Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

“Were smart enough to fire up their fears over the dangers you represented.”

  “Once again I must reassure others that there are worse things out there than the likes of me, as no doubt there are.” Sonny bowed to her this time. “You don’t need to provide me with the coordinates. Now that my people know what they’re looking for, they will find it.”

  “Ah, but that’s the best part, they won’t. The planet comes with a cloaking device, sophisticated enough to mask its presence even from advanced scanners. It can hide even the gravity well it creates. It can let light through without any lensing effect. It is quite untraceable. That way you can be in the solar system you wish to influence without anyone knowing, providing…”

  “Gerlari can get that working again.”

  “The For-Sak-En saw to it that their habitats outlived all others many times over without need of maintenance. But should they break down, only the For-Sak-En were allowed to work on them. Playing around with that kind of technology without understanding what you’re doing…”

  “I can appreciate their efforts to protect their franchise,” Sonny said with a menacing smile.

  “And should I wish to influence the thoughts of an entire galactic civilization?” Sonny asked leadingly.

  “The cloaking device on the artificial world was meant to be used in tandem with the psychic influencer to ensure poachers from other worlds didn’t get any ideas. And, as no galactic federation can police every world to that degree…Without the proper clearances, you will never know that the artificial world even exists, far less where to find it. So, to your question…”

  “A simple tweak, again for Gerlari to attend to, to turn that psychic influencer to more diabolic and far-reaching ends.”

  Farsi projected the coordinates into his mind in case anyone was listening, then bowed one last time and departed. Her dress, fit for a ball, dragging on the ground behind her. He had to admit, the scarlet dress played off her jade green eyes well.

  He raised his voice, “Tell your husband…”

  She turned back toward him. “Yes, I know. He can cash in on that favor any time.”

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  THE FOR-SAK-EN ZOO WORLD, ORIGINE

  Sonny had beamed down with his entire inner circle, Bella, Puma, Samson, Xenon, and, of course, the Blue, Gerlari.

  “We should not have beamed the Lucky Streak so close,” Bella whispered in his ear. “I don’t care how invisible this place is out the Lucky Streak’s wraparound windows, that casino is filled with every low life in The Collectors’ Menagerie. And snakes don’t need much of a hole to slither through.”

  Sonny chuckled, breathing in fully the delicious scents of the savanna. They were getting his blood up as well as the others. The sight of the prey animals grazing were part of the titillation. His inner circle people, the ones with the dog genes like him, would all love it here. Once again, they had more in common with the Saran than they cared to admit. It was all he could do to resist the urge to drop down on all fours and hunt the stragglers from one or another pack. His double-jointed knees allowed them to bend easily in either direction to facilitate both two- and four-legged ambulation. But he digressed.

  “It’s a baited trap, Bella. Let the ones cunning enough to know we’ve slipped away, wondering where we went, and smart enough to figure out how to beam down after us, come. One man’s zoo world is another man’s snake eliminator.”

  The others chuckled, watching as just such a snake slithered through their subterfuge, to beam down not too far from them. One of the predators of the savannah was already bounding after him. The humanoid could convert to four-legged running himself to give the predator a run for his money. But in the end that just worked up the predator’s bloodlust all the more.

  Their uninvited guest went down in short order, his screams piercing the savannah’s quiet. He was feasted on alive, the predator eviscerating him, and starting in on the stomach contents.

  “You mind if…?” Samson asked.

  “No, go play. You’ve earned it. We’ll meet up later after you’ve had a good run,” Sonny said.

  His people tore off their clothes, popped their knees out of joint so they could bend the other way, dropped to all fours, and bounded after the nearest prey they could find, hunting as a pack.

  Gerlari, remaining by Sonny’s side, watched with detachment and more boredom than distaste. “There is every likelihood that there are predators on this world for which your people are no match,” she said.

