Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  The self-cleaning surfaces of the eyes handled impediments to seeing with more nanite-like enzymatic hive minds. The eyes would glow if they needed to be swept free of blood, sweat, dust, or what have you, as they did now, when Choking Hanging In The Air Guy spit phlegm at his opponent to temporarily blind him.

  By the time Glowing Eyes cleared his field of vision, he was being whipped up, down, and sideways, against the roof, metal-glass walls, and floor by his own tail—which his adversary had grabbed hold of, after peeling it off his neck, with his hands. So Bashed by His Own Tail severed his tail, after adding a bit of sentience to it, so it could continue to try and kill the man, while Severed Tail procured his latest weapon.

  “We should probably get going,” Xenon coached. “This’ll be going on for hours. If they’re evenly matched, for days. No one really knows how long the Klash can fight for, possibly because no record has been set that isn’t quickly shattered.”

  Sonny nodded, all the more pleased by the latest arriving intel. Still, he lingered a bit longer for the reality to set in. In the off chance the fight ended quickly, it would certainly make it easier to ambulate past the dueling duo.

  Strangling To Death—once again—managed to get enough of the now-sentient snake uncoiled from around his entire body to squeeze behind the snake’s unhinged jaws, exposing the fangs—yes, the severed tail had continued to evolve—and drive the fangs into the neck of his adversary.

  The venom secreting into the neck caused Snake Victim to stagger back toward the metal glass wall.

  With the two of them pressed up against one another in a clinch, Xenon grabbed Sonny and whisked them past the two fighters, not bothering to wait for another opportunity.

  Sonny looked behind him as they ambulated on long enough to catch the latest turnaround. Snake Venom Drugee managed to switch positions with his attacker and head butted him repeatedly until he pushed Head Buttee through the metal glass wall. With his opponent’s head stuck in the space vacuum, Head Butter put his hand up to the glass, annealing the glass and provoking the smart glass to close the hole about the neck of his victim, eliminating the suction out the hole and sealing his opponent’s head in the vacuum of space.

  As Vacuum Head continued to slug away at the smart-glass from inside the craft, hoping to tear a hole in the hull big enough to squeeze the rest of him back inside the spaceship, so he could catch another breath, Head Butter once again peeled open Vacuum Head’s chest and this time succeeded in yanking his heart out.

  He wasted no time munching down on it and heading down the hallway in the direction Sonny and Xenon were heading.

  More dead than alive now, his opponent refused to give up the fight. The torso ripped itself away from the head still outside the hull, reached out the hole for the head quickly before it drifted off, and pulled it back in. But he wasted no time trying to reattach it.

  Instead, Headless marched toward Triumphant, grabbed him by the head, and shoved his opponent’s head into his chest cavity, the rib cage closing down on him like a steel trap, severing Triumphant’s head, which was summarily thrown out the hole in the space port before Turnaround Guy coaxed the smart-glass to reseal itself by putting his hand against it.

  Since New Headless Guy—not to be confused with Old Headless Guy—had grabbed his half-chewed heart earlier when Turn Around Guy cleaved the head of his victim, New Headless Guy ripped open his own rib cage again, reinserted his heart, and let his body commence with healing the half-chewed heart.

  Coming their way, Turn Around Guy pivoted and fired a pulse from his sidearm, holstered to his waist.

  The New Headless Guy was instantly turned into blood spatter, which Sonny was impressed to see was still coming after his attacker, the sentient goop determined to use this latest turnabout to his advantage. Perhaps by the time the blob reached his attacker his chemical makeup would have altered yet again enough to digest him.

  Sonny smiled. “Techa, I love these guys.”

  “Let’s hope they share the sentiment,” his Xenon said, steering him into an elevator leading up.

  Sonny took note of the two guards standing like pillars inside the elevator in case Sonny and company decided to do anything wonky.

  The two goons followed them out of the elevator onto the bridge.

