Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  But that didn’t mean Mother could make sense of the material. It was built of elements not on the table of elements—not a one of them. Now that he was back in his private chambers aboard the Nautilus, regarding the content on his display screens under high magnification, he could determine that much for himself.

  And Solo wouldn’t have his Mars War god supersentience to assist him—it just hadn’t been built for this. It understood enough about materials science and atomic combining, it had to, to quickly assess enemy craft and how best to disable them. But the Mars war god had no free computing time right now; it was otherwise engaged in exactly what it was designed for—war. And procuring an entirely new table of elements on the fly would take even a supersentience some time.

  Once again, Solo had no choice but to procure a supersentience just for the task.

  The way he was birthing them from one mission to the next, he was starting to feel like that Kang queen.

  There was no time for anything but cheats.

  His intellect and ego both would just have to get over it.

  Some argued that Earth’s Nikola Tesla had learned to tap the Akashic records, the mind of God, or more properly, His memory, where all information that was ever created anywhere in the cosmos was stored. Others said, much like Tesla himself confessed, that aliens from another world channeled through Tesla what he needed to know to do his science.

  Tesla’s mind had a way of functioning like a radio that could tune in things that more plebian minds could not.

  It was something Solo shared in common with him.

  Solo was already headed to his meditation chamber that would assist him with locking in the wavelengths needed for this particular data dump.

  The Kang queens knew the formula, of course, could assemble their unique table of elements for him. If they were so inclined. But they would destroy themselves the instant they felt their minds being scanned. Taking their castle worlds along with all their secrets with them. The Kang could always make more queens, always send the bees back to the source to collect the raw data needed to reengineer found alien technology the Tesla types and the queens could then use to rebuild their knowledge archive reflected in the totality of Kang worlds.

  But the Nautilus could hardly wait around to scan every castle world individually even if they could pull the knowledge out of the queens’ heads before they suicided for the greater good of the dynasty.

  Solo didn’t have a psychic sense driving these speculations.

  He had already reached out to the queen whose castle world Mother was just scanning with her LIDAR. She let him see just enough to know that she’d already initiated the self-destruct mechanism on herself.

  Solo had backed off, shutting down the LIDAR.

  There was no need to force the issue.

  He had a way of tunneling into the future every bit as profound as the Kang queens.

  And if Solo had an ace in the hole—his ability to generate more supersentiences with the unique algorithms and abilities to perform well at what they’d been tasked with—the Kang themselves might have handed him another ace.

  One thing they’d learned about the Kang, they were hell-bent on becoming killproof as a species, if not individually; they had any number of mechanisms in place already to ensure that.

  What if they had one more? What if, over the course of their long history, and seeing black holes devour enough suns and the planets associated with them, and seeing enough other suns go supernova, taking out planets far and wide, they had decided that they’d just had enough.

  Maybe the Kang goo had been formulated from elements that could only come about under the pressure of collapsing suns caught in the all-devouring maws of a black hole, or when going supernova? Hell, for all Solo knew, the Kang had crawled through a black hole to get here, with bodies and entire worlds formulated with matter so dense, they could only have been forged on the other side of a black hole. Maybe this was yet one more trick they’d evolved to cheat time. That way, even dying universes and all-devouring black holes could not stand in their way. They just had the misfortune, much like Leon and his people, of tunneling their way into The Collectors’ Menagerie. Where now, to escape eternal capture, they would have to divine one more escape ploy to cheat a race smarter and more evolved than they were. And look at the headway they’d made so far with the legacy tech they had in hand from other more advanced civilizations.

  Solo realized the Kang was not a civilization to destroy. They had to figure out how to make them allies, no matter how impossible the task. Any species that could cheat death like they could…

  He reeled his mind in.

  At least now he knew how to get the nascent supersentience he was now crafting, after stepping into his mind-amplifying dome room, a leg up, to save even more time, time which was in precious short supply with The Collectors knocking on their door.

  He would instruct the new supersentience, which he would name Materia, to download from the Mars war god everything it had gathered on all-devouring black holes, colliding suns, suns going supernova, colliding planets—some already containing many exotic rare-earth elements—to use in reconstructing the Kang’s table of elements. The Mars war god already had this intel in hand because it was currently fighting a war against the elements, against the baser physics of galaxies colliding, in an effort to save what worlds and suns it could, what black holes, for that matter, in so much as they served a constructive purpose. The Mars war god just didn’t give a damn about using this intel for anything other than its assigned purpose—rescuing as much celestial real estate as it could to protect all life within the Gypsy Galaxy.

  But Materia… Materia would be only too happy to use Mars’s intel as the basis for its new materials science.

  And what the hell… Solo threw in what insights he’d forged over the years regarding thought amplification woven into his specially designed amphitheater for promoting cognition. He would give Materia every edge he could. Because even a mind in singularity state would be hard pressed playing beat the clock to stay head of The Collectors’ arrival.

