Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  TEN

  HARDING COUNTY

  GATED RETIREMENT COMMUNITY

  The aliens came through the front of the house as if it were made of papier-mâché and not brick and mortar. By all measures they shouldn’t have made it that far.

  Old Man Savros, in his wheelchair, could hear them coming long before they got past the curb. Facial recognition software did not identify them as human, merely bipedal. That was all his auto-firing, roof-mounted .50 calibers needed to know, and the civil-war cannon, retrofitted with napalm shells and plugged into the house AI, along with everything else.

  The cannon autotracked and followed up each napalm blast with a lovely lobbing of plastique attached to thermostatic charges wrapped around the shells encasing the plastique.

  The aliens did not seem impressed.

  But the early warning did give Old Man Savros time to consider other options.

  As did the deadfall in the middle of the yard, creating a kill zone that a tiger couldn’t have leapt out of. That also upped the ante on the explosives Savros could deploy without blowing his own house and the neighbors to hell. Not that there were many locals left after the asteroid bombing. These aliens sure knew how to kill a perfectly good day. But then, so did Savros.

  The house AI hit the aliens next with suitcase-size dirty nukes and the next-gen thermite, the chemical weapons, the biological weapons, in no particular order. Savros wasn’t expecting to live past this moment. His job was to contain the bastards and find something that worked against them to give the military a running start. His live broadcasts were going out on the military grade, back channel internet now for anyone who cared to know, and the military would be fools not to be tuned in, assuming that failsafe internet was not also down.

  After all that, the alien bastards were standing in his living room. They looked carved of lava rock turned to metallic-crystal-polymer with a mix of heavy metals all pastiched together like only Mother Earth in all her fury could manage. But he didn’t get the sense that dumb luck had led to whatever actually comprised their biosuits, which he recognized as genetically grown, flexible body armor. No, these bastards had without a doubt been bred off world. Old Man Savros knew the state of the art was at least twenty five years ahead of whatever published science hit the journals—and he subscribed to all of them. He knew because he had hacked DARPA and a good many more military science research centers decades ago to keep a close eye on them.

  These alien bastards were more than twenty-five years ahead in bioengineered bodysuits grown out of their own DNA. Even with CRISPR online, Savros couldn’t see catching up with them for another hundred years, barring way better AI than he had running his house to help create the science, and that was another good twenty-five years away, minimum.

  Earth was seriously screwed.

  No doubt about it.

  He lifted the box in his lap with the activation switch to let them have the pièce de rèsistance. Full on nuke. Launched from a silo on private land he owned nearby. Anyone in Harding County proper right now had better be living under an energy dome—the likes of which wouldn’t be available for more like two hundred years—barring an AI to make the ones in any apocalyptic sci-fi film blush. It was a shitty thing to do to his neighbors and to a part of the world that had been good to him, and for the record, he was a fan of the homegrown rednecks, but sacrifices had to be made.

  He was hoping to get out a “See you in hell mother f––-!” But he never got that far.

  Just far enough to feel his face melting, his mind exploding, and the unimpressed, unaffected aliens looking at him as if he was daft. He hated that look.

  More to the point, they didn’t seem to be the least interested in him. They were checking the house. Looking for something.

  His last three Belgian shepherds, all military trained to the tune of $600K a piece, were determined to go down with a fight. Good on them, since they had to know it was every bit as hopeless as he did.

  They charged, wearing their suicide vests that they’d been trained to slip into on their own for times like this.

  Savros wasn’t sure what hit him first, the suicide vests’ blast back, or the nuke. But what he did figure was that they were looking for Dillon, the man who’d stopped in to steal Savros’s gas, and take whatever else he could get.

  Savros couldn’t begrudge the man for bringing his bad luck to Savros’s door. Just the opposite. He was thankful for being gifted with a front row seat to Armageddon. He was not the type to go out with a whimper, but with a bang.

  In the end, he’d gotten just what he wanted.

