Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  “So much for your quick fix!” Onyxi blurted from the pit of the moon’s crater where they sparred with one another, her words squirting at Blaxus like the venom of a deadly snake. She paced. “What now?”

  Blaxus got his legs under him, relaxed his caped appendage so it draped like a bright red robe from his black body. “There is one thing that might work.”

  “Don’t keep us in suspense, Blaxus. We might not live to hear the punchline,” Onyxi taunted.

  “We could try a war of attrition, compel all the galaxies to throw everything at the Gypsy Galaxy in not just one wave but wave after wave until they are simply overrun. Inferior fighting forces and inferior battle strategies and tactics will no longer matter. Victory will be assured by the sheer numbers alone.”

  Onyxi smiled without the least warmth implied. “Selling all the galaxies in the Menagerie on that will kill you.”

  “It will kill both of us, which is why we must each have a hand in it.”

  Onyxi, pacing away from him, snapped back around, and hissed, “Then you would kill us all, you madman!”

  “I believe we will be aided by an unwitting partner. Sonny’s Shadow Warriors have alerted him to Leon’s need to stall for time with a protracted fake battle, all to serve as distraction while he attempts his prison break while we’re at our weakest. With the alleged resumption of hostilities, Leon feels he can get us to stand down, get us to hold off on sending in the guards at the gate, even as the era of The Great Peace holds. We are to assume it’s business as usual.” Pity neither Sonny nor Leon realize that even the Shadow Warriors are no match for The Collectors—built for intelligence gathering, and engineered to sow the seeds of another race’s destruction well beyond anything even The Shadow Warriors could imagine. Between the satellite dishes built into The Collectors’ bodies and the converted moon world, not a word of sedition left anyone’s lips that wasn’t savored and feasted over by The Collectors.

  Onyxi’s eyes lit with awareness. “It will be the perfect excuse for that snake, Sonny, to strike.”

  “Yes, I believe he will try and disguise turning the tables on Leon and assuming control of the Gypsy Galaxy under the guise of coming to his aid, to provide the convincing show that we, The Collectors, need to feel that things have never been better in The Menagerie vis-à-vis ongoing conflict, so that Leon can make his prison break while our guard is relaxed. Long before Leon and the Gypsy Galaxy is free of our grip, Sonny will be in charge of his war machine, and it will be too late for Leon to do much about it.”

  Onyxi’s smile just grew wider. “You’ve got to love less-evolved humanoids who imagine they can have an evil thought that is anything more than derivative of our gold standard.”

  “If we are to keep the Gypsy Galaxy in the Menagerie,” Blaxus said, “this will be our best chance. But we would be fools to underestimate the impact the Cream Umbrage could have on the outcome, Farsi, the most powerful of them all, particularly.”

  Onyxi hissed and her temper flared at the mere mention of Farsi’s name. Blaxus was surprised she indulged such a spike in energy which could only drain her reserves further. “We should end her.”

  “We can’t afford to wage a war on two fronts, even with all of us engaged, not in our current state. Besides, if the prison break fails, Farsi excels at playing both sides, seeing that our survival needs are met, while furthering the evolution of the galaxies she mentors. She is just as much our ally as theirs.”

  Onyxi swirled around, the contempt for his wisdom as on display as ever on her face and saturating her body language. Her legs were splayed and her chest held out like a shield. As her arms dropped, she was holding daggers in both hands. What next? Would she drop her fangs too, a reminder of those days when they sucked blood rather than psychic energy for sustenance? “A few assassins then,” she said, clenching her fists, “timing their strikes in the event she does tilt things a little too much in their favor.”

  Blaxus nodded sheepishly. He didn’t agree with Onyxi for a second; Farsi was just too precious of a resource to spare. But he had to choose his battles wisely. And if Farsi made the prison break certain, she would be gone anyway, free of The Collectors, and of no further value. He fought for one last concession. “Your assassins would be well advised to wound and capture her, see that she is taken some place where the Gypsy Galaxy and its allies can’t get to her.”

