Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  Schopenhauer sighed relief yet again, tilted his head to heaven and mouthed, “Thank you!”

  Hailey came stomping into the soundproofed room. She looked fit to be tied.

  Schopenhauer declared, “Yes, the answer to whatever you want is yes!” He rapidly ushered her out of the room before she could say anything to upset the father, closing the door behind him to the soundproofed chamber.

  Once they were on the other side of the door…“What is it I just said yes to?”

  He noticed she’d brought reinforcements with her, namely, Thor and Frog Doll, and Thor’s Zeta Force miniatures.

  “I’ve had it with being imprisoned on this planet. I want in on the action from some place a bit more serviceable than Earth. Now that they’re hiding us out of the way to protect that artifact on the moon responsible for us being able to beam the Gypsy Galaxy and entourage anywhere, we’re in a veritable black hole, where time has slowed to a virtual stop.”

  “What she said,” Thor piped up, standing next to Hailey, crossing his arms and puffing out his chest. “Don’t make me sic my Zeta force on you.” His Special Forces dolls, on cue, lowered their assault rifles into firing position—aimed straight at Schopenhauer.

  Schopenhauer extended his arm placatingly. “You think I don’t want what you want? I’m a general. The kind that actually lives for field duty, not to hide behind a desk somewhere. But Mother has deprioritized us. Some of the teams made it off Earth before she downgraded our importance to the galactic war effort. And trying to talk her out of her decision, well, I’m guessing our best arguments have to wait in queue as well for her to even consider them.”

  Hailey’s PDA—the one the general gave her—beeped and vibrated like crazy. She checked the screen. “Yes!”

  “What?” Schopenhauer sounded guarded, he knew. He couldn’t help it. That was his baseline.

  “We’ve not only been gifted our own planet, we’ve been gifted our own galaxy!” Hailey exclaimed.

  “How the hell…?”

  “Looks like my clone copy leveraged them in a moment of weakness.” Hailey looked up from her PDA. “You know what that means, General? They have big plans for us. They’re thinking the three of us can get into enough trouble to justify populating an entire galaxy with our toys.

  “And we will live up to those expectations,” Thor said.

  “Imagine, General,” Hailey said, “all we can do to add to the war effort with an entire galaxy to build out with weaponized solutions only the three of us could ever come up with. We just got handed a lot of respect, considering that Leon is only taking the GCs and GEs out of The Collectors Prison he feels have the most to contribute.”

  The General nodded, smiled and lit his pipe, gazed at Hailey, Thor, and Frog Doll in turn. “I do believe you three are about to give the term the holy trinity a whole new meaning.”

  “Uh, about the parents thing…” Hailey said, wincing. “Something tells me they’re going to need a whole lot more psycho-therapy before this is through.”

  “Not to worry, little girl. We’ll make sure the team Mother is beaming out of here to destinations unknown has everything to cure anyone’s PTSD. We might just consider giving an entire planet over to the enterprise.”

  “Excellent thinking, General,” Hailey said.

  “Not to be a buzzkill, but it’s time for some action already,” Thor said. “Any more talk and I will go deaf as a defensive mechanism.”

  “Ditto that,” his Zeta Force team leader, Darius, said, slamming in a new magazine.

  “Now that we have the all-clear, we should be beaming up any minute,” General Schopenhauer said. “I anticipated getting the go-ahead sometime back. My teams are already assembled.”

  “How about some MASH unit worlds where we can advance field medicine?” Hailey asked.

  The General nodded. “We can teleport the world to high casualty areas. Once there, we can use the Nautilus to beam billions of wounded to where they need to go to on our hospital planet.”

  “We’ll have to make some modifications to her teleporting abilities,” Hailey said, “but that’s genius, general. I can already see we’re going to make a great team.”

  Thor made a sour face. “When do I get my chance to prove myself?”

  They were beaming up. “Looks like your time has come, my little friend,” Schopenhauer said, messing up the hair on top his head.

  ***

  THE HAUGHT GALAXY

  PLANET BRAVAS

  Schopenhauer materialized on his new home world with his entourage of Hailey, Thor, and Thor’s Zeta Force crew in tow.

