“Your talking toilet has been telling you to get checked out before your polyps turn into cancer for the last two years. Did you listen? No. Maybe God works in mysterious ways.”
“Ha, ha!” he said absently, continuing to hammer plaudits at the car’s AI, the latest one being, “I can’t believe what you just did! Genius!” The car had swerved about the latest rip in the road by going up on two wheels briefly.
Of course the fact that he’d caught her joke at all, especially listening to her only absently, suggested he may indeed be on the recovery trail. She’d settle for any coping mechanism that got him through this so he wasn’t total dead weight. But more than anything, she needed his brain back on line—and not just in bits and measures.
This war could be over by then.
On the plus side: convincing her mother she wasn’t catastrophizing because the stars didn’t look right just got a lot easier.
The thought hadn’t flown into her head unbidden. They were drawing up to their home.
Hailey could see her mother seated on the stoop, calmly drinking coffee, and staring up at the sky. It was the kind of unflappable reaction she was not looking for. If that was a psychotic break, Hailey was about to truly regret skipping her psych homework. The kind of scientists she expected to spend the rest of her life around were painfully dull, by and large. They did not walk around as poster children for DSM-5 diagnoses. Well, barring that “beautiful mind” guy that taught at Princeton.
The car pulled up to the curb and shut off right in front of her mother, who glanced at them, smiled, and waved. “Isn’t the meteor shower simply beautiful?”
Hailey sighed. “Great, just great.”
Dillon finally glanced up at Hailey, finding her still glaring wide-eyed at him. “What?”
“I figured out why the asteroids are impacting us in the absence of strategic assets in the area. It’s you, Dad. You’re the greatest cosmological physicist the world has ever known. You’re a disgraced figure, much like Picasso, because it’ll take modern science a hundred years to catch up with you. Inside your head may well be the answers to getting us out of this.”
Her father’s face changed color under the street lamp. “You’re being ridiculous. Even if I was what you say I am, you’re telling me the aliens can not only detect our military installations, but the glowing radiance of a single mind?” He swallowed hard.
Hailey kept her face neutral; she wasn’t looking to flick that panic switch in his head again. She’d said too much already.
THREE
HARDING COUNTY, NEW MEXICO
“Come on, Mom,” Hailey said taking her by the hand and lifting her off the porch stoop. “We’re going someplace where they have a much better view of the sky.”
“Really? Because, honestly, I think it’s pretty good from here.”
To her mom’s credit, she had snuck that comment in between the thunderous explosions of meteor fragments landing nearby, so, even if she was missing her mind, she wasn’t missing the beat. Also working in mom’s favor, her red hair and fair skin and freckled complexion, free of all makeup—she had never been the kind to plaster on war paint—warmed noticeably in the glow of flaming meteors whizzing by.
Hailey had her at the car. Her mother pulled at her arm, heading back to the house when the house exploded.
The angle of the asteroid hit alone had saved them, not just hammering the house to ash, but skidding along at a trajectory that took out six other houses in turn.
Her mother got thrown into the back seat from the force of the blast. Her singed eyebrows and charcoaled face looked as if a special effects artist had spent hours on her.
Her mom sat up, catching her bearings faster than Hailey expected, eying the ruination of her house before her. “Maybe you have a point, dear,” her mom said. “You really need the well-appointed homes with the candles in the windows and the fireplaces glowing inside to properly offset the meteor shower. I’m sure the view will be appreciably better elsewhere.”
Hailey picked herself off the grass growing in the sidewalk, and climbed into the driver’s seat. “Strap in, Mom.”
“Why?”
Hailey painted a plastic smile on her face and continued the conversation via the cracked rearview mirror. “I fear a cop driving by and ignoring the end of the world to give you a traffic citation.”
“Yeah, that’s all we need right now.” Her mom strapped herself in.
Hailey muttered to herself as she turned the ignition, “I knew you could act the part of an adult, Hailey. You’ve been around enough of them. I just didn’t know you had an Oscar performance in you.”
