Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  “That’s the problem. It’s damn near unstoppable. You understand that to erase a stage four, universe-wide civilization, is no joke? They come loaded up with technologies you haven’t even dreamed of yet, that make your Legacy Tech look like a poor man’s rusted out toys, salvaged from garbage heaps.”

  Leon rubbed his temples, the migraine spiking right on cue. “So what, we inform our space fleets to keep well away from it, buy us the time we need to…?”

  “I’m afraid that won’t work. The Sicca, in the absence of space fleets to gobble up, will start gobbling up entire worlds. The idea was to devour the most advanced tech a society had to throw at it first. With that out of the way…”

  “Eradication could begin in earnest, along a geometric curve that could no longer be held in check. Damn it, Solo. You had better figure out how to solve a problem you created. I have enough problems to solve that I’ve created.” Leon stormed toward the bridge doors.

  Solo watched him depart and then returned his eyes to the big screen.

  “Mother, I’ll need access to your entire supersentience. You are to shut down all other tasks, including life support on the Nautilus. Put the rest of the crew, any still aboard the Nautilus that have not already been deployed, in self-induced comas. Leon will need to be able to continue to think through his end of things, but in simulation mode. Let him imagine his meetings with remarkable men, whatever he needs to advance his thinking.”

  “Yes, Solo.”

  Solo watched Leon on the big screen ambulating out in the hall hit the ground hard.

  “I’m afraid I will need to recruit your Mars war god as well,” Solo said.

  “That will have a huge impact on the war effort,” Mother warned.

  “That is why we’re going to drop the Kang on the Tinka for now. Overlay their galaxy on top of the Tinka galaxy. This is a move Leon will be rue to make, so ensure he can follow the necessary bread crumbs in simulated mode he needs to follow so he can come to the same decision. The fact that the decision will already have been made for him, we’ll keep between us for now.”

  “It is done, Solo.”

  Solo sighed. “I’m afraid here is where the hard work begins. You will please merge your mind fully with mine.”

  ***

  Skyhawk, Ariel, and Satellite were busy studying the clam ship they’d recovered on The Star Gate mission in the hangar aboard the Nautilus. Studies were ongoing, much of the clam ship’s tech still unfathomable. There were other versions of Skyhawk, Ariel, and Satellite running around, participating in the ongoing efforts to escape The Collectors’ Menagerie. But these three were stuck here.

  A loud thud registered a jarring impact in the adjoining hangar, along with a tremor in the floor and walls that nearly knocked the three Alpha Unit cadets off their feet. The disturbance jarred their craned necks and reverential gazes from the clam ship.

  “What the hell?” Ariel said, lowering her scanner.

  “Could it be?” Skyhawk tried to squelch his own enthusiasm. “Time to make our own prison break, people.”

  They ran for the hangar doors, Satellite tapping in the “escape” code before the three of them rushed into the hall.

  Satellite hacked the touchpad access lock to gain entrance to the adjoining hangar with his scanner and its apps.

  The three cadets rushed inside to find the latest captured alien ship, a RamRadden fighter, one of many tearing through Alpha Unit Starhawks like Nouveau Viking knives through Tsu-Stu insect butter.

  “Whoa!” they all emitted at once.

  “You shouldn’t be in here.”

  They turned toward the glowing guy that had uttered the words, standing, guard-like, up against the wall. He was like a Phoenix rising out of pure flames. It took Skyhawk a moment to realize the humanoid, which was more outline than figure, was actually comprised of pure chi energy. Satellite’s scanner shoved in his face confirmed as much.

  “You’re one of us?” Skyhawk asked.

  “Chi Corps.” The soldier’s brisk tone and gruff manner, Skyhawk figured, went with being a soldier.

  “Why shouldn’t we be here?” Ariel asked.

  “This is an organic ship, as are its occupants,” the soldier replied. “They may be carrying any number of contagions your immune systems cannot defend against.”

  “With all of the Nautilus’s atmospheric nanites, all hackable by me, which can be recruited for immune system boosting, on top of our own nanites…? We’ll take our chances,” Satellite said.