  They were riding a space elevator shielded within metalglass tubing down through the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere. And there was a lot of atmosphere. The world was seven times the size of Earth. The atmospheric nanites were already assembling the mindchips in their heads, forwarding intel to their mindchips on a need-to-know basis.

  “Holy shit!” Thor exclaimed.

  Frog Doll was jumping against the glass, every bit as wide-eyed, croaking his amazement.

  The sky was dotted with birds of prey—warbirds to be even more exact. More exact still, there were Peacekeepers parked in the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere, a row or two down, came the Starhawks. The galaxy-grade battle cruisers weren’t just visible here, but surrounding the entire planet, as Hailey confirmed with her PDA, which was still running ahead of the mindchip being assembled in her head and what intel it could process so far. She showed Thor. “Whoa!” he said.

  There were countless more ships of various pedigrees and sizes with which Thor and Hailey were not familiar. But Mother had not missed a beat cataloguing what the Gypsy Galaxy had to offer, and relocating assets as needed. To be sure, there were vessels here from the various other galaxies in Leon’s budding TGC as well, either captured in battle with Alpha Unit and Omega Force clone teams, or snagged some other way when the other galaxies chose to make inroads into the Gypsy Galaxy.

  “I asked Mother for a planet big enough, with natural shielding, to hide my private collection,” Schopenhauer said. “To be honest I wanted to collect classic cars. But I think this is better.”

  “Natural shielding?” Hailey asked, reaching for the answer on her PDA even before Schopenhauer could get his lips moving.

  “Oh, I see. This world is virtually impenetrable to all known forms of scanning technology. That goes for the outer atmosphere too.”

  “You wouldn’t believe what I have parked there,” Schopenhauer said with a smile, admiring his collection. “Mother can be very accommodating once you get on the right side of her.”

  “I’m not sure it’s the best idea to keep an armada like this all in one place,” Hailey said. “Makes for an easy target.”

  “I’ve appropriated the same shielding tech they’re using to keep the earth and its moon well hidden from prying eyes. It doesn’t just block scanners, it vaporizes anything trying to pass through, like a good bug zapper. Mother approved it because you and Dillon have been afforded indispensable status. Nice, by the way. To my knowledge the only other person to swing that is Captain Nemo himself, AKA Solo.”

  “Speaking of my parents?” Hailey said, noticing that Thor was keeping his eyes pressed up to the glass tube to take in the armada, as if sizing up what vessel to try out first.

  “Already safely on the ground,” Schopenhauer replied, “with my units standing guard, and, I’m guessing, in the most advanced PTSD compound in the cosmos, until, that is, we can terraform an entire planet to such ends.”

  Hailey confirmed the veracity of the general’s comments on her PDA. He had more faith in Mother than she did.

  “Please tell me they can’t look up from the ground and see this,” Hailey said.

  “No, the upper atmosphere is too dense. Colorful as hell, but from below it all registers as a rainbow colored sky,” Schopenhauer explained.

  “I hate to be the one to find fault,” Thor said, pulling at the General’s shirt, “but y
ou did promise me and my guys action, and yet here we are.”

  “We’ll confirm everything is going to plan on the surface, and below,” Schopenhauer said. “Then we’ll take a look at the latest arriving intel, and hand out assignments then, okay?”

  Thor let out a sigh like rolling thunder, more of a groan fading into a sigh. “Whatever.”

  After an interminable period, by Thor’s standards anyway—the general continued to smile at his eagerness to jump into action and exuberance over all the play things, thinking this really could be his grandson—they dropped into the lower atmosphere.

  And the planet’s surface became visible.

  “Whoa!” Thor exclaimed. It was quickly becoming his catch-all word for any experience deemed up to par.

  Ground troops covered the planet’s surface, broken into teams, all engaged in war games and various field exercises.

  “There are aliens of every known type in The Collectors’ Menagerie, in case, in a pinch, one of them has to pretend to be in control of the ship, to dupe an enemy on the battlefield, wherever our space fleet encounters them,” Schopenhauer explained. “But don’t fool yourself, they’re all hackproof androids with Mother’s best technology. I wasn’t about to trust this place’s secrecy to loose lips. The slightest indication of being tampered with and the droids shut down, transmitting alerts far and wide.”

