Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  What resistance they’d encountered so far… it had just made Leon stronger. Hailey sensed it would continue to do so. But why? She was growing suspicious of that moon artifact. It had launched them into harm’s way, and into ever increasing danger. But she wondered if it shared Leon’s “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” thinking. If it was ramping them up rapidly for a reason.

  As if The Collectors weren’t an ugly enough reality to deal with…Just what the hell lay outside their Menagerie that was even uglier, that made everything Leon was experiencing now register as little more than growing pains?

  Hailey glanced back at her father, much calmer now after receiving next-generation medical nanites to make it harder for him to experience these mental breakdowns. But not too hard. There was his free will to consider.

  How much longer would she have a father?

  The Mars war god may or may not care. It occurred to Hailey that, having digitized them, it might well make do with their digital analogues, which it could now run twenty-four seven within Singularity State.

  Hailey had to hope that Gypsy Galaxy tech hadn’t evolved so much to so completely steal what was so special about Dillon, about each of them. Because Hailey might well need the Mars war god’s cooperation, as she might need Mother’s to keep her Humpty Dumpty father, so determined to shatter his mind into a million pieces that not even he could put it back together. If Dillon was convinced, moreover, that suiciding was the best way to protect the future, he wouldn’t stop trying.

  And what did Hailey know? Dillon might well be right. They might be headed for something, some future, they were better off never reaching.

  She gazed at her mother, at Dillon’s bedside now, holding his hand supportively. “You take things far too seriously, Dillon. It’s just a video game, for Techa’s sake!” He glared back at her with cruel eyes, his face flushing red; he couldn’t forgive her right now for being even more insulated from the truth than him.

  Rose took her hand and tilted his chin toward the wraparound windows that swept the arc of a semi-circle, the rest of their residence built into the mountain overlooking the “college campus.” “Do you believe that rainbow sky, huh? Personally I think we should thank the video game designers for thinking of the smallest details. The whole thing speaks of a woman’s touch. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I designed the aesthetics myself.”

  Rex, at her feet, barked at her, still determined to get her to wake from her fool’s paradise. Something told Hailey they wouldn’t find a command for that in his dog vocabulary book. That dog had way more smarts than the old man, Savros, its original owner, could ever know.

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  Solo, flanked by Omega Force, sans Leon and Cassandra, had taken in the game of cosmic billiards using the Galactic Disruptor from the bridge of the Nautilus. The game over, after just the initial split, the Vibra Galaxy re-agglutinated. The Gypsy Galaxy collapsed back into its resting state. Solo turned from the screen. He’d been leaning on his cane, which he now used to walk with.

  Omega Force, still dazzled from everything they’d taken in, watched him as he exited through the bridge doors, into the elevator that would take him to the rest of the ship.

  He hadn’t said a word before, during, or after the show.

  “What does it take to get a rise out of that guy?” DeWitt asked.

  “I really don’t want to know,” Ajax replied.

  “You heard Mother. It’s back to war games. Let’s go kill something,” Crumley said. “Unless you could use some more time, Ajax?” Crumley was already walking toward the sliding doors.

  “No, no,” Ajax replied. “I could use the de-stressor.”

  ***

  Omega Force arrived at one of Mother’s landing bays. They took stock of the remaining arsenal of warbirds not already deployed. One look at the Starhawks and Ajax said, “Oh no. Once was enough for me. I’m done playing Captain Kirk. I say we leave that shit for Alpha Unit.”

  “I could stand to be reminded of why we’re a unit, fighting side by side again,” Cronos said. He sounded as if he felt let down that his faith in his God couldn’t keep him sufficiently sheltered from what he’d just been exposed to.

  “Ditto,” DeWitt said.

  “Mother!” Crumley cried out. “Beam us down to some world where we can make a difference, please. We’ll need appropriate outfitting, and we’ll take whatever Alpha Unit and Theta Team backup you can spare.”

  “Now we’re talking!” Ajax said gleefully.

  “We remain unsurpassed as ground troops,” DeWitt said. “They’ll never take that from us.”

  They were being outfitted with fresh weapons, materializing on their persons. Their mindchips were being downloaded with how to use the arsenal. Their body nano was already reprogramming their bodies’ reflexes as if they’d rehearsed wargames with these weapons numerous times before, and over terrain like the one they would soon be entering. They’d already received terrain maps, topographical, LIDAR analysis, intel on atmospherics and other environmental factors, and on the lifeforms they’d be battling with below, all downloaded to their mindchips. Mother even included some Mars war god musings on the countless missions they could consider running, along with Mars’s own priority list for which missions to enact first.

  “What? No backtalk?” Ajax said, stunned that Mother was humoring them. “I hate it when a supersentience agrees with me on how I can best be utilized. Hate it. It’s damn creepy, if you must know!” He said the last part with a raised voice, apparently talking to Mother directly.

  But by then they were already beaming down to the planet. Not that she didn’t have the sense to filter anything coming out of Ajax’s mouth for her own sanity.

