Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  Leon, noticed the theme uniting Ajax’s jokes, and smiled ruefully. Fearing death was nothing new to him, but it still took some getting used to for some people.

  “My grandfather has the heart of a lion,” Ajax continued. “And a lifetime ban from the New York City zoo.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  EARTH

  LOS ALAMOS LABS

  NEW MEXICO

  OMEGA FORCE AND ALPHA UNIT, CLONE TEAM TWO –

  IN CHARGE OF TECH TRANSFER AND TRANSITIONING FROM AGE OF SCARCITY TO AGE OF ABUNDANCE

  Leon needed to move his people fast and get under the energy dome protecting the Los Alamos labs from asteroid bombardment, but not from Kang alien invasion. “As much as I’d love to yell charge, right now,” Patent said, “there’s the small matter of the asteroid bombardment. Every time one of those things hits the dome, the shrapnel alone could wipe out a small army.”

  Cassandra wasn’t waiting for the boys to figure it out.

  She was on a short fuse on a good day.

  Sensing the beat change she sauntered into the clearing. Not that the trees they were hiding behind were going to do much to protect them from asteroid splatter.

  She held out her hand and stopped the next incoming asteroid in its tracks, suspending it over the energy dome.

  “Where did we get her again?” Patent asked.

  “I hope the Kang sent reinforcements,” Leon quipped with a wry smile. He headed out at a slow trot, Patent at his side.

  Leon watched the meteor roll off the energy dome, and steamroll Kang soldiers still determined to infiltrate the dome. The ones it didn’t run over immediately fell to radiation sickness—according to Patent’s scanner that he was holding in Leon’s flummoxed face. “So, the asteroid belt they’re using to pelt us with serves a dual purpose,” Leon mused aloud, “to soften us up enough for ‘the kids’ lest they get into too much trouble, and to make sure the kids don’t wander beyond their play pen.”

  “Looks that way.” Patent stowed the Geiger counter so he could keep both hands on his assault rifle. The scanner was a little too clumsy for his purposes at this juncture in any case. He would rely on his nanites to overlay augmented reality information either by projecting it in front of his eyes, or simply allowing him “to know things” as if he had many other senses beyond the five he was born with.

  “Advise Mother” Leon said, “to send a probe out to collect a sample of one of these meteors so we can figure out what type of radiation they’re doused with. Even if it just stops the drones, she can print us up new weapons accordingly.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Satellite said, trying to keep pace with Leon and Patent.

  Satellite had briefed Leon earlier on what his alter ego had ordered, to give them a path forward in this war. It was time to amend those plans with the latest information. “Satellite…”

  “I’ve already forwarded the intel, sir, to the other clone teams and to the Nautilus that we will be beaming that asteroid belt with us to the other side of the barrier, if it comes to that, to give the Kang a taste of their own medicine.”

  Leon smiled. What felt like a psychic connection between Satellite and Leon also bolstered his confidence in the idea for the creation of a team of Zen master thought-catchers and thought-projectors both. It was Leon’s idea on Clone Team One to form such a unit, but this Leon wondered why it had taken either of them this long to come up with it. He wasn’t sure how they were going to pull off what they did, but running chi at a high level explained a lot of Cassandra’s abilities. It might just be another channel on the Chi radio no one had thought to tune in to before.

  Leon put his mind back into the moment.

  They didn’t waste any time double-timing it to the energy dome and getting through to the other side. No one was expecting Cassandra to repeat the meteor levitation trick. She had a nasty habit of not even looking behind her when she moved into battle, long used to no one being able to follow.

  Cassandra had cleared a path to the dome to help secure the battle. But more importantly, as regarded the war, the fourth brain had cleared a path to a sustainable future—free of the Kang.

  Of course, to put it in Ajax’s language, “If you want to see God laugh, show him your plans.”

  ***

  LOS ALAMOS LABS

  NEW MEXICO

  After riding the blast wave out of hangar 13-A, Thor and Frog Doll scraped themselves off the sand. Thor, finding his face buried in the head of an exposed dinosaur fossil screamed, until he realized that was one enemy he didn’t have to worry about.