  “True, but that will hardly make them more deadly.” He surrendered staring after his people and switched his focus to Gerlari. “Now, we’ve got business to attend to.”

  She led him to the gateway to the underworld.

  Their path was rudely cut short by a snarling, drooling beast, with fangs longer than Sonny’s hands. Its fur bristled and each one of those hairs would have put a porcupine’s quills to shame. But it got one whiff of the Blue and backed off.

  Several other predators bounded up to investigate the new entrants to the field. Some lingered warily and snarled before retreating, sensing the Blue’s deadliness. But some of the predators approached her, almost like a lost friend, allowing her to pet them, rubbing up against her to mark her with their scent. She seemed to enjoy them. It was the first time he’d ever seen her smile.

  “I gather this gallery of rogues represents some of the most vicious four-legged killers out here,” Sonny said, referring to the cluster of predators that had gathered around her.

  “Possibly. Predators love me.”

  He smiled. “Yes, they do.”

  They later came upon a Stone Henge-like configuration of rocks. Sonny could make the analogy only because he made a point to bone up on any mythology that could be used to manipulate people, though he himself had never seen Earth. “What is this place?”

  “These crystals are from Zalics. That will spell problems for us.”

  “How?”

  “They evolve lifeforms that come in contact with them over time. Making their brains bigger and making the lifeforms more cunning and manipulative.”

  Sonny chuckled. “How wonderful.” He passed his hand over the surface of one.

  “This is not a good sign your people will make it back alive,” Gerlari said. “The predators marking me may well have been betas and gammas looking to make it easier for their pack alphas to find me.”

  “Since my people are genetically sterile, I assure you, this is another boon for me. So, please, don’t hurt them. We might be able to breed the next generation of Shadow Warriors here with the help of the Zalics crystals. Can they make my people fertile?”

  “Yes. If it serves them. The crystals are supersentient, and their ultimate aim is one that no one has ever been able to figure out. But it is almost surely evil.”

  Sonny laughed. “I love having powerful friends in low places. This may become as much a home for my people as for the Saran, leading to crossbreeding between our lines, as well, over time. Marvelous.”

  The Blue’s eyes and ears and the rest of her senses stayed focused on the danger in the distance she was sure was there.

  The hound-humans in Sonny’s employ were yelping up a storm in the distance, sounding hurt, wounded, desperate, and calling for help. “Do you wish me to respond?” the Blue asked.

  “Nonsense. Evolution belongs to the fittest. I don’t believe in coddling. Now, I believe you wish to show me the cake beneath this wonderful icing.”

  “That’ll have to wait,” she said, turning about on herself in a complete circle. “We’re surrounded.”

  He could see nothing. “Cloaked?”

  “Yes.”

  “Threat level?”

  “Zero.”

  The giants uncloaked themselves. Sonny rose as high as the toenail of one of them. “Techa!” he exclaimed, jumping back.

  The giants towered about the duo, forming a circle, six of them in all.

  They appeared, at least from Sonny’s perspective, to be se
ntient pterodactyls, much bigger than the dinosaur era bat-like flying reptiles known to exist on earth. Their eyes were just too intelligent and predatory not to command respect.

  “What are they?” Sonny asked.

  “It appears the Zalics crystals evolved them from the indigenous life to take out spaceships entering the atmosphere, should this world’s cloaking device fail,” Gerlari replied.

  “And they’re not attacking because?”

  “The crystals imbued them with a sense of what I am.”

  On the Blue’s words, the giant pterodactyls took to the air, soaring much like condors.

  “The updrafts they’re catching…?” Sonny asked.

  “Are from the well-designed airflows created by the various buttes, the cracked world designed to isolate various animal habitats.”

  “And some of them have dinosaurs,” Sonny said, filling in the missing pieces for himself. Gerlari didn’t bother responding, realizing it was a rhetorical question.

  “Why would the crystals not want this world to be discovered or tread upon?” Sonny asked.

