Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  “I’d say ‘fascinating,’ but it’s just not!” Satellite blurted dialing back up his testiness.

  Patent had joined the huddle, standing guard over the three as he listened to them bicker.

  “These aren’t tubes as we understand them, cooling the ship, or being used to house wiring,” Skyhawk continued. “They’re wormholes, each of them.”

  “You’re a little late to the party with that revelation!” Satellite snapped. Satellite was beginning to wonder how much of his rivalry with Skyhawk for Ariel’s affections was coloring his thinking. Skyhawk was putting her life at risk, too, after all.

  “And if I don’t miss my guess,” Skyhawk continued, ignoring him, “this ship, and this molecular configuration it represents, is part of a larger body that each of the molecules are a part of.”

  “Okay, a bit more interesting,” Satellite confessed, dialing down the testiness again, but just a nudge. He still didn’t know where this was all heading.

  Ariel made the connection ahead of him. “So this ship gives access to the multiverse? I mean why else would you need all those time tunnels, and at different scales? Why else would you have to interact with so many other Space-Time Alchemist ships to work your magic? Certainly not for time traveling to alternate timelines in this universe, or from one location to another in this timeline. You’d need it for accessing the multiverse.”

  “Close,” Skyhawk said. The next moment seemed to stretch out for all eternity as they all held their breaths. “You need it for accessing all multiverses.”

  Everyone froze.

  All but Patent, who cracked his neck in both directions, as if he needed the chiropractic treatment to free up his thinking on the matter. “Leon is going to shit himself,” he said. “He thinks Christmas has been coming at least once a day since being drawn toward The Collectors’ Menagerie; he has no idea.”

  Skyhawk looked up from his display, still refusing to believe his eyes, or his calculations. “We can’t let this fall into the Kang’s hands, or The Collectors, for that matter.”

  “I figured that part out for myself, genius.” Patent’s answer doubled as a growl. “I’m just coming up a bit short on a way out of that dilemma right now.”

  The Kang hive queen was coming at them, and from the expression on her face and her body language, she had a big debt to settle.

  ***

  Cassandra was tempted to morph back to her human form, which she had far more mastery of than the Kang queen body that she’d morphed into. But the actual Kang queen was just too smart to risk it. The last thing Cassandra needed was for her to get a sample of Cassandra’s DNA in its uncloaked form. With her luck, the queen would figure out how to send an army of Cassandras against Leon and company.

  Cassandra was just going to have to fight her way out of this with a body that didn’t heal as fast as the actual queen’s, and didn’t respond as well to Cassandra—far too slow for the purposes of survival.

  She decided to buy herself some time by turning the actual queen’s horde on her. But those orders never got transmitted. Satellite managed to sever Cassandra’s COMMS to the Kang hordes infesting the STA at the same time he severed the lines to the queen Leon and Patent and Omega Force were fighting. Now that was team work for you! Remember to choke down on Satellite’s neck until his head pops, Cassandra, at your next meet and greet!

  The Kang broodless Queen was upon her, fighting as if being unable to lay eggs, and empty nest syndrome, was far more devastating to Kang queens than human mothers. The bitch shot a net out of the tip of her tail, using the tip itself as a grappling hook to carry the net. The buckyfullerine-like fibers of the net cut into Cassandra’s Kang queen body as the net constricted. The broodless queen was determined to reduce her to chunk meat her hive could recycle into the next queen.

  But Cassandra turned the tables on her, sending transmissions from her currently expanded neurocortex along the buckyfullerine lines direct to the broodless queen’s brain. The data dump from one giant crystalline brain to another was facilitated by the fact that the queens used this very tactic to make the minds of their enemies’ leaders more pliable, prior to sucking all the intel out of them. In fact, Cassandra was making more room for propagating fears in the broodless queen’s mind by sucking out all the intel about their civilization. The queens had a nasty habit of tapping one another’s communications to ensure no queen got the leg up on them in their highly competitive society. That was becoming their undoing now. Cassandra made sure to thank the broodless queen for giving her a way into her mind that she would not otherwise have had.