  “Oh, let’s give away our position. Why didn’t I think of that?” Frog Doll snarked.

  “Come on!” Thor stage whispered to Frog Doll. “We’ve got to get to that airplane hangar over there. You can bet that’s where all the action’s at.”

  Frog Doll observed the same phenomenon Thor did. Lightning strikes. And thunder. Coming from inside the airplane hangar.

  Earthquakes quickly followed—the cracks in the earth emanating from inside the hangar.

  Outside, things were disturbingly calm and quiet. The crickets were causing a racket, but the kind meant to soothe you into a restful night’s sleep. Even the meteor shower overhead, from inside the protection of the dome, seemed fairly benign; like one spectacular screensaver.

  Frog Doll said, “Something’s up.” He made “ribbit” frog-like sounds that he only made when he was nervous.

  “Like what?” Thor was itching to charge ahead.

  “Like that rock over there, for instance.”

  “Haven’t you seen a boulder before?”

  “Not there, I haven’t.”

  Thor panned his head left and right. “Who can tell in this landscape? There are big rocks everywhere. You gonna tell me you memorized where every one is?”

  “Yep. And there are more than one out of place.”

  “You know, those Kang are kind of rocklike to begin with. You don’t think they’re lying in hiding, waiting for the first fool to come along?”

  “That would make them sneaky, conniving, dirty, underhanded, backstabbing bastards.” Frog Doll croaked after the recital of epithets.

  “I know. How cool is that? Give me a second to think how best to handle this. Wait, you brought my toy soldiers, right?”

  “I cannot confirm or deny.”

  Thor reached into Frog Doll’s pouch, which technically Frog Doll wasn’t supposed to have because he wasn’t a kangaroo, and pulled out the entire set of toy soldiers, each one about two-feet tall.

  “Okay, Guys,” Thor whispered to his toy Zeta Force Special Forces unit. They didn’t look like toys, just scaled down humans. “Some of those rocks are just rocks. Some are soldiers playing at being rocks. Go get the cloaked soldiers. Oh, and don’t forget to be deadly, gruesome, sadistic, and most of all, slimy. We’re big on slimy around here.”

  “Yes, sir,” came the chorus as the special ops action figures headed off with their hydraulic-powered musculatures, and their miniature assault rifles.

  “Shit,” Thor mumbled, “I forgot to tell them to swap out the rubber bullets for the real thing. It’s not like we’re back home playing in my bedroom.”

  “Relax,” Frog Doll croaked reassuringly. “They’re smarter and better behaved than you. Though I dread the compounded insanity of you with your own Special Forces troops.”

  “Charge!” Thor shouted, running ahead. “Techa, I love saying that.”

  “Not nearly as much as I love saying, ‘Time to go home. That’s enough play time for today’,” Frog Doll said hopping after him.

  As soon as Thor bounded to about halfway between where they were and the airplane hangar hosting one kickass retro Led Zeppelin concert—Frog Doll could always hope—The rocks unfolded like pill bugs. The ones behind Thor and Frog Doll and the ones ahead of them. The enemy squadron focused on springing their trap quickly, dematerializing their targets, and hitting reset on that trap so they could await the next fools.

  But Ze
ta Force moved like lightning coursing sideways. Between their hydraulic-powered muscles and their jet boots, they were either too hard to target when on the move, or already out of harm’s way. Several had deployed their grappling hook rifles, shooting the grappling hooks straight at the Kang, climbing them like any other rock formation.

  A couple of the Zeta Force troops had looped their grappling hooks around the necks of the Kang soldiers, and pulled back on the bucki-fullerine lines, thin and wiry enough to act like garrotes, and strong enough to slice through diamond.

  Two heads rolled on the ground.

  One of the Zeta Force soldiers had looped his grappling hook around the wrist of the Kang soldier whose leg he was climbing. He pulled back on the line and sliced through the arm, catching the alien rifle on the fly. As the Kang soldier roared, the same Zeta operative drove his cleats in between the iron-like scales of the Kang and fired up the thruster in that boot, cooking the Kang drone’s flesh from beneath the protective outer scales, adding to the aria of screams the soldier was helping him compose.

