Much to the Kang queen’s chagrin, Cassandra now had shared access to her hive; her morph was precise enough to confuse her minions, who no longer knew which queen to listen to. Typically, in such matters, the queens battled to the death, if they were of a mind to merge hives. But Cassandra didn’t have a hive of her own to offer, pissing the Kang queen off further. This battle to the death would be rife with risk for her and offer nothing in exchange.
She had not struck so far because she was curious why Cassandra was imploring the Kang Tesla Types to continue their work.
She feared that once the battle ensued, Cassandra might change her mind about that, actually slowing the Kang Queen’s takeover of this ship.
So, for now, they paced and circled one another, hissing and flicking their tails at each other. You’d think this was some kind of mating dance.
And as much as Cassandra was itching to strike, her new body would not wear like a glove. The seasoned queen would be the much better fighter. As any athlete or soldier will tell you, muscle memory was eighty-percent of it, and Cassandra’s new body did not have that muscle memory to go on. Cassandra had to provoke the Kang queen enough to get her to lose her cool, to get her to reveal her best tricks.
No problem.
Using the intel Cassandra had gleaned from the queen’s hive, she started slashing through the ductwork with her tail. The queen still couldn’t quite comprehend what time tunnels were, even if Cassandra could, her COMMS channel still open to her own people and the intel they were gathering, but the Kang queen knew enough to react violently each time one was disturbed.
Each one of those time tunnels Cassandra was cutting through would need to be repaired before this ship could do what it was designed to do. And those reparations were currently beyond the capacity of Mother, who had no clue how the piping—all very much located in the physical realm of this timeline—could even contain a wormhole without collapsing, far less be calibrated to individual wormholes pointing to different locations in space-time.
But Cassandra figured that was something for supersentiences to worry about, or perhaps Solo—The Nautilus’s equivalent of Captain Nemo—who might well like to get his hands on a Space-Time Alchemist’s ship. Maybe enough to demote the Nautilus to a second class vessel and move everyone on to this ship.
But she digressed.
“Time to royally piss this bitch off.”
She backed up to the edge of the catwalk they were on, extended her tail, threatening with her body language to jump at the same time that her lengthened tail was in a position to slice through even more piping on the way down to the bottom of this bottomless abyss of a ship.
Oh, the Kang queen didn’t like that at all.
She flicked out with her tail and pulled Cassandra away from the edge. Jumped on top of her and straddled her. Took her tail and shoved it up between Cassandra’s legs—where the male member of the species was meant to deposit his eggs.
Turned out the queen had a deposit of her own to make.
She sent her eggs up through her tail into Cassandra. The eggs weaponized, turned into incendiary bombs.
But Cassandra had encountered during The Star Gate mission dragons on other worlds that relied on this ploy, using their infertile eggs for more nefarious purposes, come time to protect themselves.
She used her own tail to strangle the pipeline sending the infertile incendiary eggs into her, trapping them inside the Kang queen.
The eggs exploded in both of them before either could take additional corrective measures.
They crawled off one another shrieking, picking up their guts and trying to stuff them back in and to untangle them from each other’s intestines, ripping a little too forcefully in frustration when they should have had the sense to put their fighting on hold, and gradually undo the knots of their internal piping. Cassandra felt like she was three years old again without the patience to properly attend to her shoelaces. The intestines of a Kang queen, as Cassandra found out the hard way, were like writhing steel plumber’s snakes. The fluid spilling out of the torn intestines flickered, the metallic liquid saturated with tiny crystals, each crystal analogous to the trillions of bacteria lining the human GI tract, serving as another, backup brain, providing humans with their gut checks, and the queen with computing control she couldn’t be bothered to consciously supervise.
It only then dawned on Cassandra the fatal mistake she’d made.
The Kang Queen whose COMMS channel Cassandra was sharing was the one fighting off Omega Force in the central nerve complex of The Whorl, even as this queen reached out for more of her gutting. This queen was strictly here on protection detail. She didn’t have a brood of her own to protect.