  ELEVEN

  EARTH

  LOS ALAMOS LABS

  BUILDING 13-A

  They had the Los Alamos scientists with their backs against the walls of their own lab, and nothing but upturned furniture to serve as barriers. The lab itself was huge, along all three axis, a plus that boded well for this battle to last more than a few seconds.

  Korsh turned to take in his long-time war companion of some decades now. Though thousands of years old, they weren’t yet out of their teens, by human standards, judged by how the Kang aged physiologically, by comparison. The humans, a miserable lifeform, in addition to being horrifically primitive, endured shorter lifetimes, making it hard to learn much in the brief time they had. But evidently, they were not immune to learning, as the weapon fired at the Kang drones ably demonstrated, slicing Korsh’s clan mate, Krackus, in half.

  That was no ordinary laser; Kang Dynasty drone bodies were laser-proof.

  Korsh smiled and returned his attention to the enemy.

  “So, good sport after all, then,” Kokos said, filling the spot in their phalanx distribution left open by their fallen comrade.

  “Yes, but they are scientists, not soldiers. This will be over soon enough,” Korsh replied, emulating Kokos’s dialect perfectly. Though from different tribes, cultures, and planets, the Kang, from whatever planet in the galaxy they came, were all good mimics. They had to be to blend readily in a galactic civilization where the fighting never let up. Otherwise they’d spend more time accommodating to the new peoples and cultures moving from one world to the next in the Kang Dynasty Galaxy than they would enjoying the war games the Kang Dynasty had to offer. Forming new alliances, moreover, and breaking old ones, would be far more difficult. But it made the Kang worlds wide open to spies—like the one that had blown up the dragon ship. A very nice move that would likely have earned that citizen a graduation into a more challenging incubator, explaining possibly why he couldn’t be found.

  The Kang queens controlled entire worlds, but if their spies were good enough at encroaching other queens’ territories, to get close enough to a queen to destroy one, or to gain access to proprietary tech only individual queens controlled, then the rival queen might expand her territory, which was all the queens lived for. Hence a certain amount of spies were to be expected. And the rewards for any spy who succeeded, as well as any drone who put one down or captured a spy, was graduation into another region of the Kang Dynasty where the fighting was smarter, more fast-paced, more vicious, where the smartest, most powerful queens lived, with the biggest territories in need of the top fighters to keep their territories expanding instead of seeing them nibbled away by the competition. Points accrued other ways, as with racking up more kills of enemy drones or spies invading a queen’s territory. The better you fought, the more access you had to more lethal tech. The more you got to meet with the Ming, the Queen’s supreme tech-thieves and hackers into proprietary tech controlled by rival queens, and the more the Ming bestowed their gifts on the elite drone fighters. And so one advanced among the Kang, until one day becoming a queen oneself, if one lived that long, and managed to graduate to the level of Ming first. The queen’s own secretions, her royal excretions, were the biggest key in the path to ascension, for it granted bigger and smarter minds, allowing the drones to grow the size of their skulls to accommodate the added brain matter. When the queen felt it was time
to split the hive to prevent insurrection from her smartest, most evolved Ming she could no longer contain, that Ming was given her own world, and the final excretions to grow their minds to queen status.

  But, of course, the price was steep. It meant starting from scratch, leaving the tech and all the ming and drones of the old hive behind, to start anew. But a queen could always secrete new minions. And if she could get access to even better tech than the other queens had on their worlds, there was always the chance of getting other queens to do her bidding, allowing her to take control of even larger territories. And then those other queens would have to contribute some of their life essence to the queen with the most advanced tech, allowing her mind to grow larger relative to the other queens. It was survival of the fittest where survival hinged on gaining access to more smarts, more cunning, better tech, and better fighting skills. Nothing else mattered if a lowly drone wished to live long in the Kang Dynasty. And by the mythos of the Kang, not even dying was a way out, not truly. The most powerful queens controlled the incorporeal realm as well.

