And the Kang lucky enough to land in tandem with a fragment of the dragon ship not entirely blown to hell, landed with the cover the shrapnel—often bigger-sized chunks than a school bus—gave them.
While Omega Force was helping with some of that mop up, they just didn’t have the numbers. The one percent or less that survived each dragon ship was more than enough for them. And the dragon ships just kept coming, de-cloaking in time to appreciate the void in the sky made by their predecessors falling out of the stars onto the surface of the moon. Leon had to remind himself this was a galactic-scale civilization. What were a few thousand dragon ships? If the Kang felt the Earth’s moon was important enough—and it was—they’d send a few thousand more. So far the dragon ships numbered merely in the dozens—at a time.
It occurred to Leon that if enough of those dragon ships materialized at once and rammed the moon, they could easily push it out of Earth’s orbit—and to some place where the artifact might well serve the Kang’s needs, and not the Earth’s. Leon, like most geniuses in military affairs, had a nasty and uncanny way of predicting the future, or seeing multiple moves ahead, because of his ability to anticipate and get inside the mind of the enemy.
Right now he just hoped Kang viciousness trumped Kang genius, and that his prescience was anything but.
And then came the dragon ships – in force – ramming the moon in just the right direction to push it out of Earth’s gravity field.
What the hell had cued the Kang that the moon artifact was even worth bothering with? They couldn’t have gotten that from hacking NORAD COMMS. Could they? The military had a way of hiding secrets even from its own people, possibly buried deep enough that even the Nautilus might overlook the intel in an all-too-brief scan. Considering all she was tasked with, thoroughness with that datamining would not have been high on Mother’s list of priorities.
Still, Leon’s gut told him this was something else.
The Kang did not strike him as all that strategic-minded, and interested in fighting wars the way generals did from afar, so much as pursuing them the way field marshals and captains did on the ground. He was beginning to wonder if they had much by way of hi-tech at all.
Then it dawned on him.
If the Kang had mistaken the Dead Zone civilization for their enemy as they’d confused Earth, long before the Dead Zone peoples could escape The Collectors entirely, the Dead Zone peoples would have had to fend off the Kang with what technology they had. Now, the Dead Zone civilization he could see coming up with the tech to hurtle asteroids in a targeted way. And those dragon ships, which were built every bit as primitively as the castle-worlds of the Kang, might just hold a few more hi-tech commodities on them, also appropriated from the Dead Zone peoples: teleporting tech, and cloaking tech, along with the ability to track Leon and his people, even across the barrier field.
The Kang making use of found-tech after the Dead Zone peoples had abandoned their battle with them, and fled The Collectors, that he could see the Kang doing. Likely it was tech left over in the Kang galaxy. The Kang had not even bothered to explore the Dead Zone to see what else they could steal. It just hadn’t occurred to them. Maybe the Kang had just encountered the Dead Zone civilization in their province—during an initial attempt by that more advanced people to punch free of their prison. And the Kang were using the same tech to cross the barrier field that the Dead Zone people once did—assuming the barrier field was even up then. Leon still liked the idea that it was only when the Dead Zone people had broken free, that The Collectors had even bothered to erect the barrier field.
Maybe the Kang had taken this long to master the barrier busting technology. Or maybe they still didn’t have it, and were simply capitalizing on the pin prick hole in the barrier opening only now to make room for Earth on account of the Venus fly trap automatic settings created by The Collectors to keep the Kang happy and content in their play pens; so long as there were more worlds to conquer, perhaps the Kang would never think to stray beyond their own galaxy, allowing The Collectors to better contain them.
Leon interrupted his chain of thought to reach out to Theseus, pressing the Nautilus insignia on his shirt. “Theseus.”
“Theseus here.”
“I’ve had a few revelations about the Dead Zone peoples I need to share with you.”
“Don’t bother. Satellite hacked your COMMS a while back and forwarded your thinking to me already. I think you’re dead on with your assessment of what happened so many eons ago. I and my people are already hard at work making the most of the intel.”
“I’m thinking the Kang realized the flip side to the space station avoidance technology the Dead Zone people were using to keep those stations from crashing into one another could be used for tracking. Possibly they didn’t even have to turn the dial.”
“Yes, we’ve come to the same conclusion and applied that understanding to ensuring that when we teleport this galaxy full of space stations out of here, destined for the Milky Way, that we don’t end up colliding with the other stations, or planetary and solar bodies in the Milky Way. It’s one more puzzle piece. Oh, and we’re calling the Dead Zone people the Ethereals, less clunky. We believe that’s how they escaped their prison, by becoming pure energy beings. We’ve decided to take a hint. With Mother’s help, we’re fast at work designing your Epsilon Ethereals for you, your next Special Forces unit.”
Leon smiled and shook his head. “Can’t wait. The barrier busting technology of the Dead Zone Ethereals…”
“Yes, we’re not kidding ourselves that The Collectors won’t shut that down as soon as they become aware of it. Too many leaks sink ships. I appreciate the fireside chat, Leon, but you’re fighting off over two thousand dragon ships, each with a crew of several hundred thousand, with six guys. You think we can table this conversation for later?”
