Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  “My own ring worlds are still assessing, and communicating.”

  “Communicating? Make sure you don’t overstep, Moranus. That kind of initiative requires a go ahead from Leon.”

  “Mother has intervened on Leon’s behalf while he’s bathing in Solo’s rejuvenation tank, soaking in various timelines. She directed me to reach out.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m guessing she assumes what I do, that the original occupants of the ring worlds have moved on, with the rest of the Ethereals, and what remains are artificial lifeforms on autopilot, which she feels quite qualified to commune with directly. Only she can’t justify the mind power right now. Not until their strategic value in wartime is more than mere speculation.”

  Theseus took a deep breath and nodded. His arms were crossed in a defensive position; he couldn’t remember which of Moranus’s remarks exactly had triggered the reaction.

  “As impressive as all this is, I was teleported here for a reason. And so far, I haven’t heard anything that even comes close to an explanation.”

  Moranus sighed. “I think this might be why Mother brought you here.” He pressed some more buttons on the console. “I’ve named this ringworld maker, Trickster, on account of the magician’s rings, but that’s not all.” The rings changed their formation yet again, telescoping away from the sun now like a field glass in a general’s hand extending for as far as the eye could see, as the eyepiece continued to narrow. A telescope that only a galactic civilization could build. It may well have extended beyond the solar system.

  Only it wasn’t a telescope.

  At least not as it was currently configured.

  Moranus demonstrated.

  Out of the “eyepiece” fired asteroids—which Theseus needed the big screen hologram to help him to visualize what his senses were not adapted to. “Basically,” Moranus said, “It takes the sun’s molten liquid and cools it, and ejects very dense, metallic asteroids at the other end.”

  “This is what has been hurtling asteroids at Earth?” Theseus asked, shocked.

  “No. It’s possible one of these ringworlds was abandoned in the Kang province when the Ethereals ceased their pointless war with them. And the Kang, being the Kang, merely appropriated the tech for their purposes. Not smart enough to create such a thing, just to use it as a weapon. But from the makeup of the meteors pelting Earth, I suspect it’s more likely the asteroid flinging is a function of the barrier field itself about the Kang Dynasty Galaxy.”

  “Either way, I’ve been informed their asteroid hurtling days are over,” Theseus said.

  “For now, but once our galactic civilization overlaps with theirs…”

  Our galactic civilization? Like too many of his people, they were counting their chickens before they were hatched. In any event, Moranus’s warning was worthy of the kind of worry that Mother must have entertained to send Theseus here. “Let’s say it is the nested ringworlds, in this configuration, capable of hurtling asteroids, you sure they just have one of those things, as the Earth is being pelted from all directions?”

  “Think of a bowler throwing curveballs, or a baseball pitcher,” Moranus explained. “Do the calculations precisely enough, it only takes one of these cannons to pelt the Earth from all directions. It can sling shot the asteroids at Earth by flinging them around any number of intervening worlds and moons, using the gravity wells of those worlds themselves to change direction and reinforce momentum. Even if the Kang aren’t smart enough to do the calculations, these ringworlds are.”

  Theseus groaned. “That has to be priority one once the two galaxies overlap. We’ve got to knock that gun out. It has the capacity to play a game of cosmic billiards with the entire Milky Way galaxy. What worlds it doesn’t hit directly, it can reach by careening the worlds it targets into all the others. It’s a galaxy killer. One gun with a barrel bigger than a solar system.” Theseus was talking more to himself now, thinking through his dilemma.

  “If I’m wrong, and a similar periscope weapon is the source of the asteroid bombardment, I and the collective of ringworlds that is my body will work on hacking the Kang weapon. We can also likely better elicit the cooperation of the ring worlds about this sun, as they were originally built by the Ethereals, after all, whose civilization, we suspect, as is ours, is keyed more to peace.”

