“Like a million, Mom.” Hailey spoke absently, still trying to penetrate the compound’s off-grid status, get some kind of signature to register on her laptop. But they were down quite a few satellites in the sky after relentless asteroid bombardment. And it wasn’t as if the car’s AI had been made for hacking secret government compounds. But you could bet the Feds had hacked their way into the car. So that gave her a place to start.
Mom sighed relief from the backseat. “Well, in that case, I think I can get out and stretch my legs for a bit. We’ve got to be well ahead of the pack now.”
The Belgian Shepherd hopped out with her, looking as eager to stretch its legs. Mom tossed the “Frisbee”—a shed Kang scale she’d picked up on the road trip over here. It might well have taken a nuclear blast to shake that Kang scale loose. Hailey had tried to warn her mom, but exposure to nuclear fallout was the least of their problems right now. Her mother was probably secretly hoping she was sucking in a lethal dose before things got any more real around her.
“Hey! There she is!”
Before Hailey could finish tracking the direction the voice had come from, Frog Doll had hopped up on the hood of the Ford LTD, and Thor was at her driver’s side door.
“You know about me?” she asked Thor, surprised.
“Duh. Frog Doll here is like hacker extraordinaire. Helps with getting into all kinds of trouble. He piggybacked on your hack of Omega Force’s COMMS so we could follow you here.”
She nodded, craned toward Frog Doll. “So you’re his enabler?”
Frog Doll croaked. “Guilty as charged.”
Her dad, reading up on living off the land from the car AI’s survival video game, looked up to check the sky. “Look, Hailey! It’s the Milky Way Galaxy! We’re home! This whole thing was a psychotic break secondary to leaving the retirement village. I told you, scientists of my ilk need plenty of people to buffer them from reality: maids, cooks, gardeners, accountants to pay the bills, someone to deal with those lost Amazon UPS packages. And all those retired people just put the seal on all the tranquility. But, oh, no, you wouldn’t listen.”
Hailey sighed, shook her head slowly. “Ignore him,” she said, addressing Frog Doll and Thor. “My parents are experiencing Elizabeth-Kubler Ross’s various stages of dying out of the old reality into the new one. My mom’s still stuck on denial. My father made it all the way to acceptance before circling back to denial. If I remember right, that’s just how these things go.”
“Frog Doll says we have your dad to thank for helping us to get a lock on the Milky Way Galaxy, so come time to be thrust upon the Kang, we might actually have a fighting chance, you know, with our own galactic empire, however nascent.”
“You’re welcome. One of his more lucid moments, when he was in acceptance mode,” she said to Thor, suddenly becoming conscious of her training bra, trying to push it up.
“What are those, tits?” Thor asked, staring hard. “I’m sorry, but Frog Doll and I aren’t rated for tits. Gets a bit rough and tumble wherever we’re going.”
She frowned. “They’re the athletic kind.”
“Well, I suppose that’s okay, then.” He shifted his attention to the Belgian Shepherd. “Hey, I love dogs!”
“He’s military trained,” Hailey said, trying to impress Thor, though she wasn’t entirely sure why. “Knows a hundred-fifty verbal commands and fifteen hundred sign language commands.”
Thor whistled. “How many do you know, Frog Doll?”
“None. But I do know enough to jump on you and pull off your head with my hydraulic powered forelegs if you try any of that shit with me.”
Hailey noticed her father was wandering away from the car, arms held wide to the sky, soaking in The Milky Way Galaxy. Her mom was off in the other direction with the dog.
The buffalo had given their entire party a wide birth.
“We’ve got to get into this military compound and take charge before the shit hits the fan,” Hailey said, keying away on her keyboard.
“Yeah, that’s what Thor and I were thinking. Great minds, huh?”
She gazed up at him with a smile bigger and dumber than the one on the stain on the pizza box in the back seat. Kang invasion or no, Pizza Hut was open for business—and still paying minimum wage. “I think it’s in the land of divine madness where we will truly meet.”
