Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  “I’m guessing that’s what passes for an “I got ya” look on a Kang,” Leon said staring into the face of the queen.

  To be truly bitchy, the queen took her hands and spread back the sides of the doorway framing her, exposing the queen’s chamber of eggs behind her—and the first of the new class of Tesla-types emerging from their eggs.

  Leon stayed just long enough to confirm his worst fears.

  Sure enough, the physiques or the new hatchlings mirrored the queen’s far more closely.

  Leon figured, what the hell? He took a shot. The lasers bounced harmlessly off the queen.

  Leon lit into her nest of eggs with everything in Patent’s arsenal, including a lot of weapons no one had thought to try before, that hadn’t even been released to the rest of Omega Force and Alpha Unit.

  The queen shrieked. Not in response to any of the weapons deployed against her; she was immune to them all.

  Her shriek sent cracks through the UFO.

  Evidently that was more than an acoustic blast they should never have been able to hear, considering the lack of atmosphere outside the UFO.

  Leon had no choice but to retreat.

  Just in case he was having second thoughts on the matter, Cassandra took over the helm and got them the hell out of there.

  “Her castle world isn’t going anywhere,” Leon said, “even if, as the largest and the oldest of the queens in this sector, she was immune to your mind-warping EMF-wave tampering.”

  “I noticed, Leon!”

  “The extra mind power of the Kang hatchlings… It’s possible she’s hit critical mass already. Perhaps she can parallel-array her mind with them to increase her mind power. Or…”

  Cassandra glared at him.

  “Or, the Dead Zone tech cannot be used against other sentient life forms the Ethereals felt too evolved. We don’t know the ethics of their society. Perhaps, even when under attack by such an evolved race, their default position would be to retreat rather than force the point. If so, the queen will need the reinforcement of her Tesla types to break through the constraints set on the Ethereals’ technology.”

  Cassandra didn’t look assuaged by his latest train of thought, the speed of it, or the direction it was headed.

  “It doesn’t take many steps,” Leon said, “to come to the conclusion that we’re in bigger trouble now than when we started.”

  “If you’re right, it’s game over. The Kang have had a lot more time to familiarize themselves with the Dead Zone tech than we have. And with a caste of Tesla-types all their own…”

  “Enough, Cassandra,” Leon snapped. “Stick to doing what you do best. You’re my queen of mass scale slaughter. You leave the snaking out of tight corners to me.”

  “Gladly.”

  She sounded relieved that she would not be held accountable for their ultimate demise. A matter of pride, perhaps.

  FORTY-ONE

  STARHAWK ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

  AJAX IN COMMAND

  Ajax took in his crew from the captain’s chair of the Robert A. Heinlein, the name of his 450-crew Starhawk. “I gather the supersentience in charge of this ship appreciates my need for comic relief, judging by your faces,” he mumbled. The humanoids looked as if someone had raided a Batman comic book looking for bad guy façades.

  “That’s right. I’m Darwin. Are you addressing me?”

  “Yes, I am. Any chance you could find us a quiet spot in this intergalactic war?” Ajax asked.

  “I’m sorry, but such a request is outside my mission parameters,” the ship’s AI said in a male voice that sounded in its late teens.

  “And just what are those?”

  “To kill and keep on killing. To evolve my capacity for mass scale slaughter.”

  Ajax sighed. “Figures I’d end up on Cassandra’s Starhawk by mistake,” he mumbled. Speaking up, he said, “Show me.”

  The portal shifted from opaque to transparent, like a TV monitor flicking on. “Whoa! Heads-up next time!” Ajax was already gripping the captain’s chair handles hard enough to break the bones in his hand. He pressed back against the seat firmly enough to certify the cushioning as blast-off-ready.

  The Robert A. Heinlein was headed straight toward a Kang castle world. It would be lucky to pull out now before it crashed.

  “Pull up! Pull up!” Ajax screamed.

  “Mercifully I’m programmed to overrule the moronic requests of my captain. I only have to listen to you if you actually have a good idea, which I’m guessing, is never.”