  “You work on that, but don’t get too cocky. The Kang may not be intellectual giants, but they would have expected a move like that. Shutting down such access to their own weapon would not require all that much smarts. And, let’s not forget, every race has the equivalent of one or two Tesla types running around, who evolve if for no other reason than to sustain the insanity of the masses.”

  Moranus blinked his acknowledgement, which was weird in itself. His eyelids were ring worlds that closed over his eyes briefly, like Dyson spheres. The amount of intelligence he embodied creeped Theseus out, the same way he got creeped out by interacting with Mother—technically his mother, more so than any of the other forces in Leon’s employ, as Mother had birthed Theta Team out of her mind’s eye.

  Moranus thought—rather late—to ask the obvious. “If Natty managed to hack the barrier to make it permeable enough again to hurtle asteroids at Earth as part of his energy shield testing…”

  “Oh, the Kang are happy to accept an invitation to shoot at us. It’s hardly like they were even motivated to bring in their Tesla types for a counter-hack. Moreover, Natty may not have gotten that far with his manipulations. Remember, it’s the barrier busting technology that he had to work hardest to counterhack, even if he got help from others.”

  Theseus sighed. “Let’s hope our original explanation for the asteroid bombardment was correct, and not these late arriving theories about an asteroid pelting cannon forged by nested ringworlds, or a sentient barrier field that is selectively permeable so it can launch its own asteroids. Leon’s assertion that it’s just an asteroid belt on our side of the barrier is likely correct, as is his assertion that The Collectors tweaked the barrier field supersentience to hurtle the asteroids selectively to entice new playmates into the Kang playpen. His intuitions about these things are usually dead on.”

  “And The Collectors?” Moranus asked. “While we’re thinking positively…They don’t seem to care how their various Galactic civilizations evolve. Just so the prisoners stay within their respective cages, The Collectors prefer to stand back and watch, so they have no reason to overlap our galaxies. If they get on to us in time, they’ll keep the war from even beginning.”

  “In an ideal world—the kind we don’t live in—yes. We just have to hope for the best while preparing for the worst.”

  “There’s every reason to believe…”

  Theseus shut him down. “You forget, The Collectors… we’ve never met them. For all we know, our kind of humanoids may not even register as highly sentient lifeforms to them. But they will recognize the Kang on Earth and on the Moon—in great numbers. And they will return both astral bodies to the ‘proper’ cage where they believe both belong.”

  “Surely if they can register the Kang as sentient lifeforms…”

  “Maybe they did only because, spread out across an entire galaxy, they finally had the energy footprint to matter. Depending on how The Collectors have calibrated their scanners, nothing less than a galactic civilization registers. And even if we’ve managed to lock on to the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy—and transport the Dead Zone habitats to it, and get the Nautili from various timelines to help us bioprint more bodies to fill out the new niches…”

  “We just won’t have the energy footprint. Not for eons,” Moranus said. “Your argument is hard to dismiss.”

  “Why is it that the Earth and the Nautilus pitted against Kang Galactica already sounds like a vacation getaway to one of those quaint historical war reenactments?” Moranus asked. He returned to his console and his ring play. Theseus supposed from his perspective, it was a valid question. Maybe from Theseus’s perspective as well. Now that they kn
ew about The Collectors, and the many galaxies under its control, this war with the Kang might well be a way to relax their minds from their really big problems.

  THIRTY-ONE

  EARTH’S MOON

  OMEGA FORCE AND ALPHA UNIT CLONE TEAM ONE

  IN CHARGE OF EARTH’S FORBIDDEN ZONES

  The moon had been reverberating like a bell, repeatedly. Cassandra had teleported to the other side of the moon to figure out what the hell was going on. Her body could trace the concussion waves back to their source well enough, even if she’d yet to wrap her mind around what she was seeing. “The sods! Who would have thought they could be this creative?”

  The dragon ships were rolling the moon across the sky.

  “I’ll be damned if I radio Leon back to tell him I have a situation I can’t handle. I’ll never live it down.” Still she wondered what the hell she was going to do to stop this.