She did not have to juggle numerous duties at once, compromising her ability to do any one job as well.
This queen was fully weaponized, with no obvious weak points. You couldn’t get to her by threatening her brood.
The Kang had a second class of queens hitherto unknown to Mother or to the rest of Leon’s people. This second caste of queens had their giant-squid-like brains focused strictly on warfare.
Shit!
Cassandra had morphed into the wrong queen! Putting herself at a huge disadvantage.
This queen had cloaked her true identity both from Cassandra and Cassandra’s nanites.
She laughed at Cassandra as Cassandra realized her mistake.
Kang queen laughter was no less scary than their battle face. Its echo throughout the ship sounded like an acoustic grenade going off.
The broodless queen was already mending, well ahead of Cassandra.
She would soon be able to deliver her fatal blow.
Think fast or die, Cassandra!
Nothing new, right?
FIFTY-FOUR
THE SPACE-TIME ALCHEMIST’S SHIP,
THE WHORL
Sheldon was told Gamma Group was his to command. He was also told he was born twenty-two hours ago and all those years of battle-hardening were artificially implanted memories, but not to worry, his warrior’s reflexes would be boosted on account of that imagined experience anyway. The fact that he was created by a supersentience, which he couldn’t hope to comprehend, to be a cog in the wheel of a war machine the size of an entire galaxy…well, strangely enough, those were among the most comforting thoughts circulating through his head right now.
Less comforting was being teleported aboard The Space-Time Alchemist ship, The Whorl, which he was told had the theoretical capacity to dissolve the Gypsy Galaxy, which he now called home, back into the void, as if it were no more than a hologram to begin with. So securing this ship in advance of their enemies struck him as a real priority. As to this Kang body he was currently in, belonging to the Kang’s Ming caste that was analogous to humanity’s Tesla types… he already knew more about it than he knew about the body he was born with.
The Ming caste networked with one another, and were focused on one thing, intelligence gathering.
They recognized Sheldon and his team as imposters immediately, and didn’t seem to care. So long as they were contributing to the problem at hand—figuring out how to fire up the STA—the Gamma Group chameleons were a problem for one of the queens to handle. Gamma Group would either be assimilated, as others had before them, or killed.
Sheldon and his team were having a tough time getting into character as the Ming. It wasn’t on account of bad acting; doing what you needed to do to stay alive had a strange way of bringing out the best in everybody. Whether that best was used for good or ill was another matter. No, the problem was that the hive queen maintained her control over her hordes with her gooey secretions, and Sheldon and his unit had not partaken of it, and so were not subject to its drug-like qualities that kept the Ming singularly focused on their problem solving to the exclusion of all else.
When Sheldon asked for some of the exudate, the Ming nearest to him pointed to their food supply, looking much like a pyramid-shaped stack of eggs. Sheldon had each of his peopl
e grab one of the “eggs”, and he took one for himself. He instructed them not to imbibe it but to simply hold the egg and allow the nanites on their surface to conduct their scientific analyses.
They used the Ming’s natural capacity for working in parallel arrays to their advantage, to fast-track the breakdown of the drug. A few things were quickly apparent. The eggs, first of all, really were eggs. The Kang were eating baby queens, very early on in their incubation period, for the mind power they needed to do their work. Apparently the complex molecules making up the baby queens served as mind food only if the subjects imbibing the food were already working at their maximum potential. If they were, the elixirs grew their minds. If not, the eggs became toxic. These latest revelations did not come from Gamma Group’s ongoing chemical analysis of the eggs, but from the actual Ming in their vicinity, warning them, work as feverishly as they did, or die. The Ming were baited to comply further by the promise of growing into a queen someday with the mind power to control a hive of their own, to rule over their own castle world. Of course, the catch was, by then, they would be more Kang than ever, and whatever race they’d come from which had been assimilated would be a long-forgotten memory.