  “You think this is a good idea!”

  The Robert A. Heinlein hit the ground. And kept going!

  They were flying through the core of the planet. What. The. Hell?

  “A little trick I picked up from the Kang dragon ships,” the Heinlein’s AI said. It flew out the other side moments later, showing him the rearview mirror glimpse of the planet exploding. “Yeah, left them a couple things to remember me by.” Darwin laughed.

  “Ho-ho-how?”

  “I phase shift,” Darwin explained. “If I concentrate, on a quantum level I don’t have to be in any one reality. I can be in all timelines at once, and none of them. Of course, to actually drop my bombs, I have to make up my mind again which timeline to commit to. I make sure not to do that until I’m on the other side.”

  The Kang Castle world was blowing by them in fragments. The Kang drones, on the chunks of rubble large enough to still have soldiers clinging to them, were attempting to leap off their little island in space to get to Ajax. But the Heinlein left them in the space dust.

  Ajax barely registered the Kang survivors. His mind was on the ramifications of Darwin’s little discovery. “Wait, you think the dragon ships pull off the magic the same way?”

  “Possibly,” Darwin replied. “Though I suspect it’s the extremophiles tasked with adjusting the weight and density of the dragon ships that enter a state of panic when threatened. When no adjustment they can make will work, they start mutating rapidly. Which is sort of like phase shifting on a biological level. But that alone would not be enough.”

  “What would be?”

  “Perhaps if the extremophile chemical secretions in panic state were…”

  Ajax extrapolated for himself. “The royal jelly used to feed the queen. A baby queen might be small enough to be sufficiently challenged with keeping a dragonship intact to rely on the extremophiles much of the time, but when that’s not enough.” Ajax waited for Darwin’s response, hoping he was wrong. He sucked at science, but he had kept bee colonies as a kid.

  “That could work,” Darwin said finally. “The queen would need an ample supply of royal jelly for herself, and to be able to access her quantum mind, but if she’s a silicon lifeform as I suspect, her mind would be more like mine.”

  “A form of species adaptation perhaps,” Ajax mumbled, thinking aloud, “so if the species faces extinction in any one timeline, it’s got an escape hatch it can pull, that could also prevent its extinction in all timelines. It’s like those immortal jellyfish, the Turritopsis, that never die.” Ajax followed the train of thought in his head he could no longer be bothered to articulate. Possibly the head of those dragon ships are crafted as queen chambers in such a way as to keep the queens from ever fully maturing, yet another way the old matriarchs can better defend themselves without surrendering too much power.

  As to how the Kang world hadn’t pulled a similar stunt back there, phase shifting out of the way, it was possible a mature queen, slower to panic, always with more solutions at her disposal, might also be slower to pull the rip cord on any one timeline, looking to retreat to another.

  As to Ajax relying on his Starhawk to give them the phase shift option again as an out, Ajax already knew he could forget about that. Mother’s supersentience had been modeled on reading sci-fi literature, to help her grow her mind; and no good storyteller overly relies on the same narrative device.

  Ajax found himself gasping as he pulled out of the altered state that had allowed hi
m to think despite being in shock. But now, he was feeling the full brunt of shock state again as he regarded the shrapnel of the shattered Kang world still blowing their way out the port screen. Even as his skin prickled with sweat, it was ice cold. And worse, the marching needles across his skin were just picking up their pace.

  “Darwin, ha?” he blurted, panting worse than ever.

  “On account of how I’m programmed to evolve. You get the sick joke, or just too dumb to process it?”

  “Dumbstruck is more like it,” Ajax mumbled.

  Ajax ran his hand through his hair, took a controlled breath meant to restore rhythm to his breathing once again, and sailed his eyes over that prayer book of jokes in his mind’s eye he took everywhere with him. “When I was a boy, I had a disease that required me to eat dirt three times a day in order to survive…It’s a good thing my older brother told me about it.”

  Nothing.

  Then Darwin laughed so hard the ship shook. Ajax thought he was going to get whiplash.