She returned to her hacking.
Thor squinted at her screen in an effort to see better. “Huh. You speak Mandarin, ha? Yeah, that was probably pretty smart of you to get ahead of the curve, when they looked like they were going to take over the world. Pity The Collectors beat them to the punch. I was looking forward to Shanghai on the Hudson.”
Her father came running back to the car, picked up the dog’s manual with all his commands, buried his face in it, and slumped down in his seat.
Hailey picked up on the cue to check the sky.
Yep, a new kind of fireworks had started.
One that involved planets crashing into one another.
Suns colliding and going supernova.
And there was a clear sign of a carnivorous black hole, not at all in the center of the spiral galaxy, where it should be, based on suns disappearing at an alarming rate in one patch of the sky. The lightless void just kept getting bigger and blacker.
Hailey let out a primal scream. “I don’t have time for this!” she gestured, screaming at her laptop screen, getting frustrated by how long it was taking to hack her way into the black site.
“Hey, chill, girl,” Thor said. “I told you, we got this. Frog Doll, do your thing.”
Frog Doll jumped up on lip of the windshield. “I’m sorry, but in a galactic-scale war, I like my odds of staying hid, and peace emerging, long before anyone finds me. Against that there is hopping into this compound and facing a firing squad. Nope, not going to happen.”
Hailey looked up from her keypad and glared at him. “I thought Thor was the moron in your partnership.”
“Hey!” Thor squawked. “I’ll have you know I only aspired to being a moron—once.” He sighed. “It was just too much damn trouble.”
“There is a planet heading straight for us!” Hailey yelled at Frog Doll.
“If that’s true, I can appreciate your confusion about who’s who in this relationship.” Frog Doll sighed. “Very well. As much as I hate being leveraged…”
Frog Doll burped, and apparently that was some kind of hack of the compound, or maybe a sound he was programmed to make to convey froglike satisfaction following the successful completion of a task.
“My only other saving grace is my loogies—which I can hurl with pinpoint accuracy from a hundred meters out—that dissolve humans on contact,” Frog Doll said, still sounding as if even that realization couldn’t take the weight of the world off his shoulders.
Hailey glared at Thor.
“He’s joking—I think.” Thor grimaced at Frog Doll, but the significance of the moment was lost as the ground beneath them gave way.
The acre or so they were perched on sank straight down.
Frog Doll glanced at the buffalo that kept grazing. “I’m judging from their reaction that this is a regular occurrence around here.” He ribbited. “For the record, I’ve always subscribed to the hollow Earth theory.”
The giant—and she did mean giant—freight elevator stopped about a half mile down. It wasn’t Hailey’s spatial relations that confirmed as much; it said so on the depth gauge.
The chamber they found themselves in was several acres wider—all around them. The bison raised their heads and grunted before returning to their field grass chewing.
Hailey was more interested in the uniformed officers surrounding them.
One of them was already inside the car, ripping out the AI. He held it up in his hands. “It’s got more brains than they do.” Going by sheer size, he might be right, Hailey thought.
Rose gestured to the dog and it flew into action, biting down on the soldier’s hand, forcing him to release the AI slowly, as he broug
ht the soldier’s arm to the ground.
Several weapons pivoted toward the dog.
“You shoot that animal and I will not tell you how to save the planet, which is now caught up in an intergalactic war,” Hailey said.
The general, silent until now, letting his people do their thing, studied her as if a wall-hanging at a museum he couldn’t make hide nor hair of, other than to frown with distaste at the whole modern art movement. “Holster your weapons,” he barked at his soldiers. He shifted his attention back to Hailey. “Follow me, little lady.”
“The entourage comes with,” Hailey said. “They need me to keep them sane.” Hailey’s voice brooked no disagreement.
The general mumbled, “I know the feeling.” He fished sunflower seeds out of the bag in the palm of his hand as he walked, shelled them in his mouth, spit out the shrapnel and chewed down on the meats. He was as efficient as a Gatling gun. He offered her the bag. Hailey shook her head.