  Sonny’s eyes fell on the captain, one of the Klash leaders, and so, one of their gods. The most noticeable qualities about him were the larger head and additional ridge plates. The two ridge plates at the top jutted out further than the others, a sign of the royals. The additional brain matter these more prominent ridges accommodated was reserved for the unique forms of genius spanning all the castes of the Klash, to help them anticipate any possible uprisings, and to allow them to make use of all aptitudes available to the Klash if it came down to just them, so they could more easily walk away from a difficult encounter with an enemy, when the lesser castes could not. In short, they were the hardest bastards of all to kill among the Klash.

  Sonny bowed respectfully to the captain, partly to cover his startle response. Hearing from Xenon what he would be seeing ahead of time still wasn’t enough to blunt the shock. The heads of the royals were designed to paralyze their enemies with fear; they did not reflect the least humanity; nothing but cruelty and soulless cunning and lifeless black eyes—enlarged over the other classes. Their bodies were also larger and even crueler looking, possibly to intimidate their own people as much as alien adversaries.

  When Sonny had finished his bow and regained his senses enough to stand upright again, the captain, apparently not done with the psychological warfare, unfolded his other appendages that had been camouflaged behind his back as additional shielding.

  The metallic silver, spider-like additional limbs were all skewering weapons with a long reach. He used one of them to skewer Sonny with—right through the heart—raising him off the ground. “I hear you come to me with a proposal,” the captain said.

  Sonny just smiled at him. Sonny had two hearts, not one. No doubt the captain knew that. His eyes must have come with x-raying abilities. And he was obviously curious enough to let Sonny get out his pitch before making any final determinations about plunging another skewering appendage into him. This was just diplomacy, no more, the captain angling for some kind of advantage, and Sonny was not about to give it to him.

  Though he did have to admit the captain’s staggered shock approach, of unfolding his inhumanity in quantum steps, with the initial sight of him, before hitting Sonny with the fold out appendages, which made him look creepier still, was a nice touch.

  “I want to hire you to invade the Gypsy Galaxy, and once you’ve conquered it, to stay on in a policing capacity.” Sonny, speaking the Klash language by virtue of having received a download to his mindchip before arriving, switched now to the language of the Royals, which the others on deck could not understand or speak if they wanted to; those parts of their brains had been starved off from infancy, and the motor skills required to make the sounds with their tongues were absent. Even the shapes of their mouths and palates, simply couldn’t produce the words. Sonny wanted to say the rest so as not to compromise the captain’s legitimacy to rule, which would hardly work in Sonny’s favor right now.

  “I think you royals will find opportunities to grow those big brains of yours further, expanding your reign over a wider variety of alien humanoids with time than just the Klash. These will be new followers you will not have to hold by force to subjugate, which would just be a costly use of resources; they will happily serve you, revering you as gods, as the Klash caste commoners do. I think you’ll find Gypsy Galaxy brainwashing techniques superior even to your own, if a bit subtler.”

  Sonny’s smile and show of confidence just broadened, even with blood oozing out the edges of his mouth. No doubt the captain’s eye and body scanners realized Sonny could heal himself enough to prevent the blood loss, but it made the captain look better before his people. Politics was politics, after all, and he didn’t dare offend his
host. “Of course, if anything I say proves untrue, you can always make your play for rule over the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping as a whole, turn it into your war machine, as I intend to do. All you have to do is to play the game better than me.” Sonny laughed. “I have a similar arrangement with Leon, current ruler of The Galaxy Grouping. I think you’ll find more commonality between the Klash royals and the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping leaders than you will find with your own people. But you will have every opportunity to test that hypothesis as well.”

  Sonny was done talking, never one to sour a deal by overselling it.

  “I accept your offer,” the captain said, then promptly skewered Sonny through the second heart with another of his spider-like appendages. “You were smart to send a clone of yourself,” the captain continued in the language of the Royals, “anticipating the need we Royals have to never show capitulation in the face of the enemy. I will repay you the same courtesy in kind when I take over the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping.”