  Onyxi nodded. “Very well.” One more lap of pacing before it occurred to her to ask. “How long must we wait before we initiate this final campaign?”

  “We have just long enough to recharge ourselves.” They both turned to the audience and nodded their dismissal. Some would take orders only from Onyxi, the rest, only from Blaxus, with some that required both of them agreeing before they budged. The fact that everyone was drained helped supply the final bit of coercion.

  Blaxus observed as his people evacuated the crater that had been used as an amphitheater and fanned out over the moon’s surface, all of them turning their capes to the stars, attuning to what madness, evil, and sedition they could suck out of the Menagerie without weakening too much the opposition they were counting on to dismantle the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping for them. For now, the only food at all was what Sonny and his Shadow Warriors were procuring for The Collectors by sabotaging The Great Peace Leon had brought about, already escalating resentments by convincing oligarchs of how easily they had been played, and how much easier still it would be to turn the tables on Leon.

  With the various upturned colored capes spanning the rainbow, shaped into their satellite dish tuning configuration, The Collectors’ tails raised into position at the center of the dishes, providing for the fine tuning, The Collectors looked like every variety of sub-species of exotic bird doing a mating ritual for one another. The satellite dishes moved back and forth, changing shape, The Collectors making different clicking and whooshing noises with their mouths as each Collector marked out its territory in The Menagerie. The adding of the sound effects and the dance of the satellite dishes merely added to the analogy of exotic birds mating. In the absence of atmosphere, the transmission of sound was handled by the opening of energy cords, tiny singularities, wormholes, extending from the throats or fifth chakras of each of The Collectors to one another, for those with the eyes to see. Their blackened eyes, of course, had been engineered to see what others couldn’t.

  This “mating ritual” would repeat at the onset of their campaign against the Gypsy Galaxy, timed to the prison outbreak itself, by which time, The Collectors would be in full force, making what might well be their species’ final stand.

  EIGHTY-EIGHT

  THE DESTROIA GALAXY

  ABOARD A KLASH CONFEDERATION DESTROYER

  Xenon, one of Sonny’s Special Forces people from his larger armada of Shadow Warriors, accompanied him through the galactic-scale destroyer belonging to the Klash. The Special Forces operative, covered in his black body-stocking flexible armoring from head to toe that permitted him to move gymnastically, with an uninhibited range of motion—the outfit wore like a second skin—spoke to him through a voice distorting mechanism meant to conceal his true identity. It didn’t foil Sonny’s sensitive nose, nor was it meant to, just to make it harder to link any of the Special Forces people back to Sonny.

  “It was a wise choice to send a clone of yourself, sir. You’re not likely to make it out of here alive, even with me to protect you.”

  “Forget about protecting me,” Sonny said, stifling back his emotions, mostly infuriation, “just get yourself out of here alive. You die too many times and the residual psychic effects could well compromise your ability to fight.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  No doubt the operative understood the importance of keeping his edge against Leon’s Special Forces types whose accumulated deaths and rebirths would, with mounting psychic residue, slow their reflexes by comparison, adding micro-hesitations stemming from a number of failures.

  “What do I need to know about these clowns?” Sonn
y asked.

  “The Klash are programmed from birth to revere their ruling class like gods with around-the-clock infusions of enculturation, images, words, and impressions that a young child’s mind has no defense against, injected straight into the womb and maintained throughout life. At the same time, for such an entirely fascist state, their people are taught to direct their genius toward the sciences and toward warfare, so as to constantly co-evolve both.”

  “That way the Klash can evolve, ever-reliant on smarter and smarter next-generations-on-line scientist-soldiers without ever compromising their stranglehold on their people.” Sonny smiled. “I believe that’s how China took over the world.”

  “The whole thing is a lot more impressive from up close, as you’ll soon see.”

  They continued their promenade down the great hall, technically unescorted, but soldiers stood like pillars holding up the wall every few yards on both sides of them. Though that did little to make the sight out of the metal-glass ports any less impressive.