Her father hadn’t lifted his face from his laptop screen or his fingers from the keyboard the entire time, not since their arrival at the house.
“How’s the pep talk coming, Dad?”
“Oh, this thing will drive through Armageddon like a Sunday drive through the park,” he announced confidently.
“Hmm,” Hailey said, “to help us bond with it, it must be modeled to pass itself off as a genuine family relation.”
FOUR
ABOARD THE STARSHIP NAUTILUS
Leon, using the Herculean strength granted by his 6’ 4” WWF-grade, entirely-on-steroids wrestling physique, and the wide-angle of view provided by his shaved, perfectly-round dome of a head, grabbed the steering wheel of his convertible cherry red 1965 Mustang and swerved hard to the left—sending DeWitt and his black-striped-down-the-center Day-Glo green GTO sailing past the inside lane into the courtyard they were speeding around.
It was a nasty, vicious, entirely uncalled for move—completely in the spirit of the Demolition Derby they were participating in.
Of course, there was no way Leon would subject his actual Mustang to this kind of punishment, which is why he’d had the Nautilus nano-print an exact replica for him. He had to admit, so far, he could not distinguish the feel of the car or the sweetness of the ride from the original.
DeWitt’s GTO landed high in a tree in the tropical jungle habitat the Nautilus maintained to help the crewmates aboard destress in between battle engagements. The rest of the time, the supersentience that manifested the jungle out of itself was little more than a ball of white light at the center of the ship—and if you tried to jump into it then, there was no telling where you’d end up.
Leon, seeing DeWitt up in the tree, couldn’t help but smile. DeWitt said he always wanted to be marooned on an island with his favorite girl—and that would be his GTO that went by the name of Virginia. Of course, it was the other females of the jungle that DeWitt might well attract with his Fireman’s-calendar physique and his Mt. Rushmore chiseled features that ought to be his real concern right now.
***
“A little help here!” DeWitt shouted as he stood up in the GTO, surveying his perch high up in a tree that belonged nowhere but in Narnia, or possibly Jack and the Giant Beanstalk. As one of Leon’s Omega Force operatives he really didn’t do “helpless.” But that’s how he felt now, and royally pissed off.
“What does a person have to do for a little help around here?!” he blurted even louder. “I have a kid, and they’re more expensive to maintain than this GTO. I cannot—repeat c.a.n.n.o.t.—afford to lose this race!”
“Relax, Handsome. I got you. You might want to strap in.”
DeWitt, whose reflexes were typically superhuman relative to mortals who had not received special ops training, nonetheless took a beat. The one offering help was a talking female gorilla. A lot of the animals in the forest—all nano-upgraded—talked. He should have been used to that by now. But this thing was the size of Kong. “Yeah, okay,” DeWitt said, coming in late on cue, collapsing back into the seat and strapping in, afraid of being caught up in an all-too politically correct role-reversal drama of King Kong, with DeWitt playing the dude in distress.
The giant ape got the car in her hand, her thumb up against the driver’s-side door, and her fingers up against the passenger-side door pressing a bit too h
ard. At the sounds of crinkling metal, DeWitt shrieked, “Hey, watch it! I still have to be able to drive this thing.”
“You’re lucky you caught me between meals, Gorgeous. This thing looks like a green banana.”
DeWitt and his car went sailing through the air to land back on the track—albeit the outside lane, scraping against the metal-glass doors and walls framing the “doll houses”—the simultaneously affectionate and deprecating term for the Theta Team operative live-work spaces.
“Doll houses” because Theta Team had been bioengineered from scratch from the Nautilus’s chief supersentience—that oversaw the other supersentiences on the ship. Theta Team comprised of one-of-a-kind lifeforms that were the Nautilus’s best-guess humanoid adaptations for the variety of worlds in the universe it expected to encounter. She had more than mere speculation to go on—the Nautilus existed in numerous parallel timelines at once—and her supersentience could communicate across them. No doubt, somewhere in some parallel universe, she—by way of her crew—had explored one or another of the alien worlds that inspired these creatures.