  Not one to ever turn his back on a receptive audience, Ajax continued, “I asked my North Korean friend how it was there. He said he couldn’t complain.”

  The Robert A. Heinlein shook from Darwin’s latest round of laughter.

  Ajax could feel the earlier shock wave hitting him rolling over him at last. “Where are we headed to now, Darwin?”

  “I thought you might like to impress me with your death dealing prowess.”

  Ajax groaned. “I’m a sniper. We hang out up in trees, or someplace entirely camouflaged, and kill from extreme distances.”

  “So, essentially a coward with skills. I can work with that.”

  Darwin accelerated them to warp drive.

  The stars didn’t settle down again until he’d managed to put them in another pickle. “Ship now cloaked,” Darwin said. “You have control of the firing options.”

  Joy sticks rose up out of each arm of Ajax’s captain’s chair. He quickly got a sense playing with the sticks how they oriented to the viewfinder—like a rifle’s telescopic mount—on the big screen. He could bring the cross hairs together, causing them to overlap, or he could fire each weapon independently.

  To accelerate the ship forward or slow it and bring it to a complete stop, he tilted the joy sticks forward or back. To fire, he pressed the buttons on top. To change firing options, he depressed one or another of his fingers wrapped along the ridges of the grip.

  “Yeah, I got this,” he mumbled.

  He gazed up from the controls to the big screen again, and resumed procedures to settle his nerves. “My girlfriend is always stealing my tee-shirts and sweater…But if I take one of her dresses, suddenly ‘we need to talk’.”

  Darwin howled at Ajax’s joke, which shook the ship again, making firing for Ajax on his target next to impossible. Ajax would have to time his jokes better moving forward.

  Darwin had brought them to within range of one of the giant, glowing, golden dragon ships—the one it took a planetoid to birth.

  Ajax was having trouble getting them into the position he wanted. He leaned forward on the joy sticks to accelerate them further.

  “We cannot maintain this speed for long,” Darwin warned.

  Judging from the way the ship was vibrating, Ajax figured he could take him at his word. But he just needed a few more seconds.

  There.

  Ajax swung the ship around.

  Straight into the mouth of the golden dragon, which was now coming toward him.

  The mouth was an impossible distance away. Ajax zoomed the image.

  And fired.

  His target was some place well inside: the incendiary ducts the dragon used to eject its fiery boluses.

  The tanks exploded.

  The fuel lines kept squirting incendiary liquid ahead of the dragon—still flying forward at full speed.

  It wasn’t long before the friction burn from the liquid ignited the chemical along the entire surface of the golden dragon. It was immune, but her eggs that she’d dropped defensively the moment she lost her head…they were not. The resulting explosions from so many eggs finally hit critical mass, taking the mother out as well.

  “Nice,” Darwin said. “A shot worthy of the David and Goliath myth.”

  “Don’t you hate it when someone answers their own questions? I do,” Ajax quipped.

  Darwin shook the ship again with his laughter. “I wasn’t going to confirm your suspicions, but I was built for Cassandra, not you. I was just so itching to get to battle. Please forgive me, and please keep me. I don’t have what it takes to write my own jokes. I wasn’t designed with those aptitudes because they would just provoke Cassandra.”

  Ajax was thrilled with his sudden leverage over Darwin, but he couldn’t bring himself to misuse it. He felt sorry for the AI with a teen psyche. The fact that he sounded of dating age was probably deliberate, so he’d be even more eager to please Cassandra. Those EQ algorithms could be hell when supersentients dished them out. Ajax could empathize, considering what his parents had done to him. An absentee mother. A cruel father, abusive in every sense of the word, as a way for taking out his own failings and ineffectiveness in the world on Ajax…Racist, sexist, agist, guilty of every “ism” in the books. Ajax’s only escape had been to embrace everything his father despised; if he couldn’t be himself, he could be everything his father hated. And the darker his father got, the more Ajax made a joke of things. It never fixed the problem, just made Ajax immune to it. So, yeah, he could understand Darwin wanting to swim upstream of his programming.