  And the gods forbid the Kang take over an already inhabited world of people bearing no relation to them. That was what had happened to Korsh, Krackus, Kokos, and the rest of their friends. The queen’s essence got into them, started making them over genetically, started messing with their heads, converting them to the Kang way of life. They still felt like their old selves inside, only they weren’t.

  Because Kang worlds were hard to come by, and the queens that oversaw each one fairly matched and so fairly able to keep one another in check, they had come to rely heavily on the dragon ships which could warp space inside them to expand their hives. In theory the queens of the dragon ships could thus amass more mind power with time, as their domains far outstripped a single castle world. But these queens were kept from doing this, and coerced to accepting their place in the Kang galactic order by the secretions of the queens on the castle worlds upon which they relied to survive.

  “Let’s finish this,” Korsh said. “There’s a world to conquer, and with the low rating given this one, we can’t waste too much time on the few points we’ll earn for each key military installation.”

  Kokos smiled menacingly. “Say no more.” He loaded his weapon with a proton torpedo. The discharge would shatter the atomic structures of the scientists. Their exploding bodies wouldn’t make a mess of the room—the weapon’s one downside. But what it lacked in gore factor it made up for in efficiency. Once the atoms making up the human scientists’ bodies had been disintegrated into quarks, all that would be left would be one hell of a light show. Kokos’s people could see across a wider swath of the EMF spectrum. For them the light show was something to behold indeed. And it wouldn’t temporarily blind them as it would the surviving humans.

  ***

  “What are you waiting for?” bitched the Los Alamos scientist crouched beside Sanford.

  Sanford took a peek with a cell phone set to camera mode on a selfie-stick. He sure as hell wasn’t sticking his head up to get a better look. What he saw was self-explanatory enough. The scientists weren’t the only ones making full use of the plentiful blinds in the airplane-hangar-sized lab. Between the furniture, the equipment used for running experiments, the oversized robots used for heavy-equipment-moving assist, and whatever shit was being stowed on the platforms and catwalks overhead, the aliens had plenty of hiding places to choose from. “They’re too well hunkered down.”

  “That weapon you’re wielding will slice through the interference as readily as it will them. Fire it while you still can.”

  “Duh. Sorry, not used to thinking under this much pressure.” Despite the imperative coming from a white man and a bit of a racist asshole whose gene line traced back to the first WASPs to lay siege to the U.S., and despite being a Hispanic immigrant with one hell of a chip on his shoulder, Sanford wasn’t about to ditch a good idea based on personal feelings. So Sanford set his squat, 5’ 6” frame into action, his moustache demanding to be scratched—no doubt his wildly excited nervous system causing everything to misfire—and fired the weapon in a left to right direction, like a lawn sprinkler sweeping wide. Again. And again.

  He got every last one of the bastards—in this lab anyway, turning the blind spots into parting venetian blinds with the laser. No doubt the aliens were all over the compound by now, winning more exchanges than they were losing.

  It would be hard for the Los Alamos scientists in this lab to score this one as a win, even if it felt that way for a split second. Then, one of the aliens, ignoring the fact that he was missing the lower part of his body, fired a projectile at Sanford.

  Sanford was thrown out of his body so fast, it was like those near-death experiences people talk about in the hospital, where they watch the doctors fighting to resuscitate their bodies, begging them not to give up, shouting at themselves lying on the slab to wake up.

  Only there were no bodies to be awakened. There was no evidence they’d even been in the room. Just this bright light show, like watching the aura emitted by the human body in Kirlian photography, the colors more beautiful and more varied than in any sunset.

  Before Sanford’s consciousness dimmed, he made the obvious realization. That was them—the bright lights—spreading through all of creation, going well beyond the walls of the compound, anyway. He’d seen something like it before, in computer translations, graphic representations of subatomic particles coming alive at CERN, the particle collider.

