A few seconds later, thanks to the speed of his pit crew, Crumley was back in action, revving the engine and speeding down the track.
***
Leon, surveying the track and the state of the vintage vehicles in his rearview mirror, as the demolition derby was heading into its thirteenth lap, said, “There’s a special place in hell for people who do things like this to classic sports cars.”
“I will stand by God’s side and proclaim your everlasting worthiness to be included among the saints,” the bartender said, coming up alongside, matching Leon’s speed. “Though I’m fairly convinced, as is Nietzsche, that God is dead.” He sighed. “Thank you for this!”
It was the Nautilus’s chief bartender who had proposed the demolition derby as a way of blowing off stress at the end of The Star Gate mission. Technically, this version of the Nautilus had never been through the Star Gate; it had stayed to protect Earth. But enough of them used the rejuvenation tanks, which allowed for limited communications across timelines. And, well, the bartender’s idea was simply contagious enough to jump timelines in a heartbeat.
The bartender had delivered on his end of the deal by making Leon divinely drunk, despite what the best body-maintenance nanites could do to neutralize Leon’s high—all in exchange for the opportunity to participate in a demolition derby. As to why exactly, well, the man was entitled to eschew the third degree interrogation for a simple favor.
The bartender was one of the creations of the Nautilus’s chief supersentience, who went by Nauti or “Mother” depending on context and who was referring to her, and one’s choice of derisive sarcasm. His beard consisted of snakes with the heads of humanoid female femme fatales, each one unique. Same for the long hairs on his head that dropped below his shoulder and blended with his beard. Though Leon didn’t have the courage to ask the question, he was fairly confident the venom those fangs on those femme fatales could inject delivered highs far in excess of any liquor the bartender served up.
The bartender, finished thanking Leon, and floored it, zooming past him in a maroon 1953 Ferrari 250 roadster. He’d originally requested a duplicate of Leon’s 1965 Mustang, but Leon reassured him the Nautilus could procure for him the car of his dreams.
Leon put his eyes back on the road in front of him in time to see the White Indian materialize before him, in nothing more than a loin cloth, his figure lean and defined for living no less cushy a life than any of Leon’s Special Forces.
It was the shaman that had befriended him in their Sentient Serpents adventure. He’d reached out to Leon in a like fashion on The Star Gate mission. If the Ley line energies were flowing strongly enough through the mountain in the Amazon where he did his meditations, he could reach out with these body doubles, or avatars, across time and space.
“Leon,” he said, “this is no time for games.” And then he dematerialized. While the shaman’s face looked haunted on a good day, today he seemed more demonized than ever.
Leon sobered on a dime.
He braked, coming to a complete stop, the Mustang’s tires screeching in concert with his sense of rising tension, then he clambered out of the dinged-up vehicle.
Stood facing the cars racing toward him.
He figured his face and his stony posture said it all. Standing 6’ 4”, with a physique like Dwayne Johnson in his heyday, standing in just his camo-fatigue pants and boots, his tanned upper body exposed and glistening, he figured he’d catch most anyone’s attention even if he was just playing crossing guard.
The rest of the team came to a halt in their speedsters, their engines rumbling, and croaking more than humming at this point. The chassis of those cars were protesting even more loudly.
“Nano up,” Leon ordered. “We’re mission critical.” He was already hiking through the flock of cars.
He was not making a beeline for his rejuvenation tank, but for the bridge. “Mother. You need to bring me up to speed now.” He’d yet to squeeze the facetiousness out of his tone when uttering the word “Mother” in deference to the Nautilus’s chief supersentience. But he’d yet to think of anything better to call her.
Leon had a higher clearance and superior access to her than anyone else on Omega Force or Alpha Unit, anyone except perhaps for Theta Team, her true children. The rest of the lifeforms aboard were likely just tolerated by her, like benign infestations.