DeWitt honked at the Theta Team operative that had the gall to step from out of his doll house onto the track. The Theta Team operative, not surprisingly, ignored him. DeWitt swerved around him and, barely missing him, let out a sigh of relief. He wasn’t the least bit concerned about the Theta Team operative; he was concerned about his car.
He checked his rearview mirror, noticed Crumley had not seen the Theta Team operative sauntering across the track in time to swerve, and smiled. Crumley’s car was disintegrated on impact. Those Theta Team troops were battle-hardened like nobody’s business.
They were pacifists, ironically, one and all, and very hard to piss off enough to get them to lose their temper. The Nautilus had engineered them to suck the intel out of alien worlds by communicating with Gaia, the planetary consciousness, either directly—if it was evolved enough—or indirectly through their numerous scientific aptitudes that made short work of alien ecosystems.
When you were dealing with planets whose plant life was more sentient than its animal life, or your troops were treading on mud that was nano-infused and linked up with a planetary mind far more powerful than even nanite-enhanced Special Forces working together in a coordinated fashion… Well, suffice to say Theta Team had proven themselves several times over during The Star Gate mission—when Omega Force and Alpha Team had first been introduced to them.
True, their pacifist tendencies were quite annoying to fellow military men—the other derogatory term for “the dolls” was “the tree huggers.” But when and if they chose to engage the enemy—something not even Leon seemed able to order—look out.
DeWitt smiled, noticing that he was gaining ground on the track. There was no beating American muscle cars, in which bigger really was better; not even Leon’s Mustang was going to fare well against DeWitt’s GTO.
***
Crumley—affectionately known as “Silver Back” to the rest of his Omega Force special operatives, for his hairy body whose follicles were now turning silver, and for his beastly, gorilla-like frame—surveyed the damage to his fire-engine red, convertible 1953 Allard J2X, or what was left of it. He’d seen 2000-piece, monochromatic, featureless, pictureless jigsaw puzzle pieces right out of the box that had a better chance of being put together.
He gazed up at the soldier-scientist that he’d collided with, who said, “Sorry, pal. You do know this isn’t a race track, right?”
Crumley sighed. “Yeah, I know.”
The Theta Team operative, about a foot taller than Crumley, and who gave Crumley’s “big and beastly body” a “small and diminutive” makeover just by standing this close to him, hiked off, refusing to pay attention to the race in progress. His name was Theseus. He had a strange camera-iris-looking organ in the center of his forehead he used to teleport with, and flexible reddish-purple body armor that was simply how his skin grew. Crumley, having had more than his share of encounters with him during The Star Gate adventure, had come to like and respect the guy, explaining why he wasn’t teeing off on him right now.
Crumley took one look at the sad state of his Allard, the other cars on the track whizzing by, and simply scattering the pieces further, and whistled in the direction of the tropical jungle.
He was down, but he was not out—not by a longshot.
Crumley’s pit crew came scampering out of the rain forest, bio-enhanced howler monkeys. They were already groping the pieces and looking for ways to fit them back together. “Can you spell hopeless?” one of the howler monkeys asked.
“H.o.p.e.l.e.s.s.” replied another.
“That was a rhetorical question, you idiot,” replied the original monkey.
Despite their defeatist banter, the team was already reassembling the car with the aid of their tools borne on their tool belts. “Hey, will someone get one of the big guys?” one of them said. “There’s no way we’re stretching out these body panels on our own.”
One of the howlers did its thing, screeching up a storm, calling for the attention of one of the gorillas. He did so by stepping out in front of one of the cars and squealing so loud he spooked Ajax, who swerved so hard to get around him that he sent his car rolling on its side to land upright after about a dozen tumbles.
***
Ajax crawled out of his upside down white convertible 1957 Ford Thunderbird, known as a Battlebird; it had been designed to compete at the Daytona Time Trials, once upon a time. He stared in shocked horror at his car. “This is no way to treat a supercharged Ford V8 backed by a jaguar transmission.” He pulled at the hair on the back of his head. “On the plus side, you still have your head, Ajax. Go figure.” He regarded his wavy carrot-colored hair, fair, freckled skin, and deep set green eyes in the car’s upturned side-view mirror, and struck the same pose he did for the Fireman’s calendar back on Earth, when he was Mr. June. “You don’t look so bad with all the battle scars on you.”