  The broodless queen severed the lines to her brain the instant she realized that her ploy had only served her opponent. But an instant to telegraph information for two giant crystalline minds was already more time than this queen had.

  As the broodless queen staggered as if under the influence of some drug, determined to shake it off, Cassandra took a step back, as if retreating herself, only to flick her tail at the broodless queen, severing her head.

  The queen, making one very nasty face at her as her eyes went large, was determined to rob Cassandra of her trophy. The specks of gold in her black crystal cranium brightened all at once, as if she was sending out a mass communication. But those nodes in her brain obviously came with their own self-destruct switches.

  Now Cassandra’s eyes went wide. Was this bitch trying to take her out by turning her brain into a bomb? That would only endanger The Whorl, when the Kang were a long way from surrendering it. Alternatively, Cassandra could just teleport herself to the other queen’s location and use the bomb against her, killing two birds for the price of one. The broodless queen had plenty of space in her mind to think many moves ahead as Cassandra did. No, this was something else.

  Cassandra recognized the broodless queen’s final gambit. She was relying on the fact that this imposter in her midst—whoever and whatever she was—couldn’t hold on to all the intel a queen’s mind could hold on to if she dared to morph back to her original form. And if she refused to before beaming back to the Nautilus, she would just give the Kang all the homing signal they needed to close in on the Nautilus, and capture the real prize, the real key to Leon’s kingdom. B.i.t.c.h.!

  And Cassandra couldn’t very well beam back what she knew to the Nautilus right now, owing to the dampening fields of the STA. And the queen was not about to surrender a checkmate move, either, that would force the Kang to back off with the enemy knowing far too much about their status quo, leaving them with no final move but to change the status quo, something that even for the queens, with their very rigid society, would be painful, if impossible to do.

  How the hell do you reverse the broodless queen’s gambit, Cassandra?

  ***

  Cassandra realized, perhaps too late, that the severed Kang queen’s head could continue to do damage nearly indefinitely. Made of metallic crystal, it hardly needed life blood to sustain it the way most humanoid bodies did.

  Even now it was powering down to an energy-saving mode, going into dormancy, and from such a state, could emit enough energy to fry Cassandra without much damaging the ship. The Kang queen had evidently solved for the Catch-22 well ahead of Cassandra.

  But the bitch hadn’t counted on Cassandra’s never-say-die attitude.

  Cassandra shot the tip of her tail into the brain stem of the severed Kang queen’s head, shooting just enough energy to blast out a different kind of signal. An eternity of horrors that could only be conjured in a Kang queen’s head was broadcasted to the queen guarding The Whorl’s Dyson sphere AI. Cassandra could hear the other queen shrieking from clear across the Dyson sphere already. There was just enough energy in that final transmission to explode this hiveless queen’s head.

  With any luck, Cassandra had killed two birds with one stone.

  Time would tell.

  ***

  THE NERVE PLEXUS OF THE WHORL

  Cassandra was expecting the fight of her life with the final remaining
queen, which Leon and company were doing all they could to merely keep in check, while still drained from a narrow victory with the warrior queen.

  She had not expected to survive this encounter.

  But the queen still guarding the nerve plexus of the Dyson Sphere, shrieking at her, looking more unglued than ever, teleported out of there, taking her hive with her.

  They were retreating to the Kang world, one of many orbiting this STA ship.

  Why?

  If the queen could still manage all that, the death blow Cassandra had dealt to her before beaming to this location had clearly fallen short of expectations.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  LEON AND CASSANDRA OF CLONE TEAM TWO

  Leon and Cassandra wasted no time following the queen off the ship. Whatever she was up to, it wasn’t in the Kang’s nature to retreat, and Leon could bet if a retreat was called for, the Queen would be the last to leave the field, not the first. They were strangely protective of their minions. Perhaps that’s how they held sway over them.