The atmospheric nano, typically invisible, at Mother’s behest, made its presence known, swarmed him and “ate” him down to nothing in no time. They then reassembled him along transhuman guidelines from an up-to-the-second backup copy of Leon stored inside the Nautilus’s chief supersentience.
“Excellent,” he said, without breaking stride, feeling the difference immediately, taking it all in with a power breath and a flexing of his upper body muscles.
FIVE
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
DeWitt surveyed the others in the banged-to-hell demolition derby cars. “I guess the fastest way back to our rejuvenation tanks is still via the cars.”
“No argument from me,” Cronos said, revving the Hemi Cuda. “You think this car is dented up… It at least is made of metal.”
“I have enough compacted discs,” Crumley bitched, “to officially qualify for slug status. Definitely time to reacquaint myself with my transhuman alter ego.” He drove off ahead of them.
“Speak for yourself!” Ajax shouted after him, and shivered from the chill running up his spine. “Those rejuvenation tanks… It’s the dreaming that gets me. Haunts me is more like it.”
“What if dreaming is our brain’s way to show us what our other selves are doing in the multiverse?” Cronos replied.
Ajax glared at him with a look that could peel the paint off his car. “Get out of my head.” He sped off. The others right on his tail.
“Shit!” It was Cassandra. Headed straight for them. Sauntering like only she could. With complete feline grace and economy of movement, paired with a deadliness no lioness could match. Stark naked except for the way her nano airbrushed her private parts with the thinnest of undergarments.
More superweapon than human.
Her body paint was also courtesy of nanotech; it had her looking right now like one of those natives in Avatar, just a bit more phosphorescent, the blues a bit deeper; the yellow eyes big and sparkling. The dated movie reference, he had to remind himself, wasn’t all that dated. It was easy enough, aboard the Nautilus, to think it was 2130 and not 2030. Tesla-grade minds could do that—crinkle the timeline all to hell. Cassandra must have stepped out of the rainforest where she was no doubt practicing her jungle maneuvers.
She was technically the sixth person on Omega Force. Though where she went, no one else could truly follow. Auspiciously co-lead of the team as well, she could rarely be bothered to oversee the team; Leon would really have to be down for the count for that. As to what she would think of their demolition derby… well, she didn’t exactly go in for R&R.
She parted them like the Red Sea by extending her arms in front of her the way professional divers did before jumping into the water and then prying her arms apart. In one gesture the jungle had reverted to its light-sphere status.
The Nautilus’s Mars war god had been activated. The supersentience focused on nothing but battle strategies and tactics.
The cars went sailing into the light sphere. No doubt to be dematerialized as so much food stock for the nuclear-fusion-like reaction that was Mars’s thought processes.
As to the rest of Omega Force… Ajax could only speak for himself. He’d ended up back in the rejuvenation tank in his private quarters, splashing into it and sinking below the surface of the breathable liquid. It took him a few gasping breaths to get used to the sensation. No doubt the others had been helped to their destinations in the same way.
***
Leon arrived on the bridge to find Solo, nicknamed Nemo, because like Captain Nemo of Jules Verne’s Nautilus, he had a better understanding of the spaceship they were on than most anyone.
He was humanoid, but only barely. They’d encountered him originally in the Amazon Jungle, during the Sentient Serpents mission. He was the leader of both the Umbrage and the Nomads. Of the two classes in their society, the Umbrage were the reptilian-looking humanoids, the Nomads, the Umbrage’s idea of hired muscle, giant T-Rex-like dinosaurs. But Solo had taken to space with them, advising that they would need his peculiar talents. It was hard to argue with a man whose mind worked in multiple dimensions, and who had already stopped an enemy that no one else could stop from taking control of Earth. Barring the Nautilus’s supersentiences themselves, he remained the biggest mystery aboard ship.
As eye catching as Solo was—looking like a lizard that had learned to stand upright, with a phosphorescent green, scaly exterior, sans tail, and rainbow eyes—he was outclassed by what was on the viewport.
