodies distorted into distinctly un-humanoid-looking shapes, unfurling tentacles from fingertips and toes until they had as many tentacles as Lassiter. Other Rama Rangers collapsed themselves into sheets of film and spread themselves along the surface of the nearest Peacekeeper like a fresh coat of paint.
Maybe Mother should have called these guys the Mighty Morphers. No other Special Forces unit, to Lassiter’s knowledge, had such shape-shifting ability. He doubted if even Cassandra could pull off some of those biomorphic changes. Perhaps they were as much spies as soldiers and scientists, and some of those morphing configurations had to do with infiltrating artificial habitats undetected, so they could conduct their studies in secret.
The Rama Rangers looked more human than Lassiter did. Of course, that wasn’t saying much. They could pass for primitive humanoids like Leon and his Omega Force in a pinch. Maybe that was to beef up their spy functions.
Theseus teleported in, blocking the view from the eye that Lassiter was using to scrutinize the squad of Rama Rangers coming back on line, and interrupting Lassiter’s digression.
“How are the Rama Rangers coming along?” Theseus asked. He closely regarded Lassiter’s reaction. “I’m sorry, was that a frown, a smile?”
Lassiter made a disconcerted sound.
“Again, I apologize. Was that a groan, a sigh, a fart, or were you telling me to fuck off in your own personal language?”
Lassiter, who preferred not to talk when he was probing an alien piece of tech, finally spilled. “They seem to be doing fine. Not sure I approve of their methods of investigation, but I suppose that’s the point, for them to explore avenues of thought even a prodigy at reengineering would never think of. As such, they seem to be performing better than expected.”
“Don’t think I didn’t note the hints of sarcasm, distaste, judgement and condescension in your review. Your audio transmissions are more odorous than hundred year old wine.”
“Glad you have a nose for sound, should save me protracted explanations,” Lassiter replied gruffly. He finally sighed exasperation, giving up on the item in his hand and tossing it through the antigravity field at a Rama Ranger. “Here, try your hand at this,” Lassiter said to the soldier.
The Rama Ranger turned the component over in his hands. “It’s a communication device for speaking to stones and other inanimate matter. Looks like the Peacekeeper can suck stored memories out of rocks billions of years old—even out of loose earth and grains of sand.”
“So, it’s a scanner, not a communicator, albeit a very sophisticated one,” Lassiter corrected him.
“No, it really can talk to the past through the memories stored in the various components of a planet’s biosphere. That way it can resurrect ancient civilizations long since dead that may have been a lot more advanced than the ones which replaced them, secondary to asteroid bombardment of the planet, alien attack, you name it.”
Is he suggesting the rocks store psychic impressions, or perhaps the crystals inside them? Is he implying this is a Gaia-like capacity unknown to us, a Gaia-memory function? Or does he mean to imply the Peacekeeper can analyze complex changes in the planetary atmosphere over time, the way we did ice cores in Antarctica drilled to miles beneath the surface to look back in time? And the Peacekeeper AI built into this component is sophisticated enough to fill in the blanks for itself? It all sounded like pseudo-science to Lassiter, if not complete gibberish. But what did he know about what science possibly billions of years into the future could do?
And how the hell did that Rama Ranger pull such a realization out of his
ass?
Theseus interjected himself into the conversation at this point. “Didn’t Leon use the portal on Earth to get to one of Earth’s ancestors that had made it off world to avoid just such an asteroid attack? Didn’t they have a class of archeologists that specialized in doing something similar? You think The Peacekeepers could be one of their ships?”
“No,” Lassiter said firmly. “This is a case of parallel evolution, a right idea born to a civilization at the right time, the same way Leibniz and Newton both invented Calculus around the same time. And if Leibniz and Newton hadn’t been there, then someone else would have channeled the information. It was just time for the idea to be born into the real world.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Lassiter sighed. “I am the prodigy in this area. And you have no reason for being here, being a relative dunce on artificial habitats. So why are you here?”
“To recall one of our Theta Team operatives, Ballarius. He’s been assigned a planet.”
