Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  “How did the Mars war god know what these cylinders even did!” DeWitt blared, starting to sound as whiney as Ajax. Again, someone had figured out something ahead of him, making him feel stupid. The poor guy, he was just trying to stretch himself so his kid could aspire to being something more than DeWitt ever could, just another Special Forces officer.

  Crumley groaned. “The Mars war god is monitoring everything Theseus and Theta Team is up to, drafting the legacy tech into war as soon as it can be deciphered. It has also merged with Theta Team to give them access to the Singularity state that is its mind, shifting their focus away from normalizing those habitats to flicking the switches on anything that can be used for war.”

  “I bet those tree huggers love that!” Ajax blared. “They were built for preventing war from ever getting started by having a better sense of alien worlds than we ever could, and by making sure we didn’t club-footedly aggravate the locals into firing the first shot.”

  Crumley groaned. “Actually, this is their idea of nirvana. They’re getting to do galactic-scale engineering, farming stars and worlds across two galaxies at once, all to minimize damage to either. They see this as an enhancement of their initial mandate, not a rescinding of it.” Crumley continued to inform his own thinking on the matter by tapping the screens that gave him visual access to what was going on inside the cylinder worlds forming the newly erected space cannon. His in-ear COMMS and his mind chip and his neural cocktail of nanites were also pushing through highlights in Theta Team’s thinking, especially Theseus’s, to him.

  Crumley was well aware that the Mars war god had already completed hundreds of other missions in the time it had taken Omega Force to get their mind around the space cannon.

  They had the choice of tracking each one of those missions, one at a time, at a speed their minds could process the data. But his hand hovered over the button that would take them to the next revelation.

  He looked up at the others.

  They were all shaking their heads at him.

  No one wanted to see more.

  Ajax had gotten down on all fours to help Cronos gather up his shattered rosary. “Don’t you dare mock me!” Cronos snapped at him.

  “I’m not mocking you,” Ajax said, wiping back tears, and picking up a bead with the free hand. “Did it occur to anyone else that even with all we’ve seen, The Collectors have retained their hands-off policy, allowing these various galactic civilizations to evolve on their own accord? Settle their squabbles among themselves? What does that tell you? Shit, what blows our minds doesn’t even get a rise out of them! No matter how much the Kang’s and our abilities grow to release hell on one another, we are just not a threat. The best we can hope for is to find a rung in their Dante’s hell not even Dante could divine, and get comfortable.”

  “Help Cronos with those beads!” Crumley commanded the others not already on all fours, figuring it’d settle their minds if nothing else. No one needed to do any more thinking right now. It wouldn’t lead them anywhere good.

  As if to bolster his thinking, the space cannon was recharging. Techa help him, Crumley couldn’t look away.

  The portal was shifting focus.

  This time to the Nautilus.

  The dragon ships had it surrounded in a perfect spherical deployment of warbirds. Millions and millions of them. There was no trajectory the Nautilus could pick to fly through them—at any speed—without crashing into any number of the dragon ships; there would be enough collisions that her shields would have folded long before she cut a path free. And something had neutralized its teleporting ability. Crumley’s money was on the thousands of Kang castle worlds occupying strategic positions in that sphere. Array enough queens, their thoughts amplified by their castle worlds, and it appeared they could snare a Nautilus.

  The queens were smart enough to know that the Nautilus’s firing mechanisms were limited if it truly wanted to preserve the intel of the castle worlds.

  And the Nautilus could fire the peacekeeper weapons all it wanted at the dragon ships, destroying them thousands at a time. Millions more were coming. The queens were happy to wait for the Nautilus to exhaust herself.

  What were those dragon ships to the queens but pawns on the battlefield?

  The space cannon only had to fire once.

  Every dragon ship was vaporized so completely that there wasn’t even dust to clog the Nautilus’s engines.

  She shot out of the area at transwarp speeds before the queens could call in more dragon ships.

  The precision of the space cannon was just freaky.