  “They play a very long game. It’s possible that much like the Cream Umbrage, they weigh alternate futures that serve them best, and anticipated our arrival. And they wanted to make sure no other future crossed paths with the one they wanted for themselves.”

  Sonny nodded and smiled. “I love that there are things more devious in the universe than me. It would be awful not to have any stretch goals.”

  She pointed to the spaceships decloaking above.

  But by then, the Zalics pterodactyls had cloaked. They came out of cloaked mode so Sonny could appreciate the show of them crushing the ships in half with one snap of their beaks. As the flaming ruins fell to the ground, other vultures decloaked, much smaller, quite a few varieties of them.

  They descended on the wreckage and made short work of it. Some of the vultures specialized in the fleshy humanoids inside the ships, others in the more metallic components of the ships themselves.

  Sonny recognized the ships and the aliens that had snooped their way here, walking right into Sonny’s trap. They had all visited the Lucky Streak at one time or another. He knew now which races to befriend, in order to get access to the more talented spies in The Collectors’ Menagerie. With time, and with the help of the psychic power magnifier that was Origine, they would all come to serve him.

  The path clear of prying eyes at last, The Blue granted him entry to the underworld by making a complex hissing sound that was different from her other hisses. It carried seemingly forever, partly outcry, and embodied with clicks like static. Possibly she was communicating vast amounts of intelligence in that outcry the way Theta Team did when signaling fellow operatives.

  The Zalics Pterodactyls decloaked once again and shrieked in concert, and then disappeared again.

  The Earth rumbled beneath Sonny’s feet enough to throw him to the ground. Something was coming up through the earth, a cylindrical column.

  When it finished poking its head up, the earth shaking settled. It was an elevator of some kind he was looking at. The doors slid open, the arched panels disappearing into the circular walls.

  Sonny picked himself up and walked into the elevator with Gerlari.

  The shaft receded back into the earth.

  “This tube is giving me a headache,” he said.

  “It’s trying to kill you. You lack the necessary engineering acumen to be someone who belongs below. I’m genetically altering your brain now to make room for the necessary aptitudes. Once the work is complete I will download the acumen you need to fool the AI.”

  Sonny screamed and pressed his hand against his right temple. “Techa! Hurry.”

  “It’s not my fault you are a relative simpleton.”

  Sonny actually smiled. No one besides Leon had ever dared to speak to him in such a manner. The truth was he craved it. What’s more, the pain was already easing up. “Make sure you do not damage my wiliness.”

  “I wouldn’t think of taking away your only evolutionary advantage.”

  He enjoyed the paradoxical sensation of wanting to strangle her and kiss her at the same time.

  Sonny was feeling a lot better already. He crawled up off the floor, holding on to the walls. Suddenly the butterflies in his stomach from descending so fast drew his attention more than the headache did.

  The elevator dropped them out the bottom, not the sides. Sonny would have fallen like a stone if Gerlari hadn’t grabbed him. She had engaged an antigravity ability that he had no idea she possessed.

  Before him was a world so vast, so incomprehensible—all made of moving machine parts. Robot airships flew through the air shuttling parts back and forth to robot workers keeping everything running. Those workers took many forms. Some had humanoid bodies, others had enough physical variations to easily populate an ocean with exotic sea life—all made of different metals. The varying body sizes and shapes had to do with the nooks and crannies in the watch works they had to navigate in and out of.

  Sonny’s new engineering aptitudes were kicking in. “This metal jungle teaming with life… it’s all subterfuge.”

  “Yes, it was designed to be so complex, so intricate, so interwoven, that no one dared disturb the smallest part for fear of the whole house of cards crumbling. The actual components down here that need attending are deceptively simple and almost immune to breaking.”

  Sonny sniffed the air. “Something’s changed, hasn’t it? I can’t quite put my fingers on it.”

