“And me?”
“Will be his muscle. But you also have a nose for precision, accuracy, economy, elegance in design—all things that describe the most superior technologies. These will likely be what The Collectors were after all along, to use against the other galaxies, either to keep them in line directly, or to play them off one another.”
“But of course these secrets, once found out, you want kept.”
“Not at all,” the human-panther hybrid said. “Shadow Warriors breed resistance fighters. The more these galaxies know about how they’ve been played off of one another, the more likely they will drop their animosities to each other, and focus it where it belongs, at The Collectors.”
“The Collectors do love to play their divide and conquer games,” Cromatron confessed with a sigh, “keeping the galaxies in their dominion at each other’s throats with ‘misunderstandings’ about who is encroaching into their territory and why.”
“People need an outlet,” the Special Forces Shadow Warrior said, “an enemy that is concrete, tangible, that they can direct their animosity at. So the therapy works to keep the sheep docile. The Collectors, on the other hand, are seldom seen, working forever behind the scenes, the extent of their knowledge of and involvement in anything is rarely known. They work in the shadows like us. As you say, it takes one to know one.”
Cromatron nodded. “Seeding resistance against those bastards has been my life mission all along.”
Vassy came away from the stealth soldier’s ship at last, holding a component in his hands. “This is just one of many technologies that do not belong together, taken from various civilizations and pieced together. It’s how he knew so much about us. The shuttle itself is a thought amplifier. And this scanner allowed him to read not only our minds before arriving to get the upper hand in negotiations, but now he knows more about this planet than we do.”
The stealth soldier made no effort to deny it. Instead he shifted his attention to the wider canvas. “While you move on to the next world,” he said, “we’ll be restoring this crystalline planet to its former glory. I’m thinking it has secrets for us that Vassy might very much like to get his hands on.”
“Oh, yes, yes, I would,” Vassy said, sounding excited. He handed the component in his hand back to the stealth soldier, who just tossed it back in the direction of the ship.
The ship reassembled itself instantly.
“The AI in charge is miniscule, too small for the naked eye to detect, and so likely to be the last thing standing even if the ship is destroyed,” Vassy explained. “And if it is, at the appropriate time, when the AI senses it’s safe to do so, it activates the magnetic shielding on the pieces designed to fly apart when hit while protecting the sensitive insides, causing them to re-agglutinate. At which time the ship flies out of harm’s way, taking its precious intel with it.”
Cromatron nodded. “Elegant.” He turned to the stealth soldier. “I see you’ve been at this a while. Like The Collectors, you take the best ideas from the different galactic civilizations, combine them in ways they never thought to because they didn’t have the added outlooks of those other civilizations, and put the new inventions to work for you.”
“We’re going to beat them at their own game because we’re better at it,” the stealth soldier said.
“But you people just arrived on the scene. How…?”
“Solo is very good at designing supersentiences that in turn compress the timeline quite a bit for us. His latest one, Omni, is working from the top down, penetrating all the galaxies in the Menagerie at once, scanning for possible items of interest. We are the bottom-up approach. The foot soldiers and spies on the ground, efficient at tasks that no supersentience operating remotely can truly tackle.”
Cromatron nodded. “Just one last thing, and we’ll be on our way to our first assignment.” He drove his fist through the center of the stealth warrior’s chest, burrowing through it before he could even react, coming out the hollow in the man’s back he’d just made less than a second later.
The stealth soldier stood there, unflinching, and unimpressed. He sealed the hole in his chest, severing Cromatron’s arm for him. That hurt. “Ah!” Cromatron winced.
The Stealth Soldier padded over—on his bare feet—picked up the severed arm and brought it back to Cromatron. He reattached it for him using a combination of lasers fired from his eyes and nanotech breathed out of his mouth.
“Thanks,” Cromatron said. “Sorry about that, just had to know.”
“I let you get the cheap shot in to settle your conscience. You won’t get a second chance to make a move like that against me.”