  Like the Peacekeepers and their firing options, both technologies had clearly been designed by civilizations advanced enough to know the value of surgical strikes, doing what you could to protect the innocents and other vital assets, destroy only what you needed to, to make peace that much easier to negotiate afterwards.

  The realization was late in coming, but Crumley realized that the Mars war god’s ability to coordinate battle had been stymied briefly as well, when it was under siege, not just its ability to move the Nautilus from one location to the other, but to transmit intel. The only answer was that the Raj had stepped in, either firing the space cannon themselves, or ensuring the Mars war god communiqués got through until the Nautilus was back in action. Perhaps the Raj had signaled one of the other Nautili that her sister ship was in trouble and that Nautilus had taken over control of the cannon. One way or the other, the Raj had been involved.

  The control panel showed Crumley that since the space cannon’s activation, collisions between galaxies was now down to seven percent of the original total. As close to perfection as you could get for two galaxies in this close proximity. Still he knew Leon would not be satisfied. That meant tens of thousands of suns and hundreds of thousands of worlds were still being destroyed. It was still a mass extinction event. That was a problem for Leon.

  Crumley shut down the viewport.

  It should have been a moment of elation.

  But he understood why it wasn’t.

  Like the rest of Omega Force, he could no longer tell if they were climbing a ladder to heaven – to Leon’s coveted Promised Land of endless peace across all the multiverses, interrupted only briefly by what it took to squelch, if they couldn’t simply neutralize, civilizations like the Kang – or if they were descending rung by rung through the unabridged version of Dante’s hell. Thanks to The Collectors, and the size of their Menagerie, Dante’s Inferno didn’t just have nine levels anymore—but countless many.

  As Crumley bent down and scrambled on the floor with the others, in search of the spilled beads, he said, “Once this prayer belt has been reassembled, Omega Force is going to serve as the missing prayer bead. Maybe getting back into action and having a small impact on a war of this scale is just the medicine we need.”

  He got murmurs of approval and head nods.

  There was a time for thinking they were all that. The sharp edge of the blade. And there were times for thinking they were just six grunts in a war machine too big to be comprehended by their small minds. This moment definitely called for the latter.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Theseus had been given the assignment of teleporting himself into the hollowed out shell of a Kang world and subsequently into one of the dragon ships pulling away from it. He was to linger just long enough to get a sense of what was going on, specifically if the Kang had chosen to engage their caste of dead warriors.

  They had.

  The Nautilus was pulling away faster than the dragon ships could accelerate, and the queen was determined to have her prize.

  Before Theseus’s eyes, the 3-D warriors embossed into the walls of the Kang World, walked out of the glyphs, like gargoyles come to life, now as solid as any of the living Kang drones. They quickly switched to their more ghostly, ethereal forms to give chase, passing through the Kang world as if its solidity meant nothing to them.

  Theseus, continuing to keep his mind clear and his emotions neutral
to frustrate the queen’s ability to sense any alien life aboard her planet turned into a mother ship, teleported himself next to the dragonship giving chase.

  ***

  ABOARD A DRAGONSHIP

  Theseus arrived on the dragonship, where he saw the same phenomenon taking place. Kang Ethereals mobilizing, morphing out of solid form just long enough to free themselves from the ship’s hull before resolidifying again and teleporting out.

  ***

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  Theseus teleported back to the Nautilus where he found the Kang ethereals, who could move easily between realms, engaging with the Epsilon Ethereals, of Mother’s creation.

  Both sides altered between their ethereal forms and their corporeal forms as it suited them, using both to their advantage. When it was easier to pass through a solid adversary to get behind them rather than dance around them in hand to hand combat, they did so. To avoid a deadly stroke in the nick of time, shifting back to ethereal form did the trick.

  ***

  NATUILUS COMMAND BRIDGE

  All eyes turned to the sliding doors. Crumley was the first from Omega Force to speak. “What the hell is that ruckus?”

  They charged through the doors and into action.