“Poor bastard. I don’t envy anyone being the first on an alien world, even if they were bioengineered with the survivability of a cockroach.”
“Yes, well, be that as it may, it’s my job to convey the good news. Where is he?”
Lassiter pointed with one of his many tentacles in the direction of a Theta Team operative on the perimeter of the cylinder, outside the anti-gravity field. The Theta Team member was trying to get a sense of how the instruments down there worked.
He pressed the wrong button and disturbed the anti-gravity field, sending the Peacekeepers colliding into one another.
The metal-on-metal scraping, or whatever the hell those complex polymers were, was deafening.
The Theta Team operative quickly corrected his mistake. He shouted upwards for all those who could still hear, “Sorry about that! At least now we know how the field is generated. You can thank me later!”
“Sarcastic bastard!” Lassiter snapped. “Never knew anyone to celebrate their incompetence so openly. As you can see, he will not be missed here, except perhaps by me. When the last of your Theta Team operatives is gone it’ll just be me and the Rama Rangers.”
Theseus gave the Rama Rangers another once over, upgrading his seeing through his two eyes with what his third eye, or sixth chakra, could reveal. “Yeah, I can appreciate your sense of isolation better now. They do give one the creeps. As far as I can tell, Mother evolved them from forest fungus, and slime molds very gifted at recycling entire forests, and so, presumably, with some tweaks, equally adept at breaking down the essential components of artificial habitats.”
“You tell me those guys have another function entirely? They don’t just pull things apart to understand them?”
“My guess is, if discovered spying on an alien’s habitat tech, and threatened, to get their captors to back off of them, they simply start gobbling up the habitat.” Theseus continued to buffet his conjecture by studying the Rama Rangers through his third eye.
“Shit! Why would Mother release them in here where they’re as a big a threat to the newfound technology as the enemy?”
“I can only presume she has no intention of letting it ever fall into their hands.”
Lassiter’s head swelled. Theseus presumed that was his way of dealing with consternation. “She should have briefed me first.”
“I suppose it’s a judgement call at her level just what us humanoids can fit in our heads without them exploding.” He took another look at Lassiter. “Speaking of, you might want to dial down the blood pressure there, pal.”
Lassiter’s head deflated a bit. “If you’re quite through pissing me off…”
Theseus nodded to him respectfully and then beamed to the Theta Team operative below he’d come to brief.
The way the operative was bioengineered, he looked like three giant beach balls stacked atop one another. The thin stripes about the balls unfurled like tentacles to help him or her or it manipulate the controls at the console. Theseus had no idea why Mother would design a Theta Team operative like this, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“Um, forgive me, but how do you understand verbal communications?” Theseus asked. “What language do you speak, and how do you transmit it?”
The Tri-Ball responded with the ball on top of the stack, sliding eyes and nose and mouth into position like moons closely orbiting the gaseous planet below—without actually rotating the ball or its head or whatever that top “beach ball” actually was.
“The universal translator is engaged, moron. And as you can see, I can create a mouth and expel gas from my interiors to simulate speech. Though it pains me to do so, so please keep this brief.”
“I’m Theseus.”
“Oh, sorry, sir. I, of course, meant, ‘moron, sir,’ when I spoke earlier.”
Theseus restrained a smile.
“I’m Ballarius,” Tri-Ball announced proudly.
“Mother has called you into active duty on a gas planet the size of Jupiter, with a very dense liquid core at its center.”
“Yes, it would seem a perfect fit for me,” Ballarius muttered. He didn’t sound all that enthusiastic about the news.
“You have any idea what your mission is?”
“I’m an egg hatchery, sir,” Ballarius explained. “I interact with the surrounding gaseous or liquid world to procure lifeforms hardy enough to survive the most vicious habitats, methane atmospheres, liquid mercury molten cores, things of that nature. Since this is both a liquid and a gaseous world, I will have to repopulate quickly to send my placental sacs hither and yon to fill two entirely different ecological niches at once. Many sub-niches also, when you consider the varying density of the atmosphere at different levels of a gas giant.”
“That fits with my intel on the planet, all right. We currently do not have any lifeforms that could possibly survive more than a few minutes there.”