Cromatron smiled. “Just wanted to make sure you guys lived up to the hype.” He stared at his healing arm in fascination. “So, you’ve also figured out how to steal some of Cassandra’s soldiering tech. Oh, yes, we know about her, too.”
“Like I said,” the stealth soldier replied, “we’re very good at what we do.” He gestured toward the patch of sky he’d opened a portal to earlier. It had since closed, but Cromatron had no trouble reading the meaning in the economy of the soldier’s gesture.
Cromatron fired the weapon again. He and Vassy stepped through the portal gaining entry into a very old world, but to a very new and promising future for both of them.
The portal closed behind them, sealing off their view of the sentinel; the figure in black standing there as unperturbed as ever. That’s what sent shivers up Cromatron’s spine, not the new world, or having no idea what to expect there.
Vassy quickly took the rifle out of Cromatron’s hands, and broke it down. Apparently it converted into a utility belt Cromatron would wear around his waist, a far more innocuous piece of hardware.
Cromatron eyed Vassy queerly. “How did…? Oh never mind,” Cromatron said. “Let’s go be useful. Too many galaxies to unite, not enough time. The Collectors have eternity on their side; we just have this moment.”
***
THE NAUTILUS, LEON’S PRIVATE CHAMBERS
DeWitt came prancing in through the sliding doors, catching Crumley and Ajax seated before the mindwave TV capturing Leon’s journeys into alternative timelines while in the Samadhi tank.
He glanced at the TV and his jaw went slack. “You’re watching The Shadow Warriors Channel, and you didn’t call me?”
“This is actually the Atrocities channel.”
“Oh, yeah, the flash fiction component of the adventures of The Shadow Warriors,” DeWitt said. “But that’s just for when you don’t have enough time. Move it to the “S” channel for their full-length escapades. We’re going to be here awhile.”
Crumley groaned and writhed in his chair. He’d reached the age now where too much sitting was just plain unhealthy for him. He turned to a pillar of salt faster than Lot’s wife staring back at God descending down to rain destruction on Sodom and Gomorrah. “We should be out there with the other cloned Omega Forces units, doing our share.”
“Screw that,” DeWitt blurted. “I appoint us the intelligence arm, the nerve plexus for all the cloned Omega Force units. Someone has to make sense of Leon’s findings. Not like Mother can give the topic too much of her mind.”
“Hey, I like that!” Ajax said. “I say we actually listen to one of DeWitt’s orders for once. He is the de facto leader when Leon is out of commission. Least ways, until DeWitt says something we don’t want to hear.”
“I suppose there’s some sense to the plan.” Crumley made a few chest rotations, making sure to isolate his lower back muscles, cracking his vertebrae, and then relaxed back into the chair.
DeWitt had already made a seat for himself by issuing a command from his mindchip to the atmospheric nanites. His recliner came with a massaging function, which hummed away as he slipped into the chair.
Crumley and Ajax’s eyes met with matching frowns, after hearing the humming activity of the vibrators.
“Hey, turn up the volume, will ya?” Ajax bitched.
Crumley reached f
or the remote. “Between you and me I think this channel is misnamed. I haven’t seen any real atrocities yet.”
“Stick with that stealth soldier, and you will,” Ajax said. “His name is Xenon, by the way. The Special Forces branch of the Shadow Warriors are all named after extremely rare elements like noble gases, Argon, Neon, Krypton, et al, and other obscure elements from the table of elements no one has ever heard of. Guess it’s a reflection of how highly they think of themselves. They do seem like a rather rare commodity, even in this day and age.”
“This is Xenon?” DeWitt piped up. “Yeah, okay, I guess we can postpone switching to the S channel a while longer. I do like his style. I think of him as my darker half.”
“Yeah, right,” Ajax mumbled, “in your dreams. This guy is so much cooler.”
“Hey, no need to be hurtful.” DeWitt finally settled into the movie, materializing a 20 oz. Slurpee for himself, complete with lid and plastic straw, adding sucking sounds to the audience effect. Crumley, not to be outdone, dialed up the volume further.