  The life bleeding out of Sonny this time, his last thoughts were, “Let the fool think what he wants for now, so long as it serves my purposes. His habituation to the new world order will be long and thorough, like the one he subjects his people to. Pity he can’t see into the regions of my mind warded from his scanners by the Origine psychic amplifiers. But then, eroding the captain’s confidence at the moment would hardly serve my purposes either.” Sonny laughed raucously until the laugh faded and he died.

  Xenon did not wait for an invitation to leave. As the Klash warrior reflexes were no less well-trained than his, he opted for some shock and awe tactics of his own.

  The outer layer of his suit exploded with enough force to throw everyone on the bridge off their feet if they were standing, or out of their chairs if they were sitting.

  Xenon was not waiting for them to regain their senses.

  He leaped for the port screen while firing the acoustic pulse weapons built into the wristbands of the secondary layer of his flexible body armoring at it, now that the superficial layer had been blown clear.

  The metal-glass port shattered in time to keep Xenon from colliding with it mid-leap.

  The Klash were already holding fast to anything they could clench their fingers around to avoid being sucked into space.

  As for Xenon, well, he welcomed the suction, pulling him toward his cloaked escape pod, in position mere yards away, the doors already opening for him. By the time they sealed, he was already jumping space, well clear of the automated firing options that the Klash Destroyer’s AI did not need the Klash Captain to authorize.

  The Captain got back to his feet on the bridge, laughing, the sound carrying now that the smart-portal-screen had already healed itself and the bridge atmosphere had been dialed back up.

  The lesser castes needed a moment to hack their way back to a normal breathing pattern. For a Klash Royal, the laughter sounded eerily like the mating call of the acacia insects back on Earth, produced by their scissoring wings. Only the exaggerated thorax motion of the Royal, as he threw his whole body into the laugh, was any clue for another humanoid as to what he was doing. Xenon had left a little probe behind to monitor the after effect of his departure. He had to admit, Sonny was right; the Klash were their kind of people.

  “Alert the fleet!” the captain said, retracting his spider-like appendages all the way, already putting Xenon and any residual thoughts of revenge out of his mind; a judgment Xenon arrived at by the dismissive look on the captain’s eyes and face. The captain had bigger fish to fry.

  “We make way for the Gypsy Galaxy,” the captain declared. “It is a glorious day for The Klash. It is a galactic-scale extermination—the best kind.”

  EIGHTY-NINE

  KLASH CONFEDERATION DESTROYER,

  THE CARACAS

  The moment their fearless captain made his final determination on the fate of the Gypsy Galaxy, and stepped off the bridge, Navisor, the navigator, was beaming away. Morphos’s order would be delayed, at least long enough for someone else to key in the new coordinates the Caracas was destined for.

  ***

  THE LUCKY STREAK

  Navisor materialized, with the help of his locator beacon, aboard the Lucky Streak moments after teleporting from the Caracas. The sounds of gambling and the carousing of happy and vexed guests was as deafening as it always was.

  Navisor would prefer to reconnoiter almost anywhere else, but Sonny was convinced this place brought him luck. Pity the news he had for Sonny was not about to alter that perception.

  “The Klash have been goaded by one of your clones into a full-on attack on Leon’s armada, and a long-term invasion of the Gypsy Galaxy,” Navisor said.

  Sonny, standing by his side, turned to him and smiled. Sonny handed him a stack of chips. “You may as well go celebrate the terrific news. Unlike the rest of these saps, I can assure you one hell of a lucky streak. The least I can do is return the same in kind.”

  “If it’s all the same to you …” Navisor said, bowing respectfully, and beaming out to his next assignment.

  Sonny nonplused at first, quickly smiled. “What would I do without my workaholics?”

  He put the stack of chips down on the table where the Rippa general was gambling. Needless to say, upon his roll of the die, all of Sonny’s chips ended up at the general’s side of the table. “My loss is your gain,” Sonny said. “Care to go another round?”