Leon smiled. “To tell you the truth, I could use the distraction.”
Theseus had already signed off the line, possibly missing the joke entirely. Pity. Like Ajax, that’s about all he had to lob at the enemy right now.
Until his next big bright idea.
He’d kept his mind’s eye, with the help of his nanites, on the sight of the dragon ships ramming the moon from the opposite side. The lit dragon ships appeared to be a bizarre kind of lunar moth rolling a dung ball in which to lay their eggs across the sky.
The impacts, even coming from the other side of the moon, were making it next to impossible for him and his people not to be thrown off the surface entirely, in the moon’s weak gravity field. The Kang, on the other hand, marched forward as if immune, their bodies too dense for them to care.
Even now, Leon’s and his team’s nanites were proliferating like wildfire inside them to give them the added density to be immune themselves. Hopefully in time to do some good.
Now, where the hell was the Kang carting them off to, and why? The barrier field sealing in the Kang Dynasty in The Collectors’ Menagerie seemed too far away. Maybe if they just got it close enough… Maybe once free of Earth’s gravity well their dragon ships’ tractor beams would be enough to get it across the finish line. And how was Leon going to stop it from happening in time to keep the moon from escaping the Earth’s gravity field? He didn’t have enough Nautili from other timelines to play the same game the dragon ships were playing. They were being tasked with duties elsewhere.
And, poor military leader that he was, it never occurred to Leon to put a defensive installation on the other side of the moon—that far away from the artifact. He cursed his shortsightedness.
“What now, Leon?” he asked himself.
***
THE MOON
THE ARTIFACT CHAMBER
“Hate to turn you into a bug zapper, kid,” Patent said strapping a belt onto Skyhawk, “but you standing in one place glowing brightly with that mind of yours did put the idea in my head.”
Finished fastening the belt on the still-catatonic Skyhawk, Patent activated it and stepped back before he succ
umbed to the effect himself. The Kang Giants that got too close to Skyhawk would be mesmerized by the “light of his aura” and march dumbly to their complete dissolution, courtesy of the nanite shielding tech; at least that was the hope. The nanites emitted by the belt had only recently been upgraded in keeping with Natty’s Earth-shielding nanites, meaning, like the shield being created and field-tested around the Earth, it would vaporize anything on approach. The belt’s nanites had received the latest downloaded upgrades from Mother. Granted, the energy shield around the earth was a long way from being impenetrable; so far, initial nanite inoculations had just boosted shield strength by 30%; more than enough for Patent’s purposes.
As proof of concept, the giant Kang were already marching toward Skyhawk who was emitting rainbows of color. And the hardened aliens were being ground into oblivion. Perhaps they were just made curious by the near-blinding energy source.
Patent slapped his hands together. “Now, what toy to try out next?”
The Kang giants, not nearly close enough to Skyhawk to be influenced by his Mesmer effect, came at Patent directly in what looked to Patent like a classic Greco-Roman takedown. They ended up charging right through his hologram to hit their head hard against the monolith. As they did so, the hologram hopped to somewhere else, as if Patent had genuinely teleported out of harm’s way in the nick of time. That caused the frustrated Kang giants to charge him more determinedly than before, only to knock themselves out even more completely against the monolith.
They were passed out long enough for Patent to run from body to body tagging them with plastic explosives. The bricks of plastique didn’t hold a high potency form of TNT or some other nextgen chemical; they held toxic-waste-cleanup-nanites. Once upon a time on Earth, there was something heralded as The Diamond Age. Companies specializing in growing and culturing artificial diamonds had learned to spray microscopically thin diamonds onto virtually any surface. They’d test-piloted the idea on a city in Arizona somewhere, called The Eternal City. It was billed as a boon to the planet. No more gobbling up its resources. All you had to do was build these eternal cities as acropolises surrounded by seas of nature. The natural world remained unspoiled, and the city didn’t need to be forever upgraded—because its infrastructure would last forever. Of course, The Eternal City took on darker aspects. It would shut down evolution and the economy virtually overnight. The city was eventually leveled and the entire idea shelved. But to level the city they needed these specialized nanites in Patent’s little bombs. Upon the igniting of those bombs, the nanites could devour matter as hard as diamond.
Patent had made a few upgrades in order for them to be able to handle the Kang, as the Kang bodies were even harder.
He ducked behind the other side of the monolith to protect himself from the blast. When the nanite clouds burst to rain down on the Kang bodies, the prototype, Patent was proud to say, behaved as expected. The territorial-minded nanites knew not to devour everything else in the cave, including the monolith—assuming they could—and Patent.
Patent felt pangs of relief in successive waves rolling over his body, since the earlier nanite dust bullets that had worked against the drones had failed to impress the Kang goliath class.
“Hey, Tiny! I guess it’s just you and me now,” he said, emerging from out of hiding and addressing the last remaining Kang giant.
The giant roared and took a step toward him.
Patent held out his arm. “Just one second, please, so I can pick out the right house warming gift for you.” He reached into his pile of one-of-a-kind weapons for the perfect solution to his little quandary of how best to dispatch this guy.