SIXTY-SIX
THE PLANET CRYSTA
IN THE GYPSY GALAXY
Cromatron and Vassy tried to get a sense of the new world, and so, possibly, why they’d been sent here from Zalics by the Special Forces arm of Sonny’s Shadow Warriors.
“It’s a crystal world like Zalics,” Vassy observed.
“Only it’s thriving. I guess that explains why we were reassigned.” Cromatron’s neck was no less arched upward to take in the towering crystal formations. There was nothing but buttes and more buttes for as far as the eye could see, towering overhead, the canyon ridges rising like sheer cliffs to the high plateaus above. Vassy and Cromatron had materialized in a valley that wended between them.
Each flat-topped rock formation was carved out of crystals that varied in color, mostly one color per butte, but sometimes the colors got mixed together.
Oases of plants and animals took advantage not just of the tops of the buttes but anywhere they could get a foothold on the sheer inclines of crystalized rock.
Large soaring birds swooped between the islands of crystal. The avians rose from their perches on the gusts, riding them to land on other shelves in the rocks. Other albatrosses seemed to glide indefinitely, as if from the sheer joy of the activity.
“The rhythms of nature are off,” Cromatron said. “I can’t put my finger on it, but I can feel it. There is something a little too precise and orderly about the activity here.”
He gazed down at the valley floor they were traversing. It too was made of crystal. And the creatures scurrying about, likewise seemed to follow migratory patterns that were a little too orderly.
“I think I know what it is,” Vassy said. “This is a city.”
Cromatron winced. “That would explain the deafening sounds of insects inside my head. Those are data packets being trafficked back and forth. Can you decode them for us?”
“Of course. I will link with your mind to get what I need,” Vassy said.
“There was a time when you did that that it left you in a coma for weeks.”
“My brain is bigger now,” Vassy declared proudly.
“There’s no arguing that.” Cromatron could swear it was swelling like a balloon these days, or perhaps like a very infected puss-filled boil.
“I’ve hacked my way into their internet protocols. Give me a while longer to decipher their language.”
Rather than just wait on Vassy, Cromatron responded to his morphing belt, which, instead of turning back into the assault rifle that had opened a wormhole to get them here, morphed into a hand held monitor rising from his waist on a neck, like the head of a swan, showing him the internet that Vassy had tapped into. “The scanner is already beeping, pointing to a specific location,” Cromatron said. “Apparently this thing knows who or what we’re looking for, even if we don’t.”
Cromatron noticed his belt was continuing to morph. The “handheld scanner” turned into the dashboard of a small winged conveyance, essentially a very small airplane, with seats for two.
Vassy got in and the air machine took them toward the location of the flashing light, again without further prompting from Cromatron or Vassy.
“Any idea of what’s going on here?” Cromatron asked.
“This world, unlike the dead crystal world of Zalics, is very much alive, vibrant even. Energy courses through these crystals affecting the city’s inhabitants. It purifies their minds of all negativity. There is no crime on this world.”
“You’re kidding? Can’t see what the Shadow Warriors want with it then,” Cromatron said, noticing they were getting closer fast to the source of the beeping. It must have been coming from the butte they were approaching, somewhere near the top.
“The peoples of this world live inside the crystals,” Vassy explained.
“Why don’t we see any signs of life then?”
“They have learned to move between the digital, virtual realms of the crystals that function like crystal computers, and the physical realms at will. They’re all about us, but in different timelines, different octaves of physical reality that separate the heavens, the purgatories, and the hell worlds, in the heavenly realms, mostly.”
“And the beeping?”
“As far as I can tell,” Vassy explained, “he’s the one person in physical form that we can access. He tends this place. He designed and built it. The city’s chief architect.”
Their winged conveyance landed like one of the albatrosses on the outside patio of the floor right below the top of the butte.
They got out and made their way inside.