  Back in the UFO, Leon couldn’t believe his eyes.

  That jellyfish creature that Clone Team One had fumbled into in their UFO had its tentacles around not one, but all of the STAs, and was dragging them off into Gypsy Galaxy territory, out of the zone where their galaxies were still overlapping.

  Leon shook his head slowly in awe. “Leave it to the mind of an eleven-year-old girl married to Mother in singularity state to figure out how to talk to a glorified jellyfish.”

  The jellyfish was receiving help from The Peacekeepers.

  Somehow, Theseus had gotten them into action. It remained unclear to Leon just how many of The Peacekeepers’ firing options were still offline, but the ones that worked were decimating the Kang worlds, which Leon understood now as the individual hives of the individual queens.

  One shot from a Peacekeeper and the Kang Castle World was toast.

  As dense as the Kang were—pun intended—they got the message real fast and backed off.

  Their worlds were retreating back into Kang Dynasty territory. How exactly that teleportation trick was managed remained unclear. But it wouldn’t be much of a leap to imagine that the tech had been appropriated from Dead Zone cylinder worlds which also had the capacity to teleport themselves.

  Leon had, with the help of some of his friends, pulled off the coup of the century—even by the standards of a galactic civilization.

  Those STAs offered him access to the multiverse—and to fulfilling his wildest dreams. Mind you, there was the small matter of preventing colliding galaxies from taking them out first, and saboteurs running rampant throughout the Nautilus and the Gypsy Galaxy, and if they survived all that, they still had to break free of The Collectors. Oh, and then there was the prospect of firing up the STAs, which would require mending technology first that they scarcely understood.

  But everything in good time.

  All in all, it had been a good day.

  And it was definitely time for a beer.

  Regrettably, this generation of nanites would not allow him to get drunk any more than it would allow him to sleep. He was online twenty-four seven, being kept in the zone of maximum capability by the nanites who could also not afford for his thinking to degrade with fatigue.

  And they were a long long way from being out of trouble.

  “I guess the beer will have to wait.”

  The STAs in hand, and all of them out of harm’s way of the Kang, for now, Leon finally relaxed enough for his mind to receive the broadcast sent earlier by Sheldon and Gamma Group aboard The Whorl.

  So, they’d made away with even more bounty than Leon could have hoped for. It was just possible that Sheldon and his team had given Team Good Guys everything they needed to neutralize the Kang queens, and the Kang Dynasty as a whole.

  FIFTY-SIX

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  Omega Force stood fast, eyes riveted to the bridge port. The Nautilus trailed the pack of eleven other Nautili, the “train cars” pulsing their shields in sync to repel the two suns—about to collide into one another—away from each other.

  First pulse.

  “Girl,” Ajax said, “you’re like a car accident, because I just can’t look away.”

  Second pulse.

  Ajax pulled at his collar, eyes fixed on the unknowable. “Have hope for the future, but maybe build a bomb shelter anyway.”

  DeWitt squeezed the hand rail; he’d rather squeeze a trigger but he didn’t know what good that was going to do. “I’m with Ajax on this; there’s no way we’re getting through this one. Not even with eleven Nautili in tow.”

  “How about twenty-five Nautili?” Solo said. Solo had arrived on deck, popping out of the elevator. He joined the vigil. “More are arriving presently. We have to time their exit from the other timelines to ensure we don’t compromise their ability to survive the threats facing them in their time.”

  Ajax, trying to settle his nerves, chewing Gummy Bears, got one or more stuck in his throat. “I hope when I inevitably choke to death on gummy bears—” a couple hard coughs followed, “people just say I was killed by bears and leave it at that.” He managed to dislodge the stuck items with a couple more deep-throated hacks. “Just what the hell could be so pressing in those other timelines!” he blurted as soon as he had regained his wind.

  “Do you really want to know?” Solo asked, keeping his voice level, without looking away from the big screen.