“Oh, I can, and I will, sir,” Ballarius announced defiantly.
Theseus took a deep breath. “I won’t hold you then. I’m beaming you there now.”
Theseus used the teleporting ability of his third eye to send Ballarius to the new coordinates inside the Gypsy Galaxy.
Theseus had expected all along that their one-of-a-kind designs were meant to seed new worlds singlehandedly through very advanced forms of autogenesis, among other methods. Properly provoked, that is, once inside the habitats for which they were built, they would become both male and female so they could self-inseminate, gestate, and reproduce. He had visions of sperm crawling up from his phallus to his vagina a few inches higher up…which he currently didn’t have. But honestly, there was no telling how any of these Theta Team operatives did it.
He took a deep breath and sighed out all his resistance to Ballarius’s departure and to his assignment. It was as close to a prayer as he got for the soldiers being sent on their missions. He should have sighed out his reticence prior to Ballarius’s departure, so he didn’t send the guy along with Theseus’s many misgivings about his mission, which was unfair and could compromise his performance, if Ballarius picked up on them in some way. But Theseus had gotten lost down a train of thought that he should never have been on. It wasn’t his job to question the orders, just to follow them.
***
THE GAS GIANT, GOLIATH
WITH A 47, 525 MILE RADIUS
LOCATED IN ONE OF THE INNERMOST SPIRAL ARMS OF THE GYPSY GALAXY
Ballarius landed on the surface of the ocean core of the gas giant. The gravitational forces bearing down on him were immense, and it wasn’t like he had an endoskeleton or an exoskeleton to fend them off.
But Mother had given him the data dump prior to his arrival, cuing him on modifications to himself to set into place prior to arriving here.
His three “wombs” were pressured up adequately to compensate.
His initial eggs would be little more than tiny wombs, designed to rise to different heights in the atmosphere or sink to different depths beneath him in the ocean.
&nbs
p; The smaller bubbles already saturated his surface, foaming up like soap bubbles in a tub procured by mixing in too much bubble bath into the water. The analogies his head came stuffed with were more bizarre to him than what he was doing now.
The children launched, evaporating off of him, using the acids in the atmosphere and in the waters below to break the bonds between the bubbles. Already the first generation placentas had all they needed to crawl into whatever niche this planet had to offer.
Once the eggs had settled into their new homes, it would be their job to discern the lifeforms best suited to adapt to that level. The placental sac itself was a biological supersentience with more than enough computational power to handle its own survival and that of the progeny inside, developing from the self-fertilizing egg.
Mother’s instructions were quite clear. First, master biodiversity on a world that currently could not support life. She or one of her sister ships she was parallel arrayed to at one time had run the scans earlier to confirm this world was as dead as dead could be. There was not even an amino acid chain that had managed to bubble up from inorganic compounds due to heat and fluid dynamics. No asteroid that had smashed into Goliath had managed to leave amino acid chains that might get a leg up here. So Panspermia had failed, at least on this world.
But Ballarius would not. Failure was not an option. The Gypsy Galaxy was at war. Each Theta Team member was a one of a kind solution upon which a successful outcome to that war depended. They worked with no particular time horizon, just with a sense of urgency. Leon would win the war in a span of millions of years, or longer, or sooner. It was not Ballarius’s concern how long it took, or just when exactly the puzzle piece he was placing on the board here today would ever be fitted into the puzzle. No doubt, depending on what alternate timeline one was talking, it could be at any point in the future in one or another of those timelines. Nothing unfolded in precisely the same order in any two timelines. He had it on good authority from Mother.
It was the next phase of his mission that Ballarius found curious. The diversity of lifeforms he was giving rise to… they were simply to serve as enticements for spacefarers to settle here, to colonize, to use the food table to support them. By being eaten, Ballarius’s children would, upon entering the bodies of the ones preying on them, break down into nanite-hive minds which would then hack their hosts and compel them to do Mother’s bidding—if need be. She assured him that she would not be quick to jump the gun; she was more interested in seeing what parts these players “higher up the food chain” had to play in the big drama unfolding about her.
Moving Earth Page 80