“How come you’re holding up so well?” Hailey asked the general. “I thought you had to be better at entertaining fantasies than reality, like a kid, to get your mind around this.”
“A four star general caught up in an intergalactic war? Trust me, kid, this is my fantasy. I tore up my request for retirement this morning.”
She continued grilling him as they walked to God knows where, her entourage in tow, and a party of armed soldiers of the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later variety. “You wouldn’t like me to reassure you then that this is not a mind ray being beamed at you by the enemy to get you to lose your marbles?”
“Already ruled that out.”
“You’ve confirmed the planet coming straight for us is not a matter of poorly calibrated space telescopes?”
“I have a space fleet, which officially does not exist, by the way, peeing their panties, right now, over it.”
She sighed. “At least you’re not as much of an idiot as most of the generals I’ve known.”
He sighed. “I know the feeling.”
“You’re Schopenhauer?” Hailey said. “A direct descendent of the philosopher king? IQ 160?”
“And you’re Hailey Truitt, IQ 170, the half-wit child of Dillon Truitt, IQ classified.”
“I appreciate you sparing me having to prove myself. It’s not like we have the time,” Hailey said.
“We’ve been trying to make sense of your father’s latest equations. Some of my people tell me it could in theory cloak our galaxy, if we can figure out how to engineer the damn thing.”
Hailey realized that the general had been tracking them for quite some time. She didn’t know whether to be flattered or freaked out. She opted for neither; again, no time.
Hailey was starting to shiver. It had to be fifty degrees in here. The general seemed to read her mind. “Never let them see you sweat,” he mumbled.
She nodded, grasping his innuendo and his rationale for the room temperature just fine. “Give me a second to heat my core temperature,” Hailey said.
The general actually smiled. “We actually have a few of those Shaolin monk types around here, trainers for the troops. You can break a 2 x 4 off their Adam’s apple. Can you do that?”
She shook her head.
“Pity. Probably get me another few billion in funding if I had a video of that stunt.”
“I wouldn’t worry about funding after today.”
He sighed. “True that.”
The underground compound they were walking through had revealed little of its true nature thus far other than its vastness by how off-scale the halls and ceilings were; luxury liners had smaller passage ways. These were designed to drive big trucks down. The sickening green overhead lightning was like next-generation fluorescents designed to flush out anyone likely to puke at the sight of the grotesque.
Finally, they reached the nerve center of the compound, or at least of this floor. Another very large room, at least a half-acre across. The perimeter was covered in large 200” monitors. Each one highlighted another choice shot of two galaxies crashing into one another. If she thought the fireworks looked impressive under New Mexico’s big skies above ground, viewed through the space telescopes, the light show was something else.
Hailey had arrived in time to see one of the monitors’ views impacted by an exploding sun, destabilized by too many planets careening into it that the sun hardly had time to digest.
“Talk fast, little girl, before I lose all my eyes in the sky, making it that much harder to think,” Schopenhauer said.
He’d slowed with his sunflower seed chewing. His eyes remained on the monitors as if he wished to dual track her intel with the other intel he was receiving to make a better decision.
The shrapnel coming out of his mouth blasted keyboards and workstations now as they had littered the floor on their walk over here. No one had the guts to complain. Schopenhauer, for his part, liked to provoke people. He probably had no shortage of provocative moves, no doubt looking for the few who could talk back to him—who might actually be worth promoting. She hadn’t been standing next to him a full minute and she’d figured him out. Poor bastard, surrounded by fools like this; it really was lonely at the top.
“Just how much catching up do you need?” Hailey asked.
“We’re aware the Nautilus is a major player in this drama, and the main reason all our key military assets haven’t been asteroid-bombed into oblivion. We’re also aware of the various cloned Special Forces teams Natty Youngman left on Earth to deal with the moon artifact, and the cover they’ve been giving the HAARP compound, and numerous of our other installations, not the least of which being Los Alamos. It wasn’t until you hacked their COMMS that we had a more complete picture of what was going on, but now that you have, and we’ve been monitoring your intelligence gathering, we can now put a name to the aliens at war with us—the Kang. And more disturbingly still, to The Collectors—even higher up the food chain.”