  “Your funeral,” the soldier replied, as if he couldn’t be bothered to waste more mental energy on these fools.

  They turned back toward the RamRadden vessel, whereupon they saw a woman floating in a giant soap bubble just above it. She appeared to be meditating, swirling mandala patterns of pure energy rotating in the center of her forehead, her eyes closed, her legs crossed inside her energy sphere that phosphoresced at the edges. Her head was shaved, which went with the rest of the monkish look, including her maroon robes.

  “Who’s she?” Ariel asked.

  “Psi Force,” the Chi Corps soldier responded.

  The three Alpha Unit cadets gulped for the second time in as many minutes. “And what’s she doing?” Ariel asked.

  Satellite appeared to be working on an answer when the Chi Corps soldier spoke up. “She’s keeping the RamRadden pilot entertained, fighting an imaginary battle in his head. As far as he’s concerned he’s still on the front lines. I’m draining his chi energy and that of the ship’s sufficiently to keep both sedated, and contained, facilitating her handiwork.”

  Satellite shoved the scanner in Skyhawk’s and Ariel’s faces. “Yep,” Satellite said. “He doesn’t lie.”

  “I thought these guys were supposed to be allies,” Ariel said.

  “They are,” the Chi Corps Special Forces officer responded, “even if no one has bothered to inform them of that.”

  “If this is how we treat allies, I’d hate to see how we treat enemies,” Ariel mumbled under her breath.

  “Testy times,” the Chi Corps soldier said, sounding like no further explanation or excuses were needed.

  Skyhawk passed his hand over the hovering craft, making a “phew” sound of awe. The ship was horseshoe shaped, not quite as flat, looking like it might be perfectly at home at the bottom of an ocean—even more so than the clam ship in the adjoining hangar—by all the gnarly barnacle-looking things growing on it.

  “Is it me, or does this thing look like it might be even more at home under the ocean than in outer space?” Ariel said.

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Skyhawk and Satellite said at once.

  “It originated on a water world,” the Chi Corps soldier said sharply, refusing to relax into the moment. He could learn a thing or two from Alpha Unit about staying permanently relaxed. “It launches from the depths to engage in planetary, solar system, or galactic-scale defense, as needed.”

  “That means…” Skyhawk said.

  “That their aquatic forces are extensive and even more impressive under water,” the Chi Corps officer said. “Here, they are fighting out of their element.”

  “But we…” Ariel too was interrupted before she could finish.

  “Don’t have an aquatic corps,” the Chi Corps officer said. “We’ve already put in a request to Mother. She has deemed it a low priority request, expecting to onboard the Macoon, the Premonox, and the RamRadden presently, all with extremely advanced aquatic fighting divisions.”

  “You can read our minds?” Ariel asked.

  “Of course,” the Chi Corps officer replied. “We both can. It’s part of how we do our work.”

  Satellite, running scans on both Special Forces officers the whole time, shoved his scanner in front of Ariel’s face. “He doesn’t lie. No nanite or mindchip hacking required.”

  Skyhawk refused to have his focus pulled from the ship. Continuing to walk about it, looking for a way in, he asked, “Can you open this thing for us?”r />
  “Not recommended,” the Chi Corps officer said. “Your meddling could cause us to lose control of the RamRadden ship and crew. And Mother is too preoccupied right now to assist in your investigations, or to provide back up.”

  “Nonetheless, I want in,” Skyhawk said.

  The Chi Corps officer obviously knew who the Alpha Unit cadets were and their importance to the war effort, because he didn’t argue further. His fifth chakra in his throat flared, suggesting he was communicating something to someone.

  Another warrior-type beamed in, also standing at attention at a far wall, which was the only clue he was not a hostile.

  Satellite ran his scanner over him. “Gamma Force,” he said.

  “What’s he here for?” Ariel asked.

  “If we lose control of the ship,” the Chi Corps soldier explained, “he will pry that tin can open and tear its inhabitants apart before anyone gets anywhere.”

  Satellite, running scans over the latest entrant to the room, shoved his scanner in front of Ariel’s face. “He doesn’t lie. He looks like he could pry the Nautilus apart, given enough time. I’m not even sure what some of the alloys that make up his musculature are exactly, only that they’re stronger than the ones making up the Nautilus’s hull.”