  “We generals are always up for another round.”

  Sonny smiled. “So I hear.”

  Soon, you will be part of my little coup against Leon, too.

  NINETY

  THE NAUTILUS

  “So, this is Sonny’s opportunity.” Leon couldn’t believe the fleets pouring into the Gypsy Galaxy. Enough to blast every planet into rubble. “It looks like he’s got the numbers to make this a sure bet.”

  “Technically, he doesn’t,” Patent said, seeing the same views out the smart-glass space port. “But we have so much legacy tech we either don’t know how to use yet, or can only use at a fraction of their potential.”

  “Well, he’s not going to let the fleets anywhere near those assets until he knows what they can do for him, if not for us. That’ll narrow the scope of the territory immensely we have to protect.”

  “What’s to say he won’t send his own people to steal them away, even if he doesn’t dare let our adversaries know about our dark little secrets?”

  “It’s not like he has Mother to synthesize operatives right-fitted for delving into those mysteries.”

  Patent grunted. “He’s nearly as good as you at doing the unexpected, so I wouldn’t get too comfortable with your assessments.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Coming up against overwhelming numbers in a more confined region of space not occupied by the legacy tech doesn’t exactly work to our advantage,” Patent said.

  “No, no, it doesn’t. We have to hope our superior strategies trump their superior technologies.”

  “It has so far.”

  Leon nodded, thinking. “That may be where Sonny is doing the unexpected. He may have saved our best opponents for last, kept them in line with misinformation until now, when he could wind them up and send them at us, with still more misinformation.”

  “Take advantage of our cockiness, our growing sense of our adversaries’ strengths and weaknesses.” Patent crossed his arms, ironically putting his lungs in an iron cage as he flexed his arms at a moment when he could use more oxygen going to his brain. “He could tie our hands further by putting more potential allies in the mix than enemies that we’re afraid to decimate, assuming we’re not the ones getting decimated.”

  Leon shook his head slowly, thinking about it. “Without being absolutely sure of the outcome of this battle, he won’t risk vexing me too much. If we hurt potential allies enough to destroy any chance of a relationship, then he’s weakened my nascent war machine, something he knows I wouldn’t stand for. If there are allies in there, it’s a mock showing at best, with little pur
pose but to make us think twice about not holding back. No, for the most part these will be ‘take no prisoners, rabid dogs of war,’ looking to pick over our carcasses while we’re still breathing. That way, no matter how many we kill, he can always say he was working with me to rid the universe of vermin.”

  Patent chuckled. “Gotta admire a snake that can find holes in any strategy, including his own.” Patent fingered the smart-screen port terminal, bringing up additional images that painted a more vivid picture of how over their heads they were. “Leon, I gotta tell you, even if you just want us to buy you time, not sure how long we can hold out against that.”

  “Sonny’s only played one trump card so far.”

  “The Klash.”

  “The other attacking galaxies are just so much noise. We’ll contain them readily enough. What I fear is…”

  “He’s got more trump cards to play.”

  “Or he’s out recruiting those galactic empires now into his little coup. To his however many trump cards I currently have none. Unless…”

  Patent tensed reflexively. It was something in Leon’s tone.

  “I have an idea. But I will definitely need your mad genius to pull it off.”

  Patent craned his head toward him and smiled. “Is this where you build my confidence enough to where I can step in for you in case we lose you.”

  Leon smiled back. “Something like that.” He took a deep breath. “Just don’t go ballistic on me, save it for the enemy. We’re going to lay the Kang Dynasty trump card down on top of his trump cards.”

  “Are you out of your freaking mind!”

  “Those queens make for excellent field generals. They’ll never rise to my level because they’re too territorial and will turn on one another to keep each other in check. But give each queen some more domain to expand into, and some more tech to grab hold of and take back to their lairs to expand their brains on…”