  “No!” Ajax shouted. He smelled under his soaked armpits. “I’m not saying your perfume is too strong. I’m saying the canary was alive before you got here.”

  The other Nautili had arrived.

  Third pulse.

  The suns had been knocked clear of one another.

  The other Nautili had already returned to their timelines.

  Mother engaged her warp drive engines.

  Moments later they returned to normal space-time, orbiting a Kang Castle world. The dragon ships were already deploying in force.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Ajax said, “but we have no more thunderbirds to deploy.”

  “Starhawks!” they all shouted, correcting him.

  “Sor-r-r-r-r-y! Whatever you call them.”

  They all turned to him and hit him with the x-ray eyes. He didn’t think the x-rays were meant to see through him so much as turn him to ash.

  Ajax made a throat clearing sound. “You take away the looks, money, intelligence, charm and success and really, there’s no difference between me and George Clooney.”

  ***

  Say what you want about Ajax, Solo thought, Omega Force had gone from cringing every time he opened his mouth, to embracing the meddlesome distractions of his sometimes funny jokes. The fact that no one on the team appeared to really know who George Clooney was didn’t detract from the joke—at least not right now. Deciphering it was still a lot more inviting than dealing with the truth in front of them.

  What. In. the. Hell. Was. Mother. Thinking?

  She was scanning the Kang Castle world with their latest generation LIDAR. No doubt she had tweaked it to penetrate even a Kang world, but…

  The results of the LIDAR were coming up on screen. They were able to see through the Kang world as if it had become transparent.

  “My God!” Cronos crooned.

  “So,” Solo remarked, “the queen surrounds herself with her Tesla Types in there.” The body types most proximate to her, surrounding her royal chamber, were all of the Ming caste. The drones were distributed along the periphery of the planet, ready to board their dragon ships at a moment’s notice. “These hives are her brain trusts, where she can assist the Ming in reverse engineering the Dead Zone tech, and everything else the Kang drones stumble onto.”

  “The hive must magnify her mind power further.” Everyone turned to Ajax, not exactly known as the font of all wisdom. “I don’t just mean the Tesla Types she surrounds herself with. Something about the nature of that alloy the hive coats the castle world with, the way b
ees excrete the wax to make their hives…”

  “Stick to the jokes,” DeWitt said, returning his eyes to the screen.

  Solo nodded. “Ajax’s right. Why didn’t I see what was staring me in the face from the beginning!” He hammered his cane into the floor, mad and impatient with himself.

  He just as quickly smiled. “If I can get Mother to treat these Kang Castle worlds for what they are, thought amplifiers, we can take advantage of the full storehouse of what the Kang have learned from the legacy tech of all the civilizations that crossed paths with them at one point or another.”

  “Beats the hell out of trying to catch the bees out there while they’re still collecting the pollen, before they’ve even brought it back to the hives for analysis,” Crumley suggested.

  “Yes, it does,” Solo replied. “We were assuming the Kang Tesla types were decoding the tech on location, but their job is just to figure out what’s worth stealing. To fully understand the nature of the treasure they’ve got, they need the hive itself.”

  “And if they can’t abscond with what they need,” Crumley suggested, “as with the Space-Time Alchemist ships, then they bring a queen on location, make do as best they can.”

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” Solo said to the group. “We don’t have too much time left before The Collectors come. We can’t still be gathering intelligence from the Kang by then, because they will separate our galaxies into their respective cages. We needed a way to cheat time and you’ve given it to me. Mother and I will take it from here.”

  “I don’t much fancy the way he said The Collectors are coming soon, as if he knew,” Ajax said, addressing the rest of Omega Force, sans Leon and Cassandra, of course, who were deployed elsewhere. “Do you?”

  The rest of them, still staring at Solo exiting the room, shook their heads in concert.

  ***

  Solo had to figure out the nature of that compound the Kang secreted. It didn’t block Mother’s LIDAR, not surprisingly, because a thought amplifier would actually have to be rather good at transmitting data on any number of frequencies to function as such.