  The gnarly looking, gray Gamma Group officer seemed even less approachable than the two from Psi Force and Chi Corps.

  Skyhawk once again refused to have his attention pulled from his prize. “If you wouldn’t mind opening this thing for us now,” he said, continuing to walk around it as if each new perspective offered more insights into the vessel’s nature.

  The Chi Corps soldier arched his head toward Bubble Lady, who apparently enticed one of the ship’s occupants to pop the lid.

  “Did anyone think to bring a ladder?” Ariel asked.

  The three of them found themselves levitating over the ship so they could look inside.

  Satellite checked his scanner, gulped, then looked up at the Chi Corps soldier, and said, “Thanks.” Then, mumbling more to himself, “Guess he can boost the amount of chi flowing through others, not just dial it back.”

  Ariel and Skyhawk were already too enthused by what was inside the vessel to even pay attention to the fact that they were being piloted according to where they wanted to go next merely by their thoughts, which the Chi Corps officer empowered. If he was handling the telekinetics, Bubble Lady, aka the Psi Force Special Forces soldier, was downloading all the intel they had both sucked out of the soldiers and the RamRadden vessel by their strangely psychic methods to Skyhawk’s, Satellite’s, and Ariel’s mindchips.

  The three Alpha Unit cadets descended into the vessel. They had enough head clearance to stand and walk around. “Whoa!” they all said, even if they didn’t exactly manage it in sync this time.

  Outside the vessel, the Psi Force cadet transmitted a thought to the Chi Corps soldier. “You think they’d be more or less impressed if they knew that these guys decimated over a dozen cloned versions of them already?”

  “Let the kids work,” the Chi Corps soldier replied telepathically. “Their demons will catch up with them soon enough. Mother must be lagging behind with transferring lifetime experiences from clone to clone with everything else on her hands.”

  “Kids? They’re teens like us.”

  “They have a lot of growing up to do yet to be like us.”

  The Chi Corps soldier was surprised when the Gamma Group officer didn’t jump into their exchange. With speech not doing you much good in space, for which Gamma Group was engineered, they were every bit as up to speed on mind-to-mind transmissions. He must have been really pissed being pulled from the front lines with all the losses Leon’s forces were taking to babysit these three. Firefox couldn’t blame him. He sensed Percevra felt his pain as well. Whatever Hardan was thinking, he remained unreadable, looking more like a statue than something living.

  ***

  MOMENTS PRIOR…

  ABOARD THE STEPHEN HAWKING STARHAWK

  Skyhawk, from his captain’s chair, couldn’t believe what he was seeing out the port screen, for one, the latest evidence that they’d been bested yet again. The incoming proton torpedo rattled the Starhawk like the striking of a church bell. Evasive maneuvers had failed.

  “Satellite, you’ve activated the ship’s chief supersentience?” His tone was less than salutary to their COMMS genius, even if he had ordered him to fly in the face of Leon’s orders specifically not to engage the AIs in this “stalling for time distraction,” now a full scale intergalactic war.

  “Yes!” Satellite barked, refusing to look up from his dashboard displays confirming as much.

  Skyhawk swiveled toward Motown, their Navigations specialist. “You trying to tell me that even tethered to the Starhawk’s supersentience and operating in Singularity Time you can’t…?”

  “No!” Motown barked back.

  Skyhawk returned his eyes to the big screen as they took another hit that they should have sidestepped entirely. “It’s just not possible, I tell you.”

  “One more hit like that, and we’ll be carrying the emotional scars of our abject failure to our graves,” Ariel explained.

  “What the hell?” Satellite looked up at the RamRadden ships bedeviling them. Each one was being ghosted by a Psi Force and a Chi Corps officer that had materialized from out of nowhere.

  Ariel explained, “Psi Force and Chi Corps appear able to open their own wormholes and teleport themselves at will. At least working in tandem like this.”

  The port screen was lighting up with exploding enemy ships. “They’re turning the RamRadden ships against one another somehow,” Satellite said. “Wait a second, and I’ll tell you how.”