Earth was under asteroid bombardment.
“God damn it, Solo! Why wasn’t I summoned to the bridge at once?”
“And what were you going to do to stop an asteroid bombardment, exactly, Leon?” Solo asked, without turning away from the screen, and the all-too mesmerizing sight.
“Tell me we’re doing more than passively standing here watching the destruction of our planet!”
Solo leaned on his cane with the faceted crystal dome handle, looking much like a magician’s stick—and the powers it possessed did nothing to dispel that analogy.
“I’ve been doing what I can to run interference.”
“And by that you mean…?”
The ship moved from its current location directly into the path of one of the meteors. Leon gasped and braced himself, his special forces training alone keeping him from being thrown on his ass. He immediately bent at the knees and leaned into the direction of impact as if about to be tackled, his arm reflexively rising to cover his face.
Except for a shudder quaking the entire ship, the meteor broke apart harmlessly against the Nautilus’s energy shields. Solo must have been throwing the Nautilus against smaller asteroids earlier, for Leon not to have felt the impacts out on the racetrack.
Solo teleported the ship into position yet again.
Another meteor came straight at them.
The ship shook from the collision harder than before.
“This ship can’t teleport,” Leon calmly informed him.
“Linked to my mind, it can,” Solo replied, again keeping his eyes to the viewport.
It was comments like that which had earned Solo wary looks from day one.
“This is a losing battle,” Leon replied, putting his eyes back on the viewport, even as the ship teleported again to intercept the next meteor.
“I know. My job now is only to protect your people on the ground.”
“My people?” Leon realized Solo was referring to the cloned Alpha Unit and Omega Force teams on Earth. Each had been assigned a mission no less critical to saving the planet.
The Nautilus had no trouble cloning any of its occupants, or more technically speaking, bioprinting another body and downloading the saved digital versions of their psyches to it.
But it was Natty, the Tesla of his times, who had truly come up with the strategy, and who had identified the urgent need for the Special Forces missions even before Leon could. While Natty’s father had designed the Nautilus, it was still anybody’s guess whether the son would outshine the father.
“Thanks,” Leon mumbled feebly, thinking of the cloned teams on the ground.
“I didn’t do it to protect them. It’s their missions, which we can’t afford to let go tits up. Whatever we’re up against, the Nautilus alone will not be enough to save Earth.”
Leon had to grab hold of the arced railing in front of him this time to avoid being thrown on his ass from the latest collision with a meteor.
“What do you mean ‘whatever we’re up against?’ It’s a damned meteor shower.”
“We’re under attack, Leon. Our enemy is just smart enough and technologically superior enough to hurtle meteors at us to conserve their arsenal, while they hang back out of range of our weapons, and fully cloaked.”
Leon gulped. He didn’t like being the slowest person in the room. Then again, this was Solo. The next piece of the puzzle Leon put together on his own.
“Shit!” Leon exclaimed. “This isn’t even our sector of the galaxy. The stars… So, the artifact on the moon has activated, much as Natty predicted it would.”
“Not at all as he predicted,” Solo said curtly, keeping his eyes on the screen and the peculiar game of billiards he was playing. “That artifact on the moon, pending an alien invasion, did not beam the Earth and its satellite out of harm’s way, but into it.”
It only now occurred to Leon that Solo’s mind was calculating just how to shatter each meteor so that the fragments didn’t do even worse damage to the planet below. That mind of his, my God…
The insights, regrettably, were not queuing up in Leon’s head in any productive order, not yet. Perhaps even for a Special Forces soldier there was a such a thing as shell shock.
He did his best to think his way through it.
“Couldn’t that artifact on the moon simply have beamed us into the path of the nearest asteroid field?”
“No,” Solo said with a hint of impatience and a bit too much force, again without turning away from the monitor. “There is nothing random about those impacts. Each one of the meteoroids striking the planet is strategic, meant to cripple the globe’s defenses, and as much as possible, bomb us back to the Stone Age.”