  ***

  THE GYPSY GALAXY

  THE PLANET SANGUIS

  Omega Force was on the ground.

  Crumley and the rest of the team took a quick look around, surprised to find Mother had coupled them with clones of Satellite and Ariel, from Alpha Unit. Those two seldom operated without Skyhawk by their side, or Patent, their unit leader, for that matter. There was one more, a Theta Team member, who no one recognized.

  “Please tell me you’re Theta Team,” Ajax said, “and that we’re not already under attack.”

  “Yep,” the guy said communicating directly from his mindchip. Not surprisingly. As no one could identify on him anything approaching a mouth—or any other orifice for that matter.

  And conspicuously absent was Cassandra and Leon.

  Whatever Crumley and the others would be up against, evidently Mother didn’t think it required the brain power of a Leon, or the tech prowess of a Skyhawk, or the overkill superpower of a Cassandra. Well, they were hoping for some mindless killing, so it wasn’t like Crumley was in any position to balk.

  But Mother could be trying out different combinations of players, looking for new synergies. Supersentiences lived to out-evolve themselves and everything under their sphere of influence.

  It wouldn’t be the same groove Omega Force would be slipping back into without Leon and Cassandra. Still, it beat fighting solo on those Starhawks surrounded by new faces with whom any sense of rapport was a matter of false memories downloaded to their mindchips. Those kinds of fake synergies, and smooth inter-operational team abilities that came typically only with working together over time were a work in progress, and couldn’t compete with forging relationships under the stress of battle the hard way, to Crumley’s thinking anyway.

  “I say we go with mission one, take them in order,” Crumley said after assessing the intel downloaded to his mindchip from the Mars war god.

  “Shit, yeah,” Ajax piped up. “If I wanted to argue with a supersentience, I’d have stayed aboard the Nautilus.”

  Cronos made the sign of the cross over himself; it was how he started every mission.

  Ajax cracked wise, per his ritual. Doing both voices perfectly for his latest joke, he said: “First Martian:
That girl over there rolled her eyes at me. What should I do?

  “Second Martian: If you were a real gentleman, you’d pick them up and roll them back to her!”

  They all smiled, as they charged forward, except for the Theta Team guy. But then, who knew what passed for humor with those guys, whether or not that was even a guy? Presumably team dynamics would evolve as they went along and learned to play off one another better.

  ***

  Omega Force needed a breather; they’d been pushing toward their target through dense jungle for a while. Ajax’s machete-swinging arm was getting as sore as everyone else’s. They stopped where the unit had pretty good cover in all directions, since they weren’t sure if an attack was imminent, or where it might be coming from.

  “What are you, if you don’t mind me asking? Actually, to be honest, I do mean to be button-pushing. It’s kind of my way,” Ajax said, eying the Theta Team member.

  “I’m a Futurama,” the Theta Team member said. “I’m Rama One. There are…”

  “I assure you, I really don’t want to know.” Ajax sighed. He felt as if he were talking to a giant, wingless ant-man made of polished silver. The operative was bigger than anyone on Omega Force, even if he didn’t have Crumley’s heft. “And at the risk of sounding stupid…”

  “No risk there.” Crumley sighed. “I’m guessing a Futurama is just what it sounds like: a guy who lives in potential futures, who comes back in time to sabotage the timeline he’s living in to make sure a particular future never happens, because he doesn’t care for how the big picture is shaping up.”

  The perfectly spherical head on Futurama swiveled toward Crumley, and though it didn’t have any features, took them on, to show surprise. “That is correct.”

  “Wait, time out,” DeWitt protested. “Mother has people fighting for us, in the future? I will not take another demotion in one day! Bad enough I have to get used to the idea that we will never be to the Space Navy what Alpha Unit is. I can’t handle feeling any more like a peon. I want my chance to be the center of the multiverse, too, damn it!”

  Crumley sighed. At the rate his sighs were coming, he was at risk of giving himself a sore throat. “Mother just sent you on a Mars war god mission with a priority rating of one. So, pull yourself together, soldier!”

  DeWitt thought about it from this fresh perspective. “Yeah, okay.”

  Crumley shifted his attention back to Futurama as Futurama’s cue to continue.

  “Mother has assigned a ninety-two percent likelihood to the chance of Sonny betraying Leon before we escape The Collectors,” Futurama said.

  “Shit, more like a hundred percent,” Cronos said. “Wouldn’t even need to roll a bead to confirm I was channeling correct information.” Cronos was currently rolling a bead on his oversized rosary wrapped around his waist, all the same, absently reciting his latest Hail Mary.

  “Mother believes he will time his coup as Leon attempts his prison escape from The Collectors,” Futurama continued. “Leon will likely need a diversion, one that Sonny can turn into an all-out insurrection before Leon realizes his distraction is going a little too well.”

  The others nodded. Omega Force had put down a few coups in their day, back when overturning petty despots for the American government, or one of its private contractors, was their bread and butter. They’d used similar tactics themselves. It didn’t take a genius to figure out Mother’s reasoning wasn’t bad, if it wasn’t dead on.