  Hailey noticed the college campus-like setting at the base of the space elevator. “You’ve set up your command center like a college campus?”

  “Yes. Numerous think tanks filled with intellectuals and scientists as focused on achieving peace as on playing the best war games to ensure such an outcome. But it’s also to placate your parents. If they think you’re here to get the best education the universe can provide…”

  Hailey nodded. “Nice.” She noticed the elevator didn’t stop at the surface but kept going. “And below ground?”

  “Our own Mars war god, tweaked for our needs. I’m not entirely sure how Leon plans to use this Gypsy Galaxy for warfare, but I have some ideas.”

  They passed through a hollowed out world. Dinosaurs roamed far below the planet’s surface. “The Nomads!” Thor exclaimed.

  “Yeah,” Schopenhauer said. “I thought they might like a vacation from the Nautilus, a little more room to spread their legs.”

  “Whoa!” That was Thor getting a better look at the Nomads, in case anyone was wondering. And upon even closer examination…“There are hobbits and elves and gnomes and dwarves and goblins!”

  “Yeah, that’s for you, kid.” Schopenhauer ruffled the hair on his head again.

  “This place just gets awesomer and awesomer!” Thor exclaimed.

  “I gather the supersentience dissolves all this into its supersentience when it fires up, just like on the Nautilus,” Hailey said.

  “Yes, this realm will cease to exist in space-time as we understand it,” Schopenhauer confessed. “If you want a better explanation, take it up with the supersentience.”

  “And should the Mars war god be down for any reason, this particular simulation provides a fair amount of defense on its own.” Hailey nodded. “Smart, general.”

  “I do what I can.”

  The elevator stopped, at the bottom of the space elevator, finally, and the threesome got out.

  Hailey was surprised to see “the ground floor” extended like an Escher painting for what seemed like eternity.

  Thor gasped. “So Forbidden Planet! The Krell civilization? You brought them back just for me?”

  “I cannot confirm or deny,” Schopenhauer said chuckling. “But you will find many of their mind-expanding devices you can use to catch up with Hailey, so you feel, over time, less like a third wheel around here.”

  Thor hugged him. “You are the best grandpa ever!”

  “I do what I can,” Schopenhauer said.

  Hailey moved away from the inner courtyard peering down on “the Krell civilization” and moved to the wrap around windows facing the subterranean Jurassic world. One of the Nomads was kicking the ball at the unbreakable metalglass, teasing Thor to come out.

  He, of course, couldn’t resist. “How do I get out there?”

  “Just ask,” Schopenhauer explained, “or just think it. The Mars war god keeps an eye and an ear and all its senses peeled on anything going on in its domain. It’s hardly going to rely on our 100 meters per second nervous system to alert it to what’s going on on its home base.”

  Thor had probably stopped listening a while ago. He was beaming out to play kick ball with the dinosaur.

  “There goes the war effort.” Hailey sighed. “The attention span of a gnat.”

  “I’m guessing his Zeta Force will enjoy practicing their jungle warfare every bit as much as Thor enjoys exploring out there. Rolled up and tucked away in the Mars war god supersentience, should it go active, is also the safest place for him. If he insists on getting back out, the Mars war god can decide better than I can where he can do the most damage with the least chance of getting hurt.”

  Hailey sighed. “I see you’re in the coddling business every bit as much as I am.”

  “We do what we can for the ones we love. We’ve made tremendous advancements in PTSD on account of my being a soft touch.”

  Hailey smiled knowingly. “Just no patience for incompetent boobs you have to answer to.”

  “No, but for the real heroes in my charge, trust me, they get the red carpet treatment.”

  Hailey nodded. “Now, down to business. You say you’re not entirely sure what Leon is planning to do with his weaponized galaxy. But you have some ideas.”

  “Follow me.” He led her to the console running the perimeter of the circular room, well, one of many consoles interlinked together in an O-ring.