  “The Chi Corps cadets are boosting the chi flowing through the living ships and their crews to make them even faster,” Ariel explained.

  “Even as the Psi Force cadets project images in the heads of the crew that make them think they’re still fighting us.”

  It was weird watching the RamRadden ships darting about as if they had AI assist, with the Chi Corps soldiers teleporting about the surface of the vessels, moving from chakra to chakra on the living ships as they acted like acupuncture needles, channeling more energy through their bodies into the ships that they were vacuuming up from nearby chi energy veins in this sector. That or possibly they could mine the vacuum of space-time, convert zero point energy into chi energy—no nearby energy veins running through this sector of space-time necessary.

  The ships’ inverting repeatedly did nothing to shake the shimmering energy outlines that were the Chi Corps cadets, shining brighter periodically every time they jumped from chakra to chakra on the living ships. Nor did evasive maneuvers perturb the Psi Force operatives, all females, seated in lotus positions, in calm meditative repose, their eyes closed, but the center of their foreheads a swirling mandala of energy, the mandala shapes changing on themselves like a kaleidoscopic projector.

  “The RamRadden ships are being bested,” Ariel explained. “They’re losing between six and twelve of theirs to every one of the ships turned by the coupled Psi Force and Chi Corps cadets. But…”

  “We’re losing Chi Corps and Psi Force operatives as well.” Skyhawk jumped off his chair and started kicking it. “Bad enough we have to be rescued by these clowns, now we have their deaths on our hands as well.”

  “Leave that guilt trip for our clones to deal with come time for resurrection, man,” Motown said. “I say we retreat. If they don’t have to protect us, they don’t have to die for us either.”

  “I’m with Motown,” Satellite said. “Mother has transmitted instructions that Farsi will get the RamRadden to back off soon enough. I say we check our egos and give the RamRadden the win.”

  Skyhawk sighed and collapsed in the captain’s chair. “Easier said than done.”

  Motown was hardly waiting for a command directive. The entire fleet of Starhawks was pulling away with Techa knows how many cloned Alpha Unit Teams tucking their tai
ls between their legs. It would be a day that would live in infamy every time they visited their favorite rec-room and bar on the Nautilus where the different units met to swap war stories.

  “Satellite,” Skyhawk said, “transmit instructions to Chi Corps and Psi Force. I want one of the RamRadden ships for my clone to scrutinize back in the hangar on the Nautilus. Beat me once, shame on you…”

  “Message sent,” Satellite said.

  ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN

  ABOARD SACRIN’S AND FARSI’S PALACE SHIP

  THEIR PRIVATE CHAMBERS

  PRESENT TIME

  Farsi took Sacrin’s arm, making it look as if he was escorting her and not the other way around, per their usual routine, as the earlier jolt of adrenaline coursing through Sacrin’s body rushing to her bedside upon hearing her scream had already worn off.

  “Are you strong enough to handle these negotiations by my side?” he asked.

  “You had better hope. The Blues will not tolerate an interruption of Leon’s plans either. If they feel I can’t handle it and that they need to step in…”

  “They won’t care who is worth adding to the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping and who is not. They will simply bring an immediate halt to the infighting at any cost. I may not be as long-lived as you, but I am a rabid reader of legend. Those who do not wish to repeat history all are.”

  In truth Farsi had seen the negotiations playing out between Sonny and the Rippa and Sonny and the RamRadden many millennia before Sonny was even hatched by Mother. But she knew better than to intervene in his maturation process, as he was a key player in Leon’s menagerie. That meant informing her husband at the last minute, and now, doing some fast footwork she prayed she was up to in her pregnant state.

  The smart-doors sensed Sacrin’s and Farsi’s approach and parted. The giant doors could not be opened even by humanoids with boosted strength; their density too great. A security measure. The AI overseeing the room knew better than to mend the damage while Sacrin was still inside. He was an old-fashioned fart and a purist. He despised the idea of nanites infesting the rare stones. But they could be found no longer in nature and were literally as irreplaceable as they were priceless. It was that or sic an army of artisans on the room that would take months to restore it, and it would hardly be to its original pristine state.