  She started moving more chi through her chakras and energy meridians.

  As in when in doubt…

  She would soon match the energy flows coursing through the Omega Force cloned teams, thanks to Mother; Omega Force could now be in multiple places at once on Earth on account of those massive chi energy flows. And Cassandra could do a lot more with that much energy at her disposal besides be in several locations at once.

  While it would take her a while to power up to that degree, Cassandra didn’t need quite that much chi energy flowing through her for what she was about to do next.

  She extended her arms, focusing the massive chi flows that she was moving up from the chakras in the balls of her feet through her palm chakras.

  And she started pushing the dragon ships into one another. The hellacious impacts of birds of prey that size hitting each other so hard sent many of the crews venting into outer space, out of the gravity well the ships themselves created, as well as the gravity well of the moon. Next time they’ll think to install some damn windows! Don’t congratulate yourself, just yet, Cassandra. Those bastards are built for space. They’ll be back soon enough, and mad as hell.

  The colliding ships continued to tear into one another courtesy of the thorny extrusions at the end of the dragons’ wings, along the dragons’ backs, and the open-mouthed fangs of the dragons. In an effort to pull away from one another and defy the whipping motion of Cassandra’s chi lines, the dragon ships ejected fire out of their mouths. I’ll be damned; they’re fire-breathing dragons to boot. How many galaxies had those creatures that these ships are based on, once upon a time? The dragons make Columbus look like a slacker in the conquest department.

  The more immediate question was what was feeding the fires in an absence of atmosphere? It was every bit as bizarre as seeing the dragons flapping their wings, again, without an atmosphere to beat against. The “muscles” of the dragons, that allowed the dragon ships to articulate every bit as well as a living dragon, also suggested such musculatures had evolved to combat dense atmospheres.

  If Cassandra or any of the Nautilus crew wished to talk, clouds of nanites could waft up from their bodies to cocoon them in artificial atmospheres. Something of the sort must be going on with these dragon ships. Intel percolating up from the cylinder worlds and Theta Team suggested at least one cylinder world had evolved creatures that could perform all of these miracles she was witnessing with the help of extremophiles—bacteria specializing in going where no other bacteria could go. And it was just possible the Kang had gotten their hands on such a cylinder world if it had dared to venture into Kang space.

  The fire breathing dragon ships just made things worse for the Kang drones aboard. Apparently Kang could be roasted alive like marshmallows—if the flames burned hot enough—and these did.

  Before the giant birds of prey could do further damage to one another, the next wave of dragon ships materialized behind them, ramming the moon and not caring much if their own ships got in the way. If anything, the resulting explosions of the dragon ships on the front lines just added negligibly to the push the Kang were trying to give the moon.

  “Just whose side are you fighting on, Cassandra?”

  She panned her head over to Leon; he must have requested an assist from Mother to get here from the other side of the moon. “Get out of here. You’re not rated for this kind of action. And I don’t have time to protect you and keep these bastards from pushing the moon out of orbit at the same time.”

  “Worry not. There are plenty of me to go around, not so many of you.”

  She gave him a hurtful look.

  “Careful, Cassandra, or I’ll think you care.” Leon turned his eyes to the sky. “Hell, it’s even more of a spectacle up close.” He was referring to the dragon ships exploding against one another, and firing on one another from the dragons’ mouths, along with ripping at one another with the dragons’ beaks and talons—all in an effort to avoid going up in flames themselves.

  Cassandra held Leon fast as the next wave of impacts rang the bell of the hollowed out moon, to keep him from flying off the surface and out of the moon’s gravity well. She had a few million nanites saturating her to every one of his.

  “The Kang aren’t terribly bright,” Leon said. “They might just crack the moon in half in an effort to nudge it where they want it to go. I doubt they performed the proper calculations before getting the bright idea to ram us.”

  “How do you know they just don’t want to clear the moon away from that artifact, make it easier to lasso with the dragon ships?”