Leon let it go how Solo could know that without help from the Nautilus. Smarts were in no short supply around here. But today, of all days, none aboard the Nautilus were smart enough.
“How fast can the Nautilus clone itself?” Leon asked.
“Not fast enough to affect the outcome of the meteor shower. It doesn’t matter. I’ve already summoned her out of neighboring timelines. There are no less than a dozen versions of the Nautilus running interference currently.”
Leon gasped. No wonder everyone but everyone looked at this guy suspiciously, wondering if he was more of a threat than an asset. How the hell did an upright talking lizard outdo things not even a supersentience could manage? The Nautilus could communicate across timelines with the other versions of itself, sure, but this…
“Well, the other eleven Nautili will have to manage on their own. We’re taking this version of the Nautilus and we’ll be doing more with her than playing cosmic billiards.”
“Just what exactly do you have in mind?” It was the first time Solo turned toward Leon to face him directly, and the way he asked the question, with an all-too crisp edge to his voice, Leon got the sense that it was asked in his role as Captain Nemo, and he was daring Leon to wrest control of his ship away from him.
“Easy, Solo. I want my brain trust to coordinate with me on our best course of action in the war room,” he glanced at the monitor, “in a less distracting setting. You, me, Patent, Cassandra, Natty, Laney, the rest of Omega Force, and last but not least, the nun. And I’ll want recommendations from our Mars war God as well—in a form I and the rest of us can assimilate, Solo—not just you.” As an afterthought, Leon added, “Let’s get Theseus in on this as well.” The Theta Team operative had proven to be a valuable liaison with the Theta Team humanoids that few could communicate with. Though Leon wasn’t entirely sure Theseus could fit in any of those chairs in the boardroom.
Leon did an about face and exited the chamber.
Solo sighed. “That man does realize I’m not the butler around here, right?”
The bands in Solo’s eyes started turning in different directions. “Mars,” he thought, addressing himself to their Mars war god supersentience, “you will take over the calculations for me to ensure none of the asteroids impact the Earth, or their fragments for that matter, once they’ve impacted the Nautilus’s shields. Recruit more Nautili from neighboring timelines as needed—if those ships are not currently in harm’s way themselves.”
SIX
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
The nun, in her habit, as worn by Carmelite nuns of her order, marched toward the nearest launch bay. Her smooth, milky white complexion and her angelic countenance belied her true nature.
She slipped through the sliding doors, one step closer to exiting a domain she technically wasn’t permitted to leave. She had been created as the ship’s librarian, the one person versed in what each of the Theta Team one-of-a-kind humanoids could do, the habitats to which they were best suited, and the combat situations in which they might excel—if further analysis of the alien environment in question had been superseded by wartime needs.
It was a good day for superseding Theta Team’s standard operating procedure of engaging their scientific aptitudes ahead of their wartime aptitudes.
Without the nun on board, no one would know exactly how best to deploy Theta Team assets. Technically the Nautilus supersentience could act in the nun’s stead, but she responded to human requests—even that of the ship’s leadership team—only as it suited her. So there was no guarantee she’d forward that information if and when it was needed.
That meant the nun was leaving the ship more vulnerable the instant she was off it. But right now, without knowing what they were up against, knowing which action-figure dolls to put into play in Natty’s toy chest—arguably the Nautilus and all its crew were just his play things—would be next to impossible in any case.
If such a determination could be made, only the Nautilus chief supersentience could make it—by analyzing timelines in which they’d come up against this foe—whoever and whatever it was—and lost. It was possible that in an alternate timeline they’d already won one of these engagements. But when confronted with a civilization advanced enough to lob asteroids at them, the nun wasn’t hopeful salvation in the form of answers to their current problems would be arriving from parallel universes anytime soon.
Moving Earth Page 3