The Kang, impatient, took a swing at him. His giant fist passed right through the hologram. Giving Patent the second or two he needed to come up from behind him, jump on his back and shove his hands up against its ears.
The creatures in each of Patent’s hands wasted no time burrowing into the Kang giant’s ears. “They’re nanite snakes that will help you confuse who the actual enemy is. The enemy of my enemy is my best friend, as they say.” He tapped the Kang giant fondly on the shoulder as it turned on its own kind advancing through the numerous tunnels now leading to the cavern that the Kang giants had dug earlier.
“Well, it was a great idea, for another era.” Patent frowned. The latest Kang caste to come rushing in was more a cross between giant jumping spiders and crabs, considering their claw-like appendages.
They moved too fast for the Kang giant to get his hands around. Though he was determined to end them all, he’d never get to any in time. As the crab spiders proved Patent’s point for him, he sighed again.
He gazed at his stash. “I can’t believe you’re out of toys. It’s just not possible, I tell ya.” Talking to himself was probably a bad sign. Of course, being out of toys was a grave enough matter to cause a psychotic break, so he should probably cut himself some slack.
“Never have I been forced to sink this low,” he said, as the first of the spiders jumped on him. He reached for one of his gun belts, retrieved a bullet, and bit down on it. The resulting explosion blew the spider to bits, even if it left Patent unaffected. He’d had the good sense to make himself immune. The successive explosions from the rest of the bullets in the gunbelt going off didn’t penetrate the spider-crabs exoskeletons, so much as blow them apart at the joints, sending the parts flying. The result was the same; they were out of commission.
But he could only play this game for so long. There weren’t that many gunbelts lying around that had survived the prior waves of attack. And his surface nanites would exhaust after a time. Already his skin had to grow back after being singed off him, indicating early nanite fatigue. Soon there’d be a lot more flesh and bone that would have to grow back, if the nanites couldn’t replace themselves fast enough.
The cavern started shaking so violently again that each impact from whatever was hitting it sent Patent rolling. As it turned out, they were doing him a favor, helping him to dodge jumping spider-crabs that he couldn’t always see when they came up from behind him. All the same, earth tremors of that severity were not something to sneeze at.
What the hell was going on outside?
If this kept up, the moon would crack like an egg.
Maybe that was the point, to get at the prize inside, the monolith.
The Kang, dumber than Patent’s smart bullets from what he could tell, were still proving pesky enough to be a serious threat to the future of humanity.
TWENTY-EIGHT
EARTH
ALASKA’S OUTBACK REGION
THE HAARP INSTALLATION
OMEGA FORCE AND ALPHA UNIT, CLONE TEAM TWO, ON SITE
Everyone inside the HAARP compound came outside to see it for themselves, even if their monitors showed them as much from the relative safety of the below-ground bunker.
The energy shield around the planet, thanks to the latest tweaks, was holding off the asteroids still pelting it, disintegrating them on contact.
Everyone jumped and cheered. Some jumped into the air and did chest bumps. Others hugged each other tight and jumped and screamed in tandem.
The squall of screeches, whistles, sobs and “Yes!”s resembled a particularly loud flock of birds passing overhead.
Natty was the first to sober, shouting, “Enough!” Everyone promptly quieted, facing him, waiting for him to wipe the mystified expressions off their faces. “We still don’t know if this shield will stop a dragon ship. And the Kang may still find a way to bore a hole right through it with a wormhole transport.”
The ground was shaking under their feet again. Everyone looked up to make sure the shield hadn’t failed already, and those tremors weren’t related to the latest asteroid impacts. But the reverberations weren’t coming from above.
“There!” someone shouted and pointed.
A Kang drone army was on the move, straight for them. It was their rhythmic pacing shaking the Earth. And they did look like they were marching right out of a wormhole.
“Back inside!” Ariel ordered.
“I told you we had a lot more work to do on that shield,” Natty mumbled.
Enough panic had set in that they were crowding each other to get back inside the tunnel that led below. “Easy!” Ariel coached.
***
Once safely ensconced within the HAARP compound far underground, even the constant tremors of marching foot soldiers didn’t disturb the scientists from their work. The researchers had their end of things to tackle and the surface problems, dealing with alien armies on the march, was someone else’s department, namely Omega Force, Laney in her UFO, and whatever help the Nautili could lend.
Indafi leaned over Ariel, getting drunk on her fragrance. As far as he could tell, it was just her body odor; she was not wearing perfume.
“Eyes on the prize,” she said, as if she had eyes behind her head. He tilted his chin up toward the monitor she was scrutinizing.
“These are some pretty impressive nanites, by the way,” she added, more graciously, “for someone living in the early 21st century.”
“Thank you. Wait… What century are you from? You know what, I really don’t want to know. My head is already about to explode.” He gestured to the screen. “What are you up to?”
“We’ve got to modify these nanites so they can live on the moon, someplace without an atmosphere.”
“Assuming we could—it would take another million years—why?”
“The earth is not the only thing we have to shield better against attacks.”
Moving Earth Page 23