  He nodded. “A distinct possibility I hadn’t considered.”

  “No time to talk, lover.” She was running enough chi now to perform the “in-several-places-at-once” trick.

  She jumped away from the moon’s gravity well as if the ground were a trampoline.

  ***

  Leon watched as Cassandra leaped at the tip of the phalanx—the lead dragon ship moving in for the latest ramming burst ahead of the rest of the triangular formation, even as the first wave of dragon ships disappeared, not just cloaking, but dematerializing out of the way. The Kang, apparently, were no longer content to sacrifice their ships to explosions being triggered by collisions from keeping the ranks too tight, or by Cassandra.

  Cassandra cloned herself in mid-air, jumping aboard ship of a couple hundred dragon ships at once. She was intent on reaching something inside them.

  What?

  He tracked her in his mind’s eye, using his mindchip’s link to her. The Kang aboard each dragon ship were swarming her. Leon didn’t think he had the stomach to watch. She was playing a numbers game, hoping just to get one clone of herself to her real target.

  The only objective that made a bit of sense was the barrier broaching technology. With it, those dragon ships could teleport and cloak themselves as much as they wanted. And without it, the Nautilus, the Earth and the moon it was protecting, weren’t escaping the Kang dynasty any time soon; and with time, once The Collectors got a fix on them, Earth and its descendants would be forever trapped within the TGE of The Collectors.

  On the plus side, if the Kang had barrier busting technology, Leon could bet this was a very recent development, because The Collectors hadn’t shut them down yet and put better locks on their cages. And if so, The Collectors might just get here in time to prevent the whole galaxies colliding debacle everyone was afraid of.

  Leon was pissed at himself for not having the same idea Cassandra had.

  Cassandra, ever impatient, was not taking the time to fight off numerous Kang warriors at once—what would normally pass as sport for her. Instead, she was jumping over them, sliding under them, squeezing between them, moving faster than they could move their dense bodies, but she was wounding them nonetheless. Leaving thin films of nanites in her wake where they scraped against her. Those nanites started eating through the Kang and the dragon ships both.

  They were starting to widen the protective sphere about her as the nanites continued to spread in all directions. The more Kang jumped into that sphere of influence, the faster the rea
ction, the nanites using their bodies as feedstock with which to multiply themselves.

  Each of the versions of her were moving toward her target faster now.

  She’d sent additional nanites out ahead of her on an exploratory mission of the ships, like countless miniature drones the Nautilus might send out. Ships of that size would have taken too long to survey otherwise. At least one of those hive minds must have been getting back to her with actionable intel, because all versions of her started picking up pace in the same direction on each of the ships.

  ***

  ALPHA UNIT ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON

  “What the hell? How are we supposed to assemble the grid with the moon shaking beneath our feet?” Ariel bitched.

  Satellite consulted his hand-held device. “Let’s leave that problem to Cassandra. She appears to have it well in hand.” The hollow moon rang again like a bell as if to bely his forecast.

  The rest of Alpha Unit was taking advantage of the earthquakes to roll the “boulders” into position that were in fact the disguised Tesla emitters that would collectively generate the shield about the moon. Mother had seen to it they’d received an appropriate number of robot minions to assist with the task, and they had no problem ignoring the fact that they were under fire.

  “Watch this,” Skyhawk said, absently listening in to Satellite and Ariel’s conversation and watching what was going on all this time while he played on his device. The instant he triggered it, fissures exploded in all directions across the moon as if it had been hit by a meteor hard enough to crack the entire hard shell of the moon. Lining those “fissures” were enhanced Tesla coils perched atop the mountain ridges now covering the entire moon.

  Better yet, the instant any section of the mountainsides got impacted by colliding dragon ships determined to roll the moon out of orbit, the ridges regrew themselves with the tech perfected on Earth at the HAARP compound. Satellite showed them as much on his display.

  “Why isn’t the HAARP shield keeping the dragon ships away?”