  He pressed some buttons and the outside was replaced by smart screen images. “You recall this phase?”

  “Yes, the When Galaxies Collide segment of our journey.”

  “When engaging in war with a galactic federation or a TGE/TGC, I’m guessing the first thing he’ll do is overlay the Gypsy Galaxy and its supply chain right over it, use the colliding suns and colliding worlds to exact a vicious toll on his adversaries before he’s even fired up his warbirds.”

  She nodded. “But to do that he’ll need to protect the suns and worlds he means to keep out of harm’s way.”

  “That’s where we come in. I was hoping you could help forge some alliance with Dillon and with Solo and however many Mars war god supersentiences we’ll need distributed throughout the Gypsy Galaxy to ensure nothing worth keeping is lost. Moreover, so we don’t deplete ourselves, those suns, worlds, and meteors will ultimately have to be replaced between engagements.”

  “Tall order for a game of cosmic billiards. You’ll definitely need my father for much of that, but I can help with coordinating the Mars war gods, placing them and whatever resources they need to move into play fast. That’s a lot of responsibility for life and limb you’re putting on my shoulders, general. Not sure I appreciate it.”

  “Not as much as you think. Any oopsies can be handled by our Planet Eaters. We’ll scan all the worlds that need backing up so if we have to replace any of them, we can.”

  “People don’t always wake up after being dead a while with the same glowing attitude they had going in,” Hailey warned.

  “Yes, well, one problem at a time.”

  “And your other thoughts on how Leon might be planning to weaponize an entire galaxy?” Hailey asked leadingly.

  Schopenhauer sighed. “You need to think of the Gypsy Galaxy as a giant spider web. Any flies silly enough to enter the galaxy, well, it’s almost over for them. They’ll be under attack from all sides.”

  “Not quite all sides. It’s a spiral galaxy.”

  “Which brings me to problem number two. What’s say we turn it into a ball galaxy?”

  She smiled. “You’re like Thor, only with a 100 more IQ points. Most adults don’t have minds quite so fluid.”

  �
��Can it be done?”

  Hailey shook her head slowly. “I don’t have any answers for you right off hand. And even with the planet eaters we inherited from the Dead Zone… That much world creation? I assume you want to keep the spiral Gypsy Galaxy as the equatorial zone of this sphere, rather than shapeshift the Gypsy Galaxy.”

  “You assume correctly.”

  “That’s a massive amount of stellar body creation.”

  “More than you know. You’re still not seeing the big picture. These other galaxies we’re taking in tow as part of our supply chain… Some will be spiral galaxies, others ball galaxies, to be more precise, either elliptical, lenticular, or irregular, each with their own unique ways of warping the space-time they’re transiting through. We need a way to expand this protective sphere so it encloses all the galaxies in the trans-galactic alliance. And then we need to pad the holes between the enclosed galaxies with still more stars and worlds, as part of the insulating effect.”

  “So, like a balloon then, we can inflate to the size we need to include those galaxies, and whatever new additions we pick up along the way?”

  Schopenhauer nodded, his eyes even more brightly lit now that he saw she grasped the extent of the idea.

  Hailey sighed. “We’ll have to advance our tech further. Possibly my father can advance his work so we can draft suns and worlds from Techa knows where that fit particular profiles into the sphere. Of course, all that will require powering the artifact on the moon up by many more factors. We don’t truly know what its limits are. And if we exceed it, that’s going to slow things down quite a bit.”

  “I’ve considered that. Let’s stay positive. I don’t know who gifted us with that artifact. But considering what it is allowing us to do in such a short time…”

  “It’s more than a blessing in disguise, general, whatever the intent of the civilization that left it there. And that intent could still be good or bad. They could be bringing us up to speed and to scale to fight a war for them. They could just be a bigger badder version of The Collectors.”

  Schopenhauer, who had been leaning over the console as he talked, illustrating his ideas for her on the big screen with some virtual keyboard fancy finger work, stood up straight and sighed. “I’ve considered that too. I have our Mars war god working on the problem now, as a low key background issue, which is why he can maintain the simulation out there.”