  “That snake.” Cronos hissed. “Remind me to gut him like a fish—in the name of our Lord.” He made another sign of the cross over himself.

  The others ignored him, increasingly focused on Futurama.

  “And your role in all this?” DeWitt asked Futurama.

  “Mother has profiled The Collectors, as well, going on what little she has to go on,” Futurama said. “She believes if they benefit from ongoing tensions between galaxies in the Menagerie…while they do nothing to thwart them, they may do plenty to promote them, even while appearing stand-offish.”

  The expressions on Crumley’s face and the others on Omega Force soured. They were all too familiar with the tactics of oligarchs and overlords and—for all practical purposes, relative to other national bodies—omnipotent players on the world stage, back when Earth was the stage they played on. Everything Futurama was saying so far seemed to fit, even if no one else had had the space in their minds to run with this thinking, too preoccupied with holding their own during wartime.

  “And…?” DeWitt asked leadingly, focused on Futurama’s beady head, currently devoid of a face.

  The answer required Futurama to create a face again. “There are numerous reasons how The Collectors could benefit from ongoing strife in the Menagerie,” Futurama explained. “But Mother feels, since any tech on display within the Menagerie is likely hundreds of years or more behind anything that is available outside the Menagerie, if not millions of years behind, that the most logical explanation is that the strife benefits The Collectors solely, and not the TGEs and TGCs they serve. It is but part of their function as jailors.”

  “They’re playing a game of divide and conquer,” Crumley said, weighing the implications for himself.

  “Yes,” Futurama said. “But why?” This time he waited to see the answer on any of their faces.

  Crumley, who had been distracted by the suspicious quiet of the forest all this time, as if the creatures knew a storm was coming, or as if they were trying to hide from something they feared even worse, flinched at a screech coming from above. What appeared to be one very large vampire bat soared overhead. It was daytime, still, so the sight struck him as a bit incredulous. But it did jolt his thinking. “The Collectors—they’re psychic vampires. They live off the toxic emotions of warfare. The more of it there is, the stronger they are. So long as they excel at playing divide and conquer they hold on to their coveted job as jailors. One might even say they are genetically motivated to hold on to it, because the second they fail at it, they will be replaced by jailors who can do a far better job of keeping their captives prisoner forever.”

  All heads turned to Futurama, who just nodded. “More to the point, if the strife can be brought to an end or at least a low enough ebb, they may very well starve to death if it is their sole source of nourishment.”

  A sense of rising importance, self-confidence, even sadistic amusement spread across the faces of Omega Force.

  “This city we’re looking to make inroads into,” Crumley said, “it’s a city of psychic vampires, isn’t it? Mother wants us to study them for clues that we can use to come up against The Collectors.”

  Again Futurama nodded.

  “More than that,” Ariel interjected. Up until now the two from Alpha Unit had remained silent, respectful, deferring to the more seasoned war veterans in the group, but Crumley could tell from their faces that they sensed their moment, and they were determined to seize the day. “If it’s a city of vampires, then they have technology. More to the point, technology that might bear in some way on technology The Collectors have evolved to keep them at the top of the food chain. That would certainly explain my presence on the team, possibly Satellite’s as well, if he’s got to figure out how to open a COMMS line to it.”

  Futurama smiled one of those stick figure smiles that just make Crumley want to slug him, but it wasn’t his fault Mother hadn’t loaded him up with all the EG algorithms he needed to smooth the way to better interaction with more primitive humanoids, the kind that made up Omega Force.

  Besides, Crumley was too busy marveling at Mother’s ability to distribute information in such a way as to balance what would keep them alive with their need for adventure and for surprises around every corner.

  Satellite picked then to speak up. “Let’s get a move on. This forest, it’s eerily quiet for a reason. I suspect all these creatures are little more than eyes and ears for the psychic vampires living in the city. By now they know more about us than we know about them.”

  “
You don’t just suspect this because…?” DeWitt asked leadingly, always pumping for the information that would give his one-in-a-million worthwhile insights better hopes of being born.

  “That vampire bat’s shriek…” Satellite said, “it’s every bit as richly encoded with data as one of Theta Team’s communiqués.”

  “Shit!” Ajax was already on the move, and typically he was the last one to ever be convinced to get his butt in gear. But the idea of giving their enemy any more of a leg up on them must not have sat well with him.

  Everyone was moving as a unit now, toward the city whose location was highlighted on Ariel’s handheld device.

  ***

  Satellite had figured out what Futurama’s function on this mission on Sanguis really was. It certainly wasn’t to bring them up to speed. But he didn’t dare articulate it until the time was right. Not with the vampire race known as the Linea monitoring their communications.

  The term Linea sent chills up Satellite’s spine, causing him to shiver, right in the middle of sweating up a storm.

  Any race concerned with their lineage enough to name themselves for it suggested that the longer they lived, and the purer their bloodlines, the more powerful they were. Just like in the movies. Of course, Satellite could always hope that Mother’s language translation algorithms were just off—way off.