Hailey sighed. “Okay, we can get down to business then.” She yanked at his sleeve. “Eyes on the prize, General.”
Painful though it was to take his eyes off the light shows on the monitors—they had lost another space telescope in the time they had been talking to a black hole which had sucked the space telescope up and a planet along with it, and was in the process of gobbling up a sun, too, so, of course, that monitor had gone black—he gave her his full attention.
“I’m putting you in charge of global command, overseeing all troops, and all armies, navies, and air forces the planet can muster. Once I’m finished telling you what I have to tell you, I don’t think China or any of the other major players will give you any lip.”
He just smiled at her, defaulting to mild condescension and amusement; she couldn’t blame him for resorting to mainstays in trying times like these.
“Your main task will be divvying these resources up into independent fighting forces that can make the most of the various planets they will be beamed to. The Nautilus and her many clones recruited from other timelines is fast at work bioprinting humanoids to go with each of the planets in our galaxy, along with the resources they will need to stage a resistance from their corner of the galaxy. We, that is to say, Earth’s military assets, are strictly functioning in a relief capacity. The more of our people that can hit the ground running, the less bioprinting the Nautili have to do of key personnel and equipment. Even so, we’ll be lucky to lock down the planets in the Goldilocks zones, and if not all of those, then at least the inhabited ones.”
“We’ll have a negligible impact at best,” Schopenhauer protested.
Hailey sighed. “True, but I will loop you into the Nautili the way Leon is looped in. That AI doesn’t play favorites. The ones with the best ideas win. So, all you need to do to be a major player in this drama is to have bigger and better ideas than anyone else.”
He smiled. “As soon as I can be subjected to the Nautilus’s rejuvenation tanks, and can get good and age-reversed, I think we should get married.”
She groan
ed. “Get in line. I should tell you, I have my eyes on an eleven-year-old boy, not very bright, but I think he and his hand puppet frog could be major players.”
Schopenhauer bit his lips and she saw tears of joy coming out his eyes. “We run psyops on soldiers for years and still can’t get the agility of mind out of them we have in you.”
“We can stroke each other’s egos later, General, a small matter of a Kang galactic civilization mad for war to keep in check, and, if we survive that, and colliding galaxies, there are The Collectors that no galactic civilization in their Menagerie has managed to get around—far less a nascent one like ours that was birthed less than a few minutes ago.”
Schopenhauer gestured for some of his people to close ranks. “It’s time we upgraded that laptop access of yours,” he said to Hailey. “Take them to the Cray supercomputers.” He glanced over at Dillon. “We have skull caps that will read Dillon’s mind and transfer his thoughts to the Crays. Helps prevent carpal tunnel. You’ll still have to dial the Crays and Dillon into the Nautilus; the Crays can only do so much heavy-lifting with a galactic-scale problem like this. But we need to make progress on cloaking the Milky Way Galaxy…”
“We’re calling it the Gypsy Galaxy now…” Hailey interjected.
The general frowned. “Usually it’s the military that’s ahead of the curve with nomenclature. Very well. I’m hoping Dillon can make some progress on teleporting the galaxy the hell out of the Kang Galaxy and into its own holding cell even if he can’t get us away from The Collectors for now. One step at a time.”
Hailey thought about what he was saying, and nodded. She glanced at her father. “He does best in a soundproofed room, with some white noise, raindrops, surf…”
The general nodded to one of his people. “See the retrofits are in place before he gets there.” Whoever that soldier was Schopenhauer was addressing got on his COMMS even as he double-timed it out of the nerve complex.
“As to my mother…” Hailey glanced over at her; Rose was demonstrating how many tricks she could do. Every time she did a short routine from her gymnastics days, the dog barked approval. They were bonding on a whole other level.
Moving Earth Page 30