He strained trying to flip the car back over. “This is what you get for delousing from your nanite infestation. Techa, it sucks to be un-upgraded!”
Techa, the goddess of technology, had become the one most worshipped since each breaking generation of applied science brought remarkable new abilities and a rebirth of sorts.
But like the rest of Omega Force, who Ajax was in a death race with, he’d chosen to detox of nanites in between missions. It was that or go insane from access to augmented and virtual realities that Omega Force just found entirely too much. Of course, he was the youngest on the team, and he was pushing thirty. The nanites kept them going in a tough business that chewed everyone up and spit them out—even the bioenhanced.
Alpha Unit—comprised largely of late-year teens—on the other hand, lived for the augmented and virtual reality shit. He doubted they ever deloused from the nanites. They were likely off somewhere on the Nautilus now engaged in nextgen games more suitable to youth.
Failing to turn the car over, Ajax did the next best thing. He slid it out more into the center of the track, where it was easier to hit.
Sure enough, not everyone managed to get around it. When Leon hit it, he sent the Battlebird tumbling again. This time it landed right-side up. “Thanks, pal!” Ajax shouted at him.
Leon gave him a dirty look in his rearview mirror.
Ajax smiled. “Some people just need a high five. In the face. With a chair.” Probably just as well he couldn’t hear that, Ajax thought. Likely to go over as well as the rest of his one-liners.
He jumped back in the 1957 Thunderbird and back into the race.
***
Cronos, in his blue 1971 Plymouth Hemi Cuda with black roof and rear panels, gunned it over a ramp on the track to land on top of Leon’s convertible mustang, pancaking it just a bit, before the rear tires got enough traction to speed off.
Leon popped his head back up—he was lucky to duck out of the way so fast without his upgrades—to give Cronos a savage look.
Cronos made the sign
of the cross over himself, and kissed the old-style crucifix dangling from the rearview mirror. “God helps those who help themselves.”
Cronos was Sufi once, and then he was Muslim. But ever since reading a book on the Knights Templar, the whole Christian thing had really taken, and he’d yet to abandon it.
He wasn’t sure how his bronzed skin, bald head, and Cro-Magnon features played with the whole Knights Templar vibe. He was pretty sure Cro-Magnons worshipped no god at all. The steel plate in Cronos’s forehead, for that matter, violated the whole “my body is a temple” idea, as did the nanite-surgical repair of his severed penis with another man’s dick. That latter blasphemy had occurred in Syria after a nasty fight with a nonbeliever, before Cronos joined up with Omega Force for the Sentient Serpents mission. Alas, God’s love melts away all mankind’s transgressions.
***
The howler monkeys were bringing Crumley parts there was just no fixing. Crumley, Omega Force’s quartermaster and procurement specialist, was not one to be found coming up short on inventory—of any kind. He made a bird sound at one of the creatures in the forest.
It was a queen ant—modeled on the creature in Ridley Scott’s Alien—about twelve feet tall and guaranteed to scare the daylights out of the most upgraded humanoid. It scanned the part in his hand with its laser eyes, and then spit the part out of its egg-laying chamber, shooting it torpedo-like in Crumley’s direction.
Crumley pulled the part out of the placental sack and handed it to the howler monkey with the damaged part in his hand, so he could replace it.
Crumley signaled the queen ant that it could be a bit more on the down-low with a hand gesture. The queen ant immediately camouflaged itself, taking advantage of its chameleon outercoat.
Then Crumley signaled her to scan the rest of the broken car parts that were beyond repair and shoot the replacements to his pit crew. Which it did.
The gorilla, mercifully one of the regular-sized ones, stretched out the bent panels as best he could and passed them along the assembly line.
Moving Earth Page 2