Sheldon sent out a distress signal to the actual Ming, advising that Gamma Group needed help understanding how to break the Queen’s hold over them. With so many complex molecules entangled in even more complex webs of interaction—there was no way Gamma Group was going to figure out the secrets of the eggs on their own in time, even with their remarkable abilities as soldier-scientists.
Sheldon suggested the actual Ming eat more of the eggs to grow their minds faster, while committing the extra slivers of the processing power of their expanding minds to solving Sheldon’s problem. That way they could apply more mind power to tackling the mysteries of the STA while also ferreting more mind power to Sheldon’s project.
He advised it was now or never, because both queens on this STA were being distracted by Omega Force, Alpha Unit, and the “chameleons” as the Ming understood them.
At first Sheldon was surprised by the compliance he was receiving from the actual Ming, but he quickly realized that by feeding on queen’s eggs, they were also being reared for independence one day, for which a certain rebel nature was needed, even if it had to be tightly harnessed by the effects of the drugs themselves.
In less than half an hour, Sheldon and his unit, working in tandem with the actual Ming, had cracked everything they needed to know about the queen’s eggs.
Shortly after that, Sheldon and his people were able to dial down the addictive properties of the queen’s eggs, along with the way they made its imbibers so feverish with attending their projects at hand. Sheldon and his unit had had to allow the nanites on their surfaces to vaporize off them and migrate to the actual Ming where they could now hack the queen’s influence over them.
But they had to get off the ship fast. Sheldon didn’t like the odds of their rebel alliance holding up long against the mind power of even one unpreoccupied queen.
But could they leave?
Sheldon asked the Ming hive mind to weigh in on their progress with the STA. They advised him that the central nerve complex of the Dyson sphere they were working on activating—they could only make sense of the term Dyson sphere by being arrayed with Sheldon’s mind—would require countless more Ming for any significant progress to be made in a reasonable timeframe. To this end, more and more Kang castle worlds had been brought into proximity with the Space-Time Alchemist ship. The Ming of those worlds were entering the hive mind array of Ming to augment their mind power without having to be physically aboard The Whorl, where they would only crowd one another.
When Sheldon pushed to find out what a “reasonable amount of time” constituted, the Ming rebel alliance, still communicating to him under the noses of the expanding Ming hive mind, replied, “2 million Kang Castle worlds surrounding us will allow us to activate the Dyson Sphere’s supersentience in just under two hundred years.”
Sheldon sighed. They didn’t have two hundred years. And they sure as hell weren’t getting past two million Kang Castle worlds once that many had teleported to this site.
One way or another they had to get off this ship now, and they had to get The Whorl away from Kang Dynasty galactic space.
The only positive accomplishments Sheldon could offer Leon was that they now knew how to grow Kang Queens, how to manipulate the queens’ genetic code. And they had a rebel alliance of Ming who might now have enough freedom to think and to remember their home worlds, perhaps to yearn for them once again. And in their memories, slowly rising to the surface, might be the answers to what happened to those civilizations if they hadn’t been entirely absorbed by the Kang, just whatever forces that had entered Kang air space. And if any of those home civilizations still existed, something told Sheldon that they might have allies awaiting them once the story of how their people had been freed from the Kang was told. Perhaps even more importantly, the Gypsy Galaxy might come to understand how those civilizations had come to encounter the Kang, and The Collectors both. That kind of information might serve Leon well whether or not he’d escaped the Kang’s and The Collectors’ clutches already. You could never have enough intel at your disposal, especially if the Kang and The Collectors were merely doing the bidding of string pullers higher up the food chain.
Sheldon sent everything he had gathered so far to the Leon clone aboard the STA, to Cassandra, to Patent, and to Patent’s mind trust of Satellite, Ariel, and Skyhawk—just in case any of them had enough mind power to spare themselves to know what the hell to do with his information.