The woman turning to greet them looked rather angelic in her own right. She glowed—and he wasn’t speaking metaphorically. An ethereal light poured out of her. Her figure was tall and lithe, her hair long, blonde, and flowing as if it were made of real gold. Her face and complexion an alabaster white. Her ears were pointed as if she was one of the mythical elfin races of Earth lore.
“Forgive us, but we’ve been sent to you, somewhat against our will, I might add,” Vassy said. He was a little too quick to speak for Cromatron’s tastes, and even quicker to reveal secrets better kept close. But he may have sensed danger, or that she already knew why they were there. He did have the bigger brain of the two of them, so Cromatron chose to follow his lead.
She smiled, appearing to understand and to not need a translation for their language. “You’ve both been boning up on Earth history. They are among the more primitive worlds in the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping, so I suppose it makes sense for a pair of crooks like yourselves to start with the easy marks first.”
Cromatron and Vassy both grimaced.
“That’s why I chose to show myself to you in the guise of one of their angels. So that you might infer there are indeed others watching over them. So tread carefully.”
“The ones looking after them are fighting among themselves. Who knows who will win?” Vassy said, conveying breaking news to Cromatron. He was briefly pissed before conceding there was no way to fill Cromatron in on everything going through his big brain, just the juiciest nuggets that related to their profiteering.
“I gather you will help us,” Vassy said, “rather than risk further visits from The Shadow Warriors?”
Angel Lady smiled vaguely. “Yes. I should warn you to be careful what you wish for.”
Neither Vassy nor Cromatron liked the sound of that. But she put down her watering can she was using to water the flowering plants. Never mind that the container was transparent and there was clearly nothing in it. Out of it water came nonetheless.
Vassy and Cromatron took advantage of the moment her eyes were off them to set down the can to take in the place more completely. But as they turned about on themselves three hundred sixty degrees, Crysta—as Vassy would later inform him this world was called—gave way to Zalics.
They were back where they had left.
“The crystals of this world… How do we reactivate them?” Vassy asked, cutt
ing to the chase, well ahead of Cromatron who was still feeling dazed and in a state of shock. He wasn’t sure how much of that was Angel Lady’s ability to play freely with space and time without the use of technology, and how much of it was just her. The way she was radiating at them, it was sickening them. He could tell Vassy, too, was even more jaundiced looking.
“You will need to move the world. The crystals of Zalics thrive on the chi lines moving through the cosmos, but only the darker ones, meant to empty the toxic ooze of so many negative ideations so that hopes and dreams can remain alive. Thoughts, you know, are forever. But fears make up the bulk of them, propagated from weaker minds like yours. If they are not flushed from the God body, they will drag us all down.”
“And what will happen when we move this world to one of the darker veins of chi energy?” Vassy asked.
“The crystals of Zalics will activate on their own. Depending on which cosmic regions are influenced by the dark chi line chosen, they will exercise a morbid effect on those planets and star systems.”
“And if we choose to nestle it in a region where several of these lines intersect?” Vassy asked.
“Then the influence of the Zalics crystals will be greater.”
“Why are you helping us?” Cromatron asked, his head feeling like it was going to explode. “Do you not care what happens to others?”
“We do. But there is no telling what the Zalics crystals will do once activated. Their supersentiences work in timeframes well beyond our understanding, and their plotting and scheming likewise. In the short term, no doubt you can get them to do your bidding, but you will never be sure if over the long-term you’re furthering your agenda or theirs, and to what degree your agendas are mutually antagonistic.”
“One more reason not to help us,” Cromatron said, groaning under the rising pain in his head, growing more suspicious with his souring mood.
“You will find, if you live long enough and evolve far enough, that the devil too shall do God’s work. Sorry, I’m not sure the analogy would work in your culture or mine, but it is one you will appreciate from your study of earth history. As for the eternal dance between good and evil, we do not intervene in what we do not understand. Even the Zalics crystals will be played off the other supersentients in the cosmos toward an end they can no more prevent than we can.”
Moving Earth Page 52