  The Zeta operative had called back the hook of his weapon, which retracted back for re-firing. But he’d swung that weapon over his shoulder on a strap so he could turn the alien’s rifle on him. As it turned out, he scarcely needed to. Once the Kang’s insides were exposed to Earth’s atmosphere, whatever microbes were in the air—and they couldn’t have been too many, this being the desert and all—made short work of him. The drone’s outcries only mounted as his agony increased, but he kept the roars sounding more like defiant warnings, and like a creature-marking-its-territory. Thor suspected he was also signaling his cohorts.

  Another Zeta Force officer was running with his Kang captive, who he’d lassoed with his hook weapon about both ankles. He was running so fast that the last time Thor saw a scene like this it was in a Western movie with the cowboy being dragged behind a horse at full gallop. The Zeta Force officer got the Kang soldier to where he wanted him, opening one of the barrels of nuclear waste—marked as such on the outside—tossing him inside and letting him swallow the noxious liquid by keeping the drone’s jaws pried open with his hydraulic-empowered arms.

  The Kang soldier didn’t die so much as stumble about drunk afterward. The Zeta team operative, still on the move, let him crawl out of the barrel on his own. Thor wondered why the lack of professionalism with refusing to finish the guy, but as it turned out, his own people finished him when his drunken carousing got in their way.

  As fast as the remaining Kang targeted Zeta Force—forever on the move—they missed, because the Zeta Force soldiers moved acrobatically through the air.

  Frustrated, the remaining drones returned to rock formation and to lying in wait for the next party to pass through, hoping to have better luck with them.

  Zeta Force noticed they were more impregnable in rock formation, so saved their nanite-explosive bullets and moved on, in the direction of the hangar.

  Thor was a little upset Zeta Force was stealing his glory—he’d yet to fire off a shot—but that did give him time to strategize. If his enemy had set this trap, they might have set others. Maybe the Kang’s chief personality trait was “sneaky.”

  Thor kept his eyes ahead of his advancing team just in case he needed to warn them of the next trap. Frog Doll seemed to have the same idea, using his high leaps—which got even more ridiculously high with each hop—to get a different perspective on the terrain.

  “Halt!” Frog Doll commanded.

  Zeta Force stopped on a dime, landing crouched, and covering one another, Thor, and Frog Doll.

  “Please tell me my eyes are playing tricks on me,” Frog Doll said.

  Zeta Force engaged full-spectrum scanning of the area by donning their augmented reality shades. Technically, their eyes could do the same thing, but Thor had to agree, why waste a chance to wear really cool shades? Zeta Force was still blind to what was out there and they were determined not to be.

  Thor decided to follow suit. “Yeah, I see them!” Thor stage whispered.

  Frog Doll ribbited. “Shit, this is a nice pickle you’ve gotten everyone into, Thor, yet again.”

  Thor groaned. “Well, to be fair, we brought midgets to the party. So I don’t see why they can’t bring giants.” He looked up at the feet poised to smash them like bugs, one raised leg per Kang customer. Whichever caste of Kang this was, they were about three times as tall as the regular ones, and a good bit huskier.

  “It’s a buckle-punch scene if ever I saw one,” the Zeta Force team leader, Darius, said. All the Zeta operatives pressed the buckles on their belt and let the space suits grow over them. It was for fighting off world, but it did have the advantage of being rated to stop space debris colliding with you at over a million miles an hour. Thor guessed that meant it could repel giant stomping feet too. He followed suit.

  Darius gestured to the rest of Zeta Force to continue forward toward the hangar at a trot.

  The giant stomping feet mashed them, but they were little more than needles underfoot at this point. And Zeta Force and Thor just blasted through the feet with their rocket boots, and once out, continued their advance on foot.

  Frog Doll had continued to simply hop over the giants. Thor supposed they could have used their rocket boots to fly toward the hangar a lot faster. But Zeta Force must have had the same idea he had: with this many traps, it pays to go slow.

  That said, they made it the rest of the way into the hangar without further ado.

  But once inside, there were traps aplenty awaiting them.

  Frog Doll informed Thor that Omega Force and Alpha Unit were headed into the compound.

