The implications were clear, at least for Farsi, if not for Skyhawk himself, Mother, or anyone in Leon’s employ.
The Guardian races had found themselves another catalyst figure.
Perhaps on parallel with a Cream, if not, too close for comfort.
Farsi pulled out of the Nexus, returning her attention to the genocide in progress between the Macoon and the Premonox that she’d retreated from earlier in order to investigate its premise.
The Premonox had awakened to the presence of the Macoon.
The battles throughout the oceans wrapping about planet after planet were epic in scale—and still too close to call.
But then…
The Macoon were turning to dust before Farsi’s eyes. On the surface, and beneath, throughout the many zones of the ocean.
The timeline was crumbling.
The mutual genocide, which but moments ago seemed inevitable, would now never come to pass.
Farsi could already guess at the implications.
The Macoon and the Premonox galaxies both would soon join the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping under Leon’s lead. Both races had learned the painful lessons of what being affiliated with him meant, versus being unaffiliated. They would not make the same mistake again of ignoring his entreaties.
All thanks to the entry of the latest Skyhawk clone onto the stage.
It was ultimately a win for Leon, and so, ultimately a win for Farsi and Sacrin. But she had to be careful. Farsi’s value to Sacrin hinged on her ability to predict the future. And Skyhawk was eroding her ability to do so. Too many versions of him out there…
She would reach out to Solo immediately and apprise him of the situation.
Long term, she might have an even bigger problem on her hands than Skyhawk.
One of the other guardian races might be targeting the Cream Umbrage, looking to put them out of commission by neutralizing their value-add to the galactic oligarchs.
Such a foe might well prove a worthy adversary indeed.
***
ABOARD OLIGARCH SACRIN’S PALACE SHIP,
POLARIS
SACRIN’S AND FARSI’S PRIVATE CHAMBERS
From her side of the king-size bed, Farsi screamed, her back and neck arching back and her head tilting up as if to facilitate the geyser of a vocalization. Her hand was already at her midsection, instinctively sheltering her unborn child.
Her outcry had sent cracks splintering across the master bedroom’s stonework.
Her husband, Sacrin, surrounded by a coterie of tailors, being fitted for his latest engagement, yards from her, came charging through the couturiers like a bull trampling weeds to get to Farsi across the polished zenzenite floor. The man who could barely walk without taking her by the hand most evenings sprinted like the younger man she once knew to get to her.
“What is it, my love?”
Before she could answer he was screaming at the tailors, “Get the doctors!”
Farsi just shook her head. Taking her lead over his, the tailors refused to budge, standing there with all the solemnness of a church choir awaiting the score they were supposed to sing.
“Our timeline has shortened,” she whispered to her husband, allowing him to help her up.
The “choir” knew what her whispering meant and hurried themselves out of the room, closing the doors behind them.
Farsi considered the irony of the room. Everything was done up in polished rarefied stones, not just the floor and the walls, the pictures, sculptures and inlaid ceiling, the master bed, the furnishings, hell, even her hair brush and hairpins—each rock chosen for its jeweled finery, laced with golds and coppers and other precious metals not found on all elemental charts, but known for fostering clarity of mind and calmness. Everything the eye could land on, however briefly, stunningly beautiful, but most of all, everlasting. Nothing would change in this room ever, and by extension nothing in Sacrin’s world. Oligarchs relished their stability.
She was about to bring his world crashing down on him as if it were made of straw and not stone, and, paradoxically, he would love her all the more for shattering the illusions of a foolish old man that just made him more vulnerable to his enemies in the end.
“Skyhawk has just dismantled an entire Macoon galactic fleet with a handful of fighters. The fallout will be tremendous.” She winced as the flashes of the future continued to slash through her mind. This time they brought images of Sonny’s tampering with the fate of the Premonox—what had transpired already, and what would occur in the near future.
Sacrin pondered the implications of the Macoon defeat for himself as he rubbed her back. “They will take their injured pride and turn their attention from their customary foes, the Premonox, and slash out at the Premonox allies, less able to defend themselves, to force them to enact their revenge for the Macoon. The former Premonox allies won’t have any choice but to comply, or see the profit-making war machines hemorrhaging more money than blood.”
“If the Macoon can’t win directly, they will win circuitously, taking advantage also of their less rash allies, who will take the time to mount a more formidable assault, not possible by a race as rash as the Macoon.” Farsi leveraged herself to a standing position by grabbing his shoulder. “But you are overlooking one other factor, my husband, Sonny and his Shadow Warriors.”
“Of course. His spies and his saboteurs are everywhere. My own people tell me as much, assuming they’re still my own people and Sonny hasn’t gotten to them too.” Sacrin sighed. “Sonny will feed the conflagration between the Macoon and the Premonox, all the while ensuring both more profits, providing they join the Gypsy Galaxy, where he can continue to escalate and evolve both their warfare and the profits.”
“Leon cannot afford this distraction.” Farsi’s speech remained breathy and moist, as if speaking through a respirator. “This is just what The Collectors want. The more infighting there is, the less resources there will be to throw at The Collectors and at the prison escape. We alone can broker the peace and put out the fires in his timeframe.”