  He never imagined such power as CERN represented could be transcribed to a handheld phaser. Just the opposite. The Chinese had gone bigger than CERN—more than ten times bigger with their collider, now unsurpassed in the world. And even it didn’t produce a light show like this—even with the computer to doll up the pictures for them.

  As to converting that much matter to pure energy without blowing the entire world to hell… well, clearly the aliens had made still more tweaks to their weapons.

  At least it was good for Sanford to end on a positive note. He’d finally become a thing of beauty, after a lifetime of being haunted by the experiments they were conducting at Los Alamos, and their possible implications.

  And, well, there was one more bit of good news. That racist bastard WASP of a boss hadn’t survived the blast either. So all was well that ended well.

  ***

  Thor and Frog Doll walked in on the holocaust in the chamber in the Los Alamos lab labeled 13A. Alien bodies lay severed in half—one still gripping his thruster with a smile on his face. The alien smile admittedly not too unlike the kind you found on a wolf’s face, even in death.

  As for the scientists… there was no sign of them.

  Frog Doll yanked the phaser out of the steely grip of the dead alien soldier with hydraulic strength that could only compete with Thor’s strength when he was wielding Thor’s hammer. Of course, playing Thor convincingly, in his case, required more than his eleven-year-old imagination—second to none by the way; it required a nanotech-infused hammer.

  Thor gripped his hammer in one hand, his sword in the other.

  “It’s an atomizer,” Frog Doll announced, scanning the phaser.

  “I hardly think it’s a room freshener, Frog Doll.”

  “No, nimrod, atomizer as in that’s what happened to the scientists, they were atomized.”

  Thor nodded, understanding. “Cool.”

  “You might want to at least learn to fake empathy, in order to continue to pass as human.”

  “When in Rome…” Thor said, twitching his eyebrows at Frog Doll. “Just how much more vicious do these weapons allow us to get?” Thor asked, picking the dead alien bodies clean.

  “Stick those in my kangaroo pouch,” Frog Doll said.

  “They won’t fit, and why do you have a kangaroo pouch, by the way? You’re a frog.”

  “I might have stolen the space warping technology that only the nun, Cassandra, and the Nautilus have at their disposal.”

  “Smooth move. Glad I don’t have t
o think of everything.”

  “You apparently can’t be bothered to remember anything, either. We had this conversation already during The Star Gate mission.”

  “Techa, that was a lifetime ago. Who can remember back a lifetime?” Thor listened to the creaking rafters overhead, the sounds of collapsing infrastructure all about them. Robots looking to make their move on Frog Doll and Thor were in fact falling over, sliced in half by the laser fire that had gone on earlier, and no longer able to maintain their precarious states of balance, even under the various pressures coming from above and below. “Criminie, we better get out of here fast, before we get pancaked along with everything else.”

  Thor dumped the bounty of alien weapons down Frog Doll’s pouch, watching them disappear into a seeming void.

  “Now, get the weapons the scientists were wielding,” Frog Doll beseeched. “Just in case there’s anything interesting in there.”

  “Doubt it.”

  Frog Doll croaked. “They managed to cut down these aliens, whose battle-hardened exteriors are laserproof, and just-about-everything-else-proof.”

  “Good point.” Thor, listening to the sounds of imminent building collapse growing all around them, ignored them, grabbed what he could of the nextgen Los Alamos weapons—at least from the perspective of these scientists who still didn’t have a clue what was really out there. And then they were on to the next lab—in theory anyway.

  Running for the doors—which appeared like a mile away, the building collapsing behind them, explosions going off everywhere.

  “This is the coolest alien invasion ever,” Thor exclaimed, looking back over his shoulder at the apocalypse rolling his way. “Admittedly this beat is a bit cliché as action flicks go, but just think of what we have to look forward to: killing everything in sight from one end of the planet to the next.”

  Frog Doll sighed, grabbed up Thor in his hand, and leaped for the door, as the last of the building came down. Honestly, being inside a fire-breathing dragon’s mouth would have paled by comparison to all the explosions going on around them.