  Once Materia had the material science in hand that she needed to fully comprehend the nature of the Kang goo, she could devise how to hack the queen’s thought-amplifying worlds, get in and out with the information she needed before the queens could discover the hack. Better yet, Materia could use the thought amplifying abilities of the Kang goo itself to suck the intel Leon and his people needed out of all Kang worlds at once. Materia would know how to peel back the stealth shielding keeping the thought amplifying worlds from broadcasting all their secrets to the other queens in their highly competitive dynasty.

  It would be quite the coup for Solo to pull all this off. But he reminded himself of the value of humility. It might seem like getting the keys to the kingdom, but all the futuristic tech in the world flowing into Leon’s coffers, stolen from the Kang who had stolen it from so many others… None of it might be enough to get past The Collectors.

  For what did they know of The Collectors, really? They might well be one of the more benign forces in the cosmos, and the more easily gotten around relative to what else was out there.

  Solo sighed, surprised he could still lie to himself after all this time. From the perspective of Leon and the other shorter-lived humanoids, the idea that The Collectors “might” be one of the more benign forces out there was a matter for serious consideration. But Solo already knew, The Collectors were the least of their problems, little more than a speedbump on the highway they were racing along.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  THE BRIDGE

  “Ah, guys. Not to be the boy who cried wolf,” Ajax said, “but is that us heading into a sun’s gravity well from which there is no escape?”

  The rest of Omega Force, tired watching the show out the port screen and not being part of the drama, and already moving toward the exit to mobilize, startled by the revelation, whipped back around.

&nbs
p; “Maybe Mother’s been hacked,” DeWitt offered, his eyes getting wider by the second.

  “There!” Cronos pointed, before making the sign of the cross over himself.

  “The Kang worlds getting sucked into the sun,” Crumley said, seeing what Cronos was going on about…“Mother is racing to overtake them.”

  Mother shot past the Kang worlds and the view out the port shifted to show what was going on behind them now.

  “Mother is towing the three Kang Castle worlds on tractor beams out of harm’s way!” DeWitt exclaimed, gesturing as if his hands could possibly wrestle this cat back into the bag. “If she hasn’t been hacked then she has definitely gone soft in the head. They’re the enemy! Someone contact Solo, now!”

  Solo’s voice came over the COMMS. “Mother cannot afford to let those worlds be destroyed. Recent intel suggests the castle worlds are built as thought amplifiers for the Queens. They’re what the Kang use to decode Dead Zone tech and other legacy tech left behind by other civilizations. Intel that we need. Once the castle worlds and the queens are out of harm’s way, I assure you we’ll get right back to killing one another.”

  “Wait. How is she pulling this off?” DeWitt asked, staring out the port at Mother wrestling the Kang castle worlds free of the sun’s grip. Unlike Leon, who had his ego enough in check to not care who had the biggest or the best idea in the room, when the biggest and best ideas did not come from DeWitt, he got very defensive. He had been bucking for Leon’s job from day one.

  “Theseus has forwarded us breakthroughs Theta Team is making combing over Dead Zone tech. Mother has already incorporated this one into her repertoire,” Solo explained. “It appears that the Dead Zone habitats can both navigate toward black holes for recycling, and away from them, as need be.”

  No sooner were the castle worlds free of the gravity well than they released their dragon ships in force at the Nautilus. Mother had barely had time to drop her tractor beams. The dragon ships weren’t that much smaller than the Nautilus and they were coming at her just like bees whose nests had been thwacked.

  Mother was just as quick reacting.

  She fired her recently recalibrated phasers at all the dragon ships at once.

  Vaporizing each and every last one of them.

  The dragon ships still leaving the dragon worlds retreated back into their docking bays.

  The Kang queens had gotten the message.

  “Wait, Mother has firing options?” DeWitt sounded miffed.

  “I’d like to echo DeWitt’s sense of indignation,” Ajax said. “I could be sitting in a plush, air-conditioned room in a recliner now with one of her laser cannons in my hands, instead of going out into harm’s way in one of those teeny-weeny thunderbirds…”

  “Starhawks!” the others in the room shouted.

  “Whatever.”

  “I’m more curious to know how the hell she did what she did.” Crumley, with that big philosopher mind of his, sounded more interested in contemplating the deeper ramifications of everything he was taking in.

  Solo, sounding like an exasperated parent whose last nerve was getting tweaked, said over the COMMS, “Mother’s weapons systems are inaccessible to humanoids, as are all the more sensitive regions of the ship, as one of many precautions against possible saboteurs.”

  “I think we deserve a little gratis!” Ajax whined, loudly.

  “She considers your minds all too easily hacked to let any of you anywhere near her,” Solo informed him.

  “Wait, did that bitch just call me weak-minded?” Ajax protested.

  “Like we haven’t,” Cronos blurted. “You give the expression ‘I’m just the hand of God’ new meaning.”

  “As to your question, Crumley,” Solo continued, ignoring their outbursts, “that is Peacekeeper technology you just witnessed in action. Also just recently incorporated into the Nautilus, courtesy of the progress Theseus and Theta Team are making with appropriated legacy tech.”

  Solo sighed. “We may have won the battle, but the Kang queens are even more determined to get their hand on the Nautilus now that they know what she can do. I’m afraid the Nautilus is in more danger than ever.”