  ***

  THE NATUILUS’S MAIN BREEZEWAY

  Omega Force laid eyes on the Epsilon Ethereals for the first time—and their nemeses against which they were naturally paired, the Kang Ethereals. The battle was epic and one there was no amount of training to get Omega Force ready for—if they had a second to spare.

  “I think there’s a few spots we didn’t check where that last prayer bead might be hiding,” Ajax volunteered.

  “God forbid we not be thorough. Cronos’s sanity depends on it,” Crumley replied.

  Ajax mumbled under his breath, “Yeah, right, his sanity.” Omega Force retreated back to the command bridge.

  ***

  THE NATULIUS’S MAIN BREEZEWAY

  Theseus, still just silently observing the battle underway, noted the Epsilon Ethereals favored a type of spear that with a twist vacuumed up their ethereal adversaries like returning genies to their bottles—the bottles being the hollow transparent shafts of the spears. The trapped ghouls within the spears were a sight to behold and carried a certain fear factor for opponents. With a twist in the other direction, the Epsilon Ethereal spears stopped the transition back from solid form to ghostly form by interrupting enzymatic pathways—permanently—and killed if targeted correctly at a lethal organ.

  The Kang Ethereals favored fancy curved daggers and swords, vaguely reminiscent of ancient Arabian weaponry, that were nano-edged, the nano designed to work much as the Epsilon Ethereal spears. The Kang Ethereals did not fight with shields, nets, and other gladiatorial gear as did some of the Epsilon Ethereals—all the instruments adapted for realm-shifting fighters. The Epsilon Ethereal shields, for instance, also captured ghouls inside them, their torment visible to the enemy, by how the geometric patterns on the transparent shields shifted, making the shield impermeable in one moment, and in the next, a portal to hell.

  The Epsilon Ethereals could take any shape they wanted, so matched the Kang drone forms pound for pound, neutralizing any typical Kang strength and hardness advantage in battle.

  The Nautilus looked as if staged for the engagement, as much of the ship appeared abandoned, its crew dispersed far and wide between analyzing Dead Zone habitats and whatever other assignments Mother had tasked them with.

  The fights ensuing on every deck were already not going well. The Epsilon Ethereals were too newly minted, too unseasoned in battle. Nothing like the Kang, who also had a huge numbers advantage.

  The Kang Ethereals never hesitated when mixing it up with the Epsilon Ethereals in solid form, whereas the Epsilon Ethereals took a little longer in deciding on the best strategies for neutralizing their opponents. The Kang Ethereals availed themselves of a wider vocabulary of nasty tricks. They switched easily back into ghost form, passed into the Epsilon Ethereal warrior they were locking swords with, where they then resolidified, exploding the Epsilon Ethereal still in solid form.

  The Epsilon Ethereals, for their part, learned fast, adopting the battle tactics of the enemy when they proved superior. And so the husks of each solidified lifeform piled up as so much rubble on the ship’s decks.

  The extra Kang Ethereals wasted no time ganging up on the Epsilon Ethereals, as both sides were immortals, and so unable to do any real harm to one another—unless they were off in their timing with their death-dealing instruments—and the chances of the latter increased for Epsilon Ethereals with the more fighters each had to fend off.

  But if the Kang Ethereals were single-minded in purpose, they were capable of more than one maneuver en masse at a time. They passed their ghost-like forms into the Nautilus’s husk, before resolidifying in walls harboring key components. Occupying the same space as Mother’s choice real estate which wasn’t engineered for sharing space, key electronics exploded all over the ship. Mother would not have long to act before the ship was thus crippled by the Kang Ethereals.

  Realizing as much, she quickly isolated the frequency the Kang Ethereals were using to go between ethereal and solid forms, and emitted a cancellation wave throughout the ship.

  The Kang Ethereals had been neutralized, no longer able to enter the Nautilus, allowing the Epsilon Ethereals to redeploy themselves where they could be a lot more effective. Fighting away from the Nautilus, they would not have to divide their attention between protecting the ship and themselves.