  The battle grouping accompanying the Klash destroyer had surrounded a planet. Sensing the next move on the chessboard, Xenon grabbed him by the arm and squeezed, halting mid-stride, meaning for him to take in the show out the windows with a turn of his head.

  Sonny focused on the planet. Numerous destroyers aimed what appeared to be dispersed laser beams as if taking a slice out of the planet with the butcher-block knives of laser light. Three such beams combined to make a wedge shape. Once the wedge was cut, tractor beams pulled back on the wedges.

  The entire planet was thus cored like an apple.

  And the core was indeed what the ships were interested in.

  Fleets of scavenger ships descended from the destroyers to scoop up the molten metal core of the planet, still turning gently in a perfect sphere.

  “What the hell is going on?” Sonny asked.

  “Your psychic amplifiers are doing their work, that’s what. Responding to the telepathically transmitted impressions bombarding their heads, they’re all convinced that they’re already under attack from the Gypsy Galaxy. Responding to the sense of urgency, they just killed twelve billion of their own people to get to the molten core. They couldn’t even bother to evacuate the planet first, refusing to justify the time delay.”

  “And what’s with the alloy they’re farming?” Sonny asked.

  “It’s a particularly rare and precious element powering a lot of their advanced weaponry.”

  Sonny took in the chunks of planet drifting by, being mopped up by other lasers on different settings, which dematerialized the biomass rather effectively. To Sonny’s knowledge there were no such lasers in the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping. Their lasers were far more primitive by comparison.

  “They could have beamed all of their people off world, mind you,” Xenon said. “But then they would have been packed into the destroyers and other vessels like sardines, compromising everyone’s ability to fight, at least in the short-term. That was deemed an unnecessary risk.”

  Sonny swallowed hard. “Only a people that breed like cockroaches could possibly apply such a logic.”

  “You’re not wrong there. You asked for overwhelming numbers. You got it—even without the other galactic empires whose hornets’ nests we’re stirring up now.”

  “They didn’t even bother to scan the minds of the ones on the planet first so their scientific knowhow wouldn’t be lost.” For some reason Sonny had the most trouble wrapping his mind around that.

  “They’re more like ninja, employing unique fighting styles in tandem with the unique toys each of them invents.”

  “Sounds like you’re describing the ideal ground forces. But in space?” Sonny was again struggling to understand the logic of this race.

  “They have different castes, based on assessments done in the womb. The space fleet caste procures the various ships and specializes in how best to use them.”

  Sonny nodded, further relaxing into the idea of the Klash culture. “Best of all they were born to do more than just die. They can fight with a genius unrivaled by Gypsy Galaxy Grouping fighters.”

  “If this is our invading force…”

  “We can use them to police the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping once they’re fully entrenched and in control. Genius. There’s no way Leon could ever counter both superior numbers and superior fighting ability.” Sonny smiled paradoxically at the dying Klash soldiers ripped off their world, not yet vaporized by their space fleet’s lasers. The last thing some of them saw pushing up against the metal-glass hull panes was Sonny smiling at their agonizing deaths in progress.

  Xenon pointed with a nod up the walkway. Two Klash warriors were squaring off. “In case you were wondering why I brought you this way…This is one of the halls they use for settling their disputes. These guys make Earth’s age of dueling royalty look like it might have been the high point of our society.”

  Sonny and Xenon stood in silence to take in the latest show. Sonny had to admit, if there was something numbing if vaguely satisfying about seeing billions of people put down at once, the up close and personal duel had a much more visceral feel.

  The Klash, like so many humanoids bioengineered for warfare, had a tough but flexible hide that doubled as body armoring. It was immune to most any projectile, including the ones that hit them with enough force to send them flying. Lasers interacted with their glassy eyes which could alternate between reflective mirrors, bouncing the lasers back at their adversaries, and black abysses, absorbing the energy that would then be utilized by the rest of their bodies against their opponents.

  Sonny had received some of the briefing on the Klash’s unique bioengineering from Xenon on the way over here to help brunt the shock reaction of seeing them for the first time, which would not bode well for diplomacy.