Sheldon awaited orders to see if Gamma Group would be needed in a fighting capacity to assist any of Leon’s other forces. If no answer came within seconds, he would proceed on the assumption that they did indeed need help and would close in on their locations.
Just in case there was a hole in his thinking, Sheldon simulcast every scrap of his intel and his latest thinking to Mother aboard the Nautilus.
There must have been something he missed. Because Mother was already beaming Gamma Group along with their new confederates out to an undisclosed location for debriefing. He wasn’t sure how she was pulling that off as he’d been told Mother’s teleporting abilities were offline until whatever signal blocking her on the STA ship had been neutralized.
He suspected Satellite was to blame. Though it was doubtful that he had enough mind power to make much headway with the STA COMMS. That suggested that he must have found a way to neutralize the Kang queens’ hive signaling abilities, which were, relatively speaking, far more hackable, and that the Kang queens, not the STA, had been to blame all along for shutting down the Nautilus’s teleporting abilities within the STA. Sheldon supposed it made sense that a queen would learn early on how to prevent teleportation into her hive as a security measure.
Sheldon wasn’t sure he measured up after just one day of being alive. But he could rest assured that if not, he’d receive whatever upgrades he needed from Mother soon enough. Hopefully that didn’t mean a return to the scrap heap. Some models just weren’t worth repairing.
***
“I’ve isolated the various frequencies the Kang castes use to communicate with the Queen,” Satellite said, enjoying his perch from behind ducting that the queen so far didn’t dare damage.
“I’m shutting down those broadband communications now,” Ariel said, fiddling with her scanner. “Let’s see how that bitch reacts to that.”
Satellite peered through the slits between the ducting showing the battle in progress between the queen guarding the Dyson sphere’s nerve complex and Omega Force and Patent, thought about how their fortification might not be so impregnable now. If she was sufficiently provoked, she might be willing to damage the ship, and let the Kang Tesla types figure out how to repair it later. “I suggest we retreat.”
Ariel peered at the queen, hesitating before cutting the queen’s communication lines, and, catching Satellite’s d
rift, nodded. “Good idea.”
They dragged Skyhawk with them who was too immersed in his handheld device to pay much attention to them or to whatever else was going on.
Once they were out of eyesight, Satellite nodded and Ariel put her hand over the initiate button. Seeing her hesitation, Satellite joined his hand with hers, making this a joint decision. Any excuse to touch her, really, worked just fine for him. So far he’d only made it to first base with her. What a time to try for second base.
He squeezed Ariel’s hand and, with her, pushed down on the button.
The queen’s reaction was immediate.
Her scream reverberated throughout the ship.
And her tail sliced opened a trench to them, clearing the view back to her. She didn’t recoil it this time for another strike, but extended it. Apparently it could unfold like a telescope. Who knew?
The tip of the elongated tail had also subdivided to grab hold of their necks, squeezing, when Patent materialized, firing his bazooka straight at the tail.
The part of the tail that was severed by the blast seemed to have sentience enough to finish the job anyway.
Patent ripped the tail segment off of each of them by grabbing the severed tips and flinging them, forcing the tail extensions to uncurl. Ariel and Satellite each hit the nearby ducting so hard they were dazed getting to their feet, which worked just fine for Satellite.
But his muddled state blocking out his ugly reality didn’t last long. As soon as he came to, he directed his venom at Skyhawk. “If you hadn’t been twiddling your thumbs this whole time…!”
“I was looking for a way into the Dyson sphere supersentience.” Skyhawk’s response was as devoid of emotions as Satellite’s was full of them.
“Okay…” Satellite’s edgy tone suggested he was only putting his nastiness on hold until the other shoe dropped.
“Its entire brain is made up of the same tubing as the rest of this ship, only at different scales, including scales not present anywhere else in the ship,” Skyhawk explained.
Moving Earth Page 43