  ***

  Cignon, acting in an admiralty capacity over all Ethereal team captains, addressed the teams gathered about him aboard the Nautilus. Cignon had manifested as a horned giant with curly locks and beard comprised of coiled sandy-colored snakes whose eyes shot lasers.

  He, like all the Epsilon Ethereals, for whatever real, mythical, or imagined form each had taken, glowed in a flame-like aura, as if each were a different interpretation of a Phoenix rising.

  Standing on a raised podium, Cignon had manifested as an extension of his own body, he tasked the Epsilon Ethereals with their next assignment. “Do what you can to sabotage communications between the Kang queens and their minions. Use your abilities to cut through time and space to create the butterfly effects that will frustrate her. That will be no small task. The queens’ minds are like supercomputers, far better at calculating such things than we are. But even they can become overloaded. Go now; there is not a moment to spare.”

  The team captains and their crews vanished even more quickly than they’d taken solid form.

  Theseus had done his part. Before arriving he’d signaled the Epsilon Ethereals with the call to arms. If anything, he’d lingered longer than necessary if only to get a sense of what the Epsilon Ethereals could do. He could follow them no further. To teleport after them, to even guess where they would go next, was beyond his abilities. So he returned to the project he’d been tasked with, learning how to make the most of Dead Zone assets.

  ***

  The Kang queens’ minds were too well guarded, lest the queens’ own Ethereals try to get inside their heads, where they could solidify and explode the queens from inside out. That, the Kang Ethereals might do out of revenge, from being hacked, or for most any reason. But the lower castes among the Kang were not so protected.

  And so the Epsilon Ethereals commenced their infiltration there.

  They had only the Kang worlds and dragon ships blocking the Nautilus’s escape to focus on. But there were still far too many of those. So, with Mother’s help, they chose the ones along an assigned vector and raised havoc aboard, focusing on taking out the highly prized Tesla types, until the queens had no choice but to retreat and deal with the infestations before losing their world ships. The instant the path was clear, so was the Nautilus.

  To Cignon’s chagrin, their assignment had proven redundant. The space cannon made Mother’s job far easier still—by eliminating all dragon ships in her
way, thus opening any and all vectors of escape, not just one. The thought of their wasting their time in a battle for which there was no time to waste, boiled his blood. But he couldn’t afford additional downtime either being pissed about it.

  Their job complete for now, Cignon ordered the Epsilon Ethereals to retreat to their incorporeal realm where they would continue to spy among the spirit world, looking for early signs of attack from regions Leon would be otherwise blind to.

  FIFTY-NINE

  THE BRIDGE OF THE NAUTILUS

  Leon, from Clone Team One, who had never before stepped aboard the Nautilus, but had accepted command of her anyway when the Leon whose home was the Nautilus had stepped into Solo’s rejuvenation tank, to swim other timelines, in hopes for a way out of this one, was tempted to rip that Leon out of the tank and throw him flopping on the floor. Just so this Leon didn’t have to be here. As if his mind didn’t have enough to take in. And eying Solo, up close for the first time, wasn’t doing anything to mitigate that feeling. All the intel Leon had downloaded to his mindchip on the Nautilus and on the many exotic humanoid lifeforms aboard her wasn’t helping one bit when it came to actually processing the reality.

  “Leon, my new supersentience, Materia, has isolated the various elements in the Kang goo, made from an entire periodic table of elements with which we were formerly unfamiliar.”

  “Just the bullet, Solo.” Leon had his hands too full for a lecture right now.

  “Materia has played with the various combinations now enough to figure out how to hack the queen’s hive-mind planets, get in and out without her knowing and destroying the castle worlds to keep us from getting at what’s inside their own version of the library of Alexandria.

  “Materia has pulled out the intel we need. There is no longer any need to play this game of cosmic billiards with the Kang, colliding our galaxy into theirs. I suggest it is time to signal The Collectors to come get us.”