Sacrin nodded sagely.
“I’m afraid our interventions will not end with the Macoon and the Premonox, my husband. Sonny has gotten his mitts and his sway on the Rippa and will soon do so with the RamRadden, far more powerful adversaries than the Macoon and the Premonox combined.”
“We will start with the latter two parties then. I will summon my tailors to ensure the proper outfit to make the right impression with the RamRadden. We will need to speak with them first.”
“We don’t have time for your foolish affectations and rituals. I know you use them like good-luck charms, but there is no time.” She shrieked, louder than before, as another time quake rocked her world, the images of things to come taking a scalpel to her brain tissue, and buckled at her knees.
The outcry had practically brought the entire room down on their heads. Chunks of ceiling now decorated the floor as if they needed them to walk over the polished lake of zenzenite.
The sight of the room’s shattered state seemed to awaken her husband from his sleepwalking of self-assured calm even in the middle of a disaster that oligarchs were wont to have, their ability to neutralize any threat so ingrained. Suddenly the sense of urgency she needed him to have was upon him.
The nanites on his surface procured the proper attire for him to greet the RamRadden in a flash.
“What are our chances of success?” Sacrin asked.
“On your own, thirty-three percent. But my son and I have charted a course for us that will enhance those figures dramatically. Still, there is no time to lose. Mother is bioprinting more copies of Skyhawk even as we talk. Any one of them could agitate things further.”
“Those damn primitives with their inability to think thousands of moves ahead!” Sacrin blurted. “They will be our undoing.”
“I will explain the situation to Nemo, get him to make Mother cease and desist with that approach. Or at the very least, put the Skyhawk clones under the supervision of the Cre
am Umbrage.”
ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN
THE RAMRADDEN HIGH COMMAND CENTER
“What the hell, Xenon?” Sonny wasn’t taking to the hike through the ruined world at all. Bombed out cities in the distance was a suitable backdrop to the even deader region of the forest they were traipsing through. “We’re supposed to be meeting with the RamRadden high command.”
“Yeah, these people are a bit bizarre, even by intergalactic standards,” Xenon replied. Xenon used his visor to help him clear a path ahead of them by lasering through impenetrable jungle in the absence of a machete, the dead wood and vines no easier to cut through than the living kind. “Here comes one of them now.”
Sonny shifted his attention in the direction Xenon was pointing. Sonny gasped and reminded himself that he was just a backup copy of the actual Sonny, who knew better than to negotiate with barbarians in person.
In the clearing Xenon had gotten them to, the scorched earth beneath their feet, the singed twigs, and the molds and blight living off the dead and tasked with decomposing it further, gathered before them, taking shape into humanoid forms. The seemingly still dead golems before them sparked to life as the slime molds and fungus crawling through and over them made their final connections.
“For what do you seek the RamRadden?” asked the closest hulking brute before them, a good few feet taller than either Xenon or Sonny.
“We wish to employ you to lay waste to a galactic civilization like the one that did as much to you once upon a time,” Sonny replied.
“Relax,” Xenon whispered to Sonny as the slime molds started growing up around both Sonny and Xenon. “This is their way of getting to know you. After they suck the information from our minds, they’ll decide our fate.”
The forest floor retreated from the two men the same way it had grown up around them.
“We will intercede, as you wish,” the leader continued in a hoarse, commanding male voice, with echoes of pain reverberating across his vocal cords.
“You realize we’re the bad guys in this scenario?” Sonny said.
“You are like the blight that enlivens us, working to weaken the very megalomaniac forces that hold the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping together. Your success means less well- or evil-intentioned men seeking to rule over the rest of us. And if you wish to be the last man standing as opposed to the agent of change to a more egalitarian order, we will turn our attention to you next.”
Sonny gave him one of his best plastic smiles, thinking, “Yeah, well, all I need is time to turn the tables on anyone, including you, buster, and you are about to buy me a lot of time.”
***
THE COLLECTORS’ MOON WORLD
THE LAGRANGE POINT OF THE MENAGERIE
With their capes already shaped into satellite dishes and their tails positioned as the transmitters/receivers of those satellite dishes, The Collectors, working as one, refocused the dishes toward the RamRadden Galaxy, with nothing more than a series of ear-splitting shrieks, so finely tuned only The Collectors themselves could have interpreted the signals.
***
THE RAMRADDEN WORLD, XARUS,
SONNY AND XENON ARE CURRENTLY DEPLOYED TO
Sonny gasped and stepped back as the RamRadden golems morphed further after considering Sonny’s offer. They appeared under duress. Perhaps The Collectors were interceding on Sonny’s behalf as they’d done with the Rippa. He wasn’t sure how that would play out with the RamRadden; they might well desist from engaging further in war games just to piss off The Collectors.
Moments later, the RamRadden soldiers rose into the air and remnants of the closest shattered city in the background hurtled toward them, agglutinating around them. The biomorphic ships the RamRadden were famous for, which were extensions of the RamRadden themselves, each growing into one another, took shape before Sonny’s eyes.