  Their skulls had overlapping ridge plates that both granted additional protection to their brains while allowing for growth of those brains over a lifetime, as they gathered experience both in fighting and soldiering.

  Their inch-plus-thick hides were factories, and the trillions upon trillions of tiny laborers were a unique class of enzymes which could free-associate into hive minds. It wasn’t nano-tech, even if it functioned analogously. And it had some advantages over the nanotech preferred by the Nautilus’s bioengineering. The Klash soldier saw with microscopically tiny eyelets that also served as pores, spread over their entire surface, and that tracked the action underway so that the factory could modify the soldier’s weapons for him based on assessments of the opponent’s strengths and weaknesses, and the preferred fighting styles of both players. These assessments were like very advanced spinal cord reactions in more primitive humanoids—as none of them involved the higher brain, at least until the new weapon finished growing out of the soldier and was ready for use, at which point the higher brain would receive not only the briefing on how best to use the weapon, but the ingrained reflexes to go with it, as if he or she had practiced with the new weapon for years.

  Their hides had other finessing touches too numerous to enumerate. But one of Sonny’s favorites was the way their bodies exuded odors calibrated to make their opponents wretch. The foul stenches were meant to both sicken, weaken, and incapacitate the victims enough, even if only by clouding their thinking, to give the Klash another edge.

  Sonny was eager to see all this bioengineering genius put to good use up close.

  His sensitive nose was actually tickled by the complex mélange of odors each fighter was using against one another. It was highly possible that beneath their overlapping physical similarities and the veneer of cultural brainwashing, the individuals were even more unique than Sonny had given them credit for; otherwise the varied chemical weapon attacks wouldn’t have made much sense.

  They fought a cage-match of sorts, the cage generated by an energy shield both of them were projecting about themselves to keep either party from escaping. The invisible sphere, which only phosphoresced when one or another was thrown against the inner circumference, was w
ider than the hall was wide and taller than it was tall, allowing the two fighters to make use of the walls, ceiling and floor, which they did. They fought as if it didn’t matter to them which way they were oriented; their feet adhered to the surfaces of the ceiling and walls every bit as well, as if gravity were a nonfactor. Some gecko-like secretion or suctioning ability in the balls of their feet? Sonny should have paid more attention during the debrief.

  The other soldiers lining both sides of the corridor paid the duelists no mind, as if they weren’t even aware of the fight in progress, and possibly just there to keep an eye on Sonny and his Special Forces bodyguard.

  It occurred to Sonny that if Xenon hadn’t chosen this corridor through the ship, the captain might have insisted on it, to let them know what they were up against if they got any funny ideas.

  The soldier facing Sonny’s direction, caught up in the fight, after running the circumference of their invisible cage, pounced. The bracelet on his right hand fired energy blasts strong enough to propel his opponent to the ground. The bracelet on his left hand fired bursts of needles that lodged in his downed opponent’s joints holding him in place long enough for Wrist Projectile Klasher to straddle his temporarily incapacitated victim. He then used the talons in his hands, driving them into the ribcage midsection, before pulling back, exposing the chest cavity.

  He then cocked his arm to plunge his hand, fingers splayed like a pitch fork, straight into his opponent’s heart, clearly of a mind to rip it out.

  The fight looked all but over to Sonny.

  But he was wrong.

  The one on the floor, caught the arm at the wrist that had been turned into a garden tool, squeezing down, shattering the wrist weapon. At the same time, his tail—which he didn’t have at the start of this fight—came up behind Wrist Band Klasher, snaking around his neck, both strangling him and lifting him off Tail Fighter at the same time.

  As Wrist Band Klasher dangled in midair, making choking sounds, Tail Fighter, with both hands free, pushed his rib cage back together, sealing the seam tight with laser fire from his black eyes. These guys didn’t blink, by the way; they had no eyelids, which Sonny had to admit, from a fighter’s perspective, could be damned inconvenient, since the blink of an eye was plenty of time to die in.