  “Punch me through,” Thor said.

  “You sure?” Frog Doll asked. “I’m inclined to think Leon is going to humor you a lot less than I do.”

  “Now, you idiot!”

  Frog Doll’s COMMS crackled through his yawning mouth. “Leon here.”

  “Thought you might like to know that the Kang favor traps,” Thor informed Leon. “Real sneaky bastards. We had to make it through two just to get to the hangar we wanted to explore. Oh, and they’re particularly vulnerable to our atmosphere once you open a wound. Not to brag, but I thought to bring the grappling hook rifles with the interwoven buckyfullerine lines which makes slicing off their heads and any other body parts you care to a piece of cake.”

  ***

  “Did we think to bring that equipment?” DeWitt asked.

  “No, of course not. Maybe we should put the kid in charge,” Ajax mouthed up.

  Leon smiled. Talking through his COMMS, he said, “Nice work, Thor. I’ll be sure to tell your mom.”

  ***

  “I should warn you,” Thor said on his end of the line, speaking through the same in-ear COMMS that Omega Force and Alpha Unit were using, “the woman is prone to conniption fits. Signing off now. Got loads of Kang to kill. Oh, one last thing. They’re particularly put out by my Zeta Force special ops dolls. Between the rocket boots and the smaller targets they make zooming about, they’re playing hell with the enemy. Don’t know if you brought any of that nanococktail tech that Natty gave you for changing your size, but figured you should know.”

  ***

  Everyone on Omega Force Clone Team Two was eying Crumley whose job it was to procure what they might need for any battle engagement. He gave them an ugly look right back. “Cut me a break. It’s hard to anticipate everything you might need for the apocalypse right out of the starting gate.”

  “Not like you to make excuses, Crumley,” Leon said. “You aren’t getting too old for this work, are you?”

  “I’ll save my emotional response to that question for the enemy.”

  “You should be proud, DeWitt,” Leon said. “Your kid is putting us to shame.”

  DeWitt made a sour face. “I’m more concerned about my wife’s contribution to this war effort, which I’m afraid is likely to include cutting off my balls.”

  ***

  LOS ALAMOS LABS

  HANGAR
17-B

  The first of the traps awaiting Thor and the others inside were the giants, standing by the sliding hangar doors, feet held high, ready to stomp. But that didn’t go as the Kang goliaths had planned.

  Every time the giants tried to stomp on a Zeta Force operative, the soldiers shot through the feet of the giants with their rocket boots, leaving needle marks that exposed flesh to the air. The Zeta Force team leader, Darius, whistled for Thor’s attention as he decided to try out the rifle he’d commandeered off one of the Kang giants, which were looking sick from their exposure to Zeta’s Force’s “acupuncture treatments.” The captured Kang weapon bore a hole through the target several feet wide, like a shotgun. Only it fired some kind of invisible beam.

  “Atomic nuclei destabilizer,” Frog Doll explained.

  Thor decided to amend his report to Leon, gesturing to Frog Doll to open a COMMS line again by aping his mouth-wide-open broadcasting posture. “Ah, we commandeered one of their rifles. My Zeta Force team leader, Darius, just tried it on one of the giants—oh yeah, forgot to tell you there is this Giant Kang caste too. The rifle is an atomic nuclei destabilizer. Bores a hole through their own kind better than a shotgun.”

  ***

  All eyes swiveled back to Crumley, who frowned. “You don’t have to look at me like that! I’ll add it to the list for next time out.”

  “Next time out, he says. What an optimist!” Ajax bitched. “Your head is so big your parachute looks like a yarmulke when you skydive!”

  ***

  LOS ALAMOS LABS

  HANGAR 15-C

  Leon and the rest of Omega Force, with some members of Alpha Unit in tow, took up the most likely defensive positions upon entering the airplane hangar they were closest to.

  They were all in a holding positon for right now, just observing what was going on. The Kang were luring the scientists away from their tight grouping behind their defensive line of countertop workstations under which were storage cabinets. Apparently those pulse rifles Thor had told them about had different settings. The drones fired invisible pulses at the work stations, knocking them apart like a domino game that had come to an end.