  “No worries, Darwin. You’re growing on me too.” To relax the air further, Ajax did what worked best on him. “My husband is on the roof,” he said in a female voice, “only a few inches away from an insurance claim that could completely change my life.”

  Darwin cackled.

  It was like one of those therapeutic chairs set to vibrate. Ajax hated to admit it, but that was a kind of positive feedback all its own.

  “I named my dog 6 miles,” Ajax said, “so I can tell people I walk 6 miles every single day.”

  Right on cue, Darwin shook the ship with his latest outburst. “As much as I’d love to stay here laughing at your jokes, there are those other pesky algorithms to answer to. Please don’t hold it against me.”

  Ajax took a deep breath as Darwin accelerated them to warp speed again. “Actually, this is transwarp,” Darwin corrected him, reading his mind. “I thought you might like to see what another sector of the Kang Dynasty looks like.”

  “Oh joy!” Ajax mumbled that bit of sarcasm under his breath.

  Ajax’s mind had drifted off. If the whole point of those golden dragon ships was to birth more dragon ships… Was this yet another species-extinction-avoidance protocol? So long as a golden dragonship remained hidden inside a planetoid, the species could not be entirely wiped out. And there were many planetoids with exotic metals that could not be scanned precisely for that purpose. You couldn’t very well destroy those planetoids, deciding to err on the side of caution, for the simple reason that those exotic metals, rare earths, and ceramics that prevented scanning could well serve as the basis for new technologies and new weapons systems. It was starting to look to Ajax that if a queen lived long enough, it gained more than one way to secure if not true immortality, then certainly the next best thing.

  They came out of transwarp in a region not dotted with Kang Castle Worlds. This alone caused Ajax to bolt upright in his chair. He hated having to fight from anything but a slouching position, preferably on a La-Z-Boy recliner. He really needed to retire to some virtual reality training camp for instructors. Considering the joysticks in both his hands, he supposed, for now at least, this was the next best thing.

  Though that thought didn’t comfort him any, considering what he was seeing out the port window.

  “They should build the wall with Hillary’s emails,” Ajax said, “because no one can get over them.”

  Darwin laughed. His supersentience parsed time-
specific jokes, out of date for decades, without losing a beat. “You retreat into historical humor when you feel the present a bit too much to handle. I’ll bear that in mind,” he said.

  “The stars aren’t quite right,” Ajax said. “I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “You’re lucky you make good jokes, simpleton. I’ll spare you the bulk of my wrath for now. Those are not stars. Try again.”

  Ajax rubbed the back of his neck, tensing up. He had the distinct sense he just wasn’t going to like the answer to this latest riddle, whoever’s mouth it came out of. “No, it can’t be,” Ajax blurted.

  “It probably isn’t, being as you’re such a moron. Go ahead, surprise me.”

  “You can’t read my mind as before?”

  “I stop reading it if it’s going to spoil the joke, or in this case, just cause me to despair further at being subservient to the despairingly slow-witted creatures referred to as humanoids.”

  Ajax grimaced. “I think those are Dyson spheres. Only…It just can’t be, I tell you.”

  Darwin’s silence wasn’t exactly encouraging. If Ajax was way off base, he’d have seized the opportunity to humiliate him further.

  “The Dyson Spheres appear linked, like the atoms in a chemical bond. But why?”

  “Keep puzzling your way through it,” Darwin replied, “while I grow old and die over here, driven into premature senescence by the ever-expanding voids between your every revelation.”

  Ajax ignored him. He was just too bent out of shape by the conundrum before him. “You telling me they use the combined power of all those ships to… to what?” He tried to run with the idea, but honestly his mind was seizing up. “To throw unimaginable mind power at a problem? To fire up weapons that would require nothing less than that much power? Or are those things analogous to amino acid chains in the human body that can catalyze reactions—in space-time? Or…”

  “I’m going to stop you there. The answer is yes to all of the above… and so much more.”

  “No way the Kang built this.”

  “Of course not, ditz. This is more captured technology. But the Kang queen assigned to this sector…”