  The crackling silence felt like a gravity well far less escapable than that sun whose clutches they’d miraculously slipped through; they could all feel the weight of Solo’s mind.

  Even Crumley, the intellectual heavyweight on Omega Force, suddenly felt like an airhead.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I really do have more pressing matters.” Solo signed off on the COMMS.

  “Holy shit! What now?” Ajax piped up.

  All eyes returned to the viewport.

  “The Mars war god is engaging,” Crumley explained.

  “Wait, you mean to tell me all that just happened was on Mother’s dime? The Mars war god was taking a nap the whole time?” DeWitt, figuring his “big mind” had gotten the big picture earlier, realizing now how wrong he was, reprised his bitter resentments of earlier of being left out of the loop.

  Crumley explained, “The Mars war god only engages when too many wartime activities have to be handled at once for Mother to keep track of without shutting down life support aboard the Nautilus and her ability to coordinate with the other Nautili. If she risks losing the big picture of what’s happening in both galaxies, moreover, all is lost.”

  “You mean the big picture supplied by coordinating with the other Nautili?” DeWitt said.

  “At one time, yes, but her abilities in this area have recently been updated, as well, with access to the Raj and Mirage’s Gaia-supersentience dedicated solely to pondering galactic matters,” Crumley explained.

  “Try and keep up, DeWitt,” Cronos taunted. He was not the only one who liked to make fun of DeWitt pretending to be smarter than he was. “If you want to really understand what’s going on, I can lend you one of my rosaries.”

  They had all kept their eyes on the portal to the stars beyond the whole time they were talking.

  In that time, the Mars war god had shot the Nautilus between four suns falling into one another, and dropped what struck Crumley as a kind of depth charge.

  The resulting gravity ripples pushed the four suns far enough apart that they were no longer threatening one another and no longer heading toward forming a black hole.

  The Kang worlds that had been formerly trapped between the four suns – dozens of them – moments away from being consumed, their teleporting technology unable to break them free of the converging gravity wells – started teleporting out and away. There was no point going after the Nautilus this time; in the Mars war god’s hands, she was already gone.

  “Um…” Ajax said, “the last time I had this queasy feeling was when the nun gave the nextgen nanite cocktail to Cassandra on The Star Gate mission, and I saw what she could then do, and instead of awe and elation, I just wanted to crawl back up my mother’s vagina.”

  Crumley sighed. “More Peacekeeper technology. Mother is drafting it into her makeup as rapidly as Theseus and Theta Team crack the codes giving them access to it.”

  He realized, for once, Ajax was right. It was the same feeling he recalled having when they were suddenly gifted with too much power with their latest generation nanites. Cassandra had been chosen to be the first guinea pig, to see how they worked. Turning them into virtual gods had the opposite effect of what was intended. No one wanted access to that kind of power.

  And now this.

  The nanites weren’t to blame this time, but that hardly mattered.

  “How the hell were the Kang worlds unaffected by that gravity bomb?” DeWitt asked.

  “It was that precisely targeted,” Crumley explained. His voice had dropped an octave. He was getting a small taste of what Solo was feeling now, as the depth of his own intelligence turned in on him weighing the implications.

  The Mars war god was already in the thick of things again.

  This time the Nautilus shot through a cluster of deactivated cylinder worlds from the
Dead Zone, pulsing them with her shields, pushing them apart in the same instant as the shield blast fired them up, providing the battery-like charge needed.

  The cylinders went from bumping into one another and scraping against each other to resuming their calibrated orbit about one another—forming what looked to Crumley like a giant space cannon, the cannon itself a series of cylinders lined up, just not entirely joined together, and around the turret was a perfectly round ring of cylinders near its base, twirling, their equidistant spacing about one another sustained by their charged batteries.

  Out ahead of the cannon was a portal formed by another rotating ring of cylinders shaped into a rounded rectangle. This ring was much bigger than the one at the base of the cannon.

  The rounded rectangle was indeed a portal opened up by the power now cycling through it from the “window frame” of cylinders. Omega Force was looking at some other corner of the Gypsy Galaxy where it was converging on the Kang Galaxy.

  The cannon, charged by the ring at its base, fired a shot through the portal.

  That shot created the same depth charge that the Mars war god just had, only on a bigger scale.

  The space cannon had collapsed the black hole.

  In a series of quick shots, the space cannon closed a bunch of others—located throughout both galaxies—that were threatening any number of Gypsy Galaxy worlds.

  To grasp any of what was going on at the speed in which their minds could process it, Crumley had been forced to take control of the helm, so they could watch the footage in slow motion.

  “Oh my God!” Cronos blurted. He was rolling his wooden rosary beads that hung from his waist, like a monk wore them. He pressed down on the latest one in his hand so hard, he shattered the bead, breaking the belt. He scrambled about the floor desperate to gather up all the beads, his coping mechanism working about as well for him now as anyone else’s.

  “The Mars war god activated the space cannon, I’m guessing,” Crumley said, “to offload one aspect of its duties to it. The space cannon can do the job more efficiently, moreover, and it looks like it can tackle bigger projects than any one Nautilus can handle, even upgraded with Peacekeeper technology.”