  “The Zalics crystals. They’ve evolved this outer core of the planet into an actual tropical jungle, feeding off the heat coming from below. The tropical jungle in turn drives ever new lifeforms procuring even more lethal substances to stop whatever wants to get to the inner core, where the real magic happens.” He was referring to what was happening below the planet’s surface, in the outer core before him now.

  “But they haven’t attacked us,” Sonny said nonplused.

  “As I say, I believe the Zalics view a run in with us as one of the acceptable futures it will entertain.”

  “How will we get to the inner core?”

  “I will have to evolve you further to withstand the heat and pressure down there.”

  “How?”

  “I will lend you some of my lethal viruses, reprogrammed to upgrade you, at least temporarily.”

  “Why temporarily?”

  “Because if you were to hold on to those upgrades, you’d make yourself a target. Someone could use you as the key to unlocking this world and repurposing it.”

  Sonny sighed. “As usual you think many more moves ahead than I do. I have no doubt you’ve already seen the bastards capturing me to put to such ends. Very well, let’s get on with it.”

  She touched him and he could see the wave of color flowing from her blue body into his, as if she was ink-staining him.

  He felt somewhat sick but he didn’t complain. He supposed in the cosmic scheme of things, that’s what viruses did, made him sick so that what didn’t kill him made him stronger. Some would say he served the same purpose in Leon’s new world order.

  They sank toward the inner core of the planet. Faster and faster. “Techa! The fleet of warships down here rival that in Leon’s collection. Get enough of them fired up and …” Maybe the Zalics crystals were that determined to see their future went according to plan. Surely the crystals here would be destroyed just in the releasing of these warbirds. That could only mean that they had some collective higher purpose which they were slaved to.

  On the other hand, Sonny might get his hands on a Planet Eater so he could duplicate the tech of this world. That way he could crack this egg open and release his armada on the heavens, one to rival Leon’s. One could never have enough checks and balances, especially in a multiverse where it was increasingly hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys, allies from enemies.

  By the time they made it to the bottom, the Blue’s nanite re-engineering of his brain had progressed
enough so he was able to assist Gerlari in her repair work.

  The artificial inner core was a matter of three rings spinning about one another, only they weren’t spinning. The Blue kept making her way around the rings, secreting wave after wave of viruses, each tunneling their payloads to where they needed to go before vaporizing like steam rising from the rings. The viruses’ outer coats possessed whatever acids they needed to cut through the metals to get inside and heal the broken machinery just as quickly, just like watching actual viruses tunneling into cells in his mind’s eye.

  He couldn’t mind meld with this technology quite as well as she could just by passing her hands over it, but he could sync with her mind and have her direct him. From there, he started secreting wave after wave of viruses himself, each targeted to fixing a different component. He couldn’t see the big picture; he didn’t have a big enough mind to stuff it into. But he could clearly visualize what parts his viruses were rushing to fix. He understood now why the living metal forest above them couldn’t be redirected to doing repairs down here. It was quite possible that even if that forest were sentient, it didn’t have a big enough mind either to see the complete picture.

  But the Blue had a way with the weaponized aspects of any technology, and these inner rings had to do with this artificial world’s offensive and defensive abilities to ward off dangers. That meant she could see into the alternative timelines that bore on its ability to do its job, and pull what knowledge she needed from there.

  Hours later the rings were lighting up like giant cities, or ring worlds, only with a diameter somewhat smaller than the diameter of the artificial spherical world they inhabited.

  Hours later again, the rings started spinning about one another.

  Sonny saw through the mind of the Blue the degree to which the artificial planet’s cloaking abilities had been dialed up, once again hiding its gravity wake, and able to deflect probes from as many civilizations as a galaxy could possibly stuff into itself simultaneously.

  Teleporting abilities were once again at one hundred percent, up from an earlier ten percent.

  And most important of all, Origine’s psychic amplifier was working again. It had been completely shut down. The Zalics crystals were doing all the heavy lifting on the surface in its absence.