He could see the molds and funguses continuing to interpenetrate the larger structures, enlivening them, animating them, bringing the dead cities back to life, but not as they had been once upon a time. More like living hi-tech clay now at the funguses’ command. Was Sonny observing some Gaia-like response to having the planetary evolution violated? Whatever, it was hardly his concern how this magic was happening, just so it was happening.
The living ships, glowing and sparking with life now, worn like well-tailored suits about the RamRadden, launched themselves out of the planet’s gravity well.
Sonny and Xenon watched entire cities in the distance coming to life, reforming themselves. The Gaia-consciousness of the RamRadden was now on the move, to do his bidding. Isn’t life grand?
“Now, get me off this world,” Sonny said. “There’s not enough pumice soap in all the universe to wash off the skin-crawling effect of these people.”
Xenon summoned the UFO—cloned from Patent’s prototype—via his mindchip.
Once they were securely inside and underway, Sonny asked, “Did you get any sense The Collectors intervened on our behalf as they have before?”
“It is unlikely a world in such a dormant state could have responded to a call to arms so quickly unless a global threat was felt everywhere at once. If your words and the handful of golems before us were the sole source of menace, it would have taken far longer for that fear reaction to spread via chemical secretions from fungus across the planet. To say nothing of propagating the Gaia response from planet to planet across this galaxy.”
“I’m going to take that as a yes. I love it when people volunteer to do my bidding without all the arm-twisting. Frees up so much mental energy for even more vile pursuits.”
ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Leon walked in on Solo on the bridge viewing what the RamRadden—the latest hell-bent-on-attacking race to pop into the Gypsy Galaxy—were doing on the big screen. “How are they tearing through the Starhawks like that?” Leon asked. “To say nothing of the Alpha Unit clones at the helms?”
Solo showed him with a wave of his hand, overriding Mother’s images and intel, which had yet to pierce the veil of the RamRadden ships.
Leon drew a deep breath at the sight of the insides of one of those ships. They were organic, living ships, fused with their pilots and crew.
“Their nervous systems work at light speed, in sync with the ship,” Solo explained, referring to the crew. “There is no supersentience calling the shots, which ordinarily can get the upper hand by running so many battle simulations in real time, side by side, that it can steer humanoids toward the best battle options with the most winning outcomes.”
Leon groaned. “And handing our ships over to our supersentiences is of no help?”
“For the few that have tried, no. While the AIs are studying the enemy’s battle styles, looking for an edge, the pilots of these RamRadden vessels are winging it. The Starhawk AIs are composing Mozart symphonies of strategy, very well thought out in advance. The problem is the RamRadden are playing jazz, an entirely improvisational art form, cruder perhaps, but they play so well together, it appears almost orchestrated.”
“So, they’re also more battle seasoned than our space fleets. No surprise, as we didn’t have space fleets when we entered The Collectors’ Menagerie.” Leon’s growl sounded like one of his pet lions sending out a warning.
“The RamRadden are not the problem,” Solo said. “They will be our allies soon enough, and will pull back. Farsi will see to it. This is the problem.” Solo waved his hand again, bringing up images of another attack in progress.
“What the hell?” Leon said. “I hadn’t been informed of this.”
“That’s because Mother has no intel on them. The Sicka have destroyed all probes that have gotten near them, including the probes no bigger than a speck of space dust with which she has saturated the entire Gypsy Galaxy.”
“The Sicka?”
“Yes, we Guardians are well aware of them. They’ve been around much longer than most humanoid races. Regrettably, we’re the only ones who know of them.”
> “Why is that?”
Solo showed him rather than waste words on the matter. The Sicca armada, once in range of the Starhawks, turned to dust, and blew over the Starhawks, dissolving them in turn, before resuming their original shape. The ships comprising the armada reminded Leon of undersea colonies or perhaps early depictions of Mars colonies—a series of transparent domed habitats linked by equally transparent tunnels. The lifeforms glowing inside couldn’t help but spark curiosity.
“What the hell!”
“They’re a kind of fungus,” Solo explained. “The shapes the mold grows in are meant to lure space fleets that they feed on. There isn’t much higher intelligence involved.”
“But how…?”
Solo sighed. “I’m afraid we engineered the Sicca. In the past, when civilizations were evolving in ways we felt counterproductive to the overall evolution of the heavens…”
“You seriously do cosmic engineering on such a vast scale? Then the civilization that engineered the Star Gate…” Leon’s mind couldn’t help but jump to The Star Gate mission after a comment like that.
“Are another Guardian species that do as we do, farm the stars to get life to grow out of lifelessness. Mother Nature will do it on her own, of course, but far less efficiently.” Solo turned back to face the screen.
“So, what, you just erased these civilizations from the star map?” Leon asked.
“Yes. If the experiment had been allowed to go on too long in hopes that it would right itself, the eradication might be transgalactic in scale, sometimes universe-wide.”
“Techa, Solo!”
“You understand now why I keep some things from you until I think your mind can handle the truth.”
“Yeah, well I’d say you’re a little off on your timing.” He returned his eyes to the screen, and let go for now of the venom he wanted to squirt on Solo like a pit viper; never mind Solo was the one that looked like a human pit viper. “So you know then how to shut the Sicca down?”
Moving Earth Page 94